I accepted an offer from Dave Dilegge to join the new SWJ Monthly E-News to do a Recommended Reading column with Crispin Burke of Wings Over Iraq – sometimes we’ll both do a column….depends how much reading is worth recommending
Once a month, beginning on 1 May, we will be sending out an e-mail overview of the latest news, issues, events and more from SWJ and the broader Small Wars / Irregular Warfare community of interest and practice.
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The contents of SWJ E-News No. 1 will include:
* SWJ News – Journal articles and blog entries, Council debates and discussions, This Week at War and a sneak preview of our SWJ challenge coin,
* Doctrine Man @ SWJ – DM’s exclusive for Small Wars Journal cartoon commentary,
* Professional Reading – Snapshots and links to articles of interest from a wide array of professional journals,
* SWJ Interviews – A recap with links covering our SWJ interview series,
* Starbuck and Zenpundit – Recommended reading,
* Book Review – Bing West’s The Wrong War,
* Upcoming Events – Small Wars-related workshops, conferences, seminars and webcasts,
* More…
Dr. Von weighed in on Steven Johnson’sWhere Good Ideas Come Fromwith an extensive book review last December( I posted on Johnson here. On a related note, read Charles Cameron’s comment about the limitations of linear thinking here):
….But what exactly are innovation and creativity? The dictionary definition of innovation is ‘the introduction of new things or methods,’ while creativity is ‘the ability to create meaningful new ideas, forms or methods’ that are original and imaginative. So the key notion is the development of new ideas in whatever field one is working. A question naturally develops, which is where do new ideas come from? How do we begin preparing children now to be creative and innovative in the future? In the past, many would have first thought about the arts as being the training ground for creativity. Now, we realize that the development of the abilities and mindsets and skills necessary to be creative in every field of study is necessary.Steven Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, provides the argument that there are seven common themes that have led to the vast majority of great ideas throughout history. He gives numerous examples of such ideas, ranging from Darwin’s development of the theory of evolution to the of the GPS system, from Google to the creation of the first mechanical computing devices centuries ago, and so on. It is an interesting read.Here is a summary of the seven themes that lead to good ideas. Keep in mind there is certainly some degree of overlap and relationships between the themes, but overall they can be thought of as distinct concepts.1. The Adjacent Possible: Even if you have an interest in some topic or problem, if there is not a good environment conducive to presenting the necessary pieces to solve the problem, good ideas will almost certainly not develop. You may be brilliant with some of the information (i.e. pieces of a puzzle) in your mind that is necessary to solve a problem, but if your surroundings are not able to provide the remaining pieces of information or experiences, you will endlessly search for them to no avail. If you are isolated from others who know something about your problem or issue, or if there is no means of gathering further information (which is becoming less of a problem with the advent of the Internet), or if your environment does not provide the physical infrastructure or supplies to finish building a new physical device, you will be unable to develop the Idea or solution to your problem.
2. Liquid Networks: Great ideas can develop when information is allowed to flow through a larger network. One possible network is a social network, or often and more specifically, a professional network. The focus of this is the ability to collaborate to solve problems. It turns out that there are almost no great ideas throughout history that have been developed in isolation or by an individual who did not need any help in the development of that great idea. One may think Newton or Einstein did their work in isolation, but this is not entirely true. Those two individuals come about as close as you can get to not needing a network to develop the laws of motion or relativity, but they relied on some level of feedback, reading others’ work, and ultimately talking and discussing issues with close colleagues and friends.
An interesting study was done that looked at how research groups reach the coveted ‘Eureka!’ moment, where a new discovery is made. It turns out that these rare moments of discovery or problem solving almost never happen in the lab! Instead, the ‘Aha!’ are yelled out at the conference table, where members of the group are throwing ideas around and sharing results of their latest work over the past week. The person who figures it out needs to have input they have not thought about from the larger group or network, before the grand idea is formed….
I thought I’d back-track a little, and drag in two blog posts that I made elsewhere back in March of 2008, which may help to explain my basic outlook on the sorts of issues that analysts face.
.
I. The version of the idea as poetry:
I am Charles
.
My concern is the human mind in service
to an open heart, and my problem
is that the heart picks issues rich in ambiguity
and multiplicity of voices, tensions
and torsions tugging not one way but
in many directions, even dimensions, as does
a spider’s web weighed down with dew –
to clarify which a mind’s abacus is required
.
equal in subtlety to subtlety itself, while
in all our thinking and talking, one
effect follows one cause from question
to conclusion down one sentence or white
paper — whereas in counterpoint,
Bach’s fugal voices contain their dissonance.
.
II. The same idea presented in prose — as I say, a few years back — with graphical illustration:
Spiders and dewdrops
Spiders and dewdrops do a pretty convincing job of portraying a certain level of complexity in this node-and-edge diagram of the global situation.
When, say, Castro hands over power to his brother, or Musharraf has to give up control of the Pakistani army, it’s like snipping a couple of threads in that spiders web — and the droplets fall this way and that, carom into one another, the fine threads they’re on swing down and around until a new equilibrium is reached…
But try thinking that through in terms of Cuba and Pakistan before breakfast one morning if you’re Secretary of State, with a linear Cold War mind, Russia going through its own changes, and al-Qaida and associates training and recruiting in the background…
Well, those two instances have been and gone, and the new configurations are now the tired old same old configurations we believe we’ve figured out — until another dewdrop slips, and a thread breaks, and all things are once again new…
It’s the web of tensions that constitutes the “complexity” that must somehow be grasped by the analyst, the writer, the historian…
And Hokusai, watching across the years how grasses bend in the winds, reach for sunlight, bow under the weight of dew — and spring back when released — may finally have a mind that’s attuned to that kind of complexity — to a degree that linear thinking will never reach…
The Warlord is Colonel John Collins, who has over a half century of national service as a military officer and analyst and now is the proprietor of the national security listserv, The Warlord Loop. His tips fit in well with my review of Do the Work.
Research Techniques
*Peruse a broad spectrum of opinion with an open mind. Never reach conclusions first, then prepare a paper to support them. You will often find that initial impressions were poorly founded.
*Take nothing for granted. Challenge conventional wisdom to see if it is sound, regardless of the source.
*Document important ideas with footnotes, so readers can pursue selected topics in greater depth, if they so desire
For the contrast between Mr. Ryan last week and Mr. Obama on Wednesday wasn’t just about visions of society. There was also a difference in visions of how the world works.
Indeed there were and I found them visions that varied from mistaken to delusional to demagogic. But it likely explains why the 2011 budget was so late: there are conflicting and irreconcilable visions of how the world works and all parties finally came together on the single point they could agree on (getting re-elected).
Dave, with trademark evenhandedness, gives each plan a fisking and finds them all wanting.
….Understand that Washington had wanted Germany to pick up a big share of the tab for funding the Nabucco nightmare, which, when Wikipedia last checked, still hasn’t found funding.2. U.S. and British machinations in Ukraine, which egged on Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko to escalate his cold war with Putin. This included holding Europeans who were dependent on Russia natual gas hostage to the prospect of freezing in the winter, and which threatened to crash a good chunk of the EU economy. And which by 2008 also had something to do with a cold war between the Kremlin and the British foreign office over a joint oil deal involving British Petroleum — er, “BP.”3. The very same war in Georgia that Herr Schockenhoff delicately alluded to. You remember that war, right? The one where presidents Bush and Putin had to learn while sitting next to each other at China’s Olympics that Georgia’s president — the necktie-chewing Mikheil Sakaashvili, installed as Georgia’s President in a U.S.-orchestrated putsch (“The Rose Revolution”) — was trying to start World War Three?Yeah. That war.There are surely additional reasons not specifically related to the United States — the economic crisis for one, which brought home to Germans that they couldn’t continue bankrolling the expansion of the European Union at the rate they’d done in the past.
And there was simply the fact that a shaking out in alliances was inevitable when it became clear to West Europeans that continuing with the policy of using former Soviet republics to create an ever-expanding front against Russia was threatening to create the very instability on the Continent that had driven European fear of Russian hegemony. The Georgia war was the starkest demonstration that there had to be a realignment of priorities for Europe, even if this caused a major rift with the United States
Every nation has historic policies that are cherished and repeatedly get dusted off. The Russo-German partnership goes back to Bismarck….unless we want to count the brief period of Tsar Peter II’s Germanomaniac worship of Frederick the Great
BLOGFRIENDS UNITE! The eponymous Adam Elkusand Great Satan’s Girlfriend, Courtney Messerschmidt, the gamine of COIN, have joined forces to seize control of Wings Over Iraq! Or….maybe….Starbuck just went on vacation or something.
Where earlier attempts have fired ungainly missiles that tumbled end-over-end through the air like “hypersonic bricks,” this one uses a sabot round, which flies straight and smoothly for a distance of seven kilometers, AFTER punching through a solid steel plate
I read the GeorgeR.R. Martin series which is heavy on swords, political intrigue, war, sex and a 4GW-like collapse of a great and venerable feudal realm and lighter on sorcery. More like Machiavelli than Tolkien, at least in the earlier books ( the series is not finished). Looks quite good and true to the story, from the trailer and the preview. The first episode aired last night.
Steven Pressfield has gone Zen on us with this little tome dedicated to the triumph of the creative spirit over the self-defeating power of “Resistance”. Do the Work is both a distillation and a complementary addition to his previous and longer non-fiction examination of becoming “a professional” in a creative field, The War of Art, which I recommend highly.
Here’s my favorite passage in Do the Work:
I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what the Buddhists call “monkey mind” chatter or reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap about, hanging around the street corner.
In this book, when I say “Don’t Think”, what I mean is: don’t listen to the chatter. Pay no attention to the rambling, disjointed images and notions that drift across the movie screen of your mind.
Those are not your thoughts.
They are chatter.
They are Resistance.
Something I try to impart in my students is the practice of metacognition. Not that I expect them to execute a precision analysis of their thought process the first time through, or even the fiftieth. Instead, I am trying to break them of habitually moving on mental autopilot, running “tapes” in their head recorded by cultural osmosis, to stop and ask themselves, what do I really think here? With skepticism and active, focused, attention. For more than a few, it is the first time in their lives experiencing what it is like to be intellectually awake and in control of their own thinking.
Reading Do the Work is a little like reading the Mao’s Little Red Book or Marcus Aurelius’Meditations of writing. The sections are short vignettes of certitude that add up to a philosophical whole, in the case of Pressfield, a prescription for a personal creativity jihad based on in the moment creative action followed by reflection and refinement. It is meant for the person who can but doesn’t and doesn’t know why. Pressfield explains why and then, essentially, tells the reader to get off of the dime….NOW!
For the creative procrastinator ( like yours truly) or aspiring writer, Do the Work is a book that reads like an ass-kicking.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
creativity. Now, we realize that the development of the abilities and mindsets and skills necessary to be creative in every field of study is necessary.Steven Johnson’s new book, 
and active, focused, attention. For more than a few, it is the first time in their lives experiencing what it is like to be intellectually awake and in control of their own thinking.
