“Gamification”
Thursday, April 19th, 2012Embedding games in education and everyday life.
Embedding games in education and everyday life.
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During a recent trip to London, I took along John McAuley Palmer’s Washington – Lincoln – Wilson Three War Statesmen. Previously I reviewed Palmer’s excellent and informative America in Arms, so I’ve been looking forward to this follow-up. While I’m not finished with Washington (on about page 90), this one is a much tougher read than the first, but I’m going to press on as I can make the time among competing work and books.
What I wanted to share with you was an excerpt from Palmer’s remarks on Baron Von Steuben’s Prussian military background.
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Von Steuben, in many respects was Washington’s ace at organizing, equipping, and training the army—a job for which Von Steuben was eminently qualified. His was the latest training in the methods of Frederick the Great and his vaunted what was to become his Prussian General Staff. (many thanks to Seydlitz for correcting my error)
For training, Frederick used what he called the “applicatory method.” This sounds a lot like Fred Leland’s cutting edge law enforcement training and Don Vandergriff’s work with the US Army. Here are a few quotes:
“He found that military success depends, not upon profound theoretical knowledge, but upon sound judgement and quick resolute decision under stress. Directing a successful attack is therefore not the same thing as writing an essay about it. It is a question of grasping a situation, making a practical decision, and issuing intelligible orders to the several parts of a military command. It is a question of not merely knowing but of doing. (emphasis, Palmer, pages 42-43)
“This led Frederick to form the habit of giving himself tactical problems in his daily walks and rides. Carlyle gives us the following interesting glimpse of the great king after he had become a distinguished and successful general:
For Friedrich is always looking out, were it even form the window of his carriage, and putting military problems to himself in all manner of scenery. What would a man do, in that kind of ground, if attacking, if attacked? With that hill, that brook, that bit of bog? And advises every officer to be continually doing the like. That is the value of picturesque or other scenery to Friedrich. (emphasis mine)
“From making this a method of self-culture to making it a means of instructing others is but a step…It is the continual test of judgement, of decision, and of facility in issuing effective orders.” (Palmer, page 43)
Frederick also used this training method as a “tactical measuring rod” to help determine the competency of his leadership.
Von Steuben proved Frederick’s methods with Washington’s army. But what struck me was the simple power of establishing and maintaining good habits that promote, practice, enable coping with dynamic environments, and the exploitation individual curiosity and action. Frederick institutionalized his “self-culture” into his meta-culture and so did Von Steuben in turn.
This type of practicing; the continual maintenance of good habits will help ensure a competitive posture in just about any field. Further, Frederick practiced ad hoc—wherever he was, he was thinking through the lens of his profession and asking relevant questions of himself and his subordinates—further lessons for today’s leaders, regardless the profession.
Looking, paying attention, and thinking is free—so even in declining budgets we should follow the example set by Frederick and Baron Von Steuben in his turn.
Cross-posted at To Be or To Do.
Lexington Green sent this extended profile/interview with Charles Hill by Emily Esfahani Smith. The tone of the article is somewhat hagiographic because Hill is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and….well…. this is in Hoover’s journal 😉 If you can get past that, it is a worthwhile read about a deep thinker and scholar of grand strategy.
Profile in Strategy: Charles Hill
….In diplomacy, literature is relied upon because, as he writes in “Grand Strategies,” “The international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm; it is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out.” That is why Alexander the Great carried the Iliad with him on his conquests, and why Queen Elizabeth studied Cicero in the evenings. It is why Abraham Lincoln read, and was profoundly influenced by, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and why Paul Nitze paged through Shakespeare on his flights to Moscow as America’s chief arms negotiator.
Hill, for his part, has always kept the “History of the Peloponnesian War” in his mind as the “manual of statecraft.”
Why Thucydides? He explains: “When you read the Peloponnesian War, you realize that Thucydides is moving from one set of problems to another, and you have to deal with them all-rhetorical problems, material problems, and moral problems. That’s the closest literary work related to statecraft that I can imagine.”
To understand world order-and those who manipulate it for their own aims-requires a literary education, the kind students were once able to find at such places as Yale, where Hill now teaches the humanities to freshman undergraduates.
This is a departure from his days at the State Department, where he helped orchestrate monumental events in the grand strategy of the Cold War. One of his first memories as a diplomat was of being seated behind Adlai Stevenson at the UN during the Cuban missile crisis, characteristically scribbling notes-in grand strategy, no detail can be lost. Later, Hill was a “China watcher” during that country’s Cultural Revolution. And when the Iran-Contra scandal nearly brought down the Reagan administration, Hill’s meticulous notes played an influential role in the Congressional investigations by shedding light on the chronology of then-Secretary of State George Shultz’s knowledge of the arms sale. Over the years, Hill has also served as confidante to Secretaries of State. For Henry Kissinger, Hill was speechwriter and policy analyst. For Shultz, Hill was an executive aide and trusted ally.
These days, Hill embodies grand strategy in a different way. After a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, Hill is now a heralded figure in academia. Beyond his appointment as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, he is the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, a Senior Lecturer in Humanities, and a Senior Lecturer in International Studies at Yale. Alongside historians John Gaddis and John Kennedy [ sic] , he teaches one of Yale’s most legendary courses to a select group of elite students-future statesmen-the Grand Strategies course.
And yet, Hill tells me stoically, “There is no grand strategy in our time.” Turning his attention to the turmoil in the Middle East, Hill provides an example. “America’s lack of strategic outlook responding to the Arab Spring is really distressing.”
Hill retains the diplomat’s gift for understatement.
Read the rest here.
ADDENDUM:
Handbook of Research on Strategy Process by Pietro Mazzola and Franz W. Kellermans (Ed.)
Dr. Chet Richards has contributed to an important new theoretical book on strategic applications to business enterprises. For those newer readers, Chet is an authoritative source on strategy, particularly the theories of Colonel John Boyd and is the former proprietor of the late, great, strategy website DNI. I have learned a great deal over the years from Colonel Richards and heartily recommend his Certain to Win to anyone looking for the strategic edge.
For readers with a corporate credit card or departmental budget ( the book is *really* expensive) and a deep, academic or professional interest in strategic theory and thinking, this book is for you. I may require Inter-Library Loan. 🙂
As Chet describes it:
Deep stuff – very academic – but covers the waterfront of the research (i.e., as distinguished from the speculation) on the process of strategy. As the co-editors describe it:
While strategy content focuses on the subject of the decision, strategy process focuses on actual decision making and its associated actions. Strategy process research examines the process underpinning strategy formulation and implementation. … Although aimed primarily at the academic community, many of the contributions speak to a wider audience.
Expensive, but if you’re into this sort of thing, probably indispensable.
Grand Strategies by Charles Hill
Charles Hill, senior Cold War diplomat, Hoover Institution fellow and a co-founder of Yale’s popular Grand Strategy Program that amounts to a crash course in the kind of classical liberal education that universities once imparted to undergraduates but today pride themselves in doing so no longer. The popularity of Hill’s program, therefore, is with the students moreso than campus activists or the faculty:
…Despite whispers of words like “elitist,” “conservative,” and “cult”-words considered synonyms by many at Yale-The Grand Strategy seminar, only a few years old, has become one of the university’s marquee classes. Grand Strategy, like Professor Hill, has its own myth. The liberals on campus call the class Grand Fascism. They are kidding, but only in part. Many Yale students and faculty are suspicious of the program. Students awed or repelled by Grand Strategy are the same ones who are awed or repelled by Professor Hill, and for the same reasons: the aura of power, the whiff of elitism, the promise of an answer to life’s messiest questions.
If the Grand strategy Course at Yale is a distillation of classical liberal education, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft and World Order is Hill’s reification of the course as an education for the reader on how the evolution of the Western civilizational worldview makes possible grand strategy. The book is an intellectual tour de force by Hill, at some times an idiosyncratic one and at all times an interesting one. I have read many, though very far from all, of the classic texts that Hill critiques and uses to shape his argument but having a large library under your belt is not a prerequisite from understanding Grand Strategies. Far from it, one suspects Hill wrote the book with his seminar students in mind.
Hill examines the protean and mythopoetic relationship between cultural foundations and expressions of power and political wills in conflict represented by diplomacy and war, both navigated by grand strategy constructed from cultural vision. A recurring theme in Grand Strategies is the heroic structure of the epic tale, with the descent into the Underworld and revelation of the heroic destiny by the shades and an ascent (not always successful or as ideally envisioned) to a creative, transformative new order. The reader meets Achilles in many guises, marches upcountry with Xenophon, is cast out of Heaven by Milton, confronts Hobbes‘ Leviathan, defies Rosseau’s general will and exorcises the evil represented in Dostoyevskii’s The Possessed. And this only is a tenth of the narrative.
While I frequently found myself in agreement with Hill’s discernments of the texts, some of them struck me as strained or highly debatable, such as Hill’s reading of Plato as a wry ironist ( Hill borrows from Leo Strauss here but goes further, if I recall correctly, than Strauss did), something that Carroll Quigley, Karl Popper or many classicists would have disputed. Hill’s final chapter, “The Writer and the State” is entertaining and contains a laudatory anecdote about Hill’s former boss, the impressive SECSTATE George Schultz , but it lacked some of the gravity of earlier chapters.
Erudite and visionary, Grand Strategies is a grand synthesis by Charles Hill with lessons to learn on every page.
(Special hat tip to J. Scott Shipman who pushed me to read and review this book)