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“War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a remarkable trinity–composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.”
                                                                                                -Carl von Clausewitz, On War

“Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities….Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field. With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.”
                                                                                             – Sun Tzu, The Art of War 

This blog is read by many people with a deep interest in strategy coming from different philosophical and professional perspectives. While I have my own speculations  based on years of study, I would like to begin by first posing a few questions to the readership:

• What is the relationship between strategy and creativity?
• Or between strategic thinking and creative thinking?
• Is “doing strategy” primarily an act of planning, calculation and rational problem-solving or is it also a profoundly creative and intuitive enterprise?
• If we get better at thinking creatively, do we become better, more effective strategists? The reverse?
• Is creativity more useful in “grand strategy” (or “statecraft”, if you prefer) and policy than in straightforward “military strategy”?

The floor is yours, strong argument is welcomed.

[ by Charles Cameron — form as pattern recognition, the form of suicide / martyrdom ops, a format for analysts, first in a series on form in intelligence, and maybe the beginnings of an eccentric thinking manual for analysts ]
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Bear with me for a paragraph or two, while I try to sort something out.

Form is to content as algebra is to arithmetic: does that work for you? Form is one degree more abstract than content: how about that? I don’t think either of these expressions quite captures what I want to say about form and content, but they may help us think about form. Here’s a form:

It’s pretty clearly a diagram of connections of some sort, but exactly what those connections are is unclear as long as the various boxes in the diagram remain empty.

I could fill it with the names of members of a hippie commune that practiced a flexxible approach to free love over a decade or two, from when the founder bought the farm (in the literal sense of real estate) to the point where the last surviving member bought the farm (metaphorically speaking — the farm in the sky).

Or with the names of elements in the human digestive and energetic system…

I mention the latter, because I came across this particular (empty) diagram on a blog post by a certain Jacques Chester about how people get fat, where it was preceded by the words:

A better diagram for bodyweight control will resemble a great big mess

I won’t tell you where I got the other idea from, if you want to know you’ll just have to fantasize, as I did.

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At least in this case, form means pattern. The diagram above is a pattern, fill it with appropriate verbal or other content and you’ll give it meaning — which can then be disputed or accepted. But the form, the patterning, is somehow antecedent to any particular content.

Take the last words of each line of Shakespeare‘s Sonnet XCVII and you’ll get:

been, year, seen, everywhere, time, increase, prime, decease, me, fruit, thee, mute, cheer, near.

The rhyme scheme is pretty clear: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

That’s a form, and all of Shakespeare’s sonnets follow it. Petrarch‘s sonnets by contrast follow the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA CDECDE.

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In my practice of thinking, as a poet and as a practitioner of the open source analysis of scriptural sanctions for religious violence, I find the recognition of forms — pattern recognition — to be my central process.

I think what first really brought this home to me was the similarity of form between two reports of terrorist training activities — each in its own way illustrating the idea that the activity to be performed will begin quite naturally on earth, where training is required, but end quite supernaturally in paradise, where it isn’t:

That one’s pretty obvious, right? I mean, if you’ve seen the first instance you would be pretty likely to remember it if you ran across the second…

And what the form means is pretty clear too — martyrdom ops, suicide ops.

But what if you had a note-pad on your desk — or better, a game format on your computer — that gave you those two boxes, free of specific data, and any time you found a weird or anomalous data-point or image you could scribble it or drag-n-drop it into that form, give it a name for easy retrieval, and keep your eyes peeled for parallels, opposites, similars?

I call that format SPECS, by the way, because it allows you to see two similar ideas stereoscopically, so to speak, and thus gain an extra dimension — neat trick, eh?

What if collecting SPECS was part of your training as an analyst, and you practiced the form a few hundred times and kept 150 mind-blowing examples — as Shakespeare did with his ABAB CDCD EFEF GG sonnets?

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Why, you’d be training yourself in pattern recognition — formal thinking — horizontal thinking — lateral thinking — analogy — thinking by leaps and bounds.

Inteligence happens in the Intelligence Community, and in the human population as well. I can’t speak to the ways in which animal and plant mimicry, or the artistry of birdsong, correspond to pattern recognition, although that would be a fascinating topic for another post.

What I can say is that analogical, horizontal, cross-disciplinary thinking is in its own away more powerful than logical, rational, vertical, silo-bound thinking.

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In terms of Intelligence and intelligence, the strategies of linear / vertical thinking are like your fingers: it’s your skill at lateral / horizontal thinking that gives your mind an opposable thumb.

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Sembl, side-scrollers for the mind, light but deep ]
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According to 25 Years of Super Mario Bros: A Look Back Through Mushroom Kingdom History, from which I grabbed the Mario Bros portion of the graphic at the foot of this page, “Since 1985’s release of the second-most selling console game of all-time, over 200 Nintendo titles have featured the eponymous Mario Bros” — on which I’ve played perhaps three or four levels of one or two early versions.

The Super Mario Bros side-scrollers (image above, left) are the work of the brilliant Shigeru Miyamoto, and part of what I find so fascinating about them is the way in which they resemble the mind-blowing practice known as Parcours (image, right), which apparently developed from the work of one David Belle, born in 1973 — who would have been 12 when the first Super Mario Bros game came out.

Let’s take a look at Super Mario Bros and Parcours, and then move on to the issue of parcours for the adventuring mind.

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First, for those of you who don’t remember them, here’s what the early Mario Bros games were like…

I don’t think there’s much doubt that the Super Mario Bros games are essentially digital versions of Parcours, and you can see by comparing the video above with this next one:

Finally, this video from Jesse La Flair confirms the comnnection, at least in the mind of one top flight traceur:

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My own question is: what would a mental parcours game look like?

I was thinking for a while last week about what a Mario-like side-scrolling game of mental parcours would be like. We already have the “creative leap” side pretty well covered with the various variants of Sembl we’ll be developing, so I thought about other types of mental agility, and what a game might look like if it incorporated a bunch of them — induction? deduction? causality? the sorts of pattern skills that go into IQ tests? — in a side-scroller with playful graphics…

Two things:

One: my friend Derek Robinson pretty quickly informed me that the actual build of such a game would be enormously complex — I resisted him, saying I wasn’t aiming to build the entire game, just to get the idea down on paper to see whether we could get the initial phases funded…

And two: I ran across Lumosity:

Let’s just say Lumosity seems to have a variety of cognitive skills well in hand, which leaves me free once again to concentrate on what Derek calls the mind’s opposable thumb.

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That’s a brilliant concept, I think, and gets to the heart of what we’re working on with Sembl.

The various other conceptual skills that essentially add up to linear thinking — Zen calls it vertical thinking, see this helpful diagram — are important, and well-studied. They work best where what you are talking about is quantifiable and amenable to logic and cause and effect analysis, and is explored within fields, not across them.

But lo, that approach may help you quantify the trees and evaluate them as board feet of lumber, but consistently misses the forest, the greater context, the big picture –the combined systemic impact of many tiny details, insects, mosses, the tree as ecosystem within an ecosystem, and the ecosystems within that – the time scale, the slow growth, the root system, the transformation of mulch into nourishment, the sudden spurt of tiny leaves in spring, the photosynthesis — and the human wonder — the glory, dappled sunlight on fallen leaves, the shelter afforded to lovers by a weeping willow (I’m thinking of one willow in an Oxford college garden, but I’m time-traveling and I digress) – the poetry, of beech and birch, copper beech and silver birch, the trees, the words, the metals…

Context, quality, complexity, systems, dynamics, process, simplicity, value, passion, poetry – these are the things linear thinking has problems with. Poetry, passion, value, simplicity, process, dynamics, systems, complexity, quality, context – these are the things horizontal thinking does best.

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That’s it.

Oh, and hey — just because I like the tiny antics they’re getting up to in the graphics:

[ by Charles Cameron — embassy or consulate — a minor detail for an editor, perhaps, but all the difference in the world for Ambassador J Christopher Stevens ]
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Here’s a screen grab of a piece posted on the Atlantic site today:

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The article itself is worth your time, and I’ll get back to the screen grab later. Here’s the text para that interests me:

In the famous “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” Presidential Daily Brief of August 6, 2001, one of the major analytic points was that “Al-Qa’ida members — including some who are US citizens — have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks” (emphasis added). Notice that this analysis uses two hedges in a single sentence. Given the lack of certainty on the issue, such linguistic dodging made sense — as it does in report after report where individuals are discussing information below the level of actionable intelligence.

Leah Farrall has been tweeting about the way this characteristically cautious phrasing used by analysts gets lost as “the higher up the food chain an analytical report goes the greater the tendency for bosses in [the] food chain to add their two cents worth” — so that by the time it reaches the politicians, “there is absolutely WMD.”

The shift from “apparently” to “absolutely” is an interesting one.

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The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate featured a section on the nomenclature of such distinctions, which I trust and imagine was directed more at its readers than towards the analysts who produced it:

What We Mean When We Say: An Explanation of Estimative Language

When we use words such as “we judge” or “we assess”—terms we use synonymously — as well as “we estimate,” “likely” or “indicate,” we are trying to convey an analytical assessment or judgment. These assessments, which are based on incomplete or at times fragmentary information are not a fact, proof, or knowledge. Some analytical judgments are based directly on collected information; others rest on previous judgments, which serve as building blocks. In either type of judgment, we do not have “evidence” that shows something to be a fact or that definitively links two items or issues.

Intelligence judgments pertaining to likelihood are intended to reflect the Community’s sense of the probability of a development or event. Assigning precise numerical ratings to such judgments would imply more rigor than we intend. The chart below provides a rough idea of the relationship of terms to each other.

We do not intend the term “unlikely” to imply an event will not happen. We use “probably” and “likely” to indicate there is a greater than even chance. We use words such as “we cannot dismiss,” “we cannot rule out,” and “we cannot discount” to reflect an unlikely—or even remote—event whose consequences are such it warrants mentioning. Words such as “may be” and “suggest” are used to reflect situations in which we are unable to assess the likelihood generally because relevant information is nonexistent, sketchy, or fragmented.

In addition to using words within a judgment to convey degrees of likelihood, we also ascribe “high,” “moderate,” or “low” confidence levels based on the scope and quality of information supporting our judgments.

• “High confidence” generally indicates our judgments are based on high-quality information and/or the nature of the issue makes it possible to render a solid judgment.
• “Moderate confidence” generally means the information is interpreted in various ways, we have alternative views, or the information is credible and plausible but not corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.
• “Low confidence” generally means the information is scant, questionable, or very fragmented and it is difficult to make solid analytic inferences, or we have significant concerns or problems with the sources.

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You could think of these as counter-telephone measures — attempts to avoid the distortions and corruptions that tend to arise when a message is passed from one person to another, And that’s important a fortiori when an ascending food-chain of transmitters may wish (or be persuaded) to formulate a message that will assure them the favorable attention of their superiors — but also because the higher the report goes, the closer it gets to decision-time..

As the Atlantic article says, this kind of “linguistic dodging” (aka attention to nuance) makes sense “in report after report where individuals are discussing information below the level of actionable intelligence.”

Inevitably there’s a shift in tempo between contemplation and action.

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Anyway, messages tend to get distorted as they’re passed along.

Consider, for instance, the caption to the photograph that graces the Atlantic piece at the top of this post:

The U.S Embassy in Benghazi burns following an attack in September. (Reuters)

There’s only one problem there. The US didn’t have an Embassy in Benghazi — they had a Consulate — and that’s not a distinction that lacks a consequence. Whatever else may be the case, Ambassador Stevens would certainly have been better guarded had he been back in Tripoli in his embassy.

Whoever wrote that caption wasn’t as deeply immersed in the situation as the former CIA analyst who write the article. And when you’re not deeply immersed, it is perilously easy to get minor but important details wrong.

[ by Charles Cameron — Netanyahu’s UN speech, Jyllands-Posten cartoon, a nifty film technique, and is there an echo there? ]
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A fair number of people have commented on Israeli PM Netanyahu‘s displaying a cartoonish bomb graphic in the course of his UN address today, and some have complained, fairly IMO, at the choice of photo used to depict Netanyahu during his speech by eg Fox News:

I think it’s important to read graphic messages closely for the cues they contain.

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Sometimes, as with images of the Virgin Mary seen in grilled cheese sandwiches or oil slicks, the correspondences don’t really mean much more than that the brain is designed for pattern recognition, and a little “imagination” without critical appraisal can get things wrong: the terms commonly used for this are apophenia, patternicity and pareidola.

My own favorite example of this phenomenon is of the wall-stain in a school in the East Bay that was recognized as the Virgin Mary by Catholics and the bodhisattva Kuan-Yin by Buddhists…

Nonetheless, I’m reluctant to ridicule such modes of perception without also recognizing the utility of Rorschach blots in psychology and the even more creative uses to which Leonardo put them.

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Perceived visual similarities, in short, can be the result of creative or merely overheated imagination, but in the visually sophisticated they become much more.

Film-makers, in particular, have several names for the kind of skillful editing by which one scene segues into another via a well-chosen visual similarity: match cut and graphic match.

My personal favorite example is that of Apocalypse Now, where the rotors of the fan in that claustrophobic hotel room in Saigon morph into the rotors of the helicopter coming to take Captain Willard out and away on his mission up river…

Perhaps even more celebrated, though, is Kubrick’s match between the bone tumbling through the air and the space station tumbling through space, in 2001: A Space Odyssey:

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To get back to Netanyahu, then — is his hand held out a little above vertical, palm down, really a Hitler salute? I think not.

And does his image of a bomb carry any resonance from the Jyllands-Posten cartoon? I have to admit I’m almost undecided on that one.

And if there’s just a hint of a correspondence, would it be conscious or unconscious?

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The thing is, politicians have to be extremely careful about tossing graphic matches onto dry kindling.

To my own way of thinking, both Netanyahu’s “cartoonish bomb” graphic and his “mid-heil” salute are potential fodder for incautious speculation — but neither one is even remotely as far-fetched as Jerome Corsi‘s claim in a recent WND that a recent Obama campaign use of the Stars and Stripes (above, upper panel) — in admittedly terrible taste — suggests that Obama in any way favored the decease of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi (lower panel).

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My point here, as so often, lies not in any political content or conclusion, so much as in a general purpose invitation to persons of intelligence (and a fortiori, intel) to watch out for possible graphic matches, to make close and cautious readings of visual as well as textual data — in short, to take a closer look…