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HORIZONTAL THINKING AT COOPERATION COMMONS

A busy weekend and busier Monday has left me little time for blogging, at least until tonight, but there’s a nice piece on horizontal thinking at Cooperation Commons. The emphasis is on the lateral thinking work of Edward De Bono.

“Remember Lateral Thinking?“

“…Alvin Toffler in the Third Wave, talks about Second Wave info-space as being extensive but non-active. Filing cabinets, libraries and accounting systems. The info space of the third wave being extensive and active. But it appears there are problems with the third wave info space though. A lot of authors are trying to describe the problem, some more sucessfully than others. Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail, talks about the shelf as a place where things go to die. Clay Shirky has explored this idea of shelving systems too in his writings and talks. Are we trying to impose old metaphors on new situations, technology and social organisation? What is so crucial, and so missed by thinkers on third wave info space technology – is that De Bono exposed years ago, that the human brain itself, is indeed a place where ideas go to die. By nature of the way in which ideas arrive, they are organised in a non-optimal fashion. Rearrangement of ideas is sometimes impossible. One has to realise, that the human brain itself is a very imperfect environment for containing anything, or generating alternative solutions. Does this remind you at all of problems with wiki-pedia?

For all the talking and phDs, and talent thrown at the problem, people have tended to ignore the one important fact – the structure of the human brain itself. Big companies are trying to solve the wrong kinds of problems. People working on this are being side tracked. At great cost in time, effort and financial investment. The best commentators are circling around the problem I think. This web site about the commons, which looks back to ancient civilisations and early group behaviours is insightful enough. Steven Johnson deals with the human brain issue, in Emergence and his book about things that make us smarter. Malcolm Gladwell, has compiled many useful observations on how the brain functions. Even my auntie could read Gladwell and learn a lot. Which is great, because she deals with children a lot in her job – young brains and how they work. I must say, Blink is a most useful reference. “

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING – INTELLIGENCE EDITION

Fewer blogs, more posts. And some comments:

Kent’s Imperative – “Searching Starlight” and “The influence of the spear“

Attempting to get a person who does not understand the relative cognitive effect of perspective to a point of internalized comprehension is hard; but boy, if you do, there is a tremendous analyical payoff if you succeed. A light goes on – it’s like a V-8 engine suddenly finding the gas pedal. The second post wins plaudits for the apt phrase ” revolution in intelligence affairs”, alone.

Michael at Haft of the Spear – “Trying to Re-Tool IC HR“, “IC Strategic Human Capital Plan: Part I Challenges“, “IC Strategic Human Capital Plan: Part II The Vision” and “IC Strategic Human Capital Plan: Part III Goal I“.

What does the military, the State Department and the intelligence community all have in common ? Badly antiquated personnel systems where the incentives are out of whack from our national priorities. Or even the ostensible mission priorities.

Nice to see a few more kindred spirits.

That’s it.

ON SYSTEM PERTURBATIONS AND THE SYSTEM BUILDERS

Curtis, at his new group blog, Dreaming 5GW, analyzed system perturbations and the differences that Thomas P.M. Barnett and John Robb have had recently over 5GW. I thought I would offer my views on some of the points and questions Curtis raised ( his remarks in bold) in “‘Global Guerrillas’ as 5GW Warriors“. I’m doing so in two parts to separate personalities fromthe substantive issues:

“Perhaps it is the Zen in the ZenPundit that has led Mark Safranski to ask, “5GW Emergent — But What is It?” while maintaining neutrality between the opposing views. Neutrality is of course the wrong word, since he views both approaches with interest and not a little agreement either way.“

I’ll use the opportunity Curtis provided to clarify.

It is true that I intentionally look for connections, congruence and consilient elements as a standard analytical approach but in the case of PNM and GG, as both Tom and John are dealing with military affairs ” in the context of everything else” with ” everything else” being a dynamic system, I think the approach is warranted. In my view, the strategic theories they have created are strongly complementary tools for statesmen and soldiers to bring intellectual order to a world that seems ever more chaotic.

Frankly, they desperately need these tools. The community of defense intellectuals is not exactly a large one and those offering imaginative, paradigm-shifting, solutions is a smaller grouping still. Obviously, I’m deeply invested in Tom’s vision of shrinking the Gap as a grand strategy consistent with both America’s national interests and moral values but that does not mean other approaches or insights require a pro forma rejection as if we were sectarian Trotskyite Leftists going after Bukharinite Revisionists at the Grand Sixth International and Coffee House at CUNY, circa 1934. There’s far, far too many people in government and academia who are comfortable with the dysfunctional status quo for the * exceedingly small minority* seeking change in defense policy to waste energy on pointless feuds. Dr. Barnett’s work is an art of synthesis and originality – to remain sharp, the blade of PNM must be unsparingly tested against other ideas and GG is the whetstone.

The same goes for Global Guerillas. Dan of tdaxp threw the kitchen sink at it the other day on the issue of 5GW, but as much as I’m certain that Dan’s post irritated John, over the long haul, good theories are only improved by unstinting criticism like Dan’s, while bad theories fade. For myself, I’m not ready to draw a rigid demarcation line between 5GW and 4GW yet; while I am one of the first ( perhaps the first) to suggest that Tom’s Sys Admin might be 5GW, I’m pretty sure 5GW will run the tactical-operational-strategic gamut from destructive to constructive like previous generations of warfare.

We need more brainstorming, frank exchanges, open minds, healthy skepticism and the firsthand observations of warfighters in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as veterans of other small wars. We need data and sound metrics to undergird our speculations; but if we do these things, and do them properly, we all have the potential to make a real contribution.

Coming Soon: Part II. – Thoughts on System Perturbations.

ANALOGY FOR SHAPING THE BATTLESPACE

Consider that you intend to play a game of chess with another person and you intend to win. Then, in addition to being able to move the pieces, you can change the shape of the board itself before you even sit down to play. And perhaps the other person has never played a game of chess before, so you rewrite some of the rules of the game. Then you play a game.

That’s shaping the battlespace.

“THAT’S THE CHICAGO WAY”

A couple of noteworthy posts from blogfriend Lexington Green at Chicago Boyz :

“Old, Old News“

“Having mediocre politicians is a consequence of our having a superb private economy. We are, actually, fortunate that we have some relatively competent and public-spirited people in public life at all.

We do not rely for the success of our public institutions that they be staffed by geniuses or the shining lights of the age. To the contrary, as Walter Bagehot noted, we rely on our legislatures to act in the aggregate, to be wiser and abler collectively, or at least able to discern and respond to the public mood and public interest, than the mere sum of its parts, to capture the “wisdom of crowds”. The process seems to work. Despite all its defects, our Congress, in much this form, has legislated for the country throughout its rise from a strip along the Eastern Seaboard to global power. The system works despite the apparent, even manifest, deficiencies of its components, as it it was designed to do.”

While I agree, I will take time to note that we seem to have a surfeit of deficient components these days, on both sides of the aisle. No Daniel Webster serves in Congress today, much less an American Pericles. H.L. Mencken would have had a field day with the 2006 election.

“DC Trip — Claudio Veliz Lecture, Anglosphere Institute Launch“

“This led to his conclusion, which he left as an open question. Will the English speaking world die out? What could cause it to fade away as the prior culture-forming civilization of Greece died out, giving rise to a Hellenistic successor civilization? He seemed to believe that there is nothing in the world that is a mortal threat from outside the Anglosphere (a word he did not use). Rather, the danger is from a lack of understanding and a lack of cultural confidence within the Anglophone world. In other words, the danger is not conquest from without but suicide from within.”

Read the whole thing here. Victor Davis Hanson had some interesting commentary on Alexander and Hellenism in Carnage and Culture while Rene Grousset shed some light on the most exotic outposts of the Hellenistic world, the Greco-Buddhist syncretic kingdoms north of the Syr Darya and west of Tibet in his classic, Empire of the Steppes.