byRichard Swainswain_richard@bah.com

Fundamentals of Operational Design

At any time or place, executive judgment involves answering three sets of questions: “What is going on?”; “So what?” (or, “What difference does it make?”); and “What is to be done?” The better the process of executive judgment, the more it involves asking the questions again and again, not in set order, and testing the results until one finds a satisfactory answer to the third question….1

Ernest R. May

Author's Preface Design is a concept describing creative activity. In his pamphlet, Design: A Very Short Introduction, John Heskett writes, “design, stripped to its essence, can be defined as the human capacity to shape and make our environment in ways without precedent in nature, to serve our needs and give meaning to our lives.”2 However, design lacks practical content when it appears without an antecedent. This is why schools of design organize themselves around specific applications: architecture, industrial design, graphic design, network design, organizational design, and so on. Operational design, which this short introductory paper discusses, is “a method of critical and creative thinking for understanding, visualizing, and describing complex problems and the approaches to resolve them.”3 The adjective, operational, is used consistent with Joint Doctrine, i.e., involving “the carrying out of a strategic, operational, tactical, service, training, or administrative military mission.”4 Complex refers to situations that are dynamic, ill defined, and fluid because of the presence of numerous interactive and largely autonomous actors, where the number of separate interactions indicates the degree of complexity. Complex systems display capabilities for self-organization and emergence, where emergence is “the appearance of behavior that could not be anticipated from a knowledge of the parts of the system alone.”5 They are inherently unpredictable.

Operational design provides an effective response to situations and missions that are of sufficient obscurity that the first requirement is to gain a deep understanding of the situation in which action is intended and from that to develop a fuller understanding of the problem(s) to be resolved. Operational design begins with the postulate that strategic situations are human in origin and therefore are inherently complex. Understanding these situations starts with gaining an appreciation for the web or network of individual and collective human connections

that define them. Not surprisingly, operational design presumes that the key to dealing with social-political complexity is deep understanding of its structure and competing motivations. Only by identifying the various interwoven tensions within a human system, can one begin to identify patterns and possibilities for changing the current distress to something like future satisfaction.

A number of military authorities have argued that operational design is a set of tools, not a process. This argument risks missing the logic essential to the practice. Design involves a skeptical yet inquiring intellectual approach to learning that cannot be assumed, and a critical stance regarding declared truths and beliefs. Practice of design is progressive if not sequential. Some activities must take place first for others to proceed, although there is an expectation that the “steps” will double back on themselves continuously as design is applied. If the “tools” are applied randomly, without reference to or application of the discipline of the logic of design, it is unlikely the designer will realize the benefits of his or her efforts. While design is not a rigid process—as the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) is taken to be by some—it does have a character and logical order that must be appreciated and respected.

There is a rich and highly nuanced theoretical exegesis on design for those of a philosophical or theoretical bent, entitled The Structure of Operational Revolution. The book was written for Booz Allen Hamilton by BG (Res), Dr. Shimon Naveh, Israeli commando, division commander, historian, professor, and philosopher; Professor Jim Schneider, historian of Soviet military theory and long the military theorist at the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS); and Dr. Timothy Challans, warrior, philosopher, retired infantry officer, and sometimes philosophy professor at West Point and SAMS. Naveh is a charismatic genius. He

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developed his philosophy of Systemic Operational Design over a period of 20-odd years by combining his extensive combat experience with a broad and deep study of Soviet military theory, architectural and cybernetic design theories, learning theories, and the expressive formulations of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.6 The Structure of Operational Revolution: A Prolegomena, is a valuable Ur-text for Naveh’s theory, the parent of all operational design theories.7 The text is often difficult and fully understood only by readers prepared to invest significant time and energy

in detailed study. Busy leaders do not generally have the time for such narrow and deep study of a single, partial aspect of their professional repertoire, even when it could be very useful. Fortunately, in the case of operational design, this is not necessary. The basic notions of operational design can be acquired without learning a whole new vocabulary. This paper serves as an introduction for interested parties. Those with a greater interest or desire for understanding should turn to the more detailed text.

Table of Contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................................1

I. Operational Art ...............................................................................................................3

History of Operational Art ..............................................................................................3

Comptemporary Operational Art .....................................................................................6

II. Operational Design ........................................................................................................8

System Framing ............................................................................................................8

The Cognitive Transition ...............................................................................................12

Operation Framing .......................................................................................................13

III. Methodology ..............................................................................................................16

Leading Collaborative Learning ....................................................................................16

Discourse ..................................................................................................................18

Rules to Guide Discussion Leaders ..............................................................................19

IV. Conclusions ................................................................................................................21

V. Endnotes ....................................................................................................................23

About the Author ..............................................................................................................26

About Booz Allen ..............................................................................................................27

Principal Offices ...............................................................................................................28

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Since publication of the US Army’s 1986 FM 100-5, which introduced both the US Army concept of operational art and the notion of more or less official “Concepts of Operational Design,” Army and later Joint manuals have alluded to the practice of operational design without going beyond manipulation of certain approved design elements or concepts as its content.8 The 2006/08 Joint Publication 3.0, Joint Operations, describes operational design this way, recognizing its core relationship with the practice of operational art:

Operational art is applied during operational design—the conception and construction of the framework that underpins a campaign or joint operation plan and its subsequent execution. While operational art is the manifestation of informed vision and creativity, operational design is the practical extension of the creative process. Together they synthesize the intuition and creativity of the commander with the analytical and logical process of design. Operational design is particularly helpful during COA [course of action] determination. Resulting design alternatives provide the basis for selecting a COA and developing the detailed CONOPS [concept of operations]. During execution, commanders and their staffs continue to consider design elements and adjust both current operations and future plans as the joint operation unfolds.9

The discussion of design that follows is heavily indebted to General Shimon Naveh’s work on Systemic Operational Design. The good ideas, the framework particularly, and most of the terms are derived from General Naveh’s work and that of Dr. Jim Schneider. The purpose of this document is to provide an elementary introduction to the ideas contained in their more theoretical effort, written in collaboration with Dr. Timothy Challans and entitled, The Structure of Operational Revolution: A Prolegomena.10

Booz Allen Hamilton has had a fruitful relationship offering introductory instruction on design to the

officers at US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and Third Army, and worked with the School of Advanced Military Studies supporting its instruction in design. Booz Allen instructor advisors have learned a great deal from the SOCOM Staff’s practical work applying design, as they have learned also from much different work at Third Army. The SOCOM J5 Staff has been engaged in creating a global strategic vision to guide SOCOM leaders in preparing for the future. Third Army, as Army Service Component for US Central Command, has been involved in gaining a deeper understanding of the US Central Command’s highly complex area of responsibility and, led by its commander, in developing operational concepts that can serve as a basis for his dialogs with the theater commander and other interested authorities, as well as provide guidance for more traditional planning activities.

Operational design consists of three major activities, creating a System Frame,11 participating in an activity General Naveh calls the Cognitive Transition12, and

creating an Operation Frame. The System Frame is the expression of an understanding of the governing human system that has created the situation that is the object of design activity.13 The Cognitive Transition, the climax of the process, consists of the conceptual actions required to move from developing situational understanding to formulating relevant actions. The Operational Frame encompasses the most visible creative part of operational design, the development of the design itself, a combination of form and function, expressed as guidance to orient planners.14 This three-element structure forms the framework of the discussion that follows. Both the Cognitive Transition and Operations Frame are grounded on the learning that supports creation of the System Frame.

Like the larger work of Naveh, Schneider, and Challans, this discussion begins by relating the

Introduction

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practice of design to the notion of operational art, taking as the definition of the doctrinal concept a more simplified notion, hopefully freed of baggage related to hierarchical jurisdiction of contemporary joint and service organizations. The justification of this paper’s

underlying logic is intended to be nothing more than the arguments it makes, tested against the practical experience of those midcareer officers for whom it is intended as a guide for instruction and practice.

Exhibit 1 | Stages of design

Source: Booz Allen Hamilton, Center of the Application of Design factsheet, 2009

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Operational Art The application of creative imagination by commanders and staffs—supported by their skill, knowledge, and experience—to design strategies, campaigns, and major operations and organize and employ military forces. Operational art integrates ends, ways, and means across the levels of war. (JP 3-0)16

History of Operational Art The practice of operational design, though not limited to the domain of operational art, resonates with the broader concept defined originally in the interwar years of the 20th century by Soviet military theorists, especially A. A. Svechin, called “the Red Mandarin” by Dr. James Schneider in his book, The Structure of Strategic Revolution: Total War and the Roots of the Soviet Warfare State.17 It was Svechin who first gave a name to operational art and set it within a hierarchy of activities unified in their nested logics and distinguished by their purpose and instruments. Svechin wrote—

Tactics and administration are the material of operational art…On the basis of the goal of an operation, operational art sets forth a whole series of tactical missions and a number of logistical requirements…Strategy is the art of combining preparations for war and the grouping of operations for achieving the goal set by the war for the armed forces.18

Svechin distinguished between tactics and operations in terms of their basic functions. He defined the essence of tactics as “adapting equipment to battle conditions.”19 Operations required combining a number of heterogeneous activities: developing a plan, preparing supplies, concentration of forces, building defenses, marching, fighting to destroy a portion of the enemy force and forcing withdrawal of others, and capturing and holding a given line or area. In a critical note, Svechin wrote. “While strategy pursues goals,

tactics solves problems.”20 Operational art, then, mediates between the strategy and tactics, imposing a governing logic on tactics while pursuing strategic goals.

The Red Army concept of operational art was a response to the recognition in theory that the possibility of the Napoleonic campaign, conducted in a single season and culminating in a single decisive tactical encounter, had become unlikely—at least in continental conflicts with peer competitors. The changes came about because of the size of industrial armies, the resisting power of modern weapons, and the robustness of modern forces provided with material by modern logistic communications and possessing the self-organizing capacity created by instruments of command and control reaching throughout the force. Red Army theorists, disposed ideologically to comprehensive theories of politics and the state, developed a unique theory of the conduct of war, accounting for actions from the councils of government to the factory floor and on to the furthest reconnaissance unit, on or beyond the battlefront.21 The function of operational art was to mediate between the goals of strategy and discrete tactical actions, carried out in parallel and in series, to achieve intermediate objectives contributing to the final desired outcome. As developed, Red Army operational art consisted in general of techniques for successive use of massive forces on converging narrow but deep sectors of broad fronts, leading eventually to destruction of all the enemy forces and capture or destruction of their means of war.22 While the proponents of operational art were killed in the Stalinist purges, notions of operational art were revived in practice during the Soviet Great Patriotic War and practiced with great success from Kursk to Berlin once mastered in the field.

Following World War II, just as the technologies of war between early 20th century industrial powers had

I. Operational Art

created the need for new frameworks for thinking about the conduct of war, so the experience of World War II and the anticipation of war with nuclear weapons demanded new paradigms—not to mention means—to address the requirements of the new forms of war that were emerging in retreat from empire and carried on below the nuclear threshold. Strategically, as Sir Michael Howard observed more than 40 years ago, “…these wars are not simply military conflicts with a complex political background; they are rather political conflicts which involve an unusually high level of violence.”23

The magnitude of national efforts involved in the conduct of global war, and the culminating introduction of nuclear weapons in the years after World War II, tended to confirm for all nations the elevation of strategy from the operational realm, as described by Clausewitz (“the use of the engagement for the purpose of war”24), to the political councils of chiefs of state. The strategic influence exerted by professional military men like George C. Marshall and the wartime Combined Chiefs of Staff diminished in the face of challenges by civilian academic theorists like Bernard Brodie and Albert Wohlstetter. The notion of strategy as the use of battles for the purpose of the war was extended, French strategist Raymond Aron wrote, until “there is no difference between what was once called a “policy” and what is now called a “strategy".”25 Another academic theorist, Thomas C. Schelling, in a 1980 book entitled The Strategy of Conflict, adopted a notion of strategy drawn from game theory, where games of strategy are “those in which the best course for each player depends on what the other players do.”26 From this concept, Schelling drew two conclusions regarding conflicts short of existential war. The first was that winning in conflict “is not winning relative to one’s adversary. It means gaining relative to one’s own value system….” The second, more pertinent to the notion of design applied to national level political-military problems, was the following:

Thus strategy—in the sense in which I am using it here—is not concerned with the efficient application of force but with the exploitation

of potential force. It is concerned not just with enemies who dislike each other but with partners who distrust or disagree with each other. It is concerned not just with the division or gains and losses between two claimants but with the possibility that particular outcomes are worse (better) for both claimants than certain other outcomes.27

On the continent of Europe, following the war, the Soviet Army retained the vision of massive forces, distributed across a broad front, conducting successive operations into the enemy’s strategic depths, adding in the use of airborne forces and nuclear weapons. US forces, which had practiced operational art in all theaters in the recent war, did not develop a theory for it until the defeat in Vietnam.28 General Dwight Eisenhower probably reflected the pragmatic American view in 1946 when he wrote a letter to a recent biographer of U.S. Grant. Eisenhower reflected on reading Grant’s July 1865 Report to the Secretary of War and particularly the impression made by Grant’s concept for the 1864 operations leading to the defeat of the Confederacy. Eisenhower went on to say:

I think people frequently lose sight of the importance of this broad scheme which lies behind every move the Commander makes. As a consequence we see people—sometimes highly informed critics—attempting to separate one battle or one point of a campaign from the whole and in doing so they get it completely out of focus.29

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The US Armed Forces did not adopt a concept of operational art until 1986, although the 1982 FM 100-5, as part of its discussion of Combat Fundamentals, did announce the discovery of three “levels of war”: strategic, operational, and tactical. “The operational level of war,” it said, “uses available military resources to attain strategic goals within a theater of war.” The single-paragraph discussion focuses on the conduct of the campaign, characterized as “sustained operations designed to defeat an enemy force in a specified place and time with simultaneous and sequential battles.”30 The paragraph listed a collection of tasks, not dissimilar to Svechin’s, that were included at the operational level. The problem of crossing the nuclear threshold and the fear that once crossed, one could not go back, always gave Cold War discussions of operational art a surreal quality, which was never resolved. The gap between nuclear and conventional warfare remained broad and deep, and because fortunately it was never crossed, it was without reference to experience.

In the 1986 FM 100-5, a discussion of operational art was part of the “Structure of Modern Warfare” and was defined as “the employment of military forces to attain strategic goals in a theater of war or theater of operations through the design, organization, and conduct of campaigns and major operations.”31 Practice of operational art was reduced to answering three questions:

1. What military condition must be produced in the theater of war or operations to achieve the strategic goal?

2. What sequence of actions is most likely to produce that condition?

3. How should the resources of the force be applied to accomplish that sequence of actions?

Shortly after the publication of the 1986 manual, the Goldwater-Nichols Act mandated a new superior level of joint doctrine, which was published under authority of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Institutional thinking about campaign planning found itself caught on the jurisdictional boundary between service competence and joint authority, where it has languished ever since.

US Army thought about operational art may have culminated in the preface to an excellent historical anthology published by the Army’s Center of Military History (CMH) in 2005. The general editors, Colonel Michael D. Krause, one of the Army’s most brilliant historians, and R. Cody Phillips, a civilian historian at CMH, wrote early in their joint preface that—

Strategy, operations, and tactics routinely affect the dimensions of military conflict, each in a different manner. For instance, the strategist aims at the enemy center of gravity, which often is the nation’s will to fight, or perhaps the key resources or the delicate bond that holds an alliance together. The operational artist’s center of gravity is the mass of the enemy’s military force and its ability to command and control its forces. At the tactical level, the battlefield commander has a more limited and proximate perspective and focuses on his immediate foe. Strategy may dictate whether or not to fight, but operations will determine where and when to fight and tactics how to conduct the fight. In turn, tacticians employ fire and maneuver to achieve a limited objective, while operational commanders use fire and maneuver on a larger scale to create an imbalance against the enemy and set the tempo of a campaign.32

One hundred years earlier, Colonel Arthur L. Wagner, one of the US Army’s intellectual leaders prior to World War I, defined strategy as “the art of moving an army in the theater of operations, with a view to placing it in such a position, relative to the enemy, as to increase the probability of victory, increase the consequences

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of victory, or lessen the consequences of defeat.”33 Current Army doctrine simply parrots the Joint Definition, shown at the top of this section and then adds, gratuitously, “It is applied only at the operational level.”34

Design offers a creative logic and a set of useful tools to revive thinking about the practice of operational art and to apply it in the creative ways required for resolving the unique kinds of operational challenges thrown up by today’s unsettled world. The premise of the discussion that follows is that, although the circumstances of continental industrial war on land no longer obtain, the concept of operational art retains its validity, pretty much as described by Svechin. It is used today at much lower levels of hierarchy than those assumed by either Svechin or the authors of the 1986 FM 100-5.

Comtemporary Operational ArtWhile large-scale, existential, continental war between peer states seems ruled out for the foreseeable future, the political–military conflicts of today still seem unlikely to be resolved by decisive battles on single fields as those of the early 19th century were, albeit for entirely different reasons. Land forces confront even more distributed enemies, networked electronically, collaborative more than hierarchical in structure, and often armed, at least in niches as well as U.S. forces. These foes move among and are often indistinguishable from the people at large and therefore are essentially invisible until they act. Their immediate goals are often local, resourced selectively by franchisers to advance larger political causes. Even where traditional conventional operations may initiate a war, as in Iraq, these seem likely to be succeeded by irregular wars among the people for some time after, until stability can be returned on some terms. Moreover, conventional adversaries, such as North Korea and Iran, are prepared to employ irregular or paramilitary forces in large numbers, behind the conventional front and among the people. Such wars must be fought very differently than the existential war between armed forces of rival powers the Red Army theorists of the twenties and thirties anticipated,

although Mao’s Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War (December 1936) may still have much to offer.35

Military forces still construct campaigns in which battles are mere incidents in operations, and success is sought by development of a creative ensemble of tactical actions of even greater variety to develop desired transformational conditions. Although Western societies seem to have lost the capacity for full mobilization, armies conduct year-round operations, tied to their homelands by continuous logistics and personnel flow. Campaigns are prolonged, if the annual costs can be met, because wars seem not to be existential in content and mass armies are a thing of the past in the West, a condition that allows small, mobile, decentralized enemy forces to conduct prolonged dispersed operations of hit and run as long as they are tolerated by the people they live among. Intelligence, and particularly network analysis, rises to supreme importance, in part compensating for the absence of numbers capable of full occupation. Providing oversight and security to target populations requires even greater distribution and decentralization of both tactical and operational initiative for, as Tip O’Neill said long ago, “all politics are local.”

The operational artist is still required to take the measure of the situation and environment, and invent patterns of action that will create the desired strategic results over time while wearing away the

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enemy force and will faster than the enemy wears down one’s own. Today, before they can withdraw to their camps, commanders must coordinate, creatively, their more traditional military activities with a range of non-military actions required to build viable social organizations capable of maintaining relative local peace and social stability. Often that entails designing comprehensive campaigns and then negotiating unity of effort with collocated but independent governmental and nongovernmental agencies, to follow a common operational path to the successful situational transformation, which is the goal of all campaigns.

While senior joint commanders still apply operational art by planning campaigns and major operations involving major forces, today’s mid-level commanders are no longer challenged only to find the most efficient combination of physical means to achieve assigned tasks. They too are often given vague, abstract missions, extending in duration over time, for which no single tactical action will be decisive. They are required to understand the complex human situations they confront and develop patterns of “tactical” responses (where tactical may include well digging and conducting effective constabulary operations), which, together, will accomplish the desired goals—at least in the small theaters for which they are responsible. What they

are doing looks a lot like what Svechin defined as operational art, even when it is qualitatively different than what is done at the theater level.

The function of design in operational art is to produce the skills that Schneider, referring to U.S. Grant, lists for operational artists: the “unified and holistic approach in the design, execution, and sustainment of their campaigns. They have had that intuitive ability to render incomplete and ambiguous information into a meaningful impression of the true state of affairs in their theater of operations.”36

Design helps the commander confronted with a complex multifaceted situation to develop a deep, nuanced understanding of the factors creating the situation, an understanding not likely to result from immediate pattern recognition based only on prior experience. Design then adds a creative dimension to operational planning, helping the commander answer the three questions of the 1986 FM 100-5, based on understanding grounded in sophisticated and thorough insight into the circumstances of the situation. The function of design is to help the commander, or staff leader, choose the best way forward dealing with the situation as it is, not to mistake it for what one might believe or wish it were.

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Operational design is a highly reflective and introspective process. It fosters a posture of skepticism about the possibility of completeness of understanding, presuming that, however good one’s current understanding, the nature of human problems condemns us to continual revision to keep pace with changing circumstances. Design can be initiated by a commander, a staff leader, or a superior authority, either to direct the organization to a new task or to update current understanding or declare it false and replace it with a sounder version. As skeptics, operational designers practice Karl Popper’s theory of falsification, presuming that hypotheses can never be fully validated, only disproven and rejected for better approximations.37 All conclusions in operational design, then, remain provisional.

It is useful to distinguish here between designing and planning. Planning, when it is referred to in this paper, is the absolutely essential work to identify, acquire, and maximize the forces, the material means, and the actions required to accomplish assigned missions. Staff planners do the sums and assist the commander in realizing his or her vision. Design is all about helping the commander to create his or her vision of a future campaign or operation and to formulate this vision in a fashion that can be passed on to subordinate and collaborating actors in order to carry out the necessary planning to achieve the assigned tasks through action. This distinction is somewhat artificial to the extent that the Marine Corps and Army doctrine writers, each in their own way, already account for both functions within planning. The Marine Corps planning doctrine describes planning as “the art and science of envisioning a desired future and laying out effective ways of bringing it about.”38 The Army has adapted its doctrine on Battle Command to account for anticipatory creation of understanding as the basis for action.39

Because each situation is unique, designers begin by defining the governing situation in some detail and then develop a unique theory for transforming it. Because the observed situations are likely to be complex and will evolve as operations are executed, planners produce schemes for ensembles or patterns of actions intended to produce fundamental and self-sustaining systemic change. A single design may result in a number of operational plans, each largely self-contained and intended to be pursued through success or abandonment in favor of another plan.

Planners inform and often participate in development of a design as members of a design team. In some headquarters, designers are all planners, and the only distinction between the roles is that between the activity in hand and that to follow—where movement is back and forth. In cases where they are separate groups, if both are to be effective, there must be continuous comprehensive communications between the two, and both must focus on serving the commander whose vision, in the end, is the one that matters.

System FramingSystem Framing40 is a critical examination of a situation deemed problematic. It asks, in effect: ”What are the conditions that cause this situation to exist?” System Framing includes examination of the initiating directive; developing a deep, nuanced understanding of the system underlying the unsatisfactory situation, including the path that brought you there; and the formulation of a more desirable state of affairs. System Framing addresses Clausewitz’s famous admonition:

The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test [the

II. Operational Design

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subordination of war to policy] the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to nature41

System Framing is carried out using a collaborative process of interpretative criticism, here called discourse. Discourse will be discussed more fully later in the paper.

Legacy SystemEven before seeking to understand the current or observed system,42 operational designers ask themselves one of their most important questions: What has brought us together? Why are we here? General Naveh uses the formula of the Passover Seder. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” No part of operational design is more important than examining critically the motives and expectations that serve as pretext for the design effort. This often seems impertinent to military officers, accustomed by discipline to accept missions at face value and immediately to begin to reduce them to executable tasks. On reflection, however, it is apparent that this initial examination is an essential part of intelligent discipline because it assures that whatever follows will, in fact, satisfy the wishes of the commander or higher authority, however imperfectly the initial guidance may have been framed or expressed. Matthew Ridgway described his approach to command in 1952, saying, “When you get a new job to do, spend most of your time discovering exactly what your new mission is. Then break it down into workable units.”43

The object of this first inquiry is to discover what has happened that made the existing situation unsatisfactory. Where a new mission is assigned, it is likely that some existing condition has become unsatisfactory, or a new situation has been recognized that requires a response to restore conditions to an acceptable state. In either case, it is particularly important to tease out precisely what needs changing, what limits circumscribe possible solutions, and how the new mission affects existing guidance and policies. Often it is useful to review the history of how the

current system got to be what it is to set the present in an historical or genealogical perspective.

The purpose of the initial inquiry is exploratory. The goal is mutual understanding between superior and subordinate, and often, an initial discussion is required for clarification. Aside from the desirability of avoiding unproductive or counterproductive work, this initial inquiry is necessary in the methodology to provide a standard of relevance for further inquiry. A personal exchange is often useful to help the superior clarify his own views, and such an exchange provides an opportunity for the executing leader to offer advice on the suitability of a particular directed action, or apparent contradictions with standing instructions. In an army as hierarchical as the US Army and in a society as jealous of civilian control of the military as the United States, the tone of this inquiry is obviously is critical. Such discussions are a basic professional obligation.

The Current SystemOnce the motivation for the design inquiry is clear, the design team can begin to explore the existing situation. It does so, counter-intuitively—not by addressing “the problem”—but by developing a deeper understanding of the environment, or ecology of the situation that will have to be transformed. The only intrusion of the task itself at this point is in its role in bounding the inquiry by indicating which actors, influences, potentials, and tensions44 (positive and negative) within the existing system are relevant to the concern expressed by the instigator and indicating the governing motivations of the United States as a player in the system.

Designers lay out a plan of inquiry created uniquely to address the particular kind of situation they are confronting and the kind of action their guidance envisions. This plan is provisional and subject to adaptation as more is learned about the situation. (Fundamental adaptation is called reframing.) The inquiry itself must be self-consciously unbounded; that is a deliberate effort must be made to expand one’s inquiry beyond circumstantial limits, such as assigned areas of responsibility, national borders, or

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organizations of thought that have become customary over time. Examples of the latter are regional abstractions like “West Africa,” which may no longer reflect critical relationships, or considerations of the Far East that continue to separate Hong Kong from China, long after it has passed back to sovereignty of the Chinese authorities.45

The critical task of System Framing—understanding the current or observed system—involves an exhaustive mapping of interested actors and their relationships relevant to the situation in question. Actors are included according to their ability to influence future actions but exploration of their relationships is not limited to those involving the particular issue at this point. Rather, the goal is to gain an understanding of the contextual system in general, as a set of relationships motivated by any number of agendas or influences. Influences may include history, relevant cultures, political ideologies and structures, economic issues, and social structures.46 All these should be considered, although no standard list should limit the range of possible perspectives to be considered in defining any given situation.

This desire to un-constrain the initial analysis ought not to be taken as justification to ignore entirely physical realities (geography), which will present themselves objectively in all perspectives alike (although their impact will be different in benefits and vulnerabilities realized according to situation). In fact, defining the situation will be enhanced by considering the spatial relationships offered by graphic portrayal on maps. Physical features and relative positioning “are what they are.” For that matter, international boundaries exist in fact. Even if they do not necessarily “bound” anything, they bring with them certain expectations and therefore suggest certain lines of inquiry. It would be wrong to ignore them entirely in the name of free speculation. A large map should be posted for reference in the design team work area to ensure these realities are considered.

Actors may be involved or neutral but interested. They may be proximate or distant. Sometimes their interest

will be of second order, that is, disinterested in the particular issues but concerned about the effects of possible outcomes with regard to the status of other interested parties. For entirely unrelated reasons, a player may be loath to see a rival benefit. Actors may be individual or collective, and deep understanding will often call for the deconstruction of collective actors, say states, into constituent interest groups. Sometimes second-order actors will form contingent groups—a set of otherwise unrelated actors may share a common interest that causes them to act as one.47 Transnational actors, religious bodies, criminal cartels, supranational associations, and multinational corporations must be considered, as well as indigenous actors in the political form contingent groups—a set of otherwise unrelated actors may share a common interest that causes them to act as one. Transnational actors, religious bodies, criminal cartels, supranational associations, and multinational corporations must be considered, as well as indigenous actors in the political system. The map of relationships should be captured graphically and in narrative form for use as a reference and, eventually, to share learning.

Mapping relationships between actors must recognize that players often reflect different identities according to the question they are addressing and that each identity may prompt a different response to an issue, depending on how the stimulus is interpreted. The key is that the design team must enter into the conscious mind of the subject actor sympathetically and make the best judgment possible about how that actor sees

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the world and his/her/its place in it. To make this kind of judgment effectively, the design team will have to learn as much as possible about the culture and self-identity of the various players. Often, use of a trained “Red Team,” skilled at playing “the other,” will assist in this effort.

The design team will draw on all available sources of expertise in making these judgments and consider various factors of social conditioning that can be expected to influence interpretation. The overlapping influence of cultural forces in modernizing regions can be very complicated indeed. Take the perspective of the Middle Eastern Arab in whom the Sunni-Shia and Arab-Persian cultural divides may be expected to produce different effects according to which predominates in a particular setting. How do Iraqi Arab Shias relate to Iranian Shia interventions in Iraqi affairs? How do Palestinian Arab Hamas Sunnis relate to Lebanese Arab Hezbollah Shias who acknowledge Iranian clerical authority, and vice versa? How do intervening variables, say mutual enemies, affect their responses? Identities are multiple and overlapping, and sometimes the governing identity is difficult to discern.

It is important to remember to include one’s country in the mix of actors. Analysis of one’s own national perspective and cultural biases is also important. To continue with the Middle Eastern example, the American concern with equality of the sexes can make full cooperation with conservative Muslim nations problematic, as can the Arab view of the history of US relations with the State of Israel. Part of this initial analysis must be historical, asking how things have come to their current pass, recognizing that the history understood by each actor will be different in both perspective and content. This searching inquiry provides the basis for the necessary insight to construct a new fuller understanding of the governing situation.

Writing at the end of the War in Vietnam, General Jack Cushman reflected that US Army advisors had often

failed for lack of adequate insight, which he found to be a remedial fault. He said—

Insight—or the ability to see the situation as it really is—is the most valuable asset an advisor can have. Intellect alone does not guarantee insight. Soldierly virtues such as integrity, courage, loyalty, and steadfastness are valuable indeed, but they are often not accompanied by insight. Insight comes from a willing openness to a variety of stimuli, from intellectual curiosity, from observation and reflection, from continuous evaluation and testing, from conversations and discussions, from review of assumptions, from listening to the views of outsiders, and from the indispensable ingredient of humility. Self-doubt is essential equipment for a responsible officer in this environment; the man who believes he has the situation entirely figured out is a danger to himself and to his mission.48

Framing the current system is all about creating such understanding-based insight.

The Desired SystemThere comes a point in System Framing when a provisional understanding is adequate to move to the next level, or time forces forward movement despite the promise that in design one is always free to go back and revisit earlier steps to fill gaps and omissions. The final act of System Framing is creating a Desired System Frame that will produce the necessary conditions—the desired state—that meet the wishes and expectations of the initiating sponsor.

The creation of the desired state supposes a review of the revised understanding of the initiating directive in light of the new understanding of the working of the current system. If guidance requires modification, recommendations should be made to the originating authority. If the guidance does not require reconsideration in light of new knowledge, the design team looks at its handiwork, marks the conditions and relationships that make the existing system what it is, and creates a concept or vision of what a new situation or state, more satisfactory to the sponsor’s desires, would look like. This creation is a strategic act that provides necessary detail for the sponsor’s

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guidance. This, in turn, makes possible the operational decisions involved in translating broad strategic goals into temporal and spatial patterns of sufficient clarity to take action.

Based on their now deeper understanding of existing circumstances and relationships, designers propose changes to the observed system’s defining relationships and governing conditions that, if accomplished, might lead to creation of a new more desirable and hopefully sustainable state or situation. The action is highly subjective and provisional. At the theater or regional level, even in occupied districts, the action involves positing new or revised relationships among key actors and proposing modification of conditions estimated to produce identified negative tensions and trends toward manageable levels or desirable directions. Where military forces are involved, this will normally include removal of certain actors from the system entirely, or at least forceful limitation of their freedom of action. Goals at this point are broad and general. Designers take a holistic view and do not limit themselves to military or security goals. The desired state should be portrayed similarly to the observed system, that is graphically with an accompanying narrative. Creation of the desired system sets the context for the climax of the design process, called the Cognitive Transition.

The Cognitive TransitionArriving at the problem statement is the unique contribution of the phase of design called the Cognitive Transition.49 This particular sequence is critical to the logic of the process or methodology of operational design. It represents the climax or turning point of operational design because it effects the shift from learning to creation, from the description involved in System Framing to the formulation of action in Operation Framing.50 This turning point imposes a different character on the inquiry. The Cognitive Transition is decisive in the design process because it is the core of the translation of system understanding to creative action, from strategic choice to operational form, defining “in text and graphics, the areas for

action that will move existing conditions toward the desired end state.”51

The Cognitive Transition provides for the identification of changes required in the current system to allow for transformation from the existing or observed to the desired state. It does so by identifying the relevant and practical considerations useful for shaping a system of intervention in the construction of the Operational Frame. Creation of a problem statement, indicating what must be done, completes the bridge to move from System Framing, a process of describing the existing and desired state, to the Operational Frame, a portrayal of intended actions expressed as a broad pattern organized sufficiently in spatial and temporal terms to guide more formal planning. This requires further system study in light of the desired goals.

Once the design team has created a vision of its desired system, designers must go back to their Current System Frame and identify the actors who could be expected to resist such a change, those who would support it, and those who would be interested but not become involved if handled with care. Further, they must identify those negative tensions and trends that would retard movement forward and those positive tensions and trends that, if reinforced, would accelerate the change. Finally, designers make a tentative assessment of available sources of energy from all sources that might be marshaled to encourage or force the desired transformation.

Designers revise and reorganize their understanding of the current system. They create three new conceptual systems: a system of opposition,52 a system of command,53 and a system of logistics or support. The system of opposition describes, as a system, those actors, trends, and conditions that must be overcome to accomplish the desired transformation. The system of command describes the organizational and cybernetic structures that will be required to accomplish the desired transformation.54 The system of support, or logistics, describes those features of the current system that can be exploited to make the desired change.

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This new design stage is as complex as the earlier System Framing, and it is carried out the same way, by discourse and debate. It is important to realize that building the system of opposition is not simply collecting opposing actors. There may be features within oneself or one’s allies that will be an obstacle to doing what the design team feels must be done. One recurrent US example is the division of authorities and responsibilities for aspects of US strategic policy between the Departments of State and Defense. Different structures and different institutional priorities often challenge the ability of US agents on the ground to create unity of effort without expenditure of significant effort to overcome divisions that make very good sense in Washington.55 A second example involves allies unable or unwilling to have their forces participate in certain activities. The presence of allies is still part of the system of support but their caveats and reservations may be seen as part of the system of opposition, requiring accommodation or effort to resolve. Similarly, the opposing forces may have certain ideological configurations or certain contradictions in their structures, beliefs, and actions that can be made part of the system of support, as features to be exploited.

Based then on the understanding gained by this tripartite refinement of the System Frame, the design team can describe the cognitive distance between the two states—the current state and the desired state—in terms of the conditions, actors, and relationships that need to be changed to move from one state (the existing system) to another (the desired system) in order to transform the current situation into the desired state. This action is called problematization,56 and from the results, designers should develop a problem statement, a brief document defining graphically and in narrative their hypothesis about what needs to be done to effect the changes desired.57

Operation FramingOperation Framing involves formulating a theory of action,58 turning it into an operational design,59 and transmitting it in useful form as commander’s

guidance. It identifies the functions that need to be accomplished and stipulates the form, as a pattern of actions in space and time, to be performed in a particular ensemble, to transform the existing situation into the desired state.60 Design is not planning, although designers left to their own devices will intrude on planning, so seamless is the line dividing the two. An architect sketches a commission in line with the piece of ground on which it is to sit. So the operational design team lays out the activities necessary to achieve the desired transformation against the knowledge they have acquired in their learning, in accordance with a sense of time and priority. They leave it to the planners to perform Ridgway’s second step of breaking tasks down into workable parts and assigning each to appropriate units.61 Design is not planning. It is, in essence, a form of mediation between the strategist or goal setter and the tactician or actor/ artisan.

Operation Framing is the point where talent and creativity reap their greatest rewards. Faced with the need to design a building, an architect may produce a perfectly functional but pedestrian concept, or he or she may move the boundaries of the possible, use materials in new ways, and create the Sydney Opera House. The “designers” who could envision using Army bombers from the decks of aircraft carriers to make a one-way flight over Japan in Doolittle’s raid showed this gift of creativity, as did the Al Qaida terrorists who saw that box cutters and intercontinental airplanes could be combined, turning sophisticated transportation platforms into weapons of mass destruction.62

There is a well-known tendency of design students, concerned to properly frame the task they have been assigned, to expand their project and forget their task. Bryan Lawson, Dean of the Faculty of Architectural Studies at Sheffield University, attributes a story to J. P. Eberhard, Chairman, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Carnegie-Mellon University, about a student assigned to design a doorknob for a government office. The student begins by questioning whether a doorknob is the right piece of hardware. Then he questions the need for the door. Soon, he decides to abolish a staff

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division, and ultimately he comes to his instructor with a solution that recommends reorganization of the whole government, instead of designing a piece of functional hardware.63 The current necessary emphasis on developing whole-of-government solutions to complex situations abroad, a concomitant to the mixed nature of contemporary struggles, feeds this propensity. Booz Allen experience in the past 2 years observing midgrade officers doing operational design has demonstrated that an ambiguous initiating directive can easily turn into “a work order for the Secretary of Defense to submit to the rest of the executive branch.”64 In part, this reflects the reality the commander lives in. He or she must negotiate the total design with those whom he cannot direct, or be prepared to adjust his ambitions and planning accordingly. Designers and planners must keep this in mind, ultimately producing an executable concept for the forces assigned, or likely to be assigned, for the part of the design the commander will control and for which he or she will be responsible.

Theory of ActionOperation Framing begins with creation of a theory of action, a description of the actions necessary to move from the current or observed system or state, to the desired system or state, thus resolving the issues identified by the problem statement.65 The theory of action serves as a basis for the commander’s intent statement, indicating what he intends his forces and others responsive to his lead (within existing limits66) to do. In turn, the theory of action serves as the basis for development of an operational design67 that provides sufficient detail to serve as a basis for planning by subordinate commanders, supporting and coordinating authorities, and the commander’s own staff. The theory of action, as the basis of the commander’s intent statement, should properly come from the commander himself, expressing his vision. This suggests that the commander needs to join his design team to participate in the actions we have referred to here as Operation Framing.

The Operational DesignThe operational design consists of a statement of the tasks the command as a whole must perform, laid against those that collaborating authorities and allies should accomplish if the design is to be realized, expressed in a way that indicates the temporal-spatial pattern of action the commander desires in order to have the most productive effects. Where adequate forces and resources are not immediately available, the concept should indicate as much and estimate the risk to success if identified needs are not met. The concept is translated into planning guidance from the commander to interested subordinates and collaborators. The detail of this commander’s guidance is whatever the commander feels necessary, and it will vary with his audience and tasks.68

Normally, a commander’s guidance will include the commander’s statement of intent, that is his or her vision of how the various tasks identified for forces under military command or direction will be accomplished, what they entail in broad terms, time considerations and anticipated resources, and guidance about the strategic communications message with which operations are expected to be consistent. Resources and timing considerations will be subject to questioning and modification in the planning process as practical realities become more evident. Finally, a narrative and graphic portrayal of the design and design process should be passed by the design team to the planning staff to serve as a reference. Experience indicates this is most often done in the graphical form of lines of effort, accompanied by a narrative explanation. More than one operational plan may be required to implement a given design.

In addition to operational considerations, the commander’s guidance should contain direction for regular review of the collective understanding in light of new observations. Provision for regular deliberate review is required to ensure the general understanding remains relevant to observed facts and to ensure the actions growing out of that understanding continue to

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be effective in light of the changes to the system state engendered by the infusion of energy through action. The commander should indicate possible evolving conditions that would cause him or her to reconsider the fundamental understanding, or trigger reframing. Simply put, reframing is called for when the existing understanding can no longer account for observed system behavior. At the same time, the commander must guard against allowing the sensitivity to reframing moments to undermine the “strength of character” that allows great commanders to prevail in uncertain circumstances.69 This choice between adaptability and steadfastness is a complicated act for which little useful advice can be given.

The design team meets periodically during execution of an operation to share new insights and new learning and to evaluate whether any of this rises to level requiring reframing. Does the understanding currently held, still account for the behavior of the system as it is observed? If it does not, the design team advises the commander to reframe his or her understanding. At some point, whether or not the broad system understanding has broken down, all initiatives will reach the point of diminishing returns beyond which they should not be pursued. So the design team should also ask the question: Are ongoing actions still relevant to the movement from the existing system to the desired system that the team originally envisioned? If not, adjustments must be made to actions.

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Leading Collaborative LearningCollaborative learning does not come naturally to hierarchical organizations. Armies work well tactically because they can be employed rapidly in response to a single will, each actor behaving in a relatively predictable fashion. The natural move by Soldiers entering a room is to see who is in charge by virtue of rank and position and to defer to authority expressed from that direction. Discursive learning is quite different. The intent here is to engage the full intellect and imagination of the entire group, with each member engaged fully and contributing as he or she can, either by virtue of some unique expertise or acuteness of judgment or vision. This sort of sharing will not take place if the protocols of hierarchy are strictly observed. Each member must come to the discourse as an equal, free to disagree about any expressed understanding so long as disagreement is based on evidence and logic. The challenger is prepared, equally, for his or her argument to be contested in turn, again based on evidence and logical inference. For collaborative learning, there can be no understanding privileged beyond criticism because of its origin and yet, it is ultimately the commander’s understanding and decision that will go forward. The challenge is how to conduct the learning collaboratively while maintaining respect for the authority of the commander to decide and direct.

The role of the commander or leader is critical in the conduct of design. In an ideal situation, the commander would spend a good deal of time organizing the design team, guiding its work and the learning of its members. However, while individual staff leaders may have time to devote directly to such efforts, the commander seldom will. Indeed, his or her formal design group in the staff will likely be just one of the designing groups in which he or she participates. Others will involve subordinate commanders and leaders of coordinating organizations

and, very likely, the commander will be a participant in a design group led by his or her superior. So, at best, the commander probably will give guidance and interact with his or her design team only at critical points. If that is the case, the commander must appoint a design team leader to stand in for him or her to guide the work and keep the learning focused and on track. And, when the time comes, the commander must engage the design team, challenge its work and permit its members to challenge his or her understanding until he or she has made the learning common and the understanding his or her own.

Design teams may be ad hoc organizations, called into being only when the commander or leader recognizes the need to develop a deep, multi-perspective understanding of a given situation, or they can be standing teams with whom the commander is comfortable testing his or her ideas. The groups may be formal or informal, large or small. The large group can represent more perspectives and do wider research but will inevitably have to subdivide to conduct the kind of searching critical discourse that design calls for to tease meaning from assembled facts. The small team, because it can learn more about the techniques of design over time, may do better distilling meaning from fewer facts but may suffer from narrowness of view or development of tacit

III. Methodology

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rules of behavior that can lead to “group think” and unwarranted satisfaction with existing interpretation. It is essential that there be some familiarity with the conduct of design in the group in either case. A useful compromise may be to have a small core to which others can be added as desired to expand the perspective set, expertise, or access to external knowledge. Where design intends to comprehend future actions of external agencies or authorities, it is wise to bring their representatives into the process so their particular sensitivities and agendas can be considered from the outset.

To lead collaborative learning in design teams, a commander must do three things. First, he or she must make it clear that disagreement is invited, indeed considered a duty, for each member of the design group. Second, the commander must demonstrate that this is so by the way he or she responds when his or her understanding is challenged. Finally, it is helpful if the commander, or group leader, remains in the middle distance from the process itself, what Harvard Kennedy School of Business professors Ronald A Heifetz and Marty Linsky call “taking the balcony perspective,” giving broad guidance, organizing the learning group, and then standing outside the process of learning and observing how the group works, intervening only by exception as the learning process unfolds.70

This is often not difficult because the commander is normally too busy to participate in the detailed learning that begins the design process. Generally, the commander will be represented by a designated leader and will interact periodically to check on progress, influence the direction of inquiry, and sometimes apply pressure for progress when time is a compelling factor, recognizing that completeness may be sacrificed. These interactions, expressed in Heifetz’ terms, occur when the leader comes down on the dance floor, metaphorically, to see where the dancers are going, ask questions, and provide adjustments where required. The commander, who circulates abroad more than the staff and engages with a wider circle of executive contacts, will bring a good deal of useful information to these sessions about how things look

on the ground and what the boss really has in his mind in assigning the current project. Early in the design process, there may be long periods when the design team is self-directing. As the process moves toward concept development, the commander must be more involved with the evolution of his design, as he develops his guidance for planners, subordinates, and collaborators based on the design team learning that he must make his own.

There are two major parts of the design learning process. One is a research effort—seeking information from whatever sources are available. The second part involves evaluating the role that specific information plays in creating a provisional but comprehensive understanding of the situation at hand, teasing meaning from factual data, and accepting that the total available data is always incomplete and subject to revision. While some design proponents believe only the interpretive function matters, it is more logical to believe that more facts, well understood, are more likely to provide the desired, nuanced understanding of the situation than a much smaller number of facts exquisitely tortured for understanding. One of the most important qualities of a design effort is the extent to which it draws on multiple perspectives and sources of expert counsel. On the other hand, the design team must balance the desire for the greatest possible store of data with the need to conduct an adequate cross-examination of the data it already possesses.

The learning process itself must be self-conscious and reflective. The design team must organize its campaign of learning deliberately, in light of what it knows to begin with about the nature of the situation and the commander’s requirements. Participants must frequently pull back and take an introspective view of how their approach is working and how well the members are collaborating. Then they must adjust their behavior as required. As new information is developed, new lines of relevant inquiry will suggest themselves, and the team should be reorganized to pursue them by either breaking off an inquiry team or bringing in new experts. Sometimes just reorganizing subgroups will generate new perspectives on stalemated problems.

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Periodically, the whole team must get together to share its learning and test the findings of one group against the perspectives of others. At the end of the day, time should be reserved to evaluate how the learning process itself is going, identify required information, and develop a plan for continuation the next day. The group should be self-critical, insisting on participation and contribution by all members and on demeanor that respects the person while disagreeing, sometimes intensely, with the understanding. Groups progress best that keep a running narrative, employed self-critically to sharpen the logic of group conclusions.

DiscourseThe method of collaborative learning is called discourse. Discourse is carried out best by small groups, although small groups can meet together as a large group and meld their insights, once developed. “Discourse is democratic and asymmetric.”71 It is democratic in that everyone is expected to participate. It is asymmetric in that it respects differences in knowledge—where these can be backed up with evidence and reason. The goal of discourse is a shared understanding of the broad situation, where shared understanding does not imply consensus. Consensus implies agreement on all particulars. In discourse, shared understanding provides for disagreement on particulars. Discourse is satisfied with common understanding of the limits of agreement and of the relevant discontinuities, which become areas for further research.

In discourse, members lay out their interpretation of the meaning of facts, first, with regard to portraying the web of relationships that define an existing situation. They do so, expecting their understanding to be challenged by their peers, using different perspectives and bases of fact. The explanations are then modified to the extent that agreement can be reached on a common understanding. Where agreement is not possible, the differences are captured and defined and the question left open. Gradually, a narrative is built and captured that describes how the human system under observation works and why it works as it does under the circumstances as they are known and understood.

Discourse is a time consuming and sometimes painful process. Not everyone is capable of separating themselves emotionally from their positions or of attacking understanding rather than the believer. Discourse works rather like Thomas Kuhn explained the process of normal science in his classic text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.72 The collective learning or understanding increases, along with a set of unresolved issues, until the list of exceptions requires a new explanation, a new paradigm that comprehends both the facts explained by the old understanding and the set of exceptions. In operational design, this reinvention or explanation is called reframing and it may occur at anytime that the current understanding can no longer explain the observed behavior of the system. Sometimes the discourse will become stuck as it progresses. Then, a process called meta-questioning is called for.

Meta-questioning, Donald A. Schön calls it “Reflection-in-Action,” means simply raising one’s perspective. Meta-questioning is questioning one’s own line of questioning to structure one’s process of thought in order to discover why the discussion has reached an impasse.73 In general, meta-questions involve asking: “What are we doing and why are we doing it?” Meta-questioning often involves thought experiments to gain different perspectives on the manner in which the inquirer is approaching the issue. Sometimes it involves imposing a new angle of vision or approach to break the stalemate. Meta-questioning

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can lead to a “Copernican breakthrough,” as when the astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, discovering he could make no progress explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies while assuming the Earth was the center of the universe, reversed his view and assumed that the Earth revolved while the sun remained at rest.74 In short, Copernicus reversed his perspective and made the unexplainable explainable.

Meta-questioning can free understanding by causing the questioners to unpack their metaphors and evidence and reassemble explanations from a better vantage point. Eventually the web of understanding will become so complex that it is overwhelming. It is here that insight begins to come to the fore, or as one student at the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies once remarked, “Here is where the magic happens.” Insight is not magic at all. In fact, it is a kind of pattern recognition based on the totality of one’s experience addressing similar appearing problems and the detailed learning that has gone on during the process of collaborative inquiry.75 The observers must stand back and simplify the mass of insights into a useful summary. In doing so, they will seek to describe system tendencies and potentials, where the former indicate movement the system is likely to realize in the absence of any intervention, while the latter makes a judgment about the extent to which the system is open to change.

Again, the process of discourse, of searching assertion, challenge, and response (or description, problematization, construction76) is used to avoid the self-deception likely to occur when this conceptual leap is the property of only one observer. The process and result must be captured diagrammatically and in narrative to document the learning process and provide a reference for others who will come to it later. As indicated above, experience in teaching design has shown that the composition of a running narrative, reviewed periodically in the process, serves as a check against logical leaps that cannot be justified on

reflection. The narrative also captures nuance that gets lost in simple depiction.

The product of all this work is a hypothesis about how the macro-system of actors, within which the undesirable situation has developed, actually operates. It is defined as a set of positive and negative relationships linking the members of the system. It is always subject to disproof if new information appears or new observations are made that were not possible within the old understanding.

Operational designers face two issues as they construct their description of the strategic system confronting them. First, knowing the mission already, they may begin to get ideas about approaches, which are not useful for describing the system and which are premature until a solid understanding of the system is built up. These should not be discarded, but set aside to be considered and tested again later in the process. Insights and inspiration should not be cast aside and lost. Second, when interpretations are undermined in the process of discourse, they too should be recorded for future reference. New, confirming information may surface that will restore an abandoned position. Design does not waste knowledge. Like confirmation, rejection is always tentative, and the explanation of the moment is never more than provisional, always subject to reconsideration when warranted by new information, even when a given understanding has become the foundation of action. Design offers the agility to move back and forth to respond to new information or new questions, as required.

Rules to Guide Discussion Leaders Experience suggests some rules to guide discussion leaders. There are undoubtedly others, and not all will apply in any particular inquiry.77

1. Conduct collaborative planning for the next effort prior to each work session based on current understanding. Revalidate the plan if there is a gap in time between sessions. (People always learn by reflection or individual effort between sessions.)

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2. Full participation is expected. Those who hang back must be drawn out by asking “What do you think about this?” and “Why do you think that?”

3. Relevance to the goal is the test but it should be applied with a light touch to avoid overly constraining conceptual initiative.

4. Don’t bypass disagreement. Clarify it and document it. You may change your judgment later.

5. Don’t discard inspiration. When possible solutions jump out of initial inquiry, list them somewhere for future reference. Meanwhile, get back to the task at hand.

6. Identify gaps in knowledge. Take steps to fill them.

7. Seek the advice of experts to add to content and to evaluate what you think you have learned from their perspective. (Don’t accept their evaluation as the new answer; question it where it differs so you

identify the sources of difference and whatever new evidence the expert offers that you must reconsider.)

8. When discourse freezes, ask the meta-questions. “What are we asking?” “What does the question itself entail?” “Is there a different perspective that might be more productive?”

9. Maintain a record of the learning—retain all diagrams and produce a running narrative. Conduct regular review of the narrative. The documentation will serve as a check on the design team’s logic in process and a reference for those who receive the design to indicate how particular insights developed—and perhaps reveal weakness in the process.

10. At the end of each session, allow time to reflect on what has been learned and how the learning journey has gone. (“Where are we?” “How has our learning journey gone so far?” “How can we organize our efforts and ourselves better to move forward?”)

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Operational design is a creative approach to problem solving for leaders confronted with complex situations—situations that conceal their actual nature under a set of surface appearances. Operational design is particularly useful to those required to translate large, abstract goals into ensembles of instrumental acts over time, those we call operational artists. Operational design adopts a skeptical posture regarding the finality of learning, or achieving stasis in human situations. It assumes intervention in a situation by one party will elicit a variety of responses from other interested parties—an assumption often omitted by military planners who behave as though they believe they can act on a passive opponent before a local and global audience that will interpret those planners’ motives with the same sense of altruism they assigned to themselves. Operational design offers a conceptual framework that can revitalize moribund professional theory and practice of operational art, understood as the mediating activity between strategy and action in the conditions and circumstances of the day.

The US Army came late to the concept of operational art, then quickly took the notion, created to deal with clashes of symmetrical industrial armies, as settled; failing to notice that the original conditions requiring the triune differentiation—tactics, operational art, and strategy—were largely disappearing from the nature of contemporary war. Jim Schneider, whose groundbreaking work has been discussed above, took the position in his book that operational art requires a symmetrical opponent.78 This paper has tried to indicate, to the contrary, that Svechin’s definitions—precisely because they do not tie the concepts to temporally limiting features—in fact are still useful, that operational art is still required but must develop a new content. Indeed, following the direction indicated by Sir Michael Howard—that contemporary conflicts (in his case post-colonial wars of the 1960s)

should be seen in their political rather than military characters—the operational art of today’s conflicts requires new construction for every necessarily unique situation, corresponding to the uniqueness of the defining contexts. Operational design, then, becomes the means to revitalize and rebuild a useful concept of operational art, broader and more flexible in application and practice than its predecessors under the old paradigm. As understood by Schilling, design is just as useful in designing strategies that recognize the “interdependence of the adversaries’ decisions and…their expectations about each other’s behavior.”79

There has been a strong reluctance to call operational design a process, for fear it will harden into a sequential series of actions frozen in posters on staff college walls. This fear has led to a general neglect of the governing logic of the actions that constitute operational design, some of which must, logically, come before others. Operational design is not a frozen sequence but neither is it a random application of cognitive tools. Some actions must be complete before others are examined and, while turning back to earlier stages is expected, operational designers must be sensitive to the logic that says that if you reframe your system understanding midway into the effort, this will naturally require review of the subsequent conclusions drawn from the old understanding.

Finally, the practice of operational design is predicated on the practice of collaborative learning, which, in turn, requires employing collaborative leadership, at least in the development of design concepts. Because of the hierarchical nature of the US Armed Forces, this can only be done deliberately and self-consciously, with sensitivity by the senior leaders to the added volume their rank and position gives their opinions when they are offered, particularly in heat, which may actually reflect depth of belief more than a will to impose an idea. Humility requires admission that you might just

IV. Conclusions

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be wrong, depth of belief notwithstanding. Collaborative learning will not just happen. It must be planned for and arranged deliberately.

Operational design is an approach to addressing complex strategic and operational problems. It

does not replace either efficient planning or tactical virtuosity in execution. It does keep one, however, from jumping on one’s horse and riding off in all directions at once because one has failed to ask the proper questions and ferret out the right answers before beginning to act aggressively without evident purpose.

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1 Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), page 458.

2 John Heskett, Design: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), page 5.

3 FM 5-0, Operations Process (Revised Final Draft) (5 June 2009), para. 3-3, page 3-1.

4 Joint Publication 1-02[1], Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (12 April 2001: As Amended Through 17 October 2008), page 397.

5 “Complex or just complicated: What is a complex system?” Fact sheet prepared by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) Centre for Complex Systems Science. Available online at http://www.csiro.au/resources/About-Complex-Systems.html. Accessed on 22 July 2009.

6 Shimon Naveh, Operational Art and the IDF: A Critical Study of a Command Culture (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA), September 30, 2007) for the Director of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary Defense.

7 Shimon Naveh, Jim Schneider, Tim Challans, The Structure of Operational Revolution: A Prolegomena (1.0) (Leavenworth, KS: Booz Allen Hamilton, 2009).

8 “Key Concepts of Operational Design,” Appendix B, FM 100-5, Operations (May 1986), 179 et seq. In 1986, there were only three: Center of Gravity, Lines of Operation, and Culminating Points. JP 3-0 currently lists 17 “Elements of Operational Design.” JP 3.0, Joint Operations (17 September 2006), Incorporating Change 1 (13 February 2008), page IV-6.

9 JP 3.0, page IV-3.

10 Published by Booz Allen Hamilton.

11 Called the Environmental Frame in FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft), (5 June 2009).

12 Called the Problem Frame in the Environmental Frame in FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft) (5 June 2009). The terms frame and framing have fairly specific meanings in design. They are used here according to the definitions of Martin Rein and Donald A. Schön. “A frame is a perspective from which an amorphous, ill-defined problematic situation can be made sense of and acted upon.” “Framing is…a way of selecting, organizing, interpolating, and making sense of a complex reality so as to provide guideposts for knowing, analyzing, persuading, and acting.” In Martin Rein and Donald A. Schön, “Frame-reflective policy discourse,” in Social Sciences, Modern States, National Experiences and Theoretical Crossroads, Peter Wagner, Carol Hirschon Weiss, Bjorn Wittrock, and Hellmut Wollman, editors (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), page 263.

13 Called a “frame of understanding” in Naveh et al., The Structure of Operational Revolution, page 62.

14 Called a “frame of intervention” in Naveh et al., The Structure of Operational Revolution, page 62, and the “Design Concept” in FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft).

15 FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft), page 3-7.

16 Joint Publication 3-0, Joint Operations (17 September 2006: Incorporating Change 1, 13 February 2008), page IV-2.

17 James J. Schneider, The Structure of Strategic Revolution: Total War and the Roots of the Soviet Warfare State (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1994). Schneider argues that operational art emerged as a separate activity during the American Civil War with U.S. Grant the exemplary practitioner.

18 Aleksandr A. Svechin, Strategy, A Translation of Strategiia (Moscow: Voennyi vestnik, 1927), Kent D. Lee, editor (Minneapolis, MN: East View Publications, 1991), pages 68–69.

19 Ibid, page 68.

20 Ibid.

21 Jacob W. Kipp, “The Origins of Soviet Operational Art, 1917–1936,” in Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art, Michael D. Krause and R. Cody Phillips, general editors (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2005), pages 213–239. See also Condoleezza Rice, “The Making of Soviet Strategy,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Peter Paret, editor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pages 648–676.

22 See, for example, G. S. Isserson, The Evolution of Operational Art, Bruce W. Menning, trans. (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, USACGSC, July 2005).

23 Michael Eliot Howard, “The Demand for Military History,” The Times Literary Supplement (13 November 1969), page 1295. This outstanding essay, one of Howard’s best, has not been included in any of his anthologies.

24 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Peter Paret and Michael Howard, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), page 177.

25 Raymond Aron, “The Evolution of Modern Strategic Thought (1945–1968)” Chapter 10 in Raymond Aron, Politics and History, Miriam Bernheim Conant, translator and editor (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984; The Free Press, 1978), page 187.

26 Thomas C. Shelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1980), page 3 (note 1).

27 Ibid., page 5.

28 For US experience, see Brig. Gen. Harold W. Nelson, in “The Origins of Operational Art,” in Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art, Krause and Phillips, general editors, pages 333–348. Nelson is a former US Army Chief of Military History and a long-time professor at the Army War College.

29 General Dwight D. Eisenhower to William Elizabeth Brooks, November 12, 1946, number 1180 in The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The Chief of Staff, Vol. 8 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pages 1372–73.

30 FM 100-5, Operations (20 August 1982), pages 2–3.

V. Endnotes

31 FM 100-5, Operations (May 1986), 9-11. The 1986 FM 100-5 is also significant for its discussion of campaign planning, which broadened the focus of the manual compared with its two predecessors, which were almost entirely tactical in focus.

32 Krause and Phillips, general editors, Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art, pages v, vi.

33 Colonel Arthur L. Wagner, Strategy: A Lecture Delivered by Colonel Arthur L. Wagner, Assistant Adjutant-General, U.S.A., to the Officers of the Regular Army and National Guard at the Maneuvers at West Point, Ky., and at Fort Riley, Kansas (Kansas City, MO: Hudson-Kimberly Publishing Co., 1904), page 5. Wagner attributed his definition to the influence of British Major General Edward Bruce Hamley’s Operations of War, a didactic text first published in 1864 and remaining in print through the First World War.

34 Para 6.1, FM 3-0. Operations (February 2008), page 6-1.

35 Available on line at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1-12.htm. What is particularly interesting is the dialectical relationship between the general and the particular, the laws of war and the laws of revolutionary war conducted in China. Accessed on 17 May 2009.

36 Schneider, Structure of Strategic Revolution, page 24.

37 Karl R. Popper, “Falsifiability as a Criterion of Demarcation,” The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group), 1959, 2002), pages 17–18.

38 Department of the Navy, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 5, Planning (1997), page 3.

39 Department of the Army, Figure 5-1, Battle Command, Field Manual 3-0, Operations, page 5-3.

40 Environmental Framing in FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft).

41 Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, Peter Paret and Michael Eliot Howard, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), page 88.

42 Also referred to as the existing system.

43 Quoted in Adrian R. Lewis, The American Culture of War (New York: Routledge, 2007), page 109. Ridgeway’s remarks, taken as a whole, do make a case for design by any means. He goes on to say of the next steps: “Then break it down into workable units. Establish an organization that will enable each unit to accomplish its particular mission. Then try to find good men to fill the key spots. Give them full authority for individual action, but check them relentlessly to see they speed the main job. And if they don’t produce, fire them.”

44 Tension is defined as “the resistance or friction among and between actors.” FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft), paragraph 3-78, page 3-12.

45 Both examples provided by LTG (Ret) Bill Carter.

46 In their introduction to the anthology, The Making of Strategy, Williamson Murray and Mark Grimsley list as critical influences: geography, history, nature of regime, religion, ideology, culture, economic factors, and organization of government. The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War, Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, editors. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pages 7–20.

47 See Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society; Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New York: Continuum, 2006). FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft), paragraph 3-72, page 3-11, refers to “groupings of actors that exert influence in the operational environment, perhaps without even sharing a common goal among the members.”

48 LTG (Ret) John H. Cushman. Fort Leavenworth—A Memoir. (Annapolis, MD: Private Printing, September 2001), pages 46-47.

49 Called Problem Framing in FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft).

50 Called Operations Framing in FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft).

51 FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft), paragraph 3-78.

52 Referred to by General Naveh at one point in his theory development as The Rival as Rationale.

53 General Naveh called this focus area, Command as Rationale.

54 General Naveh describes this as “the systemic conditions, means and measures affording reflective learning, critical understanding, and effective execution of the operational framing in the course of the campaign.” Briefing Operation Renegade, slide titled “Hezbollah Directive.”

55 See NSPD 44, Subject: Management of Interagency Efforts Concerning Reconstruction and Stabilization, December 7, 2005.

56 Or “making a problem of.” This is the macro-use of the term problematization. It is also used below in a micro-sense to describe the part of the process of discourse where the assertion of one interlocutor is challenged from another perspective by another in order to achieve a more accurate synthesis.

57 FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft), paragraph 3-89, page 3-13, says, “The problem statement clearly defines the problem or problem set that commanders must manage or solve.”

58 Called the Operational Approach in FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft).

59 Called the Design Concept in FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft).

60 FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft), paragraph 3-90, page 3-14, says, “The operations frame bounds the selection of possible actions that together lead toward achieving the desired end state.”

61 Ibid, paragraph 3-92, page 3-14, which defines the operational approach as “a visualization of the broad general actions that will produce the conditions that define the desired end state.”

62 The Doolittle raid is one of the examples of creative operational design used by General Naveh and Dr. Jim Schneider.

63 Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2006), pages 56–57.

64 An observation made by LTG (Ret) Mike Steele to a group of operational designers at a US Army Training and Doctrine Command wargame.

65 Theory of Action was a term used in an early doctrinal draft, Field Manual Interim (FMI) 5-2 Design (DRAFT) (20 February 2009), page 25. The draft defines the theory of action as “a single logic that binds together the pattern of actions into a coherent whole.” The draft combined the theory of action and what came to be called the Problem Statement, continuing: “The theory of action is defined as a hypothesis about the nature of the problem together with a proposed solution.” Here it is used only the latter sense.

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25

66 Other governmental agencies and supporting commanders normally have limits set on their collaboration, either deliberately, or de facto, by their higher authorities. Most often, the same applies to allied forces under nominal allied command, often hemmed in by various reservations.

67 Called the Design Concept in FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft).

68 FM 5-0 (Revised Final Draft), paragraphs 3-104 and 3-105, pages 3-15 and 3-16, list as minimum content for the Design Concept: Narrative and graphics from the design activities; problem statement; initial commander’s intent; operational approach; and commander’s initial planning guidance. The planning guidance, it says, “is the commander’s visualization and description of the desired end state and its implications for future planning. The planning guidance orients the focus of operations, links desired conditions to potential combinations of actions the force may employ to achieve them. Other information provided in the initial planning guidance includes information integration, resources, [and] risk.”

69 The term “strength of character” refers deliberately to the discussion by Clausewitz in Chapter III of Book I, On War.

70 Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), pages 51–74.

71 Phrase used frequently by General Naveh.

72 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1970), pages 5-6.

73 Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pages 128-133.

74 This is a paraphrase of Immanuel Kant’s famous “Copernican move,” which, coincidently (or perhaps not) is referenced by Thomas Kuhn. Immanuel Kant, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Critique of Pure Reason, Meiklejohn Translation, Vasilis Politis, editor (London: John Dent, Everyman Edition, 1934, 1991, 1993), page 15 [Bxv]. Kuhn’s first book was The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

75 Schön, Reflective Practitioner, page 130.

76 General Naveh’s formulation of the same process. In this case, problematization is used in a micro-sense to mean looking for flaws in the assertion, that is “making a problem” of the formulation. The larger sense of the term is explained above in the discussion of the cognitive transition.

77 See Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), page 128

78 Schneider, Structure of Strategic Revolution, pages 50–51, 53.

79 Schilling, The Strategy of Conflict, page 3 (note 1).

About the Author

Contact Information:

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Dr. Richard Swain (swain_richard@bah.com), an Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, currently supports UNIFIED QUEST and instruction in Operational Design. Dr. Swain was Director of Fellows at the School for Advanced Military Studies from 1994 to 1999, where he taught courses in ethics, military history, and the history of military thought. From 2002 to 2007, he was Professor of Officership at the William E. Simon Center for the Professional Military Ethic at the US Military Academy at West Point. Dr. Swain is a 1966 graduate of West Point and holds a doctorate

from Duke University. He is one of the authors of The Armed Forces Officer and he is the author of ‘Lucky War': Third Army in Desert Storm; “Neither War Nor Not War: Army Command in Europe During the Time of Peace Operations; Tasks Confronting USAREUR Commanders, 1994-2000” (SSI); “AirLand Battle,” Chapter 11 of Camp Colt to Desert Storm; The History of US Armored Forces; “Filling the Void: Operational Art and the US Army," Chapter 8 in The Operational Art: Developments in the Theories of War, and various articles in journals and reviews.

Richard Swain Associateswain_richard@bah.com 845/401-9104

Bob MayesSenior Associate Mayes_Robert@bah.com913/682-3159

Rolly DessertSenior AssociateDessert_Rolland@bah.com 913/680-6571

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