President Obama has announced that he is nominating General Martin E. Dempsey to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a background article on General Dempsey, NY Times reporter Thom Shanker lists General Dempsey’s current readings. I find them interesting (here):
The three most recent books he read illustrate his interests, concerns and priorities.
One was “Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty,” by Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. Another was “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations,” by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. And the third was “Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power,” by Robert D. Kaplan.
Kaplan’s book I noted back in January and edited this brief video of one of Kaplan’s talks:
The book “Managing the Unexpected” by Weick and Sutcliffe is about High Reliability Organizations (HROs) and how to create them:
We attribute the success of HROs in managing the unexpected to their determined efforts to act mindfully. By this we mean that they organize themselves in such a way that they are better able to notice the unexpected in the making and halt its development. If they have difficulty halting the development of the unexpected, they focus on containing it. And if some of the unexpected breaks through the containment, they focus on resilience and swift restoration of system functioning.
The book “The Starfish and the Spider” by Brafman and and Beckstrom is about dealing (fighting) with a decentralized and adaptive organizational structure. Consider the Apaches ( from the blog "the narrative lab" here)
In their book, The Starfish and the Spider: the unstoppable power of leaderless organisation", Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom relate the story of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and Incas, and their subsequent defeat by the Apaches.
In short, when legendary Spanish explorer Cortez first laid eyes on the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlan he was amazed at the level of civilization he found. Expecting to find savages, he found a population of more than 15 million with it's own language, an advanced calendar and a central government. Cortez, coveting Aztec gold, double-crossed the Aztec leader, Montezuma, and killed him. In the resulting chaos, Cortez and his army surrounded the city, blocked off aqueducts and barricaded roads - within 80 days 240,000 people had starved to death. Within just two years, the entire Aztec empire, which could trace it's origins back thousands of years, had collapsed. A similar fate befell the Incas and by the 1680's the Spanish forces seemed unstoppable. Until they headed north and encountered the Apaches.
To the surprise of many, the Spanish could not seem to subdue these seemingly primitive people. In fact, the Apaches held off the Spanish for two centuries. They had no secret weapon, but unlike the Aztecs and Incas, the Apache society were organised very differently: they had no single city or pyramid, no scarce resources to manage, no infrastructure. They had very little centralised political power - they were a Starfish society.
So, what led to the Apache's demise? They were "gifted" with cattle by the Americans, which necessitated some form of centralization as power had to be concentrated among leaders in order to manage this new resource. As soon as this happened, the Starfish turned into a Spider (or at least a hybrid) and therefore lost its adaptive abilities. Less than a century later, little was left of this once proud nation.
I find it quite appropriate that our military leader is thinking about the geopolitical shift to the Indian Ocean and Asia, about how to make the military a “high reliability organization,” and about how to fight a decentralized enemy.
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