Organizational Time Wasters—What Are They?

I'm struggling to describe a phenomenon that is acute in the military, but it must exist in many other organizations.

The realization came to me more than five years ago, while deployed to Kosovo. I found myself spending inordinate time doing tasks that merely kept me in good standing with the Army bureacracy. 

Some might be tempted to call these things maintenance or compliance tasks. But they were more wasteful than the former implied, and less a bow to outside authority or regulations than the latter suggests.

They were things like updating this or that form, verifying the accuracy of a piece of data by resubmitting several pages of data, and giving information to a new person in charge because the last person in charge has been reassigned.

A classic one is redoing an online "cyber-awareness" training module because you haven't logged into your network account for 30 days.

It has only got worse. For instance, our demobilization rituals here at Fort Dix include completing medical forms eight or nine times, all with the same information. It will clearly speed things up for the medical personnel who have to see us, dozens after dozens, but this is information that a) is simply repeated on several similar forms, and b) the military already has! A junior high drop out could come up with multiple ways to get that information replicated and delivered to the right people, all before I show up in the flesh.

You know of our travel adventures. Did you know that we did pre-deployment stuff here in New Jersey for six weeks before landing in Afghanistan? And once we got there it was at least two weeks before we were really up to speed. The flip side of that is two weeks to a month before leaving theater most units start scaling back operations in order to accomplish the daunting—and I used that word advisedly—job of major movement. So in a seven-month deployment the Army might get four and a half month's worhth of solid woork out of me.

I understand that the two things, the time-wasting tasks and the ramp-up and ramp-down time that bookend operations, are different. But they lead to the same thing: inefficiency. And it really comes down to this: Soldiers spend less and less of their time and energy doing the work the Army hired them to do, and more time and energy on simply being in compliance with broader organizational requirements.

Anyway, I'm trying to find out more about these maintenance tasks in the organizational literature. And I can't. Someone has had to come across this.

What would you call it?

Doesn't It Just Make Sense?

How does such a big organization like the Army expect small groups of young men and women to figure out how to act in the face of complex and changing problems?

As the right side of this blog indicates (you have to scroll down a bit), I have written some four dozen posts that can loosely be regarded as having to do with organizational theory.

It’s a fancy term (“organizational theory,” that is) that deals with how a group organizes itself to serve a function. Now, there might be better phrases to encompass all the academic work that has gone into the enterprise, but I have yet to stumble upon one. So “organizational theory” it is.

Still, it’s a big topic. Here is a small sliver that resonates with me, and I think it might with you, if you have ever spent any time in any type of organizations.

It’s called “sensemaking,” and it answers the question posed above. It also explains how many organizations behave. That is, it describes the behavior of you or your colleagues in your organization.

Sensemaking views the organization and the product of a bunch of actors who try to tell the story of what's going on around them, and act in according with what they think that story will turn out to be. For example, what does it mean to be a Soldier in Afghanistan, and how does one act in a given situation? I act on my presumptions about how I should act. After all, “organization is an attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action.”

No group can plan for every eventuality, and at any rate, plans assume that everyone in the organization knows them and interprets them similarly.

Here is where it gets pretty insightful. What sensemaking tells us is that members figure things out after they do them.

One scholar formulates it by saying “people think by acting,” and, “action focuses cognition.”

So while the Army expects small groups of young men and women to figure out how to act in the face of complex and changing problems by reading up on all the doctrine and remembering everything the sergeant major said, that’s just not what happens. Instead, people take in as much information around them and make a guess, hoping for the best. Once they act, they retrospectively make sense of it. 

Volumes have been written about this, and I plan to add a volume and a half to them in the form of my dissertation. As exciting as I think it is, I'll spare you the tome, though, and leave you with this instead. 

The idea that people in an organization try to make sense of things is, well, sensible. It’s a bit more radical to declare that the sensemaking creates a story about their action and the organization that then feeds future events. 

But it’s not as radical to think that a young Soldier uses his own actions to justify what he thinks about an event. Those thoughts influence options to further actions, which result in reflection. So action precedes thought, and creates a cycle. 

It’s not the most exciting post, but we’re talking organizational theory here. It’ll be super exciting when you read my dissertation. 

Engineering and SeaBeeing in Kabul

It looked just like "the point of the mountain," a colloquialism in Utah for the Jordan Narrows, Draper, and the boundary between Salt Lake and Utah Counties.

The similarities-- geographic-- are uncanny. But the architecture is other-worldly, to me. The suburbs of Kabul are like an ancient mockery of South San Francisco-- tightly-packed row houses in dingy pastels cubed together in neatly lined streets that defy the mountain terrain.

The flight from Bagram Airfield to the place called NKC (New Kabul Compound) was about 15 minutes. I may have written before, and I will certainly write it again-- a Black Hawk flight will always be cool. Only two of us left the bird at NKC, and CPT Packer was there to greet me.

I was invited (read, "ordered") here to cover an important milestone in the westernization of the Afghan military. A special engineer unit of the Afghan National Army constructed a Mabey Johnson bridge. Now I'm not sure how momentous that is in the grand scheme of the War on Radical Islam, but it's a big enough deal to send me up to cover it. 

And I think it's kind of a big deal because it's a concrete step toward Afghan self-sufficiency. The larger mission of getting these guys to operate independently is really the culmination of thousands of these steps. And too often Soldiers forget that the step doesn't just happen because we are telling the other guys that we are leaving and they'll have to do it on their own. 

If I tried that approach in a high school math class ("Better learn this stuff or you'll be screwed next year in Trig!") without actually teaching, evaluating, and reteaching, I'd be fired.

Imagine how difficult it would be to stand up a modern Army along American lines. Or, just read the news about Afghanistan and you'll get a pretty good idea. Of course, culture and language are easy scapegoats, but the sheer monstrosity of the task is the biggest challenge. 

We're asking them to build an organization of a half a million personnel, with hundreds of thousands of pieces of totally foreign equipment, develop systems from scratch, and oh, fight a war while they're doing it. 

Robert Gates notes glibly in his memoir (I've got an only slightly lame "review" of it here) about similar phenomena in Iraq and Afghanistan. He complained about American politicians' impatience with the governments in our two war zones, and pointed out that it has taken the U.S. a couple hundred years to get some of these systems working. And Congress is still as dysfunctional as ever!

War can be a crucible to make things happen quickly, too. But if left to their own devices, these guys would fight it the old fashioned way-- the way we asked them to fight the soviets. Isn't that interesting? 

Anyway, it's fascinating to catch a glimpse of what "Train, Advise, and Assist" really means in one particular unit. Today it means that an engineer company can complete a fairly complicated, if routine, task on its own once ISAF leaves.

Maybe the reason this was so successful is because the Navy did it. It was a Navy Mobile Construction Battalion that got the ANA engineers up and running. Fun fact: The name, "Seabees" comes from CB (construction battalion). 

I was thoroughly impressed with them. And that's not to take anything away from the engineer Soldiers who advise the ANA brigade, but it has always seemed to me that Sailors are more systematic and particular about things because working at sea has a way of forcing efficiency and reliability. (Karl Weick began his illustrious career in studying reliable organizations on an aircraft carrier). 

Also, I was invited to eat with the honchos. I'm certain it was by accident, but I quite enjoyed the rice nonetheless. 

Tomorrow I fly back to BAF. It's fun being expeditionary for a few days. It was fun hanging out with the guys who wear "Don't Tread on Me" on their shoulders, and it was fun to see Kabul. 

Remember Keating: A Five-Year Retrospective, Part 6

This is the final part in a six-part series. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4. Read Part 5.

Three Medals of Honor have been awarded in connection with COP Keating, two from the final battle. As the highest honor a soldier can receive for action in combat, these awards ratify the ways the soldiers fought. In essence, they legitimate the way they organized themselves. That organizing activity was heavily influenced by the Warrior Ethos.

SSG (Ret.) Clint Romesha.

Properly understood as a tool that soldiers use to enact and make sense of their environment, the Ethos is a powerful instrument in combat. The actions of the soldiers in battle of COP Keating illustrates as much in several ways. While soldiers act during combat, they do so without carefully rationalizing those actions. Instead, they look for validation after the action. The language of the Warrior Ethos gives them material to make the necessary meaning.

None of this is to say that the American soldiers had not been combat effective until 2003, when they were enlightened with a breakthrough mission statement. But to dismiss the power of the Warrior Ethos is to commit two major errors. One is to ignore the overwhelming superiority of U.S. combat performance relative to the nation’s battlefield enemies. The other is to ignore the fact that the current force is regarded as the greatest fighting force of modernity.

Certainly many factors contribute to the effectiveness of soldiers in combat, but to take the extreme position that the Warrior Ethos affects it in only a minor way to is take the position that words don’t matter, that what trainers tell Soldiers don’t matter, and that soldiers are merely components in some mechanistic, post-human form of warfighting.

That claim defies the human dimension of battle, and the centrality of human relationship in organizing in it.

The above was adapted from a paper I submitted in a doctoral seminar in organizational communication. The paper was titled, "More than Mere Words: Enacting the Warrior Ethos in Combat."

Quotes from the Soldiers are taken from The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by the eminent Jake Tapper. References to enactment, sensemaking, and other social psychology ideas are mainly from the various works of Karl E. Weick. 

Remember Keating: A Five-Year Retrospective, Part 5

This is the fifth part in a six-part series. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4. Read Part 6.

Five soldiers were pinned down in a Humvee on the COP. The insurgents who were firing a seemingly endless supply of small arms rounds and rocket-propelled grenades had obviously studied how to disable the Americans’ best positions.

The soldiers—SGT Justin Gallegos, SGT Vernon Martin, SGT Brad Larson, SPC Stephan Mace, and SPC Ty Carter—understood they might die trying to escape, or would certainly die if they remained in the truck. Planning their egress, they made their move. Gallegos, Mace, and Martin were all hit immediately. Carter and Larson ran back to the truck. Mace was wounded by both RPG and small arms fire.  As he lay on the ground, bleeding and more exposed than ever, Mace tried to crawl on his elbows toward the Humvee. Carter saw him about fifteen yards away.

SPC Ty Carter

"I’m going to go get him," Carter told Larson. "No," the sergeant replied. "I can see him, he’s right there," Carter insisted. "You’re no good to him dead," was the reply from the senior soldier. They argued, and Carter continued to plea. Eventually, Larson consented, and Carter went out again to administer aid. The two soldiers carried Mace back into the Humvee under fire, and later to the aid station.

Perhaps the most conspicuous, and romanticized, element of the Warrior Ethos in the popular imagination of "leave no man behind." Carter’s persistence and selflessness would earn him the Medal of Honor; at the presentation ceremony, President Obama described Carter’s actions as "the story... of what our troops do for each other," explaining that "he displayed the essence of true heroism— "not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost."

"I will never leave a fallen comrade" expresses two truisms that make soldiers more effective in combat: one, they have received training aligned to social cohesion that helps them enact it, and two, they are imbued with the trust that makes the enactment natural. Both phenomena are evident on the battlefield in cases like Carter rescuing Mace and in the anecdote that began this paper.

Mission Statements serve to focus purpose and create organizational unanimity of goals. In this way, they help an organization allocate resources to for “translating organizational objectives into a work structure so that time, cost and performance parameters can be assessed and controlled.” . In the Army, soldiers are systematically trained to leave nobody behind. While the ethos of rescuing fallen soldiers is not new, its inclusion in a written mission statement as the ultimate line of the Warrior Ethos has encouraged the Army to explicitly incorporate it into large programs, such as Combat Life Saver, begun in 2007.

Perhaps a more elemental dimension of the leave nobody behind ethos is the trust that it instills in soldiers. Sociologists refer to trust in military action as social or unit cohesion, and its power is well documented. Interestingly, trust comes from drill—time spent on organizational action—by unit members acting together. Perhaps counter intuitively, then, drill and rehearsal don’t have as primary benefits preparation for a particular course of action, but to instill trust. Wong, et al., found that soldiers feel empowered to do their jobs when they believe that their team mates support them and will keep them safe.

Trust on the battlefield runs deep, as evident from Romesha’s emotional recollection of his own decision during the Battle of COP Keating. In an interview with Romesha on the eve of the Soldier’s Medal of Honor ceremony, Tapper asked about the importance of the Warrior Ethos:

"Tell me why it’s so important to you that the enemy not get their hands on a dead American soldier. Why does that thought bother you so much?"
Romesha: "Cause they’re ours. I mean, to give closure to the family, you know to have their son one more time. We’re not going to leave someone behind. Never gonna do it."

Perhaps this sentiment precedes action, to some degree, but it is justified and intensified after action. Carter didn’t have any particular fondness for Mace, but said in hindsight that he had to risk his life to save his team mate because they were both soldiers.

It was the ethos in action.

The above was adapted from a paper I submitted in a doctoral seminar in organizational communication. The paper was titled, "More than Mere Words: Enacting the Warrior Ethos in Combat."

Quotes from the Soldiers are taken from The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by the eminent Jake Tapper. References to enactment, sensemaking, and other social psychology ideas are mainly from the various works of Karl E. Weick. 

Remember Keating: A Five-Year Retrospective, Part 4

This is the fourth part in a six-part series. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 5. Read Part 6.

"I will never accept defeat."

The enemy had breached the perimeter at COP Keating. The officer in charge, 1LT Andrew Bundermann, a 24-year-old graduate of West Point, stepped outside of the operations center to see his camp overrun and in flames; hundreds of enemy fighters still advanced toward them. He decided the Americans would have to consolidate their position and abandon the outer parts of the camp. "We need to fight this out; we need to hold our ground," Bundermann told his first sergeant and SSG Romesha. "F--- that," replied Romesha. “We need to retake this fucking camp and drive the f---ing Taliban out."

Bundermann’s idea to consolidate was probably the wisest, rationally. It was calculated. By all accounts, Bundermann was a good officer; His superiors said that he managed the battle effectively. But it was Romesha’s emotional response, a reaction based on refusing to give up what some members of his team had already died for. It was grounded in ethos.

1LT Andrew Bundermann and SGT Brad Larson

Romesha’s decision didn’t really make much sense in the moment that he made it. Nevertheless, his two superiors—Bundermann and 1SG Hill—agreed and proceeded to devise a counterattack. It was profitable only in retrospect, but it was an action borne of the dissonant and chaotic.

Organizing in combat is about men and women who seize those dissonant and surprising moments to direct action.

Whether Romesha’s instinct was resultant of systematic training or traits he brought to the Army is beside the point. The Ethos is articulated and reinforced in training and throughout Army activity, finding its way even into the citation for the Medal of Honor that Romesha was awarded in 2013:

"Undeterred by his injuries, SSG Romesha continued to fight and upon the arrival of another soldier to aid him and the assistant gunner, he again rushed through the exposed avenue to assemble additional soldiers."

Enactment helps us understand the process by which the individual acts in these chaotic situations. Romesha and his teammates formulated a plan to defeat the enemy, now inside the wire. But plans and goals seem to pose a counterexample to the retrospective conception of enacting and organizing. Remember that meaning and justification are used to create order from chaos, to maintain micro-stability during disruptive moments. One remedy, then, is to change the future tense of plans to future perfect tense. "I will never accept defeat" becomes, "I will not have been defeated." In this way, enactment becomes a way to avoid thinking about the disruptive nature of an alternative future. It allows the actors to avoid considering what the world would be like if he had to inhabit it as defeated actors.

Ethos allows soldiers to formulate such plans against all logic. In combat, sometimes logic reigns—as when Black hawk Medevac helicopter pilots refused to land at the COP for over 10 hours because of the intense fire (though a senior officer in the brigade told me a few days ago that that decision may not have been the right one). But as soldiers try to recover some form of stability and order during battle, they tend to organize under ethical considerations rather than rational ones. Refusing to accept defeat is one such consideration.

The above was adapted from a paper I submitted in a doctoral seminar in organizational communication. The paper was titled, "More than Mere Words: Enacting the Warrior Ethos in Combat."

Quotes from the Soldiers are taken from The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by the eminent Jake Tapper. References to enactment, sensemaking, and other social psychology ideas are mainly from the various works of Karl E. Weick. 

Remember Keating: A Five-Year Retrospective, Part 3

This is the third part in a six-part series. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 4. Read Part 5. Read Part 6.

The mission-first primacy of organizational action helps soldiers prioritize, focus, and execute. It was at the heart of adoption of the Ethos, and was "based on an understanding of what is most important to least important in the context that all specified and implied tasks must be performed."

All organizing occurs in contexts that are chaotic and open to multiple interpretations, and combat is only an exemplar of such a context. Thus, organizing involves the systematic reduction of equivocality .

SGT Joshua Kirk

Making sense of events requires a fair amount of post-decision validation. Equivocality can rear its head before or after a soldier commits to an action. After an action, like the decision by SGT Francis to keep fighting with broken ribs, must be validated in order to make sense of it, especially because it was a social act.

Inherent in enactment is the assumption that there is no single, objective reality to which actors can compare their activity. Reality is contingent and contextual, making decisions about the most important and most social things difficult. For example, less than 30 minutes into the battle at Keating, SGT Josh Kirk was struck in the head by a bullet, and was losing blood quickly. CPT Cordova, the ranking medical officer at the outpost, treated Kirk for several minutes while his condition deteriorated. Then,

After many minutes of trying to keep the sergeant alive by breathing for him with the squeeze bag, Cordova looked down at the floor. They would have to perform CPR on him all day to keep him alive, taking two of the four medical staff out of commission. Any other day, they would have done it without question, but not today. The wounded were already stacked up, and more would be coming in.... At 6:45 a.m., Cordova pronounced Kirk dead.

The Ethos helps actors validate actions that are otherwise difficult to justify. Commitment "marshals forces that destroy the plausibility of alternatives." In organizing, and especially in combat, there is little advantage to considering alternatives once an action has been taken. Intense actions, we find, enforces this tendency, and when actors validate intense actions, they often find unexpected and attractive meaning therein.

The language of the Warrior Ethos is highly flexible, rendering itself meaningful to a vast universe of action. It also promotes the social aspect of finding meaning, and encourages soldiers to commit. It is a linguistic tool that helps soldiers make sense of the nonsensical in battle.


The above was adapted from a paper I submitted in a doctoral seminar in organizational communication. The paper was titled, "More than Mere Words: Enacting the Warrior Ethos in Combat."

Quotes from the Soldiers are taken from The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by the eminent Jake Tapper. References to enactment, sensemaking, and other social psychology ideas are mainly from the various works of Karl E. Weick. 

Remember Keating: A Five-Year Retrospective, Part 2

This is the second part in a six-part series. Read Part 1. Read Part 3. Read Part 4. Read Part 5. Read Part 6.

SPC Mark Dulaney shook SGT John Francis. "You good? You alright?"

A rocket-propelled grenade had sent Francis flying and he landed on his back. "Can you get up? Asked the specialist. "I think I got some busted ribs," replied the sergeant. He did, in fact, have five of them. "Should we go to the aid station?" asked Dulaney, a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

"F--- no," said Francis. "we gotta keep fighting til this s--t’s over."

In combat, effective soldiers take the initiative, military speak for staying on the move and on offense. Military culture, in fact, privileges decisiveness, sometimes to the detriment of the organization. COP Keating was, after all, under attack because senior army leaders to long refused to seriously reconsider the decision to build an outpost in Nuristan.

But just as action supplies the necessary material for cognition, commitment supplies incoherent groups the material for organization. The ways in which individuals develop a commitment is important for understanding how they act. Further, an examination of how soldiers put into action the first statement of the Warrior Ethos reveals some of the dimensions of how they make sense of the organizing going on around them.

Karl Weick is a social psychologist who has profoundly influenced the way organizational experts are now understanding how people communicate in high-tempo and high-risk situations. Nearly all of Weick’s ideas about organizing can be traced to a set of experiments he conducted in the late 1960s, when he invited participants to conduct a complex task with the promise of monetary reward. Those participants who were deprived of their promised reward subsequently rated the task more interesting.

Thus, the experiment and his analysis reveals quite a bit about why individuals act and follow direction—in other words organize—and how they find satisfaction in that work. Weick’s experiments had a "person [make] a clear commitment to the task, a commitment whose full content was not grasped at the beginning." Thus, action became the independent variable.

Weick calls commitment a "reference point for sensemaking." Fundamental to sensemaking in organizational life is the notion that action is almost always social. Thus, acts become "interacts" between and among actors. The anecdote above was an interact between Dulaney and Francis. Commitment, then, usually invokes the social.

When soldiers say (or think) "I will always place the mission first," they are equating the mission with the team. In one respect, it absolves the individual of responsibility and makes it easier to deal with the mental and emotional load of combat.

The commitment pattern is heavily reliant on language. By looking at action as a cause, we are free to speculate that the way soldiers express their commitments might also be the result of action. Sharing and socializing commitments is enabled by organizations that focus on language . The consistency and variety with which the Army employs the Warrior Ethos makes it more likely that commitment will be shared and understood in common ways.

The most superficial reading of the Battle of COP Keating makes plain that these guys were committed to the fight.

The above was adapted from a paper I submitted in a doctoral seminar in organizational communication. The paper was titled, "More than Mere Words: Enacting the Warrior Ethos in Combat."

Quotes from the Soldiers are taken from The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by the eminent Jake Tapper. References to enactment, sensemaking, and other social psychology ideas are mainly from the various works of Karl E. Weick. 

Remember Keating: A Five-Year Retrospective, Part 1

This is the first part in a six-part series commemorating the Battle of COP Keating. 

Half a decade ago the war in Afghanistan raged on in climactic fashion: 

On 3 October 2009, Soldiers of Bravo Troop, 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry, repelled an enemy force of 300 Anti-Afghan Forces (AAF) fighters, preserving their combat outpost and killing approximately 150 of the enemy fighters. US forces sustained eight killed in action and 22 wounded, all but three of whom returned to duty after the attack. The Soldiers distinguished themselves with conspicuous gallantry, courage, and bravery under the heavy enemy fire that surrounded them.

—Excerpt from AR-15-6 Investigation re: Complex 

Attack on COP Keating - 3 Oct 09 Executive Summary

COP Keating from above. Photo by 1LT Brad Larson

Throughout the day I'll post five additional vignettes about the battle and its implications for the Army, all taken from a paper I submitted in a graduate seminar on organizational communication. 

As U.S. Forces continue their withdrawal, it is important to remember those who have borne the heavy costs of standing up a democracy in such an inhospitable place. It is important because we still have a mission here, and that mission will require much more resolve than during the years of fierce fighting and American casualties. It is important also because the U.S. Army will fight other wars, and lessons wait to be discovered from those already concluded. 

Read "Remember Keating: A Five-Year Retrospective, Part 2."

Embracing the Suck: Depression and Deployment

Why are combat deployments so depressing?  You're talking to an expert, not because I am severely depressed (this post is not a "cry for help,") nor because I have extensive psychological training, though I did sleep in a military barracks last night.

I have claim to expertise because I think about these things a lot and I write about the things I think about.

During overseas War on Terror operations, a common mantra has been, "embrace the suck." It encapsulates much of the deployed experience. A good friend of mine even wrote a book with the title. He hopes that it "will provide [the reader] with strength, courage, wisdom, and faith plus a little bit of humor and hope to get through each day while deployed."

Why do readers need some courage and hope to get through deployments?

"Embrace the suck" is an idea elegantly loaded with prescriptive value, but has no diagnostic value. Whether it's the tidbits of inspiration in the book or the idea that suckiness can be lovingly accepted and held, ETS helps Soldiers soldier on, as it were. But it doesn't help those Soldiers' families and friends understand exactly whence the suckiness comes.

That's where "My Public Affairs" comes in. Here are five reasons why deployments depress.

1. Isolation from family and friends

First, being away from home, for most people, sucks. There is a class of Soldier that likes being away from home. This is strange. As in, not normal. It might beg a larger discussion, but one of the policy reasons for sending us over here nine months to a year at a time is to prevent disruptions at home. In other words, the Army deploys precisely to make it more likely that people can lead normal lives with their families most of the time.

Communication with loved ones is hard for Soldiers away from their families, and the disruptions are intense. It is compounded for those with children-- the absence can often be wrenching for me, as I see snapshots of my two boys growing and developing in spurts. Trying the optimistic tack-- looking forward to a time when I'll be with them and will get to enjoy their energy and love, makes the present even harder.

2. It's a small, small world

Another reason that a deployment depresses the soul is the limited people and geography. Forget the suckiness of seeing little more than the same dozen buildings every day, traversing the exact same path to get to the laundry or to a meal. The work we do is mostly routine and monotonous, and makes the world feel even smaller. For the vast majority of Soldiers, work in a war zone is anything but glamorous. It's assembly line labor. Even the guys who go out of the wire usually patrol the same road every week or visit the same small Afghan village. Or guard the same entry control point every night. In public affairs we write the same stories... just change the names.

It's not terribly different from the work a lot of Americans do. But Soldiers don't get weekends. We can't go to a new restaurant tonight just to mix it up. Often, at home, I'd grab a book and head to the coffee shop for a few hours. Here, I'm just going to see that same people I'm trying to take a break from.

3. Everyone sees (and cares) what you're up to

That brings to mind the distinct lack of privacy. Here, there are very little alone time, and no "alone place." Everything from sleeping to showering is done in the company of others.

For a lone wolf like me, living under the microscope for so long is withering.

It goes without saying that there is no sex on a deployment. For accuracy's sake, there might be sex happening out here, but it is punishable by fine and demotion.

4. It's hot

There are other factors to the suck. The heat is inescapable at times. It's dusty. The only basketball court is concrete and outdoors. No McDonald's. No good steak. No a lot of things. The mission seems murky or unattainable. Many Soldiers confess to very low levels of satisfaction in their work.

There are a million little things for me and every other human being that can add up to a big thing.

5. Big Brother doesn't requite your love

But by far the biggest factor in The Suck is the Army itself. Working under the weight of a tired, uncompassionate, unforgiving, relentless bureaucracy can figuratively suck the life out of you. I have written about this many times before.

The deployment cycle begins with excitement and motivation, followed by bouts of frustration and constructive defiance. After the inevitable defeats, Soldiers lose the energy to defy and create, entering a period of lethargic resignation, like to cruise control. Toward the end, some Soldiers begin the surrender phase. If you've ever read the final paragraph of 1984, you'll know what this looks like.

He was not running or cheering any longer....  The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.... But it was all right, everything was all right, he had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. 

Winston Smith embraced the suck. And then he was dead. Of course the killing that the Army does is only metaphoric. It kills the creative spirit. And I know that there are "resiliency" tactics to combat feelings of defeat to Big Army Brother. But those tactics drain mental and emotional resources. They cause stress. The body and brain can only cope for so long. About a year, as it turns out.

The all-important fifth phase of the deployment cycle is the elation of returning home.

Let's hope I can hold out that long.

Complaining the Army Way, aka Don't Gripe to the Brass

I complain a lot. Well, I take that back for modification.

I complain about the Army a lot. And even more specifically, the active duty Army. Big Army, as opposed to the Army National Guard. And while I'm clarifying and qualifying, let me add that the extent that the National Guard invites complaints is in direct proportion to the degree to which it tries to emulate Big Army.

On to the topic, then.

When a higher ranking Soldier politely accused me of simply pointing out flaws in the Army instead of trying to productively engage them, I had to reflect on that. Of course, I think my complaining is productive, because it's legitimate. Doesn't everybody?

Well, turns out, no.

To get to the bottom of it, I looked into bona fide social science. There are plenty of people and organizations who want to know why people complain (the Army isn't one of them, by the way.)

For starters, there are many types of complaints. Some whine. Others vent. The whiners and venters think they are just blowing off steam. But the irony is, Guy Winch, author of The Squeaky Wheel tells us, that we are not blowing off steam but creating it.

I might be guilty of that. But in an effort to affirm my behavior, I kept digging. 

According to Jeffrey Kassing, a communication researcher at Arizona State University, people vent because they feel helpless. In an organizational setting, this manifests as dissent. According to the literature (a really fancy terms that simply means, "a bunch of published studies"):

expressions of dissent can occur when employees combat psychological and political restraints imposed by modern organizations, when they choose to exercise freedom of speech in the workplace, or when they decide to use dissent as a means of participation.

Now here is the fascinating part (fascinating for people who get really excited by findings in journals with titles like, Management Communication Quarterly!) This dissent-- we'll call it complaining from here on out-- can be grouped into one of three types:

1. Articulated complaints (expressing dissent directly and openly to managers)
2. Antagonistic complaints (dissenting in an adversarial way, but with a perception of protection from reprisal)
3. Displaced complaints

Can you guess which one this blog predominantly expresses?

Look, the reason I write is to find an audience. I am but a humble staff sergeant. I can't go to the colonel (whose main priority is to please a general) with a complaint. A lieutenant colonel can't even lodge a complaint, because the colonel used to be in Delta Force, so if you say something that upsets him, his mere glare will emit extracorporeal lithotripsic shock waves directed at your head and turn your brain to mush. For this reason, anyone O-5 and below must wait until the D-Force guy has had three cups of coffee and the Cowboys have won at least two games in a row before speaking with him, just to be on the safe side.

Me? I just write a blog. It is a safe way to express displaced dissent. The good kind of complaining. Or at least the best kind in the Army.

You see, displaced complaints are marked by,

disagreeing without confronting or challenging... It involves [complaining] to external audiences and/or to ineffectual internal audiences... [which] include nonwork friends, spouses/partners, strangers, and family members. Employees [complain] to these audiences because the risk of retailiation deminishes. (Kassing, J. 1998. "Development of the Organizational Dissent Scale," p. 192). 

Dissent serves as a corrective feedback mechanism. So I am really just trying to better the organization. And you wonderful readers are a part of that important work!

So, in the interest of telling the entire story, if dissent (complaining) is a way to provide feedback, then assent (praise) should be a regular practice, too, when appropriate. I think this blog has praised the Army quite well here, here, here, and here, for examples.

So I'm not done complaining. I'm just trying to do my military duty. 

Kissing up to the Master Sergeant

He's got "master" in his title, after all.

Prior to my first deployment, to Kosovo, then-SFC Paul Wade presented his vision for our unit.

"My job is to make sure these guys have fun," he declared as his enthusiastic and semi-well-behaved German Shepherd prowled the room during a Family Readiness orientation before we deployed.

And fun we had. Our time in Kosovo was no picnic, but we made it count.

As many Soldiers are fond of saying, "we work hard and play hard." For nine months our seven-man section met resistance from the command staff, but still managed to produced a 30-plus-page monthly task force magazine, which required the management of printing contracts off base; produced 11 video magazines and distributed fully-functioning DVDs to the task force; Established one of the first Army unit YouTube channels; developed and managed a Pleistocene-age intranet site; produced a 20-minute end-of-tour video, the likes of which had never before been conceived by a brigade-level element; and took care of the countless command photo-ops and "hooah" videos that always fall to any public affairs unit.

But our NCOIC made sure we had fun. So we had barbecues. We played volleyball (poorly). We met new people and new units. We got creative with our photography and video-making. We visited historic sites and hiked mountains. We had snowball fights. We ate on the economy-- sometimes it was good, sometimes not so much.

More than anything was the comraderie developed from small, but meaningful, interactions every day. Hanging out at chow, joking around about a mission, that kind of stuff. Wade had a penchant for making fun of me in an exaggerated Mr. Peabody voice as he pushed up his notional spectacles. When we started to guffaw, he'd put his monologue into high gear until we split at the seams from laughter.

All of these morale-building efforts took, well, effort. They didn't just happen. Someone had to make sure we had fun. That someone was SFC Wade.

I'd put his photography, writing, and graphic design skills up there with anyone's in the Army. But I'd put his capacity for having amd making fun second to none.

He is now a master sergeant, and sits in an office most of the time, I presume. I get his Facebook updates, and it looks like he is still committed to the f-word.

When all is said and done, all sentient Soldiers with the capacity to emote (so you can omit most light colonels and above), hold on to a set of memories from deployed life that includes friends made and good times had. Yeah, we worked. That work probably made an impact. But the real impact on me and most junior Soldiers was the fun.

Thanks, Master Sergeant.

The Curse of Thoroughness: When Army Leaders Can't Get Things Done

The following originally appeared in the blog, "Musings of a Factotum" on January 27, 2009, under the title, "Is the Army Effective?

I was a Truck Commander today. That’s a glorified way of saying that I sat in the passenger seat while my buddy drove the Humvee from the dispatch lot to our working area.

We had been assigned a vehicle, but the only one available was a tactical Humvee. With any tactical vehicle come too many rules and restrictions. You need a ground guide to move in and out of parking lots, Kevlar helmets must be worn by all vehicle occupants, and drivers need to place blocks and drip pans whenever shutting down. So even though we are only driving the truck on paved roads in a one-mile radius at no more than 18 miles per hour, we are burdened with all these inefficiencies.

I understand that the United States Army is not designed to run with ruthless drive for profits. But the mentality of thoroughness translates into other areas. It took several man-hours to get the vehicle signed over to us. Two Specialists, a Sergeant First Class, a Major, and a civilian contractor all had their hands in the transaction. What productive items of business could at least some of these soldiers been engaged in?

There is no such thing as “military efficiency.” The U.S. Army is not efficient. It is thorough. Thoroughness can serve us well, but should it be the highest priority?

How many bright, talented people are stifled in the military because they are forced to comply with endless regulations and redundancies? In the world of the Army, even these people, as smart as they may be, end up as mindless automatons, more worried about compliance and approval from their superiors than about getting a job done right.

Frustration is the call word, even among these people. Everyone in the Army loves to say express how screwed up it is. One high-ranking officer told me not too long ago, “You need to become an officer so you can fix this.”

“You’re an officer!,” I shouted in my mind. It seems everyone can see how fouled up the system is, but no one sees how screwed up it is in their own area of responsibility, and nobody wants to tell their superiors that the way we’ve been doing it doesn't make sense.

At Basic Training, when I thought twice about executing a command that sounded mistaken, my drill sergeant told me not to second guess myself. As I noted then, even when you’re right, you look like an ass if you’re the only one.

That truism holds in the everyday institutional army. It is much easier to hide behind caution smothered in ineffectiveness, then to tread into open ground of risky newness, where the potential of figuring out better ways to do things lurk.

The Army is effective at being a behemoth of an organization, and can run itself for the sake of running itself.


Epilogue: I have become very aware in the years since I wrote this piece just how much the Army can change. It is a remarkably forward-thinking organization, in many ways. But in too many ways it is weighed down by the fear of getting things wrong. A professor of mine once noted that the military should be the most experimental organization, but very often it is the least. I have two theories as to why. One is rank, and the other is manning, though the two are connected. By rank I refer to the tendency of those in charge of executing operations to defer to seniors who, by their very seniority, tend to be more conservative and traditional. By manning I mean that those who get into senior positions are the very people who reaffirm Army culture and practice. Leadership positions are always internal hires. I wonder how the military would respond to some leadership from outside the comabt sectore. Hmmm... that gives me an idea...

How to Spot a Waste-of-Time Meeting

Peter Drucker was a genius. And he should have been made an honorary sergeant major in charge of the Army Meeting Command.

But it would have been a boring gig, since he likely would have abolished most meetings. I had read a long time ago that Drucker, who preached efficiency by bucking conventional wisdom, believed meetings to be a sign of organizational dysfunction.

But are they? I did a little reading up on the matter. Turns out that meetings get a bad name because there are so many bad meetings. But there are a few instances when it is appropriate to hold meetings.

He categorized meetings thusly:

• A meeting to prepare a statement, an announcement, or a press release.
• A meeting to make an announcement—for example, an organizational change.
• A meeting in which one member reports.
• A meeting in which several or all members report.
• A meeting to inform the convening executive.
• A meeting whose only function is to allow the participants to be in the executive’s presence. 

Of this last kind, the management guru said, "there is no way to make these meetings productive. They are the penalties of rank.” We wouldn't know anything about that in the Army.

You see, Drucker's concern was productivity, which always comes down to cost analysis. In the Army we are subject to many meetings, but they aren't inherently bad if they are productive, and don't detract from otherwise productive work. 

A few things will harm productivity:

• Convening a meeting in the middle of the work day without fair notice.
• Failing to provide a written agenda
• Letting discussions wander into unplanned realms
• Failing to follow up on agreements made

Finally, the maxim that meetings are a symptom of organizational dysfunction isn't an indictment against meetings, but rather one against dysfunction! Nobody cures poor eyesight by swearing off spectacles.

I view bad meetings as a symptom of poor organization, in the same way that an excess of meetings indicates poor organization. As ironic as it is, though, we might need to hold a brief meeting to fix all those problems. 

Needless Irritants

Who can I complain to?

The Army is adept at throwing wrenches in the smoothly turning gears of war. Actually, I'm going to blame support elements. This is a story about what GEN William Westmoreland called "needless irritants."

First, a bit of background. In the early 1970s, Westmoreland, as the Army Chief of Staff, was staring an all volunteer force in the face. Before then, the Army filled its ranks with conscripts. Those who volunteered often did so because they might otherwise have been drafted. So the draft gave the Army the luxury of treating its peronnel like chattel.

I sometimes wonder how much has changed.

You see, we had to move yesterday. I'm talking about a the furniture, lugging, dust-sweeping, clothes-organizing, kind of barracks move.

Two days ago, we arrived at our room, greeted by a notice to vacate the premises within 48 hours.

Not cool. When something is not cool, lodge a complaint, right? Except the guy kicking us out is only following orders. He has no authority, nor any desire to pass any feedback up the chain.

This, from an Operation Ready leader's handbook, describes my feelings well:

How would you feel if your next commander changed the tapes? Then the next commander comes along and changes them back? We do this to soldiers in the barracks all the time, for no better reason than to prove to them (and ourselves) who is in charge.

As their appointed leader you have great power to create misery and little power to reduce it, for you will be blind to its existence—unless you vigorously seek it out.

As with the moving imperative, whoever got the idea up his butt for us to move three buildings down the road excercised "great power to create misery."

It was an irritant, to say the least.

Westmoreland understood that the needless irritants (colloquially known as Mickey Mouse, or chickenshit, according to scholar Beth Bailey) were particularly deteriorating to readiness, for several reasons.

First, irritants take away resources for doing actual Army work. Second, they dminish the pool of willing violunteers. Third, they drive people crazy, often tipping the scales in favor of getting out of the service sooner.

I hear quite frequently from Soldiers on a deployment that they're getting out. Not because they had to move needlessly, but because of that plus 1,000 other petty tyrannies.

And cna we complain? Nope. The sergeant in charge of the circus is doing the bidding of some major probably, who doesn't give two spits about how maddening it is. But he'll never hear about it, because his sergeant wouldn't dare give him negative feedback-- the very type of feedback that helps good organizations make real-time adjustments to its practices.

Needless irritant? Yep. Need not complain, because it never does any good in the Army. 

Why Jargon Makes You Sound Ridiculous

Think Soldiers who use jargon to excess sound like tools? Well, it turns out you have research on your side. Yep, scientists have discovered that people who try to sound technical probably shouldn't be talking.

Okay, that's the Soldier in me trying to break it down Barney style. It's really called the "Schutz Test of Comprehension," and it says that real understanding is arrived at through three phases: simplicity, complexity, and profound simplicity.

So when a brilliant scientist understands something really well, she can explain it in simple terms. When she doesn't understand it well, she uses jargon to mask the deficiency.

At this point everyone is thinking of a person who uses jargon to sound smart. But what does he sound like?

That's right. An idiot.

My assignment here in Afghanistan requires me to browse operational reports that might read something like:

BDA= 1xANA WIA and 2xIED BIP

Now, these acronyms make things read more efficiently if you understand them. If you don't, then it's a bit like wearing a pair of wool briefs on a 10-kilometer ruck march-- irritating.

What's more irritating than that? Sorry, I'm out of Jonah Goldberg-style similes (a web-page full of which I was going to link to, but alas, none exists as far as I can tell. Someone should really work on that.)*

But the point is one that we all know, and it is irritating, which is that there are three circumstance under which people lace their declarations with jargon:

1. When they want or need to communicate more efficiently, as when a soldier calls in for a medevac or close air support. Often, success hinges on seconds saved in those circumstances, and reliability sometimes requires highly routinized communication.
2. When they want to impress people.
3. When they don't quite know what they are talking about

Perhaps people acting in 2 and 3 think they are acting in 1, but the fact is that it is more than annoying, it can be counter productive. For one, most circumstances aren't life or death, and to make proper judgments about them others need context and description. Templated talk generalizes and tends to fill in missing information. It also omits pertinent stuff that doesn't fit into the template.

Templates inherently proscribe description. They prevent people from explaining things in new ways. Sometimes that's fine, but what if the thing is new, and doesn't neatly fit the ways that people talk about the stuff with which they are more familiar?

That's getting a little off topic. Sometimes jargon is useful. Think a police dispatcher or the general in the melodramatic and campy military movie preparing to launch a nuclear strike.

The guys who uses jargon is really saying that he fantasizes about being that campy guy. Take it from Schutz, you don't want that guy anywhere near nukes. And as I said, he probably shouldn't be talking anyway.

*Example: "Though some things, like gas station burritos, only emerge as mistakes after you try them."

The Power of Getting it Wrong

"However we do it, we're never gonna be more wrong than the way we did it before."

Never start a column with a quote. I think that's some rule in journalism.

Unless it's really good. And as I read Moneyball, so many of Michael Lewis's elegantly crafted phrases rise to the level of good enough to open a column.

And it reminds me of military operations, in many ways. I heard a similar quote in a brief at the command post where I work: "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." One Ken Robinson wrote that one, in a book called, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, which I haven't read.

But I have read Moneyball, and it is great. I think all great literature teaches one about life, and the Army is my life right now, so the circle of life continues, or something. Who's Fabio, anyway?

The bottom line of the Moneyball story is that a few creative problem solvers figured out how to win baseball games on the cheap. They were wildly successful, too. The Oakland A's didn't win any World Series titles, but they pushed the big spenders around pretty good, with a lot fewer resources at their disposal.

They were the insurgents of MLB, and they won a lot of assymetric wars by outthinking their rivals. They realized that they couldn't compete with the Yankees and Braves by doing things the Yankees' and Braves' ways. Billy Beane deserves his own Apple poster. To grace one, that is. I don't think just giving him a poster of Apple Computers is reward enough for how he revolutionized big league baseball.

We need some thinkers like that in the Army. There are quite a few, but I wouldn't quite call them "insurgents" (which would probably be impolitic).

My Jedi trainer, Karl Weick, also believes that "mistakes" can be good, though he puts it a different way:

...people who really get in trouble during crises are those who try to think everything through before taking any action.

We all know the cliche about how the best battle plan never survives first contact. What Weick is saying is that, given that reality, go ahead and act. If your organization is set up properly, then you'll be able to learn in real time, but you won't learn quickly unless you are engaged, and perhaps making small mistakes along the way.

In other words, risk aversion can be deadly. And the only thing worse than not doing anything is doing something wrong just because that's how you've always done it.

A Highly-Resilient Army?

Karl Weick is a brilliant scholar and researcher of organization. His latest work, co-authored by Kathleen Sutcliffe, is about high-re;iability organizations (HROs), among which he includes the sailors on an aircraft carrier. They use the term resilient in the subtitle of the book, and the two R words are almost synonymous in their parlance. I've written about reliablity before, so the idea applied to an organization instead of an individual is provacative.

HROs display characteristics that distinguish them from typical organizations-- things like a willingness to track small failures, a resistance to oversimplification, and a sensitivity to operations.

A carrier crew might be the prototypical HRO, but Army units offer a more practical case study, at least for yours truly. I'll be in such a unit in Afghanistan within a fortnight.

The goal of any organization, reliable or not, is high performance. Effective organizations are organized so as to negotiate changing environments. Certainly the military has a need to be so organized. Uncertainty has a way of auditing these organizations. In a market, the organization that fails the audit goes bankrupt. In war, it suffers defeat.

According to Weick and Sutcliffe, they have identified a particular class of organizations that reduce "the brutality of audits and speeds up the process of recovery."

News from Afghanistan suggests a relatively stable operating environment for the Army. Compared to the deadliest years of 2009 - 2011, over 60 percent of all OEF casualties occurred, 2014 is shaping up to be the year of Afghanistan security. That means dramatically different missions for US troops. Whether the Army can shift from an offensive combat posture to stability operations will be a real test of its organizational resilience.

Weick and Sutcliffe offer some advice to those organizations looking to stay resilient and adaptive to a changing environment: defer to expertise. Not all commanders, and certainly not all Soldiers, are experts at the type of operations coming down the pike. If the powers that be can identify who the real experts are, then the Army should be able to manage the coming changes.

On Combat Creativity

Milan Vego of the Naval War College wrote a wonderful essay that appeared in Joint Forces Quarterly.

“On Military Creativity” explores the benefits and risks of thinking outside the box in a military context. It reminded me of a wonderful post I wrote for this blog several years ago.

My complaint, at the time, is reflected in Vego’s essay: military institutions are designed to prevent creativity, and instead promote group think. But military successes usually result from leaders who are courageous enough to challenge convention and think outside the box.

Of course, 95% of the time, the Army is very similar to any other major organization. It needs to finance its operations; hire, retain, and train its employees; acquire and maintain equipment; develop and execute strategies; plan ahead; and sell itself to the public.

But militaries are designed for combat, even if combat is an exception to their daily organizational reality. So while the Army, for instance, may thrive under its norms and conventions, when its Soldiers are under fire they must think quickly and creatively to prevail.

In combat, everything is creativity. Drills and routine training merely give a Soldier the tools he needs to win the fight. Such training is applied almost scientifically, while their application in battle resembles art.

Of course there is a balance.

Vego makes the case that war is an art, and faults those who view it as a science for the military’s dogmatic resistance to innovation. “The art of warfare rests on the freest application of its fundamentals under constantly changing conditions,” writes Vego. But the influential British military theorist J.F.C. Fuller (to whom Vego refers in his essay as an exemplar of a military innovator) believed that war could ultimately be studied scientifically.

Though Fuller’s Foundations of the Science of War was panned, it was a robust attempt to look at warfare systematically. Science, Fuller argued, doesn’t preclude using creativity:

Poetry, painting, and music may be arts, but they are based on the sciences of language, of optics, and of acoustics. True, it is possible to be an artist without being a scientist, it is possible to theorize without knowing much, but this does not abrogate science, which, as I shall explain later on, is nothing else than true knowledge in place of haphazard knowledge, logical thinking in place of chaotic thinking…

In the Battle of Kamdesh, as told by Jake Tapper in The Outpost, Soldiers were faced with scenarios that resisted traditional thinking. Taliban forces descended on COP Keating with a plan that rendered the U.S. forces’ typical response impossible or useless.

It was up to quick thinking, bold, and creative Soldiers to push back the enemy after it had breached the wire.

There is certainly a lot more that can be written about creativity in combat. I think the biggest impediment to many of the ideas that might be offered is the fact that the military operates under ordinary circumstances, but is put to the test and evaluated in extraordinary circumstances.

(Original photo by SGT Edwin M. Bridges)

The Army, Crowds, Battleship, and Doom Scenarios

Meandering through the Incheon Airport toward Gate 115 (it's a really big airport), heading home from training with the ROK Army, I was pretty fascinated with how well airports work.

Any airport is a complicated organism. A behemoth like Incheon is almost a wonder of human precision. I don't presume to know what it takes to manage an airport, but watching the crowds of passengers find their way pretty effortlessly to where they need to be reminded me of something I wrote in Nine Weeks about  lines and crowds:

It’s natural to want to find the most efficient route through any circuit, but futile in any Army one. Whatever time is saved finding paths of less resistance is lost waiting for the rest of the group to catch up. Moreover, our NCOs displayed a compulsive desire to try to manage any movement of troops, when usually the randomness of the crowd would otherwise find the smoothest configuration. The free market versus a command economy was Basic Training. Everything was centrally-planned, and all power was held by those managers that allocated resources. No trust whatever was afforded to the individual to make a wise decision, and something as important as getting people in the right lines was too risky to leave to the collective judgment.

I think, outside of strict training environments like Boot Camp and OCS, the Army understands this. It takes more resources controlling a crowd than it is worth, especially when that crowd will do what you want if you leave it alone, most of the time.

Then, on the flight, I gave in to the temptation to watch Battleship, which was a lot better than I expected. But one scene fit in with the thought above. When the aliens had attacked, news clips narrated a tale of earthlings in panic...societies in chaos-- even in areas that weren't under attack.

Prof. Sean Lawson contributed to the literature debunking the myth of social chaos resulting from disaster. His paper is about cyber doom scenarios, but the pattern is the same: when normal life is interrupted (by an earthquake or an extra-terrestrial invasion) central planners, military types, and others with a stake in the public safety/ security business think everyone will start looting and killing their neighbors.

But that rarely happens. People pretty much do what they need to do, most of the time. It's a good paper, so I think I'll write about it more in another post.

Right now, I'm excited to get home to my wife and kids and tell them all about my Korean adventures.