If a professional military education institute wanted to double down on its efforts to ensure that its curriculum was providing the critical and creative thinking skills required in the contemporary and future operating environment, what would be the basic learning objectives? Upon reflecting on this with a collegue, we reasoned that five maybe six items might serve as core learning objectives. Those five, or six, may be as follows:
1) The ability to bring diversity into play
2) The ability to facilitate collaboration
3) The ability to think holistically
4) The ability to analyze causal relationships
5) The ability to strive for objectivity over subjectivity and maybe,
6) The ability to conduct reflective thinking.
Bring diversity into play. Perhaps one core-learning objective should be how to facilitate intellectual synergy by being able to identify and understand the gaps of knowledge that an organization, command group or planning group, might have with regard to a particular problem. Upon establishing that understanding of what new knowledge is required, identifying sources of expertise that can fill that knowledge, either resident within the organization or from without, and gaining access to that source of expertise.
Facilitate collaborative thinking. Military organizations are often as being convergent, checklist driven, and reliant on linear methods to understand and solve problems. This line of reasoning is “strategic rationality” and is well suited for problems that may have a different contextual setting, but are reasonably familiar to what the organization is used to handling. On the other hand, communicative rationale is another approach to sense-making which is reliant upon equal opportunity discourse between participant problem solvers who are each given equal opportunity to contribute to the sense-making, thus creating knowledge through mutual understanding. This type of collaborative reasoning may be more apropos for complex situations in which none, or very few, members of the organization have any experience. Additionally, the cognitive skills described as communicative rationale are not just requisite individual skills, but require the collective skills of all members of a planning organization to identify and frame issues in a creative and holistic fashion based on a communicative rationale – hence the requirement to facilitate collaborative thinking.
Think holistically. Military professionals, developed to seek solutions to problems by applying models of previous successful concepts of operations to new problems may need the ability to understand how several unrelated issues within their operating environment are interrelated. This interrelation thus makes the problem they are dealing with unpredictable due to the multiple permutations it may take on once they start interacting with it. By identifying relationships between the various groups or individuals, social, cultural, and government structures and institutions, they may be able to determine points of tension and resilience that demonstrate how the environment truly operates.
Analyze causal relationships. The military professional must understand that there are multitudes of reasons for why any action occurs within any given operating environment. What is primarily useful is being able to analyze the most probable cause of an action, like violent conflict, within the environment and establishing testable hypotheses, whose results can be observed and recorded. Thus, the military organization will have a basis for establishing those always elusive measures of effectiveness and performances.
Objectivity seeking. Critical reasoning must distinguish between multiple perspectives and the self-biases that are inherent to the thinker. Critical thinking should instill in the thinker how those biases affect the thinkers understanding of the others’ perspectives and cloud their own perception. In other words, critical thinking should striving for objective judgment.
The ability to reflect. A core program of instruction on critical and innovative reasoning might be more effective if it facilitates the student’s ability to think reflectively about the application of the learned material to their previous experiences and to their potential future experiences. This follows Donald Schön’s recommendation to develop a program that allows the student to learn in uniquely complex settings that they have never encountered before, and thus may not be able to apply familiar concepts of operation that they were trained to implement.
The above list may not be the exlcusive list of base learning objectives needed to develop cognitive skills that allow for critical and creative judgment. However, it is humbly offered as a primer to discussion about developing an education approach that instills in the military professional the ability to judge how, when, and in what degree to employ their professional knowledge to solve complex problems when the normal principles of their profession are not as easily applied in the manner prescribed in current PME pedagogy.
Posted by Len Lira
