Breakfast
with Ret. Marine Commander, Lt Gen Van Riper - Immediate Engagement vs Holding
back and acquiring pertinent information before acting - when do you know you
are savvy enough for one or the other?
For those who have read Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink’, you are likely
familiar with Lt General Paul Van Riper. For those not familiar with Gladwell’s
work or Lt Gen Van Riper, the book ‘Blink’ describes an intelligent experienced
retired Marine Lt General who is asked by the Department of Defense to portray
an enemy leader during a very expensive Joint Task Force war game in 2002.
Using non-traditional tactics, Van Riper’s Red team is seemingly able to
effortlessly overwhelm the well informed and well equipped “modernized” Blue
forces. Van Riper explained to Gladwell that the notion that more information
will lead the opposing force to success in reality is far from the truth; that
is, in times of war, more information is typically paralytic. He explains that
successful commanders should have enough experience AND training to have a
repertoire of knowledge in their mental library such that they only need a minimal
amount of information to react swiftly. Van Riper utilized this advantage to
stay ahead of the informationally hindered opposing forces and quickly led the
Red team to triumph. Sounds pretty simple right? Ok, too much information is
bad and will cause me to become paralyzed so I must act on instinct using less
information in a quicker time frame. No problem. Except what if I am a young
surgeon? What if I am an old surgeon? Does that matter? Do I have enough
information to proceed? What if I react too hastily? Would it not be better to
call in the ‘grey haired’ and have them take over? For that matter, how do we
think? That is how do we perform critical thinking in the midst of a dire
situation? Is this the same or different than just getting into the car and
driving to work? For that matter is driving to work really any different than
trying to survive a critical moment in a crisis? Can you teach this? When do I
know I have ‘’got it’? When does a leader trust that his subordinates have ‘got
it’? Well I do not have the answers to these questions, BUT fortunately for me,
Lt General Paul Van Riper (VR) lives down the road and agreed to meet with me
for breakfast to help me understand this and pass this along.
To start we can eliminate the assumption that driving to work is a linear
system. VR opened my eyes to fact that just driving to work is always a complex
system. It is not that simple. I will never encounter the same series of events
in the same conditions ever again. He pointed out that the statistics show that
we face a potentially life-threatening event every 10-15 minutes while on the road!
However, we simplify our task into getting from point A to B with little
thought or effort regarding these potential dangers. Apparently, it is somewhat
the same on a battlefield, except of course the danger occurs much more
frequently and there is much more distraction. To simplify this, VR explains
that a good experienced battlefield commander sees glimpses of the enemy,
sees his own troops, hears gunfire and then using those very brief pieces of
information, combines that with his prior experience into a ‘Story’ which he
uses to develop a plan. That’s it… using our senses we assimilate 1.
Visual input (the enemy) 2. Auditory input (gunfire or shouting) 3. Our innate
library of information from battle planning, simulation and being in the field,
and then 4. create a PATTERN in our head that accounts for all that information
coming up with a plan of action. You may already know this as CRITICAL
THINKING. Pretty easy if you: 1. Remember that life is not linear 2. Success
comes to the prepared (Louis Pasteur) 3. To be creative you must be prepared!
So that answered my question if a human wakes up one day and is an
instantaneous successful commander. The answer is a blatant NO! It is a
combination of being aware of your surroundings along with a significant
critical training AND working experience in the real world. It appears that if
you lack any of these three your response to a crisis will most definitely be
retarded or potentially wrong. If you think just experiencing something in a
high fidelity manner will quickly allow you to succeed, then you will likely be
proven wrong. VR says that it is a myth that you can only perform in a lab
environment and succeed in battle (or most other high risk scenarios) and you
will need to combine high fidelity experience with real life repetition. You
must build up muscle and mental memory and that occurs only thru 1st- training
over and over in ideal conditions, then 2nd -learning to be adaptive and
creative in non-ideal conditions.
Let’s go back to driving. We learn to
drive in a linear format in ideal conditions. We simulate, then drive with an
experienced instructor in ideal conditions. We are told ‘go from point A to
point B using this route’. Well, we do not limit ourselves to that in real
life. In real circumstances, there are a lot of variables. Conditions may
warrant a different route than the one that our navigator tells us. Traffic may
change and a course alteration may be warranted. We only pick this up…… BY
DRIVING A LOT! You drive… you make mistakes…. You learn from them and move on.
Hopefully by using simulation and instructor lead training you are able to
recognize you are about to make a mistake or mitigate that mistake before
something bad happens. But you create that muscle and mental memory. VR tells
me about an associate Gary Klein who attempted to extract this exact process
(how does a person think through and survive a dire situation) from fire
fighters. He quickly came to the notion that if you ask a fire-fighter to “tell
me how you made your decisions while moving from point A to B to C during that
fire and saved the structure or lives” the answer he received universally was
“We don’t think, we just do it” (similar to what surgeons tell us when asked
the same question). They totally miss that they ONE obtained sensory
information, TWO accessed their library of experience THREE created a picture
of what is in front of them and finally FOUR made a plan of action based on all
three of those. Another lesson learned during this process is what boils down
to the creation of successful vs dysfunctional team dynamics. In a
dysfunctional combat team, you are told to just shut up, listen and ask no
questions. So, when you hear gun fire, that is what you do… you just drop and
say nothing till you receive orders. That can prove disastrous. Functional
teams practice communication so that when they are under fire, they drop to the
ground and then talk to one another, and increase their odds of surviving.
So
back to my original question: are successful military commanders just born that
way? Well VR describes three types of commanders. The ‘HOT’ one who takes no
information from subordinates and questions nothing, but will in the end likely
end up with more casualties than needed. The ‘COLD’ commander, who just cannot
make a decision and is bogged down in information until forced to make a
decision or someone takes over. And finally, the ‘JUST RIGHT’ commander, who
takes in information, assesses his library and WHEN appropriate, solicits input
from others, then makes a decision.
Does
that mean that you can take some Wall-Street Traders and make them into
fantastic commanders? VR explains that you can take a Wall-Street Trader and
put him in a simulation room and they can rapidly assume control and make
spot-on decisions and succeed. What if they actually have to experience the
real results of war? Are they as good? VR says they took the traders to the
field and let them experience the projectiles flying overhead and witness
injuries so they fully understood the impact of their decisions (ie the sound
of bullets over their head and explosions). Back in the simulation room, they
slowed down quite a bit and began to question their decisions more frequently.
To succeed in any high risk field you just simply must utilize a combination of
simulation (that vicarious experience) AND real action (where you see the
consequences of your actions and learn how to avoid them or accept them and
move on).
Lastly, we need to be cautious of what we are asking of people. For one, if we
are not crystal clear of our intentions, then a person will hear our request
and create a potential mental picture that is distinctly different than what we
intended. If all we do is tell someone what to do but not the purpose then the
result could likely be completely different than what we intended. That is,
often the intent is more important that the task. It could be that a different
task will accomplish the intent. As I have stated before, we can become so
focused on the task, that confirmation bias causes us to lose sight of the
intent (ie the paper clip experiment by Feuerbacher) and fail miserably. As VR
tells me, we only hear a bit of what we are told, then create a mental picture,
and go from there. If our picture is totally wrong, well then, we will fail. He
used the example of telling students to “think about D.O.G” then ask what they
see… they describe their favorite pet or something concrete, but not the specific
letters D- O- G. Or even better yet, (I love this example of his) tell someone
an acre is “43,560 square
feet”
and they will forget immediately. But tell them an acre is about the size of a
football field and they will never forget… (by the way I had to go look up how
big an acre was just an hour after we had that conversation). You can read many
examples of where a SEAL team is provided a task but not a clear objective,
resulting in disastrous consequences in Dick Couche’s book on the history of the
SEALS. Without front loading the information you can end up with avoidable
casualties (ie do we just blow up Noreiga’s plane and airfield or do we need to
control the field so our forces can use the field?).
So
let’s summarize my two hour breakfast with this unbelievable military leader,
thinker AND teacher:
- Life is complex- we just really simplify stuff.
- Some scenarios are more complex than usual.
- Some complex scenarios are life threatening and you better figure that out an plan in advance.
- Instinctually or with thought, you take in input, think about your experience then maybe or maybe not get some information from those around you, then make a plan, then act.
- You are more likely to succeed if you have had both virtual (simulation) and actual experience in that scenario before.
- If you do not have a library in your head to get you through this, GET HELP IMMEDIATELY if you can afford to do so.
- Individuals reach the point that they can engage at differing periods of time depending on the experience and mental library they carry.
- Lack of confidence will likely make you react either too swiftly or too slowly and you better figure that out before someone dies on your watch.
- Finally, just look up Lt General Paul Van Riper and you will understand my burning desire to meet with this vault of valuable experience and information.
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