I also think that we get stuck on the old valuing what we can measure yardstick. We have spoken before about the peacetime officer population, and how, without a war to weed out the useless, we use metrics that don’t really measure the correct thing.

One of the best, if not the best western General in WWI was Arthur Currie. He was pear shaped, double-chinned, and trailing a scandal about misappropriated funds. He was also a “militia” (reserve or National Guard) officer. There is no way that he would make it in the current peacetime army.

We get what we measure and value. And it seems to me that what we “value” is corporatist, go-along-to-get-along, ticket punchers who will climb over their grandmother’s corpse for their next promotion. For whom keeping their nose clean (except for the brown from having it up the next layer’s ass), is the top priority.

This is our current upper leadership, and this is what is molding and mentoring the next generation of leaders.

When is the last time ANY senior officer actually resigned in protest over something?

I agree, and I think you are also getting a dose of it in a cultural way as well. Look at Political Correctness and language. Even those fighting it find themselves unconsciously using the language/terms even as they try to refute them.

Been there, done that. When I was the operations/training NCO for our company in Korea, I totted up all the “mandatory requirements” laid on by 8th Army, 2nd Infantry Division, the Brigade headquarters, and then the Battalion Commander’s “guidance”.

The total came to something considerably more than the total available training time we had, under optimal conditions and without also subtracting all the holidays and days off they mandated we take.

Produced a chart, sent it off with the Commander to the quarterly training meeting up at Division, suggested he ask them to prioritize which set of events we should focus on. Commander came back with a major off-the-record ass chewing from the boss two levels up, and “guidance” that we should do our required training… All of it.

I’m in the middle of writing something up for Dr. Wong about this whole issue, and we’ll see what I get back. My reaction to the video that John posted was kind of like watching Captain Renault in Casablanca:

“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!” (The croupier hands him his money.) “…Your winnings, sir.” “Oh, thank you very much!”

What flatly blows my mind is that nobody seems to have ever sat down and counted up all the hours available to conduct training and do things, and then compared that to the actual hours they’re demanding we expend on their mandatory BS. You do the math, and you rapidly discover that the commander’s time isn’t his own, at all–The knuckleheads two levels up have basically taken everything for themselves, and they operate in apparent obliviousness to the whole issue that they’ve created.

I’m coming around to a conceptualization that visualizes each and every event in an organization as being essentially a “Skinner Box”, where the subject of the event is undergoing operant conditioning–Whether or not you like to admit it, that’s what you’re doing with policy and procedure: You’re creating a Skinnerian box, and you need to be aware of the actual “event” you’re conditioning with those boxes, as well as what the actual behaviors are that you are shaping.

All too many of the people running our hierarchies are completely and utterly oblivious to this reality, and that’s precisely why so many of these policies and procedures don’t get the effect they envision for them, and why they eventually choke the life out of the organization.

I think Dr. Wong is self aware on the issues now, and he probably looks back on his career in the Army with some degree of chagrin. Did he understand then? I doubt it, at least not fully. Most people are just too busy day-to-day trying to keep their heads above water to be analytical enough on such a self-image compromising topic. It *is* a series of Skinner boxes, and it starts, as he pointed out, before you even join the Army.

I have some suspicions that up-or-out is also part of the issue. You have no time day-to-day because of mandatory training overload and no time on a longer time horizon because you have to keep pressing for the next rank and if you challenge the status quo before you get flag rank (and possibly after), you could find yourself out of the Army early.

Healthy entities don’t need outside intervention to manage change and adaptations. If you absolutely must have a consultant come in to manage/lead/initiate change and adaptation, you’ll save yourself a lot time, money, and grief by just shutting the business down ASAP. Or, killing the agency, if it’s not a business.

The pencil-whipping is a real problem, especially now days, with all the extra diversity, suicide prevention, drunk driving prevention etc.etc.

A US Navy officer got in some trouble for pointing out that if you added up the hours required for all of the “Mandatory” refresher and non core role training, it took more training hours than were actually allocated. The ONLY way to get it done was to pencil-whip it or hand out the cheat sheet for the computer based training quiz at the end. There was no legal way to accomplish it.

However, in my experience, I have seen dueling consultants, where the first batch didn’t come to the conclusion, or endorse the course of action the bosses wanted, so another round of consultancy resulted until the “correct” result is found. Or, the empire building and faction fighting you refer to means each faction trying to get their pet consultant in to bolster their position and vice-versa.

Hiring an outside consultant, particularly in an area you don’t know about, for example, after an acquisition, or when trying to automate or computerize a process you did manually before makes sense. Hiring one to tell you what you already know can be a waste of money.

In most cases the management hiring the consultants knows what the problems are and where they want to be, what they don’t know is how to get there. Consultants provide the external push and plans to get them there.

The two major virtues of a consultant are 1) they should be unaligned with regards to internal politics, and 2) they should go away after the project is done.

The former is supposed to protect against empire building and vendettas, the latter is important in cases such as layoffs, as they can bear the ill will and make it easier for the remaining staff to work together again. Note that these virtues are ideal, real world situations are not and the further you drift from the ideals the more useless the consultants are.

But, management isn’t listening.

Once management does figure out that there’s a problem, they then don’t perform any sort of introspective looking into things, they hire an outside “expert” at exorbitant cost, and then ignore them, as well.

I’ve come to conceptualize a lot of this crap as unplanned and entirely unaware operant conditioning. How long do you think it takes for the subjects of this environment to modify their behavior to comply with it all? You wonder why your officers lack candor and lie their asses off to you, after setting up Skinner box after Skinner box for them to work through on the daily, and you’re surprised at the result…?

The utter lack of self-awareness these types exhibit is amazing to observe. I watched that video that John posted, and it’s a hoot. This Dr. Wong, a former field-grade officer, seems to be totally self-unaware of the issues, and I find it horrifyingly humorous to observe. What the heck did he think he was part of, upholding, and creating as a field grade officer in the US Army.

Also, that whole passage about “…the Navy having a special term for it, gundecking…”. Uhmm. Sir, have you never heard the term “Skilcrafting”? It was pretty well used, throughout the entire Army during my career. Also, “pencil-whipped”.