At the end of last week’s post on Christopher Lamb and Irving Lachow’s article on Reforming Pentagon Strategic Decisionmaking I mentioned the relationship between intuition and strategic decisionmaking.

By intuition I mean the type of Blink thinking explored by Malcolm Gladwell. An extensive amount of research across a diverse range of specialties indicates that humans have the ability to make exceptionally accurate assessments in moments. From psychologists being able to read minute expressions of emotion to produce an assessment of a marriage’s prospects for success to first responders being able to rapidly assess what lifesaving measures a patient needs, time and again documented evidence indicates that experts rely upon rapid, implicit assessments. Much of what it means to be an expert is the ability to make accurate assessments under such conditions.

This brings us to Boyd’s OODA loop, since it provides a model of how humans turn observations into actions. To an outside observer, an expert using “thin slicing” appears to be jumping straight from observation to action. Think of a baseball player hitting an off-speed pitch. At first glance, it seems that the batter’s adjustment and the pitch’s break occur simultaneously. The path from observing the pitch break to taking the action of swinging the bat appears to be instantaneous.

How Blink Thinking Appears
[modified from Dr. Richards slides]

If one watches the same sequence in slow motion, however, it becomes clear that the batter anticipated the pitch’s behavior. Before the pitch broke, the batter had already kept his weight and hands back, indicating that he had already adjusted to the pitch. What is actually happening, then, is that the batter has already observed a subtle tell that his previous experience allows him to recognize as an off-speed pitch. This orientation seamlessly leads to the proper action. By the time the pitch breaks, the batter has already anticipated where it will be and is already starting his swing.

How Blink Thinking Actually Occurs
[modified from Dr. Richards slides]

Orientation filters observation based upon past experience and starts an action - just like a reflex. The entire process - implicit orientation leading directly to action - is so rapid that it can appear instantaneous. One has to earn this ability, however. If one takes the time to explicitly orient to one’s observations, by analyzing and applying rational decision models, then the moment for action will have passed before one makes a decision. It is only through extensive experience that one can build up a sufficient experience base to allow implicit orientation. If the reflexive decisions flowing from those observations require physical action, then the training process must also include training one’s body in the necessary actions. Think of learning a martial art or learning to play a musical instrument. As David Klein explains,

The key to using intuition effectively is experience - more specifically, meaningful experience - that allows us to recognize patterns and build mental models. Thus, the way to improve . . . intuitive skills is to strengthen [the] experience base.[1]

As a side note, I’ll point out that in competitive interactions, an adversary’s first job is to disrupt these trained responses. This can be achieved by simply denying your opponent the chance to use them (this is like playing go instead of chess with a grandmaster), which forces them to develop an entire new set of responses. Often, however, external constraints prevent one from changing the context to this extent, leading to a more subtle approach. Instead of making an enemy’s entire training useless, one can instead present them with situations that appear to fit within their existing orientation but which actually contain significant differences. An instinctual response to the wrong stimuli will create mis-matches between an adversary’s orientation and the outside world. These mis-matches represent fleeting opporunities for you to exploit. Of course, it isn’t as easy as all that, because your opponent is trying to do exactly the same thing to you.

So what insights does this perspective offer for strategic decisionmaking at the Pentagon? Lamb and Lachow argue that it suggests the need for

practicing difficult decisions in life-like situations is decisionmaking exercises, which are thought experiments,
usually built upon well-defined scenarios that attempt to capture the essence of specific decisions. Although often conducted as games, they can also utilize virtual environments that allow players to participate while dispersed at great distances.

These exercises are necessary because

relying solely on real-world experience has two downsides. First, gaining experience this way is a time-consuming and inefficient process. Senior leaders with relatively short tenures in government need to develop intuitive decisionmaking capabilities quickly and in areas that meet immediate needs. Second, one of the ways that people learn via on-the-job training is by making mistakes (which is one of the best ways to learn). However,given the stakes associated with strategic decisionmaking in the Pentagon, such mistakes are often too costly to accept.

Training expert strategic decisionmakers is neither cheap nor quick. Examples from Gary Klein’s research indicate that it takes a regular practice of several hours a day for a decade to achieve expert status in an area. Last week, Tom Barnett pegged the necessary apprentiship time to become a grand strategist as “several decades.” While these may not be appropriate or feasible goals for all of our civilian decisionmakers at the Pentagon, they do illustrate the investment necessary if we expect them to be actual experts. It also suggests that we cannot honestly expect a senior decisionmaker to be devote this sort of time to training when he or she already is already fully consumed with fending off beaucratic skirmishes. Thus, the inefficiencies and non-cooperative elements of the DoD impair the ability of decisionmakers to make the strategic assessment that only they can perform. If one must spend all one’s time fighting to observe all the necessary data, then one will not have any time left to orient.

According to Lamb and Lachow , the problem is so severe that

former Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries of Defense from both political parties are virtually unanimous in the belief that the Pentagon bureaucracy could be substantially cut, from 25 to 75 percent, without any degradation in the quality of decision support. Often the Office of the Secretary of Defense is singled out for particularly harsh criticism, but the Joint Staff also hoards information and defaults toward least common denominator products. Colin Powell once remarked that while he was the Chairman, the “sole purpose” of his 1,500-person staff “was to keep as much information away from me as possible, [thinking] let’s just give him what we want him to have, not what he needs.”

We don’t have to get this perfect, but we do have to do it better than our adversaries.

[1 ]Gary Klein, The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work, 2004, p 36.