Watts, intuition, “ahas” and go.
A month ago, Barry Watts of CSBA kicked up some dust when he wrote this article criticizing DoD for not building good strategists.
Jason weighed in productively and created some good give-and-take in his comments.
I tossed up two posts recognizing the work but didn’t have time for extended commentary.
This morning, however, I had the following realization. Watts draws the intriguing distinction between intuitive decision making and “aha” decision making. The former represents the product of work done by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Gary Klein, showing that in time-pressured situations where leaders can develop a body of relevant experience, “intuitive” decision methods dominate traditional rational comparison of alternatives. The latter describes work done more recently by Mark Jung-Beeman and John Kournios (whose work I am not familiar with) that focuses on problem solving that requires some flash of insight.
The environments amenable to intuitive decision-making methods are already fairly well-defined and the military uses training methods influenced by Klein to maximize the usefulness of training opportunities for these sorts of tactical situations. Strategic situations, on the other hand, require a different approach and therefore different training methods. At least that is what the argument implies.
I had a relevant experience during a game of go last night. I hadn’t played for a while and so started off rusty. During the first third of the game I held my own but was feeling very pessimistic because I was coming out the worse in every tactical engagement. My opponent was building up good shape while I was wasting stones in heavy formations just to avoid a rout. Then, looking at the entire board, I had an “aha” moment where I realized that while my shape was worse and I had lost many more stones than my opponent up to that point, I had more potential territory than he did. With this strategic insight, I changed my tactics to play more conservatively to maximize my territory while reducing (instead of invading) my opponent’s territory.
This, by the way, is why I argue that go is a better game for strategic thinking than chess. Go’s potential to serve as a metaphor for the complex, murky and surprising dynamics of human conflict exceeds that of chess. An analyst I met a few years back summed it up wonderfully by saying that chess is a tactical and operational game of attrition while go involves all three levels (tactical, operational and strategic) in a game of influence and territory control. What I’m wondering about is whether games like go can be built into some curriculum to train strategists in developing their capacity for “aha” moments. Of course, the first question to answer in such a program would be whether capacity for such insights can be trained or whether it is largely innate [1].
[1] Chapter VI, Nuclear Heuristics.
