LPD #3: The Student as Teacher

Training, educating, and the messy stuff in between

This is the third in a series of Leader Professional Developments shared with the CC/PL team. The first two LPDs focused heavily on roles we conventionally attach to soldiering: tactical proficiency and adaptive leadership. This one goes a little further out of the box by talking about the author’s philosophy of education. Here’s a teaser:

The permutations and variables of war make it impossible for us to prepare for combat by navigating our way through the manuals and developing a checklist for every conceivable situation and scenario. In light of the last thirteen years of war, our senior-leaders have guided that our doctrine focus even more on the principles and the purpose behind actions. GEN Martin Dempsey in 2009 noted that:

We must be prepared for full spectrum operations. This requires an unprecedented degree of versatility among our leaders. Importantly, it also requires us to dominate in what we describe as the competitive learning environment for it is in this dimension of conflict, in our ability to learn, where victory will be decided.

This is an important trend for both leader development and mission command. To not only survive but to win in the Darwinian contest of war, we have to be learners. We need soldiers that can train on four or five tasks, understand the principles that drive those tasks and supporting actions, and create solutions to tasks or problems that we have not even envisioned yet. Thus our challenge becomes one not just of training but also education. The reality is that we are in the business of doing both-sometimes simultaneously. As Gary Klein wrote in The Bridge:]

Training is the process of learning how to do something and conditioning oneself towards a particular behavior or performance. Educating on the other hand is the process of learning why something happens, or more generally, learning how to think. Given these two definitions, and the desire to develop adaptive leaders, it is clear that education must be a significant portion of the Army’s leadership development efforts.

We train to know how to do something but we educate to know why to do something. Both are important, but generally the why allows us to conquer similar and even new problems. Additionally, understanding the why and being given challenges that force us to apply our knowledge to new problems and create new solutions makes us adaptable and makes that knowledge stickier!

Members of the CC/PL Forums can read the whole document and supporting readings here. Leadership Counts!