From the King's of War blog. Problem solving versus problem understanding. Some excellent food for thought in this piece. One of my favorite excerpts:
We have to understand our assumptions. Sometimes we don’t dig deeply enough to expose the assumptions upon which our strategies hinge. We have to expose the building blocks of our strategies so that they can be scrutinized. We can’t get caught up in the rush to ‘get it done’; time spent on analysis of the key premises is seldom wasted, I always say.
To borrow and adapt a time worn phrase, "It's the assumptions stupid."
V/R
Dave,
Dave,
Flogging Dead Strategies: When is ‘problem solving’ no longer useful?
Gordon, why do you keep laughing when they call me “Tommy Tank”?
I am having one of those weeks where everything seems to be related. You know, you are mulling over an idea and almost everything that you read or hear seems to fit in with it?
And, that Dear Reader, is what is happening to me. Fascinating, I know. Allow me to explain…
I took part in a great workshop last week on the issue of the Millennium Development Goals and what comes after them. There was talk about more goals, better goals, less goals, more inclusive processes, high-level championship, grass-roots consultations, etc., etc. After about an hour, I made an intervention, asking simply whether or not the time for fine-tuning was done. Maybe, I posited, the entire “development” project was finished: we’d tried all possible permutations over the last eight decades, and now maybe it was time to admit defeat and move on to something else.
In a room full of development practitioners you can imagine that this question was about as popular as…well, you get the idea. The notion was immediately dismissed, and the conversation returned to a debate about how to fix development, rather than discussing replacing it outright.
So with this in mind, I then encountered Dave Betz’s post on Dylan and how it relates to–may indeed alter–Clausewitz’s notions of the links between war, policy, and society. Then I read Thomas Rid’s post here on KOW. He, too, asks a similar question, in a different field: when does deterrence end?
I have wondered about this before in these pages. What if the entire foundation of an idea is faulty, rather than just certain aspects of it, or the particular way in which it was implemented? How far do we go before ‘calling it’, and shifting our attention to developing a new idea or system? How come we tend, though, to get caught up in ‘re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic’?
http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2012/11/flogging-dead-strategies-when-is-problem-solving-no-longer-useful/
(Continued at the Link above)
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