2006 Ad

Strategic Forum, July, 2006 by Christopher J. Lamb, Irving Lachow

Another benefit of a Decision Support Cell with this type of mandate, authority, and resources is that it would reduce a major source of waste. Each year, the Pentagon spends billions of dollars on analytic support that cannot be harnessed in support of senior leader strategic decisionmaking. The situation is so bad that the Pentagon occasionally pays contractors to study past studies in hopes of finding a baseline of authoritative knowledge on a subject. Invariably the answer comes back that the results from many years of expensive studies are not transparent, comparable, or consistent and cannot be explained.

Putting an end to this waste of human skills with a Decision Support Cell is also a necessary step in the Pentagon's transition to a capabilities-based planning approach. Capabilities-based planning is a top-down exercise in comparing the value of alternative capability investments. A top-down, strategy-driven process is only as good as the weakest link, and all the necessary links for comparing alternative capabilities--scenarios, operating concepts, data, methods, and metrics--are currently weak. A Decision Support Cell can change that by providing an authoritative analytic backbone that would make rigorous comparison of alternative capabilities possible.

Improving Intuitive Decisionmaking Support. The Decision Support Cell also needs to be able to support senior leader intuitive decisionmaking by providing leaders with the breadth and depth of experience they need in their jobs:

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. (17)

The list of areas where meaningful experience would be desirable is both long and diverse: military operations, executive management, bureaucratic processes, political savvy, government budgeting, media relations, intelligence products and operations, emerging technologies, and so forth. While it would be ideal for all senior leaders to possess a depth of real-life experience in each these areas before taking office, it is not realistic to expect leaders with such uniformly rich experience.

Senior leaders can gain needed experience on the job. However, 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.

A better approach to develop one's experience base in a given area is to use a tailored "intuition skills training program." (18) Such a program must help decisionmakers do three things: