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Agile leaders, agile institutions: Educating adaptive and innovative leaders for today and tomorrow

, , and . Carlisle papers in security strategy Strategic Studies Institute U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks PA, (2005)

Abstract

This paper is a "directed telescope" focused on the Captain's Career Courses (CCCs). It seeks to answer the research question, how should TRADOC change its education system, with specific regard to the CCCs, to better develop and prepare mentally agile leaders for the Army's new strategic reality? To answer this question, this paper examines the new strategic reality and its implications on our officers' professional military education, as well as the concepts of individual and organizational agility, specifically investigating adaptability, innovation, and learning. It then advances a recommended model to develop agile leaders, while making the institutional system more agile as well.

Description

Agile . . . characterized by quickness of mind, resourcefulness, or adaptability in coping with new and varied situations . . . —Webster’s Third New International Dictionary Applied to mental or intellectual matters, it suggests ready adaptability to change and adjust. Army literature uses the terms agile and adaptive in tandem and often synonymously. Both derive from the tenets of Army operations: initiative, agility, depth, synchronization, and versatility (from which we get adaptability).18 As the definition above shows, agile and adaptive are nearly synonymous with agile, adding the ideas of quickness, ease, and readiness. According to Field Manual 7-0, the responsibility of the institutional Army (schools and training centers) is to provide the framework to develop adaptive, mentally agile leaders.19 The Army’s Training and Leader Development Panel (ATLDP) Officer Study concluded that, because of the ambiguous nature of the future operating environment, leaders should focus on developing the “enduring competencies,” or what they call metacompetencies,4 of self-awareness and adaptability.20 They recognized that the two were symbiotic; one without the other is useless. These metacompetencies are the essential building blocks of learning. Agility embodies this symbiotic relationship between self-awareness and adaptability. In this paper, agility is a metaphor for self-awareness and adaptability in action, the essence of learning. Learning is both an individual and organizational phenomenon. Researchers have defined experiential learning as a change of beliefs (or the degree of confidence in one’s beliefs) or the development of new beliefs, skills, or procedures as a result of observation and interpretation of experience.21 This learning happens at the individual cognitive level. Organizations, though often thought of as an organism with goals, beliefs, and memories, do not and cannot learn in the same way. Organizations learn through the experiences of their individual members by encoding these experiential lessons learned into organizational norms and routines. This is a widely accepted perspective advanced by Argyris and Schön,22 Heclo,23 and Hedberg.24 Organizations learn from experience to the extent that member experiences are assimilated into various organizational policies, doctrines, and procedures. The research describes “a multistage process in which environmental feedback leads to individual learning, which leads to individual action to change organizational procedures, which leads to change in organizational behavior, which leads to further feedback.”25

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