Refereed Publications
Abstract:
The authors challenge the old school of hierarchical strategic leadership that dominates the military professional culture and, in contrast, emphasize complex adaptive systems (CASs) as a compelling alternative mental model to view the military profession. The authors suggest eight leadership tasks that come to the fore when the mental model of the military as a professional CAS is used to examine the circumstances that engulf military activities: relationship building, loose coupling, complicating, diversifying, sensemaking, learning, improvising, and emergent thinking. These are distinguished from the traditional tasks of role defining, standardization, simplifying, socializing, decision making, knowing, commanding and controlling, and planning based on estimates.
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Summer 2011 | Vol. 7 No. 2
Pushing the Boundaries