Bias caused by organizational culture is a constant companion of military planning. Cognitive models dominated by Newtonian, mechanistic, and reductionist thinking, have all but entrenched bias at the operational level of war where contextual, or environmental, orientation to a rival is rarely more than an unthinking or ideological mirage. The results are brittle campaign plans that are broadly predictable by any thinking competitor. Systemic Operation Design claims to address this major problem by re-orienting users to each unique problem that they face. It rejects the unconscious application of previous experiences and cognitive templates as a dangerous trap that is more likely to produce incoherent and flawed actions, than effective operational art and science. A holistic approach, based on seven rounds of recorded (or textualized) discourse, it seeks to self-consciously, cognitively orient users to the problem at hand, before investigating the logic underlying the form of the system that connects them to a given rival entity. Instead of working in reverse from teleological, mechanistic, rigid, and pre-determined strategic end-states to possible actions likely to deliver them, the approach seeks to frame the logical terms for planning to begin, while recognizing that the most likely outcome of a given action is a series of new emergences that will alter the dynamic and adaptive system (in turn necessitating a cognitive re-structuring of its terms), preferably in the strategic direction desired. It sets as its goal the manipulation of the evolution of systemic changes, resulting from actions or threatened actions, which create circumstances that facilitate ones own logic and which are, in optimal conditions, self-regulating. This paper will first examine the continuing problems of bias caused by military organizational culture, accompanied by an addiction to the rigid application of reductionist epistemologies. It will then investigate how Systemic Operation Design seeks to overcome the problems it claims to address, before concluding by outlining the principal future organizational challenges that its application might demand.

ADA449968 Approved for public release; Distribution is unlimited. The opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the student-authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College or any other governmental agency. (References to these studies should include the foregoing statement.)