Forced to Change by Bernd Horn Dr. Bill Bentley

Author:Bernd Horn, Dr. Bill Bentley [Bernd Horn, Dr. Bill Bentley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459727847
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2015-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

Additionally, respected scholar and author Dr. Richard Gabriel, who has written extensively on leadership and the great commanders throughout history, insists that “an open and receptive intellect permits a leader to challenge existing assumptions about his environment and generate new ways of thinking as a means of adjusting to a new environment.” He explains, “This is an intellectual achievement of the first order and characterizes the thinking of history’s great commanders.”25 He further elaborates:

The great commanders succeeded because they possessed the imagination to see the world not as it was, but as it could be. These traits — conceptual thinking from cause to effect, receptivity to new ideas, thinking beyond existing paradigms, and practical imagination — are all intellectual achievements that transcend technology and culture. Taken together, they constitute what might be called imaginative reasoning where all relevant aspects of problem-solving come together to make sense of the world outside the mind.”26

And so, if experience once again becomes the primary discriminator for advancement, and higher education is again deemed inconsequential, the CAF will return to a system where emphasis is placed on progression in a series of key appointments and geographic postings, most notably Afghanistan. As such, successful completion of these tours then once again becomes perceived as sufficient to prepare an individual for the next higher rank and responsibilities.

Unfortunately, this type of myopic outlook and inward-focused mindset fails to see the inherent flaw of this model. Experience in itself is valuable and irreplaceable. But it is also constrained by time, geography, and memory. One person’s experience, particularly at a specific time and place, does not necessarily represent the knowledge or abilities that are needed for an institution to advance into the future. Moreover, the perspective from a shell-hole, turret, or command post is very limited. Service needs become defined in and of themselves without being rooted in their proper societal context. But most of all, a system that values experience as the only true arbitrator of reality suffers from human arrogance and frailty. “We see,” wrote Major Seiberg in the mid-1930s, “that the Spanish Civil War has up to now demonstrated nothing really new, and also that men only regard experience as valid when it is their own experience. Otherwise it would not be possible for the same errors that led to failure in the Great War to be repeated.”27 Simply put, those who refuse to open their minds are doomed to suffer the limitations of their narrow, restricted, and outdated beliefs.

The truth in this condemnation of professional development based almost exclusively on the experiential paradigm settled home in the nineties. “Undeniably,” wrote General Baril, “the 1990s represented the first strong test of the contemporary CAF Officer Corps and we found that part of it was broken.” He concluded, “Experience in and of itself was not enough.”28 He later acknowledged that “over the past 10 years … we constantly found ourselves thrown into the unknown. Complex, ambiguous and politically charged operations tested our leadership and confronted us with ethical dilemmas.

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