Author: Richard Maltz

Summer Essay Campaign #9: “Cultural Impediments to Negotiating Complex Challenges”

To Answer Question #7: “In what ways does strategic culture influence military operations?”

By Richard Maltz

Our efforts to negotiate complex challenges, to include the ability to establish and exercise a significant capability to operate, compete, and prevail in the Cognitive Domain, are principally constrained, as is everything else that we think, say, and do, by our own culture of productivity (human interaction with the goal of accomplishing shared objectives).  This constraint will be manifested in several ways, at multiple levels.  Salient among these are:

1.  Inertia.  In actively and consciously engaging complex challenges (notably campaigning in the Cognitive Domain), we are challenging our existing habits.  We are habituated to focus on the Physical and Information Domains.  We have staffed our ranks, built our organizations, structured our processes, and refined our culture to focus on these, and to largely ignore the complex, especially in the Cognitive Domain.  Reversing that approach will require defeating tremendous organizational inertia, and transformation of our manning, organizations, processes, and culture.  An undertaking on this scale will be daunting, and will be viewed my many (likely most) as more difficult than it’s worth.  The alternative however is to continue to institutionalize the tremendous waste and opportunity costs imbedded in and emblematic of our existing culture.