No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
The Power and Origins of Decision-Forcing Cases: History, Application, and Transformational Learning with Bruce Gudmundsson
Ever wonder why Harvard Business School started using decision forcing cases (DFCs) way back in 1923?
Buckle up and prepare to be enlightened as we journey into the past with Bruce Gudmundsson, unraveling the origins and applications of this powerful tool that was also adopted by the US Army Infantry School. We're talking about a method that builds your skills and mindset to tackle wicked problems by putting you in the shoes of past decision-makers who faced tough challenges.
Imagine the pressure of running a manufacturing plant, leading a law firm, or even coaching a football team - it's intense! Well, the principles of DFCs are not just for historical or military situations. Bruce reveals how the Socratic Method and orientation are integral to DFCs and demonstrates how this approach can be utilized across diverse fields. From Xenophon's interpretation of Socrates to the creation of business versions of military history, you're in for a treat.
But make no mistake, studying decision forcing cases isn't just about absorbing information. It's about transforming the way you think and developing your character. Bruce emphasizes how learning from history and understanding the limits of our knowledge can empower us to make better decisions, even under pressure. And if you're wondering where to apply these lessons, look no further than the Decision Game Club - a melting pot of insights from different ages, nationalities, and backgrounds.
Get ready to change the way you approach decision-making!
Decision Forcing Cases by Bruce Gudmundsson
Welcome To The Case Method by Bruce Gudmundsson
The Tactical Notebook Substack by Bruce Gudmundsson
Extra Muros Substack by Bruce Gudmundsson
No Way Out Episode 15 with Chris Butler
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Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Acta Non Verba – with Marcus Aurelius Anderson
Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast...
Okay, Bruce. So decision forcing cases are something that we heard on a previous episode from our mutual friend, Chris Butler, who has never spent one day in the military and is an avid devotee of decision forcing cases, and we had a great discussion about it. Now, Chris has never spent one day in the military and sees a lot of value in this methodology for organizational learning, for team building. Give us the big view and then we'll get down into specifics. What is a decision forcing case and where do they come from, and why do you think they're important?
Bruce Gudmundsson :Okay, a lot of questions there. Start off with what it is. It's an exercise, it's something that people do, and it's an exercise that puts the player, the participant, in the position, in the role, in the shoes, if you will of somebody, a real person, who, at some time in the past, was faced with a challenge, faced with a decision, and a decision that required not just a binary choice up down, left right, but a creative solution, something that was custom tailored to the problem at hand. You could say that a DFC a decision forcing case is an exercise in which people practice the bespoke art of custom tailoring. It's not about pulling something off the shelf. It's about making something new. Now, where does it come from? It comes from lots of places. It's one of those things that pops up at certain points in the past and then goes away.
Bruce Gudmundsson :The mother church of the DFC is the Harvard Business School. Right now, it's 2023. About 1923, they started using these to teach the business administration. They've been going strong for about 100 years. Unfortunately, a lot of people take the materials that Harvard has created for people at Harvard. I used to be one of them. I used to be a case writer, not at Harvard Business School, but across the river at the Kennedy School, they take the case materials and use them for other purposes.
Bruce Gudmundsson :This is our biggest problem with the world of formal education. People want to take the elements of the game, the physical materials, the articles, the charts and diagrams and such, and turn those into something else, usually materials for a lecture. That's the biggest problem we have with DFCs and why they thrive for a while and then they go away. There's these Camelot moments. One of them was my favorite actually is the US Army Infantry School down at Fort Benning when George Marshall you may remember him from such hits as the Marshall Plan and World War II, George Marshall was using these. He called them historical map problems. They were used at Fort Benning for about nine years 1931, 1939, as far as I can tell.
Mark McGrath :They stopped in 1939, right, because nothing was going to happen after that, right.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Actually quite the opposite. The difficulty what happened is after 1939, prior to 1939, the folks at Fort Benning were preparing the infantry officers for a wide variety of contingencies.
Mark McGrath :I see.
Bruce Gudmundsson :And what's really, really interesting. In fact, before we started, I was looking at the Marine Corps Gazette from the 20s and 30s and struck by the sheer variety of scenarios. People were dealing with A great deal of interest in everything from landing in a port city we imagine Marines in the 30s practicing landing on beaches, and there was a bit of that. But they were also practicing landing in cities, which is something we tend not to think about these days and imagining all sorts of different scenarios. Will get sent back to Central America to deal with the actually to keep the Japanese from building a canal through Nicaragua. I think that's the real reason. But a lot of possibilities.
Bruce Gudmundsson :And then 1939 comes and the list of possibilities narrows and people start thinking well, what we need to do is we need to start raising this mass citizen army, and this mass citizen army requires a script. So they replaced the decision games with these scripts and these problems that had scripted solutions. This is the famous school solution. It's a bit of graffiti that was popular at Fort Benning during World War II. This is after this period and it goes something like this here lie the bones of Lieutenant Jones, a student at this institution. He died on the night of his very first fight, while applying the school solution. A little bit of doggery from World War II.
Mark McGrath :Sounds like something that sounds like a poem that John Boyd would love to read and remind people.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, I know, and I'm sure he knew of that Because he was of the generation trained by the generation that was trained in this very doctrinaire way and again this idea of doctrine that there's going to be a script for everything and all you need to do is read the cookbook and very, very, very different from the philosophy of Marshall and his colleagues at Fort Benning. So this thing it pops up and then it goes away. But it's incredibly useful for helping people deal with new problems, and by new I mean problems that are new to them, and sometimes I like the phrase wicked problems Confuses people when I try to explain it when I'm in New England. But wicked has a different meaning.
Bruce Gudmundsson :But a wicked problem, all kidding aside, is a problem that doesn't sit still while you're trying to solve it, and it's a problem that when you solve it, your reward is often another problem, very, very different from the kind of problem solving we learn in math class.
Mark McGrath :So you're speaking our language, so we're consultants who help build confidence and complexity, and one of the ways that we do it is helping improve organizational learning and following void for exactly what you're talking about novel problems and wicked problems. So decision forcing cases are a way to help get people in the right frame of mind, right type of thinking that they're going to need when something is emergent that didn't previously exist. This would be an aid for that, like a training and learning aid for that. Is that my following?
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yeah, very much, so very much so.
Bruce Gudmundsson :And I think that it's got a sibling. Another type of exercise that's similar, called the tactical decision game or the decision game. And the decision games or these fictional decision games are very similar to DFCs rather, but based on imaginary scenarios. And you may know of John Schmidt, who wrote FMFM1 Warfighting, that famous manual that changed the certainly the style of, not the substance of, american manuals for a generation, and he recommended looking up his book Mastering Tactics. He's a man of immense creativity, you know, kind of person who in I think, if he hadn't joined the Marine Corps, would have become a novelist. And he's very good at coming up with scenarios, fictional scenarios, imaginary scenarios, and those have their uses as well. I much prefer to use things that actually happened, one because I'm not as creative as someone like John I usually only see something when I see it but also because it helps people to avoid the trap of fighting the scenario. So, for example, you know I'll use a Marine Corps example If you give your Marines a scenario in which you know the ammunition didn't arrive, the canteens are empty, the orders are incorrect, the intelligence is wrong, they will say wait a minute.
Bruce Gudmundsson :You're messing with us. You know you're just. This is just the harassment package. But if you give them an actual scenario, something from history, where all those things were true, which is more normal than not, you can simply say well, this actually happened. I'm not messing with you. This is a situation that Brigadier Thompson faced on the Falklands or Jeremy Moore faced later in the Falklands on this day. What we're working on now.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, yes, no, no, I'm not.
Mark McGrath :So for the listeners yours truly, your co-host here on no Way Out. I'm a member of Bruce's Case Method Club, which is made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds, certainly not just military. There are people from all over industry and everything all over the world in fact, and we get put in these scenarios that are actual historical scenarios that we get pre-reading on, and what you're trying to do is get us in a frame of reference to approach a problem that's going to involve multiple decision points versus, say, like a TDG, maybe only one or two, right?
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, you can have any number of decision points. That's at least one. So for example, at the Harvard Business School, a lot of their cases will have one or two decision points. Okay.
Bruce Gudmundsson :In fact, having two decision points is a rarity. They call that having an A and a B case, and there's a great deal of background material. So before you get to the decision, if you're a student at the Harvard Business School, you're going to get a big, thick article full of data and observations and information and that's what you use to make your decision, because usually the business decisions are single decisions. They are, in essence, strategic decisions. Tactics are different. Tactics is about a number of events that follow each other in rapid succession, each of which requires a decision, and the type of cases I tend to do with the decision game club is that that's the group of which you are a member. Those tend to have multiple decisions. There might be six, seven, eight decisions in the course of a single hour.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, well, so one of the things that it's appealing to me to talk about decision force in cases so that our audience hears it is that I think that there are invaluable tools to improve learning and complexity and in those scenarios that are there so these things actually happen. So these are things that we can learn from. We talked about the various decision points. You're certainly usually more than one and you're trying to put yourself in the shoes of someone that dealt with something that was certainly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And then they're open-ended, right, I mean, you're asking open-ended questions to get people to sort of zero down on what they think that they would do given the scenario correct.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Precisely right. There is no multiple choice, there's no simple. I mean sometimes it's go left or go right, but there's a lot more to going left or right than meets the eye.
Mark McGrath :So and you fuse that with Socratic Method. So you're putting people in a nice way because we're all there to learn, but I have no idea that I'm going to be called and I have to be paying attention and you're going to implement the Socratic Method, asking us a question, whereas we're going to give you an answer on what we think could happen based off the events. Correct.
Bruce Gudmundsson :That's correct. Now permission, sir, to geek out on Socrates a bit Absolutely.
Mark McGrath :If I may Okay.
Bruce Gudmundsson :So there's two approaches to the Socratic Method, which leads still it's been leading to confusion, to a lot of confusion for about 2,500 years now. There's the Socrates in the Platonic Dialogues and he's got a point of view and he's pushing his point of view. He's very often he's actually asking questions that he ends up in many cases answering himself, but he's got a very clear sense of where he wants to go. There's another Socrates which I much prefer, which is that of Xenophon. You may have heard of Xenophon.
Mark McGrath :Oh yeah.
Bruce Gudmundsson :He took a long trip with 10,000 of his closest friends through the Persian Empire and his approach is again much more open-ended. His Socrates is genuinely interested in the student solution. He's all about empowering the solution. Plato's got an agenda and Xenophon doesn't, so if I use the term Socratic Method quite often, this is right here in this little pamphlet which I'm happy to send to your listeners.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, we'll link to it in the show notes. What I'm hearing you say, though, is that the Xenophon interpretation of Socrates which you apply is empowering the player in the decision-forcing case. So if an organization is running these, or if we're helping facilitate a decision-forcing case scenario, or a class or something like that, we're empowering them to come up with their own solutions, their own decisions to get them to the point where, eventually well, it was the Socratic Method we get you down to the say I don't know right, because we're trying to trigger and continue learning correct.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Very much so. But the point is not to inflict the facilitator's opinion upon the participant, upon the player. It is to give the player experience in exercising judgment.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, breaking their orientation and revising it and reorienting and based off new facts and then using their viewpoints to deal with the mission at hand or the case at hand, correct?
Bruce Gudmundsson :Very much so. And again, you're mentioning John Boyd and I'm sitting here in the old headquarters building in Quantico Town, about a block and a half from the place where I had lunch with John Boyd in 1989. And one of the points he always liked to make was the most important step in the Udalloop is orientation. So a big question that I often ask in the course of teaching a case is who are you, when are you, what are you trying to do? Release these orientation type questions.
Mark McGrath :So the military, military history, rather, is chock full of examples that are just ready made for these things, right? I mean, you don't have to go and create hypothetical scenarios. These are real things that actually happened. Do you see? Now, if HBS is doing this, are they using decision forcing cases inside of actual business scenarios too? Do they point those out?
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, very much so. When Dean Wallace B Dunham, who is the godfather of the case method at Harvard very interesting guy he quickly realized that there was no business equivalent of military history, even in 1923, you go into the Boston Public Library or the New York Public Library and there'll be just the shelves will grown under the weight of military history, not so much for business. So he ended up developing, creating a little research shop. Its name has changed off over the years. I think it was originally called the Institute for Business Research or the Business Research Something, but anyway, to actually write the business history.
Bruce Gudmundsson :And the difference with military based cases is that you have this treasure trove of military history to work off of. This is certainly something that General, then Colonel George Marshall, realized that you could just simply go to the shelf and pull off books and find a lot of the raw materials for DFCs, whereas again, the business folks have got to work a little harder. And it's interesting you think about different fields. I know there's some folks in the firefighting business, particularly wilderness firefighting police officers, who do these, but their difficulty often is finding the scenarios.
Mark McGrath :So it's not. I mean, I've always thought that, again, I'm biased. I'm a veteran and I'm the son of a career officer myself, so it's like I'm biased towards military history. But, to your point, there's no shortage of materials, going all the way back to the ancients, to present, that can be used in these scenarios. And what I see, and even the club that you have and that you guide and lead, with all these individuals coming from various backgrounds, not military, what I see people doing is they're extracting principles, they're learning principles that happen to present themselves to somebody in a military situation. Yet you can take those principles out and apply them to your manufacturing company, and apply them to your law firm, and apply them to your football team, whatever. It's the same type of thinking. Am I following on that?
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, yeah, I'd be careful with the word principles, because a lot of people use it to mean something else.
Mark McGrath :People often use principles to mean guidelines and rules of following them, even hard and fast rules.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yeah, what would you say that if I'm going to what you'll get from DFCs, but you will get habits and attitudes. You will get certain skills that you can apply to a wide variety of situations.
Mark McGrath :Which we would say, I think, and we would agree, that would round out and augment someone's orientation, as they continue to interact with volatility, uncertainty, complex ambiguities at fair, yes, yes.
Bruce Gudmundsson :And a big part of what people learn it's not all of it, but a big part is being comfortable with those things. They have people who are comfortable with discomfort. Okay, they don't expect things to be laid out for them. If you look at what most students do in school, most of the time that they are being asked to solve problems that have very narrow limits on them and all of the orientation work has been done for them and that really, again going back to Boyd is the most important step is orienting yourself Really. It's the problem. Framing, it's the figuring out what's going on.
Bruce Gudmundsson :A Ferdinand Foch you remember him as the man who won World War I. He was a French officer with a German library. It's very, very interesting realizing watching him grow up in the French army trying to use what he learned about the once in future enemy and trying to instruct his compatriots in these methods. But his central question was de quoi s'agit-il? What's going on here? What's happening? I used to refer to this as Marvin Gaye's question, but now the time has passed, no one remembers my reference to the song what's Going On?
Mark McGrath :It's funny that you mentioned that we did actually record it with someone today and they brought up what's Going On by Marvin.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Gaye.
Mark McGrath :I'm not exaggerating.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, that's a sort of reference, that. But 10 years ago I'd make it and I called it my Master Sergeant and above reference, the old timer's got it and the youngsters gave me a blank look so I stopped using it. But that idea again going back to this idea of orientation, figuring out what the problem is, Right, what's actually going on.
Mark McGrath :So we get, in order to get people comfortable, being uncomfortable in complexity as it unfolds, we, in a decision forcing case, we put them in the shoes of a protagonist, so a historical protagonist. And then, reading off of Chris Butler's article here, he says that there's six components for a DFC. There's the introduction, then there's the context setting the story, and there's the questions to explore the context as a group. And then the fourth part is to prompt to make a decision and compare and contrast between participants. And then five is to repeat two through four as many times as appropriate, and then six discuss the actual outcome. Is that the basics of what I need for a successful DFC?
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, yes, I think Chris is probably being a bit more systematic than.
Mark McGrath :I am.
Bruce Gudmundsson :But this is often the case with the practitioner. It's like the famous Frenchman who didn't realize he'd been speaking prose all his life. So very much so. I think there is that and we often miss. I know and this is my fault in our discussions, because I'm so keen on keeping things exactly to an hour we often miss that last stage, which is the reflection, reflecting back on the case and asking ourselves okay, so we've worked through this case, we've made, we've dealt with a bunch of problems, we've made a bunch of decisions. We've seen how those decisions played out, both in the near term and sometimes in the longer term. So what is this case about? What's standing on one foot? Tell us, what's the story here? What would you call this? What's the headline?
Mark McGrath :One of the things that I love about it is, no matter how much I think I know about a certain historical event, the way that you've designed them and you're designing them. I think it's brilliant. I hope others look into this. But you, even if you know a lot about something, you're still put into situations where you're thinking and you know how this ends. But there you are faced with these scenarios and now you have a better understanding of what that person was actually encountering and the complexities that they were actually encountering and the forces of nature and the unknowns and things that they didn't know. I think that it gives you a completely different context. Even if you think you know a lot about a certain event, like, say, for example, we're doing the Falklands War right now it is amazing to me that, no matter how much you've read and studied about that, when you're putting those shoes to make those decisions, it really does sort of bring out that discomfort that you need to grow, to improve your learning and improve your ability to shift perspectives. Does that make a sense?
Bruce Gudmundsson :Very much so, in fact, the other side. Mostly when I'm using DFCs or teaching DFCs, facilitating DFCs, what I'm doing is helping people use history to practice decision-making, to deal with problems of a certain kind. For example, with our Falklands cases that we're working through in the Decision Game Club, a lot of what we're dealing with is the problem of how to get forces on land to cooperate with forces at sea. That's a lot more complicated than certainly I thought before we started doing this series. But at the same time as I put these problems together, as these exercises together, I'm also learning a great deal about history.
Bruce Gudmundsson :All sorts of questions pop up that aren't in the references I'm using and that forces me to dig. You realize there are a bunch of things that are happening in the scenario that didn't turn out to be important but could have been. For example, I just discovered that most of the fighting in the Falklands war happens on the island of East Falkland, where most of the people live, but there's another island called West Falkland. I just discovered, after doing this since Christmas time right, it's now middle of July that there was an Argentine garrison in a place called Port Howard on.
Bruce Gudmundsson :West Falkland. Nobody talks about that in the memoirs because it was a beached whale. It was a garrison that just got landed, wasn't supported and was just basically keeping itself alive, not doing anything. It also didn't have any transport and what have you, but it was always there. If you think about the decision makers, that's always in the back of their mind. That's one of the reasons they're keeping a lot of resources out of the fight, or the fight that turned out to be, because they're concerned about how do we deal with these 800 guys in Port Howard, but because nothing happened of it, it's at best a footnote.
Mark McGrath :So when you do present us with these problems and we get these questions, it seems like one of the things so clearly. It's helping us make better decisions in a pressure situation where people are watching you right. So we have everybody zoomed in from all over the world. You don't know when you're going to be called. You're making a decision. You've got to do it quick and you have to be able to explain your rationale and learn from it. I think the other thing is that you're developing. You're really putting yourself in someone else's shoes, you're putting yourself in a leader's shoes, so that in a way, I guess we could say we're gaining maybe some empathy when we find ourselves in those exact situations. And maybe we're not in the Falklands War, but maybe we're in a scenario within our own company, or we're in a scenario within our own law firm or football team or whatever. And that ability to challenge yourself, like that challenge your thinking, is going to pay benefits as you continue to learn, as you go forward.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, very much so.
Bruce Gudmundsson :And it's also, it's about having developing these habits of thought, yeah, and, it happens, of character really, because one of them is humility. It's realizing what you don't know. If you have a particular character… should we say doctrine? Right, you went to school, you learned this method and you're now going to go out in the world and apply it, that can give you a kind of false confidence, right, and until you fall on your face, you have this immense faith in this method. If you study by means of cases, you realize there's a whole bunch of really smart guys, really smart people who made some hard decisions and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, but they were venturing into the unloan, they were going to the Terra Incognita where the dragons dance, and it's a very sobering thought, I think, both not humiliating but humble making yeah, it's like the nuance there but also very liberating. So you end up realizing that there's a whole bunch of stuff you don't know In fact, most things you don't know.
Mark McGrath :Isn't that? The greatest part of it Is that you realize that there's a whole lot you don't know and you now have the opportunity to learn in order to adapt. And I think that that's the when I think of decision forcing cases, and why would recommend it to If I was talking with leaders in a company that were looking to build more team cohesion around organizational learning in order to create better adaptiveness. If you're not learning, you're not adapting. Period. And this is a way where people can exercise those intellectual muscles, those insight muscles that they have inside their cognitive power to put themselves in a scenario that's relatively capital, light, right, it doesn't cost anything really to get on the internet or go through a scenario. You don't have to buy or build anything and you're exercising your most potent weapon your mind.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, no, you mentioned the term cohesion. What happens is when you build, when you work through a bunch of these exercises with a group of the people in the group learn a lot about each other.
Mark McGrath :Yes.
Bruce Gudmundsson :And they also get into the habit of learning from each other.
Mark McGrath :Well, to your point. It is interesting in our cohort with it right now with the Falklands War, to have people from so many different nationalities participate, to get a perspective where you as an American or you as someone from the UK, you think you know the story and then you hear it from other sides that you'd never heard of before and I think that that's enlightening in some respect because you're able to we talked about empathy but you're able to have an environment where you can gain another perspective that you would not likely have, sort of going through your own canon or stuff, through your own stuff that you learned in school or whatever. So there is that.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Indeed, and the Decision Game Club has again, people from all over the world and people from many different walks of life, people of different ages. But I think that, even if you're this is something you're doing with your local company, with your 20-person company or 10-person company, even if everybody grew up in the same town, you're going to get a variety of perspectives, and perspectives in the most literal sense of the term, people who are looking at the problem from a different direction. Yes, and the problem has got multiple dimensions, so you're seeing it from different perspectives, and that gives you it helps you form a fuller picture of the problem.
Mark McGrath :There's that famous example that Chuck Spinney uses in his epistemology of Boyd's Destruction Creation. But think of a pyramid. Right, if you're only looking at a pyramid from one point, one group only sees an isosceles triangle or an equilateral triangle. Somebody from they only gets one other vantage point, they only see a square. And then another group sees a triangle with a line down the middle or a square with an accident, right, and if we don't get those other perspectives, we're going to prepare for square and somebody's going to prepare for equilateral triangle, but nobody's going to be prepared for pyramid.
Mark McGrath :Yes, and if we don't gain those perspectives?
Mark McGrath :I mean, that seems to me one of the most common things or not common, but very widely rampant is that when other perspectives are stifled or when an environment, a learning environment like that, comes with a decision forcing case, perspectives are going to be maybe limited, maybe we're just going to get one side, one view, and we're not going to look at problems, we're not going to look at business challenges, we're not going to look at things from an array of perspectives, because we don't have the ability to do so and that's going to cost us in the long run.
Mark McGrath :That's going to make sure that our orientation is misaligned from reality and it's going to have a negative effect on how we observe and it's going to have a negative effect on how we decide and act. And then the loop we're not going to be able to learn this effectively because we're going to be operating on a bad orientation or a misaligned orientation that's going to diverge as time goes forward. Because we're not going to have, we're going to just prepare for triangle. We're not going to ever consider pyramid, if that makes sense.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, and I would add to Chuck Spinney's analogy there that if you're inside the pyramid, what you see is flickering torches and a mummy chasing you.
Mark McGrath :There, you go.
Bruce Gudmundsson :There's a whole bunch of things going on and the fact that the DFC, or the historical map problem, if you will, to use the General Marshall's term, they also call it a hip historical immersion problem, because you're being dipped in history, you're being immersed in a historical situation, but because these things are not discipline specific, nobody is saying, well, you can't say that or you can't think of that.
Bruce Gudmundsson :I think of so much of academic training. The things people get in the classroom is about limiting the framework, about limiting the perspective. In my own academic field, that of history, there are many people who will take great umbrage at people doing counterfactuals, going through the what if scenarios. Now, I find those incredibly useful for trying to figure out what actually happened and why people did what they did. But a lot of people will say, well, you can't do that, that's not history. We're trying to extend things into the future. There's no such limitation in the decision forcing case that there are. You don't have any of these preexisting limitations.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, you're free to explore, you're free to question, you're free to challenge, you're free to test and ultimately, that's preparing you for something that you may be facing down the road in the reality of your world, be it business, military, etc.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Very much so, and I also find that there are a lot of simple DFCs, and I do these very much to introduce the method to people and people in a wide variety of fields. One of them, very simple one, one of my favorites is that you're Queen Elizabeth the first, not the one we all know, but Queen Elizabeth from the 16th century.
Bruce Gudmundsson :And you've just become queen. And you became queen because your sister, your sister Mary, died. And soon after becoming queen, you get a letter from your former brother-in-law, Philip of Spain, proposing marriage. What do you do, your majesty? You know and I've done that with you know groups of school children, I've done that with people in the airline business, and you get lots of interesting perspectives. In particular, what was interesting is that I did this with airline employees, both cabin crew and flight crew, from an airline based in Lithuania, and back in the 16th century, you know, Lithuania was a very, very big kingdom or Commonwealth, rather very, very big place, you know, all the way from the Baltic to Black Sea, and so they kept asking questions about well, maybe there's a Lithuanian prince that the queen can marry, and it's something that 99% of your British historians wouldn't think about, Because they're thinking about okay, I'm thinking about Spain, I'm thinking about France, thinking about Scotland, I'm not thinking about Lithuania, and that's one of the actually the joys of doing these with groups from different parts of the world.
Bruce Gudmundsson :It says that you do get a different geographical perspective.
Mark McGrath :So if you have a cohort of 20, and you're instructing ones, teaching in 21 or learning, Very much so yes.
Bruce Gudmundsson :No, no.
Mark McGrath :The great secret of case teaching is that the case teacher learns a lot more than the students do, and maybe as we wind down, then I mean it's also too a way to put people in situations without actually exposing them to, you know market risk or danger. You know it's a, you know you can think about decisions that had to have been made under fire in chaotic, adverse environments and it might prep you for one that you don't actually have to go to to. You know, cognitively, discuss it with others but at the same time ready you for scenarios that may come as your markets unfold or as business unfolds, right Indeed you know, the real world is expensive.
Mark McGrath :Yeah.
Bruce Gudmundsson :You know, doing things in the real world is expensive. So having exercises with a lot of of cognitive fidelity, has to say the mental as far as your brain is concerned is a very similar exercise, but as far as your wallet is concerned is not. And to do that over and over again, to build up a vast stock of of experience, Without actually having to go do it.
Mark McGrath :you could learn about it, you can test it, you can try it, you can discuss it, you can think about it, you can challenge each other on it, and not one bullet comes flying.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, yes, the no. No. Nobody's in danger of losing his livelihood.
Mark McGrath :Now, some of these decision forcing cases, too, do take form on actual battlefields. We know of many businesses and corporations and we've done them as well over the years of taking people to actual battlefields and putting them in these scenarios to think about these things. So so there's, there's there's other methods than just virtual classroom or in-person classroom, right, there's also maybe some hands-on ways. If you're close to these types of things, I mean in America, certainly on the here, in the sort of the East, northeast and Southeast really, I mean there's lots of opportunities to go and do these things where these actually happened, correct, Very much so.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yeah, we call these on-site decision forcing cases or decision forcing staff rides, and so the and the method is basically the same, except that, rather than you know, showing people a map and saying, here you are, you're your major Beckham, and you're in charge of the, the horse artillery of General Stewart's cavalry, and it is the, I think, what is it? 5th, 6th, 6th of June, early June 1863, and you're about to head north and your, your battalion, is bivouacked. And you've got your horses, you've let them loose so they can enjoy the nice, nice, fresh summer grass, that good Virginia grass, before they have to haul the guns up up through the Great Valley. It's going to be hard to work for them. So horses are having a fine time. It's about time to get up.
Bruce Gudmundsson :It's almost dawn, people are stirring in their blankets, some people have started breakfast already, and you hear two shots fire from from the direction of this, this creek. You know what do you do, major Beckham. And then, of course, there's a whole bunch of decisions that he makes over the course of the of the day, and that's something you know you can do if, if the battlefield is, you know, it resembles what it did at the time of the decision. But again this, this brandy station, battlefields in great shape, thanks to the folks at the Civil War Trust. The Battle of Fredericksburg. From the Union point of view, fredericksburg hasn't changed much.
Mark McGrath :The Gettysburg and Antietam are my two favorites. I find that they're they're really good for that.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Yes, yes, and because a lot of people have done a lot of good work, they're reverbing those parks, if you're like me and a big fan of the American War of Independence. And there's Moors Creek Bridge, which is a really interesting battle early in the war. All sorts of interesting things going on. There's an amphibious landing about to happen a few miles away. There's ethnic conflict, there's ethnic communities taking sides, there's tactics and there's politics. All these things coming together gives you a really good sense of the richness of the problems faced by the people involved in that war.
Mark McGrath :Yep, and, like we said, we know many people, many backgrounds, that come to these things, that have never spent one day in the military and find a lot of value in this for their teams that they're leading Again the opportunity to not only enhance learning but enhance cohesion and trust and other things. There's a lot of benefit to this and it's definitely something we can go in depth and talk about with them Now. If I want to learn more about your decision-forcing cases, I go to what website?
Bruce Gudmundsson :Okay, so a couple of things you can do. One is what I call the Military Learning Gateway, which is a blogspot website. It's teachUSMC, and I wish I had called it learnUSMC but teachUSMCblogspotcom and then you'll find a couple of sites on the other side of that gateway that deal with decision-forcing cases. One is an introductory site and one is an advanced site, depending on how you like to learn. You can start with either one. The pamphlet that's up here on the screen takes an academic view, and you can find that on the site. I've got a bunch of other pamphlets that look at decision-forcing cases from different points of view. Some are more military than others. It's teachUSMCblogspotcom. You'll find all sorts of things there. Also, check out my substacks. I've got a couple of substacks which look at these problems from two different angles. One is called the Tactical Notebook, which, as you can imagine, is about military things, and the other one is called Extramurus, which is about self-directed learning Of course these things come together in the DFCs.
Mark McGrath :Full disclosure. I'm a subscriber to Tactical Notebook. It's phenomenal. It's very straightforward to read and it's applicable. You can pull things out of it that, when you understand them and see them, you'll see it everywhere. It's like a lot of stuff with John Boyd Bruce, I mean. Once you see it, once you get it, it's hard to unsee it and then you just want more.
Mark McGrath :This is another methodology that organizations and teams can implement pretty straightforward, pretty simply, to enhance their organizational learning, which in turn, enhances their adaptability. Organizations like the Marines, for example, have been doing this for a long time. You and I are both alumni of that organization. People that are alumni of that organization have taken that out and brought it to the business world. It's, I think, a great effect. I think it's a really good thing that people need to look into and they also need to say well, I wasn't in the military. And again they could go back to our episode with Chris Butler and say, no, I wasn't in the military. But there's a lot of value in this because it's forcing me to take multiple perspectives, to look at problems from more than one vantage point and come up with solutions quickly, under pressure, that are going to get challenged, that are going to get me uncomfortable, becoming uncomfortable, which I'm going to need to be if I want to thrive in complexity. Is that a?
Bruce Gudmundsson :good summation. Yes, I think I get it. We've been talking a lot about the military aspect of this, but I've done these with rooms full of eighth graders. I've done an undergraduate course at Dickinson College based entirely on decision forcing cases. I've done this with rooms full of flight attendants. It's not something that's just for military folk or even primarily for military folk. Military people are the people I most often work with, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Mark McGrath :I was in asset management for almost 20 years and it never ceased to amaze me how people would blow it off because it came from the military, that there was nothing you could learn from the military. Some did not all, but some did, and they would explore and try to understand these things and they would see hey, you're actually getting us to think about things from different perspectives. We need that operating capital markets, we need that if we're going to operate a hedge fund or a portfolio or things like that. I would challenge people don't dismiss this. Look into this and consider this, because your organizational learning is going to be the key to your adaptation as complexity continues to unfold. Leaders or readers and learners this is a big component of that to learn, sharpen the cognitive edge. When you're in scenarios that are similar in the future, you'll be better prepared than those that hadn't done this type of training. Is that a fair statement?
Bruce Gudmundsson :I think, a very fair statement.
Mark McGrath :Excellent, Bruce. Why don't we end it on that note? I think that was a great conversation. Anything else that you want to bring up and make sure that we know about decision-forcing cases? I think we know where to go. We've got the basics. Anything else to add?
Bruce Gudmundsson :No, I think you find the website, you find the substacks and you're on your way.
Mark McGrath :Excellent. Bruce Govinsen, thanks so much for joining us on no Way Out.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Thank you, moose, it's been a real pleasure.
Mark McGrath :We'll talk soon.
Bruce Gudmundsson :Okay, bye-bye.
