Why Military Organizations Are Cautious About Learning?

Abstract

This article argues that military organizations display a more rigorous form of collective sensemaking than ordinary bureaucratic organizations. Military organizing is predicated on the rigorous modes of thinking and acting that follow from the particular military propensity to impose order on chaos. This trait is antithetical to modern notions of “the learning organization,” in which exploring variety and experimenting and testing out unproven methods are central. We identify two sets of structural conditions that constitute the sociocognitive landscape of military organizations and discuss how the military logic of action might be enacted in different sociocultural contexts. Our framework is brought to bear on recent research on international military missions, and in the concluding section, we summarize our arguments and discuss their wider implications in terms of trade-offs between adaptability and other capabilities in the design of military forces.

Military Organizations Can Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time

“…In their recent article “Why Military Organizations Are Cautious About Learning?” Hasselbladh and Ydén (2020) represent military organizations and the way they learn and operate as a fait accompli. The authors argue that military organizations, like traditional bureaucratic organizations, adopt a rationality that is amenable to routine, consistency, and predictability—as a means to impose order on chaotic or disorderly settings and situations.…”

“…Moreover, certain capabilities within the military such as information warfare and psychological, special, and influence operations all require capacities for adaptation, creativity, and agility. Hasselbladh and Ydén (2020) argue that traditional military organizations promote robustness and resilience in the face of uncertainty, but the same can be said for learning which also promotes robustness and resilience in ways that can assist organizations to better navigate successful outcomes in conditions of uncertainty. Would a loss of agility be a better option?…”

Mastering Both: The Planned and the Unforeseen An Epistemological Investigation of Swedish Military Professionalism

“…This statement can be contrasted with Janowitz's notion that "human beings cannot operate effectively if they find themselves under the pressures of conflicting authority" (Janowitz, 1971, p. 423). But as we shall see, conflicting authority can today be said to be a basic prerequisite in military practice, a point which recent research on the officer profession has also shown (Moskos, Williams & Segal 2000;Hasselbladh & Ydén 2019).…”

Learning to organize and organizing to learn: the case of Dutch military expeditionary task forces

“…Traditionally, military organizations are not known for their capabilities for innovation, learning and creativity, being mostly portrayed as hierarchical and cautious operating 'machines' (Hasselbladh and Ydén, 2019;Morgan, 2006). In the past decades, however, it has been increasingly acknowledged that combat represents a dynamic, turbulent and competitive situation that poses important challenges to those purportedly hierarchical machines (Visser, 2017).…”