Adaptive Readiness: Enhancing Personnel's Cognitive, Affective and Pyschosocial Skills

Recently, Alan Kay defined the challenge of ?new vs. news.? Using this metaphor, Kay described how the Medieval Catholic Church did not view Gutenburg's printing press as a ?new? (i.e., foundationally vital) invention. Rather the Church saw the printing press as ?news,? as an incremental update of the status quo and, as a result, was slow to recognize the impact the printing press might have on society. Kay's metaphor is analogous to Thomas Kuhn's notion of ?normal science? versus a ?paradigm shift.? Following the path described by Kuhn and Kay, we argue that enhanced individual readiness for the ?human dimension? represents a paradigm shift for the military. It is fundamentally NEW?more significant than just incremental NEWS. Unfortunately, military senior leaders may fail to recognize the full importance of widespread cognitive, affective, and psychosocial readiness. Military policymakers may undervalue human-dimension capacities: viewing them as ?mere soft skills,? believing that they are less impactful than technological solutions, or failing to recognize the fundamentally ?new? approaches that this novel paradigm requires. In this presentation, we will discuss barriers to extending the training, education, assessment, and sustainment of human-dimension skills within the military community. We will also offer recommended solutions.

Over the last decade, military operations have become more decentralized while the operating environment has grown in complexity. As a result, junior leaders now carry more responsibility than ever before ?not just for traditional warfighting duties, but for a range of mental, emotional, and social challenges. Today's ground forces, in particular, are asked to make rapid decisions under stressful, ill-defined, time-compressed situations, where even seemingly small decisions may have substantial strategic implications. Given these factors, the US Marine Corps recently launched the Small Unit Decision Making (SUDM) initiative. Its aim is to reliably engender expert decision-making capacities in small unit leaders. Essentially, the initiative seeks to reproduce the successful Marine Officer model for the enlisted ranks. Senior leaders, however, traditionally develop expertise through thousands of hours of experience, and this conventional approach is too time-consuming and expensive to be realistically applied to junior leaders. Thus, the goal of the SUDM initiative is to accelerate the acquisition of expertise at the small unit level by integrating more deliberate practice, novel instructional techniques, and greater use of scenario-based instruction throughout the training and education continuum. This presentation will discuss the SUDM initiative, overall, as well as the related pilot study currently underway.