We’ve recently been tasked with revamping the academic
program at the National Defense Academy here in Georgia. I’ve been thinking about that and how we
should approach it. So I’m thinking
aloud here, basing a lot of my thinking on my experiences in Iraq. Sometimes it seems we have a “reverse Midas”
situation – everything we touch turns to crap.
And the main reason is, we rely too much on what works for us. I think it’s important that we don’t try to
teach the Georgians how to do things the American way using American procedures. I saw every contractor in Iraq do that; I
know that I’ve been guilty of doing that with the Academy’s tactical officers
and occasionally with my own “advisee,” and I know it would be a terrible idea
to try it with the Academy folks because when our suggestion/recommendation
doesn’t work we don’t ask why it failed; we simply say to the host nationals,
“OK, then try it this other (American) way,” and to ourselves we say, “Thank
God we’re here to fix this.”
You see, American contractors tend to look at problems in
one of three ways: as colonialists, as
imperialists, or as missionaries. This
leads to either patronization, where we treat the locals as our servants, or to
paternalism, where we treat them as children.
Obviously, neither of these is going to work with the current Georgian
group.
My experiences in Iraq taught me several things: 1) if the locals don’t want your help, leave
them alone. We can’t force our ideas on them;
all we can do is wait for them to decide to try our ideas. 2) To be successful, we have to take on the
mindset of a servant instead of a leader.
That means asking the people we’re trying to help, “What do you
feel is important and what do you want to do? What does the final product look like to you?” And that means that, sometimes, we have to
direct them away from what they think they want. They may want something that’s too hard, too
costly, too dangerous, or just too wrong for them. We have to direct them, through soft power,
to what is best for them. Once we do
this, our role is to help the customers find the knowledge they need to do what
they want to do. Sometimes we’ll be the
source of that information; sometimes we won’t.
If we’re not the source of that information, we have to do the research
to provide it.
We forget that our job is to talk – specifically, to ask
questions. Even though it may sound
counter intuitive because we’re supposed to be the advisor/expert, we need to listen more. Our job is not to tell the Georgians what to
do and how to do it. Our job is to shut up and listen, and to offer options
and ideas once they decide what they want to do. Our guiding question should be: “What can we do to help you get to where you
want to be?” Where they want to go is sometimes irrelevant; how they get there isn’t. Having said that,…
Planning is incompatible to advising because we plan in a
vacuum, because we plan using US methodologies and procedures, and because we
plan assuming greater US resources and motivation. I see our role as guiding the Georgians in their planning process, no matter how
inefficient or slow that process may be.
I see our role as being planning
resources for the Georgians, just as we would use higher sources in the
US. We also have to look at the Georgian
planning process from their point of view.
The most important – if not the ONLY – things we can contribute to that
process are confidentiality (so they’re not afraid to bounce ideas off us),
passionate service (so they learn to trust us), and truth, specifically where
they are, what they have, and what they need.
All of these, however, must be based on what they want, not on what we think they need. This will be easier if we delete the word “I”
from our vocabulary, substituting the word “we.”
We can’t change the Georgians; however, we can be a part
of the Georgians changing themselves.
That means picking our battles.
And fighting small. Let’s get
some wins under our belt, let’s let the Georgians win a few battles, before we
tackle the big issues.
The late Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch wrote a book, and
later produced a video, called The Last
Lecture. If you haven’t seen it, you
should watch it; it’s on youtube. In
that book and lecture, he said a good lecture has a “head fake” built into it. That’s where you think the lecture is about
one topic designed for a specific audience, then you discover it’s meant to be a
totally different topic for another audience.
Did you catch the head fake here?
I’m not talking about training Georgians; I’m talking about raising
teenagers.
Thanks for reading.
And good luck.
