Bruce Gudmundsson on learning by decision-forcing cases

Bruce Gudmundsson joins me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss the great work he is doing down in Quantico putting together case studies on military operations and acquisition. The case studies are different than you might see in business schools. He takes historical situations and puts you in the shoes of a central character. Bruce provides a lecture on the background, gives statistics and other images that help you understand the terrain or technology, and then at critical junctures in the story, he asks, “what would you do?” These “decision-forcing case studies” are at the intersection of the traditional case study method, decision games, and Socratic conversations.

Podcast annotations.

In the podcast, Bruce gives us a flavor of a decision-forcing case study featuring French artilleryman Emile Rimaihlo. He became a paragon of the French military after he helped develop a recouperator device in which only the barrel of the gun recoiled, rather than the whole carriage as you would have seen in the US Civil War. It was a revolutionary weapon, as Bruce explains:

Rather than being able to fire, let’s say, 3 rounds every two minutes, you can fire 20 or even 30 rounds a minute. It’s a huge increase in the rate of fire.

Listen to the whole thing to hear about the conundrums Rimaihlo faced, how the French fell behind the Germans in artillery design because of certain choices concerning the metallurgy of the barrel, and the battlefield consequences. We find out that “This is a case where a technological innovation really requires a change in acquisition policy.”

I enjoyed this tidbit in the discussion of weapons choice:

One of the stranger aspects — and perennial aspects — of defense acquisition is the aesthetics of weapons. Beautiful weapons are much more popular than ugly ones. 

That reminds me of Brent Flyvberg’s excellent work on megaprojects. He says there are four “sublimes”: political, technological, economic, and aesthetic. These sublimes help explain the increased size and frequency of megaprojects. 

Bruce also gave three quick, but insightful, jabs. First on John Maynard Keynes with economy:

This is hard to believe in 2019, but this is long before Keynesian economics. The French state prides itself on economy. It’s very parsimonious and takes good care of its equipment, holds onto it for a long time.

Then on Plato with philosophy:

… that scoundrel Plato really misrepresented Socrates. I’m a great believer that if you want the real Socrates you go to Xenophon and not Plato. Plato was somebody using the character of Socrates to push his, well, his totalitarian ideas.

And finally on Robert Strange McNamara with defense management 

We’ve been burdened by the systems introduced by Robert Strange McNamara… His idea was that this was all really a branch of engineering and that the clever engineer at the top, given the right data, can make all these decisions and everything will flow from that.

I sympathize with those statements. Here are some good lines on learning and the case study method:

It’s very easy to be wise after-the-fact. But that warps our judgment…

 

There is in fact some good documentation that does show that students who study by the case method have a much higher tolerance for ambiguity than people who studied by other means. And that I think is one of the big benefits of the approach. The other one, and this is related, is humility…

 

…the mother of the idea is the student. The facilitator is the midwife… the facilitator is not trying to lead the student to the answer. This is not the Hansel and Gretel method, as some German teachers call it, you know, with the bread crumbs.

Because you don’t know how the decision-forcing case studies will turn out, you can focus on the process of decision-making rather than the outcomes. Case studies are fun because of

… the same thing that makes games enjoyable. Not knowing how things turn out. You look at most traditional academic teaching. You’re told what you’re going to learn, and you’re told it again, then it’s summarized for you, and then you return it to the professor in the form of an examination of sorts. There’s no mystery there, no surprises. No adventure. Whereas with the case method there’s adventure every time you engage a case.

A few things on that. First, the benefits of the case study reminds me somewhat of an apprenticeship model, where the student is experiencing the decision-making process in real time without access to the final answer. I have been a great believer in apprenticeships.

Second, the purpose of games, like competitions, is to find out what happens or who wins. It would be patently absurd to play a game if you knew exactly what would happen. Games and competitions become more important in a world dominated by uncertainty. They generate information from participants that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. Here is Hayek in his 1968 classic, Competition as a Discovery Procedure:

In sporting events, examinations, the awarding of government contracts, or the bestowal of prizes for poems, not to mention science, it would be patently absurd to sponsor a contest if we knew in advance who the winner would be.

Third, the focus on games is interesting not only as applied to learning, but potentially for a much wider range of human experience, including business and strategy. Here is Arnold Kling on the matter:

I want to suggest that the new phase of humanity can be described as playing games. This is a radical hypothesis. Please examine it with an open mind… I claim that we are entering the era of games, in which the key words are scorekeeping and strategy.

Kling points to sci-fi novel Ender’s Game, the author of which, incidentally, was invited by Bruce’s group at the School of Advanced Warfighting to help in their quest to reform Marine Corps military doctrine.

Bruce also took part in the Quantico Renaissance, which led to the development of updated Marine Corps doctrine that pivoted away from linear fronts and hierarchy to an appreciation of nonlinearity and uncertainty in combat. I asked Bruce to describe the atmosphere at the time, and whether such a reform is possible in defense acquisition as well. Here’s a teaser:

I don’t know if stars can align in the same way for acquisition…

The question of acquisition reform may not, however, be so divorced from the way we teach:

If, focusing on the cultural side of reform, you could image a world in which, the people who are influential in the world of defense procurement are all trained by means of decision-forcing cases in the way we described. Those virtues, the bias for action, the humility, the appreciation for the chaotic nature of both the battlefield and the world of business, I think we would reduce a lot of the pathologies that come from over-centralization. That’s a very expensive hobby we have there.

I think Admiral Hyman Rickover, who took a great interest in the US education system, would agree.

We perhaps see the pathologies Bruce describes in the bureaucratic layering of the DOD. Rickover clamored on about how staff officials studied programs to death rather than acted, they were overconfident in their paper analyses and underappreciated military judgment, and they relied on overly simplified models that neglected certain costs and uncertainties. Rickover raged against officials who had no responsibility to get the work done, but were able to stall or kill decisions, even if by inaction.

Here is Bruce on the mentality that comes from opinions divorced from action:

Every time you’ve encountered someone whose acted in an opinionated way, that opinion was usually divorced from action. And that’s what makes it really irritating, is that somebody says, yes, I’ve made up my mind about this thing. I don’t have skin-in-the-game. I’m not a stakeholder here, but I’ve got an opinion!

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Join the decision game club.

There are three opportunities each week to take part in decision-forcing case studies with Bruce Gudmundsson. There is an in-person Thursday class at 4:30pm in Quantico, and there are two online classes Tuesday at 7:30pm and Friday at 10:30pm (all times Eastern Standard). I highly recommend giving his class a try. It’s free, fun, and not intimidating in the least. You’ll likely find me in an online class most weeks.

You can learn more by visiting http://teachusmc.blogspot.com (see E-Bildung), or simply emailing Bruce at thecasemethodclub@gmail.com. He will provide you information and links to join the sessions. Also, be sure to check out Bruce’s fantastic books, which are available on Amazon, as well as other podcast episodes featuring Bruce, such as at POGO (here and here) and All Marine Radio.

I’d like to thank Bruce for joining me on Acquisition Talk, and for all the great things I’ve learned over the course of his classes. Definitely shoot him an email if you’d like to participate. Finally, a shout out to the estimable Mark Mandeles for recommending Bruce to me, many thanks!