© 2010, Small Wars Foundation November 9, 2010
Design and the Prospects for Decision
by Christopher R. Paparone
The designers may begin with a vague image of some ideal
solution. They factor their decision into a sequence of nested
design and search cycles, essentially working their way
through a decision tree, with the decisions at each node more
narrow and focused than the last. Failure at any node can
lead to cycling back to an earlier node. Thus a solution
crystallizes, as the designers grope along building their
solution brick by brick without really knowing what it will
look like until it is completed.
--Henry Mintzberg, Duru Raisinghani and Andre Theoret,
―The Structure of Unstructured Decision Processes‖
Designers do not rely on set decision-making schemes; they design them as they go. To
embrace a more open philosophy of deciding, this essay calls for an enlargement of how decision
is defined and develops a typology that serves the military designer as would an artist‘s palette.
Unfortunately, the US defense community is stuck on decision-making models which are the
antithesis of what design philosophy advocates.1 These models – the programmatic and
rational-analytic– are so taken-for-granted that they blind the culture to alternatives.
One could argue further that the US Defense Department‘s ―planning culture‖ clashes
with other stakeholders while seeking to impose its programmatic and analytic decision
templates. Here is a quote that exemplifies this quest taken from Michèle A. Flournoy‘s 28 Jan
2008 testimony to Congress calling for a Goldwater-Nichols Act equivalent for the interagency:
… unlike the U.S. military, which has doctrine and a standard approach to planning
its operations, the U.S. government as a whole lacks established procedures for
planning and conducting interagency operations. Each new administration tends to
reinvent this wheel, either issuing new Presidential guidance—which too often
overlooks the lessons learned and best practices of its predecessors—or ignoring the
issue entirely until it faces an actual crisis. This ad hoc approach has kept the United
States from learning from its mistakes and improving its performance in complex
1
Such as the joint operation planning process explained in US doctrine, Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Operation
Planning.
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