© 2011, Small Wars Foundation March 18, 2011
To Design or Not to Design (Part Three):
Metacognition: How Problematizing Transforms a Complex System
towards a Desired State
by Ben Zweibelson
Editor’s Note: This is part two of a six part series on design. Parts one and two can be found
here and here.
If our previous experience with systems analysis proves anything, it proves that anyone who tries
to use all the information- even about the simple systems existing today- will be drowned in
paper and never accomplish anything…The synthesist is someone who makes very specific plans
for action, and more often than not stays around during the execution of those plans to adjust
them to ongoing reality.
FM5-0 Chapter 3 Design describes design‟s purpose as a methodology used to “make
sense of complex, ill-structured problems.”
The term „make sense‟ deals with explanation of the
open system. The previous article of „To Design or Not to Design‟ demonstrated how military
institutions have a strong propensity for describing an open system instead of explaining it. To
make sense of a complex system, humans instinctively attempt to categorize information through
descriptive monikers and reductive classifications. Knowledge is usually “pursued in depth in
isolation…Rather than getting a continuous and coherent picture, we are getting fragments-
remarkably detailed but isolated patterns.”
FM5-0 Chapter 3 Design follows military
institutional preference for reconstructive and mechanical methodology prevalent at the tactical
level of war by misapplying it to the operational level with design. Army design doctrine does
not articulate why and how to transform a complex system into a desired one.
To understand something conceptual requires thinking about thinking, also known as
metacognition. FM5-0 Chapter 3 Design implies metacognition by stressing the requirement of
thoroughly understanding the nature of the problem and prescribing three frames through which
planners operate to transform the system.
Design doctrine graphically depicts the environmental
frame, problem frame, and operational approach with minimal insight on how they function, or
how operational artists actually „transform the system.‟ Ironically, design doctrine stresses the
Gerald M. Weinberg, Rethinking Systems Analysis and Design (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982) 12.
United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, Field Manual 5-0; The Operations Process. (Headquarters, Department
of the Army, 2010), 3-6.
Ervin Laszlo, The Systems View of the World; a Holistic Vision for Our Time. (New Jersey, Hampton Press, 1996) 2; Valerie
Ahl and T.F.H. Allen, Hierarchy Theory: A Vision, Vocabulary, and Epistemology (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996) 1. “In all ages humanity has been confronted by complex problems. The difference between then and now is that
contemporary society has ambitions of solving complex problems through technical understanding;” Ian Stewart, Nature’s
Numbers (BasicBooks, 1995) 62. “Because all of the classical branches of science have grown so vast that no single mind can
likely encompass even one of them, we now live in an age of specialists.”
United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, Field Manual 5-0; The Operations Process. (Headquarters, Department
of the Army, 2010), 3-8.
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