Philip Tetlock: “The more diverse the perspectives, the wider the range of potentially viable solutions a collection of problem-solvers can find.”[1]
War requires us to be adaptive and creative. Adaptive because we can never accurately predict the enemy course of actions, nor what other factors like the environment will throw at us in battle. Creative because we want to mislead our enemy on our own planned course of action. Both adaptiveness and creativity are not something you simply have or can teach. It requires that you broaden your reference frame and knowledge about the world, which means looking across the barriers of conventional military art or science. Brilliant military minds like John Boyd did exactly this, they looked at other disciplinary fields of science and philosophy.[2] This is the purpose of my Substack and why it is called ‘Beyond the Art of War’. To show you why it is useful to look at other fields of expertise, consider the following problem described in the awesome book, Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed:
Suppose you are a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant tumor in his stomach. It is impossible to operate on the patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed, the patient will die. There is a kind of ray that can be used to destroy the tumor. If the rays reach the tumor all at once at a sufficiently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed. Unfortunately, at this intensity the healthy tissue that the rays pass through on the way to the tumor will also be destroyed. At lower intensities, the rays are harmless to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the tumor, either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumor with the rays and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue?[3]
More than 75% of people say that there is no solution and that the patient will therefore likely die. Syed now urges us to read the following seemingly unrelated story:
A fortress was situated in the middle of the country, surrounded by farms and villages. Many roads led to the fortress through the countryside. A rebel general vowed to capture the fortress but learned that mines had been planted on each of the roads. The mines were set so that small bodies of men could pass over them safely, but any large force would detonate them. The general divided his army into small groups and dispatched each group to the head of a different road. When all was ready, he gave the signal and each group marched down a different road. Each group continued down its road so that the entire army arrived together at the fortress at the same time. In this way, the general captured the fortress.[4]
Now think back to the medical problem. Syed now asks his reader if he or she can see the solution after having read the second story. It proved that when tested, more than 70% now found a procedure to save the patient, which is an enormous increase. The analogy provided a new perspective, and thus a solution to the problem. The solution is to set multiple rays at a low intensity at the tumor from different angles. This will ensure that the individual rays will not harm healthy tissue, yet the combined intensities of the multiple rays will destroy the tumor.
Syed explains that we tend to be tempted to hire more experts, in this case more doctors to solve the initial problem. The point of this simple example is that different perspectives can provide a novel insight that can lead to new solutions. In this example, someone with a military background can be of help to an oncologist.
Now let’s reverse this: could an oncologist be of assistance to the military? There is no reason why this could not be the case, as the example showed us. We perceive and interpret the world through models and reference frames (see my earlier post on how our brains are the measure of all things), although we do not literally see these reference frames themselves. This creates what Syed calls perspective blindness, it means that we do not see our own blind spots.[5] Syed makes a strong case for why we ought to make use of diverse groups of people in order to solve problems, especially complex problems.
The beauty of the analogy provided above is that it shows why and how different ‘fields of expertise’ can provide new insights and lead to new solutions. This is why I started writing ‘Beyond the Art of War’. You don’t win wars by sheer strength or will. We don’t engage in pre-planned battles on empty fields where only the numbers count, and nor did the Napoleonic armies centuries ago. Unless we want a war of pure attrition, we better be smarter but especially more adaptive and creative than our adversaries. Don’t get me wrong, all wars involve some degree of attrition but it is something we ought to avoid at all costs. This means that we need to use our brains, better still, a diverse set of brains that can provide a new perspective on problems that we weren’t able to solve earlier. Let’s look Beyond the Art of War.
[1] Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, P17
[3] Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, P16
[4] Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, P16
[5] Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, P17
Bibliography:
Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking (New York: Flatiron Books, 2019)
Image 1: Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash