An anonymous reader a Goodreads wants us to enjoy quotations.  Like this.

quotable quote

“You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.”
— Mae West

Great edgy line, isn’t it? And I almost compelled to “like” the quote except that Mae West didn’t say it.  Dorothy Parker’s got dibs on it.

Mae West was arguably the first great InSincere Blonde and I’ll bet she kicked herself for not thinking of this line if she heard the quotable Mrs. Parker. (“Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”)

Mrs. Parker distinguished herself as a great New York City writer in the 1920s and 30s with the Algonquin Round Table luminaries of the time including Robert Benchley, George Kaufman, Alexander Woolcott, and occasionally Harpo Marx and Tallulah Bankhead.

I can understand the anonymous poster’s great confusion – Mae West should have said this to further inflame her reputation – but it was a Smart Girl who thought of it.  Not the Blonde.

If you haven’t yet, please read TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-0, The Army Capstone Concept (through Small Wars Journal here).  If you are a civilian with an interest in persuasion, consider it as a learning opportunity to understand how the world’s largest and most powerful organization thinks and plans.  If you are military, you need to read the pamphlet for both what it contains and what it seeks.  In this post, I want to work from a close analysis of General Martin Dempsey’s Foreword to the Pamphlet.

Ideas matter.  Emerging from specific human, historical, and technological contexts, ideas affect understanding and influence behavior.  Ideas can serve as the driving force behind significant institutional change.  Because the need for change will always be with us, the exchange of ideas and conceptual development must be among our top priorities.

This paragraph argues that if you can change ideas, you can change people in directions you desire.  But, how do you change behavior?  Persuasion uses communication to change how freely choosing people think, feel, and act.

The purpose of TRADOC Pam 525-3-0, The Army Capstone Concept Operational Adaptability—Operating Under Conditions of Uncertainty and Complexity in an Era of Persistent Conflict, is to describe the broad capabilities the Army will require in 2016-2028. It provides a guide to how the Army will apply available resources to overcome adaptive enemies and accomplish challenging missions. TRADOC Pam 525-3-0 articulates how to think about future armed conflict within an uncertain and complex environment. It provides a foundation for a campaign of learning and analysis that will evaluate and refine the concept’s major ideas and required capabilities. Ultimately, prioritized capabilities that emerge from this concept and subordinate, more detailed concepts will guide changes in doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leader development and programs related to the human dimension for our Army.

As part of the “Campaign of Learning and Analysis” I’d like to suggest the principles, concepts, and skills of persuasion as an organized, coherent, and tested body of knowledge.  Persuasion is not a brand name, but rather an extremely old and well studied area of inquiry.  It explains and reveals human nature whether that human nature operates in a marketplace or a theater.

The aim of Army operations is to set conditions that achieve or facilitate the achievement of policy goals and objectives. Future enemies will constantly adapt and seek ways to overcome Army strengths and capitalize on what they perceive as our vulnerabilities. We operate where our enemies, indigenous populations, culture, politics, and religion intersect and where the fog and friction of war persists. The U.S. Army must maintain its core competency of conducting effective combined arms operations in close combat to employ defeat and stability mechanisms against a variety of threats. The U.S. Army must also hone its ability to integrate joint and interagency assets, develop the situation through action, and adjust rapidly to changing situations to achieve what this concept defines as operational adaptability.

“Under Conditions of Uncertainty and Complexity” is the key idea of this paragraph.  While war always involves uncertainty and complexity, we are clearly transitioning from more familiar forms of war (World War I and II) into something less familiar.  Stated another way, uncertainty and complexity in war is even more uncertain and complex in this transition as we discover what the rest of the world is going to do in relation to the overwhelming US power.  Persuasion is the prime form of human thought and action under conditions of uncertainty and complexity.  If you are certain, you don’t persuade; you inform or you power.  If you have simplicity, you don’t persuade; you unload on schedule.  Persuasion is how you make your way through the fog and friction “Under Conditions of Uncertainty and Complexity.”  You use persuasion principles to plan, to generate support, and to coordinate partners, resources, and action.  You use persuasion to test, manipulate, and shape uncertainty and complexity to make the problem before you less uncertain and more simple.

Operational adaptability requires a mindset based on flexibility of thought calling for leaders at all levels who are comfortable with collaborative planning and decentralized execution, have a tolerance for ambiguity, and possess the ability and willingness to make rapid adjustments according to the situation. Operational adaptability is essential to developing situational understanding and seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative under a broad range of conditions. Operational adaptability is also critical to developing the coercive and persuasive skills the Army will need to assist friends, reassure and protect populations, and to identify, isolate, and defeat enemies.

The essence of “Operational Adaptability and Flexibility” is expressed in three persuasion Rules:  It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid; All Persuasion Is Local; and All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.  If you live with uncertainty and complexity AND you have to solve problems with and through other people, you can learn how to adapt and flex through persuasion principles and skills.  Indeed, the essence of effective practical persuasion is Adaptation and Flexibility in the face of Uncertainty and Complexity.  Stated another way, if you can persuade, you are adaptable and flexible.

Although the Army must continue to develop technology to meet future challenges, we must emphasize the integration of technology into capable formations commanded by innovative leaders who are comfortable operating under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty. To maximize the potential of technological developments, we must conscientiously evolve and adapt capabilities based on changes in threat capabilities and the operational environment.

We now add the challenges of Technology to our previous issues of Uncertainty and Complexity.  Does persuasion have anything to offer here?  Persuasion shows you how to master and innovate with technology within existing and proven persuasion principles and skills.  Realize that no one any longer talks about Marshall McLuhan and the Medium Is the Message, as if a new technological device is a new form of human nature.  New technologies bundle old elements of human nature into different combinations, but the new technologies do not change those elements of human nature.  Technology is beautiful when you understand that is a new way of combining old things.

We must be prepared to decentralize operations to adapt to complex and rapidly changing situations. Yet, organizational or physical decentralization alone may be insufficient to meet the challenges of the future. Leaders throughout our future force must have both the authority as well as the judgment to make decisions and develop the situation through action. Critical thinking by Soldiers and their leaders will be essential to achieve the trust and wisdom implicit in such authority. The training and education of our entire force must aim to develop the mindset and requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities required to operate effectively under conditions of uncertainty and complexity.

This paragraph implies that we are each that advertised Army of One.  One person in one moment doing the one thing can be decisive.  What training helps make the Army of One we seek?  Persuasion.

To achieve clarity in thinking about future armed conflict, it is critical that our Army evaluate and discuss the implications of the ideas presented in this concept. Our language must be clear and our logic must be precise. While TRADOC Pam 525-3-0 lays the conceptual foundation for Army modernization, it is only a beginning of an ongoing campaign of learning.

Much of TRADOC Pam 525-3-0 will strike experienced readers as old wine in new skins or perhaps as a discernible new adaptation in the evolution of the Army.  Where do you direct your personal campaign of learning about Uncertainty, Complexity, Technology, the “Army of One,” and the rest?  Please consider persuasion.

Finally, recall this post’s title:  Capstones without Persuasion are like Good Strategy with Bad Tactics.  Persuasion is not a Magic Bullet, never has been, and never will be.  It is a specific set of ideas and practices aimed at one important element of human nature:  People can change solely through planned words.  Persuasion understands why and how people change through communication, but is deaf, dumb, and mute when it comes to determining what should be changed.  Persuasion is a tool of strategy, but it is not a strategy in itself.  Do not read this post as Snake Oil from a civilian in a blue suit.  Although, I’ve got a book for sale and I do train for hire . . . but so do a lot of other persuasion folks.

Most science today produces small effects.  In health and safety it shows up in those small risk ratios optimistically stated in values like 1.34 expressed as 134% greater risk which sounds pretty serious if you don’t understand the scale.  And then the researchers use helpful words like “elevated risk” to explain those numbers to those of us who need more than fingers and toes to count.  Hey, now, if I’m at a 134% greater risk of some dread outcome, aren’t we being modest to call that “elevated?”  An abstract in a recent issue of Journal Watch demonstrates the crazy disconnect between numbers and words in scientific geekspeak.

The writer is giving a 250 word summary of a longer research report that looks at Adult Survivors of Childhood Cancer.  While the study itself employs that weak observation method of retrospective cohort analysis (essentially a database study that looks back in time to predict future events), the size of the study plus another feature we’ll get to shortly, make the results helpful.  Researchers looked back at kids around age 6 who had cancer and survived into adulthood then asked what kinds of health problems these people experienced with a particular emphasis not on cancer, but rather heart problems (like congestive heart failure or myocardial infarction).  They were compared to a control group of siblings of childhood cancer victims.

Not too surprisingly kids who survived cancer had a lot of heart problems as adults.  But the numbers were really large compared to what you usually see in health research (those 1.34 RR expressed as 134% increase).  For kids who survived cancers, their likelihood of experiencing congestive heart failure was 590% higher; for myocardial infarction it was 500% higher; pericardial disease, 630% higher.  You don’t need a degree in math to realize that these are huge differences, a 5 to 6 times greater likelihood of a problem occurring, compared to the much more frequently observed and reported outcome of 134% which really just means a 34% higher risk.

Now, the interesting part.  We’ve got a relative risk of 500% to 600% higher for adult heart disease among survivors of childhood cancer.  What kind of word would you use to describe this effect size?  Here’s how the Journal Watch writer described it.

” . . . an elevated risk for heart disease . . . ”

I’d have to nominate that for understatement of the year.  “Elevated” for something that is 500% more likely in one group than another?  This is typically the kind of verbal label researchers supply for the outcomes of calorie counts on menus and demonstrates little awareness of the difference between the frequently found epidemiological result of “34% increase and this remarkable effect size.

Peggy Noonan at WSJ provides a nice illustration of the Rule, It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid, in her analysis of the current state of persuasion for Mr. Obama.  Here’s her key observation.

Washington’s pundits have begun announcing that the White House is better at campaigning than at governing, but that was obvious last summer. The president and his advisers understand one thing really well, and that is Democratic primaries and Democratic politics. This is the area in which they made their careers. It’s how they defeated Hillary Clinton—by knowing how Democrats think. In the 2008 general election, appealing for the first time to all of America and not only to Democrats, they had one great gift on their side, the man who both made Mr. Obama and did in John McCain, and that was George W. Bush.

Whether you are Left or Right, Ambidextrous or sitting This One Out, it is apparent that things have slipped for Mr. Obama, especially since last summer.  Riding the wave of change we can believe in, he’s having trouble making anything happen persuasively while also owning a lot of power.  Power Corrupts Persuasion and You Can Get Farther with a Kind Word and a Gun than with Either Alone, yet here we have the odd case where Power and Persuasion don’t do anything.

Noonan’s observation cuts to the root of this odd outcome.  If you don’t focus on the Other Guy, nothing else – Power, Persuasion, Power and Persuasion – matters.

With the recent passing of J.D. Salinger, the Literary Lice are moving as this NYT story demonstrates with an analysis of several unpublished personal letters from Salinger to an old friend, who has also passed away.  The old friend had surreptitiously sold the letters to a third party who gave them to a repository.  And, now that Salinger is well buried, it is safer for that repository to make public the letters since it is unlikely that Mr. Salinger will rise to defend his privacy.  The letters disclose two powerful quotes from Salinger, one that simply resounds within me, the second that provides insight into one of my Rules.

. . . he can’t recall ever answering the telephone “without unconsciously gritting my teeth.”

I suspect that many of us have felt this way.  For me a ringing telephone tends to pull the trigger on my Reactance revolver – an unfair restriction on my autonomy as I’m reading, writing, or just thinking where my mind will go.  Only when it is from someone I care about, like various trade school graduates of my acquaintance, does the Reactance reverse.

But, that’s me.

The second quote is more to our purposes.

“Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid,” the author wrote back . . .

Recall my Rule:  All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Nothing about Salinger was Bad Persuasion and it was because he did not write sincerely, but rather artistically.  And Salinger’s observation of “left unsaid” does not mean unexpressed.  Properly revealed, the people you want to know will understand your sincerity.  But as Salinger, Oscar Wilde, and my modifications advise, never reveal your sincerity when striving for Art or for Persuasion.