Raising The Bar Quotes

“The new leader development paradigm starts with developing the leader – the hard part – first, and then the technician later, once the leader knows how to think.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“The ACM also develops the following traits: •Strength of character; •Experience and intuition through repetitive skills training; •An understanding of the value of self-study; and •Proper understanding of a command climate that promotes adaptability accepts change and encourages innovation.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“As an example, teachers at any leader-centric course should “refer to Army operations or mission as “evolutions,” a term that has biological connotations rather than mechanistic ones. This suggests that the theme of curriculums, which deal with leader development, should be “adaptation and adjustment” rather than “precise planning and detailed schedule” curriculums and training plans that “enforce” procedures.148”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“Army after action review process. Also, due to the Army’s adherence to a “zero-defects” mentality, students will often use caution when admitting to their mistakes or allowing others to criticize them. The AAR can turn into a session of “who shot who” if not properly facilitated by the teacher.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“The teacher must thoroughly understand each aspect of adaptability in order to pass it on to students, both real world applications of adaptability as well as theory. Some aspects that are associated with adaptability include: •Cognitive ability;172 • Problem-solving skills;173 and • Metacognitive skills; these comprise the ability to critically assess your own thoughts, always questioning, “Have I thought about this or that?” As well as looking from the outside in and saying, “What consequences does my decision have?”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“Potential adaptive leaders must be able to assimilate the education with their training and apply both through their personal actions. Learning is a measurement of whether the adaptive leader is ready to practice in the real environment what has been preached in the classroom.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“The learning environment also supports and understands that the ACM is where students become members of the course when they are: •Left to do as much as possible, from planning training to making and executing recommendations to improve the course; •Allowed to fail, as long as they show signs of learning, and do not repeat mistakes (those who made a mistake in the act of doing something will attempt to explain why they made their error); and •Pushed to seek answers, and to produce adaptive leaders familiar with tasks that may comprise their solutions to tactical and non-tactical problems. They understand how to employ tasks together to solve problems.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“The purpose of the ACM is creating leaders who understand and practice adaptability, while encouraging Army senior leaders to nurture this trait in their subordinates. A student that emerges from any leader-centric course that employs the ACM is adaptive and can demonstrate the ability to: •Rapidly distinguish between information that is useful in making decisions and that which is not pertinent; • Avoid the natural temptation to delay their decisions until more information makes the situation clearer, at the risk of losing the initiative; • Avoid the pitfall of thinking that once the mission is underway, more information will clarify the tactical picture; and • Feel the battlefield tempo, discern patterns among the chaos, and make critically important decisions in seconds.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“Discussed in this chapter are the major elements of how to develop adaptive leaders for the future. They include: (1) the adaptive course model (ACM); (2) the ACM Program of Instruction (POI); (3) the establishment of teachers of adaptability (TA), through a certification process and implementation of tools they can employ to develop adaptability; and (4) the Leader Evaluation System, or LES. Taken together, they form the beginning of the new leader education revolution.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“In contradiction to established beliefs, a new model of leader education would depart from current conditions where 1) students often know everything about the course before hand, and 2) there are expectations about orders, lectures, pressure for constant feedback and a preference for performance over learning.149”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“Rather than teaching decision-making and leadership in war as a stable structure, as Schmitt argues, the Army needs curriculums to deal with a type of war that “resembles a standing wave pattern of continuously fluxing matter, energy and information. War is more a dynamical process than a thing.”147 According to him, the Army needs to change the way it addresses the professional education of leaders.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“John Schmitt, a co-author of a critical Marine Corps Gazette article in 1989, described the new complexity of war this way: “War is fundamentally a far from-equilibrium, open, distributed, nonlinear dynamical system highly sensitive to initial conditions and characterized by entropy production/dissipation and complex, continuous feedback.”146 With that observation in mind, how the Army creates adaptability must also evolve as the service deals with the complexity of 4GW. Schmitt’s work with complexity theory as it applies to war can also be applied to the education and training of leaders.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“Future battlefields require a more liberally educated, mentally adaptable leadership to coexist in a culture with high standards of cohesion and discipline. An adaptive Army will require very high standards of entry training for commissioned members, to acculturate tactical knowledge in the force at a very early stage.”144 Col. Robert B. Killebrew, U.S. Army, (Ret.)”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“Why is that so? Why is it easy to say the Army is going to create “adaptive leaders” during a Power Point presentation, but so difficult to put those words into action? Understanding leadership and how to develop leaders to be adaptive, and subsequently how to nurture those traits with the right command environment and organizational culture, is very hard. It requires current leaders at all levels to have a shared vision of change, and a thorough understanding of U.S. military and civilian history as both have evolved with the nation’s experiences in war.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“Leadership” is an intangible concept that is hard to measure; leaders are often criticized but good leadership can be difficult to implement. However, if the necessary changes discussed in this study are tested, it will provide an invaluable advantage for the Army and the nation in dealing with evolving and dangerous enemies.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“1. Strategic leaders must change a counterproductive array of long-established beliefs including many laws, regulations and policies, which are based on out-of-date assumptions. 2. Military leaders must drive and sustain a military cultural evolution through effective education and training of the next generation(s) of leaders in a system that is flexible enough to evolve alongside emerging changes in, and lessons from, war, society and technology. 3. Finally, senior leaders must continue to nurture and protect these younger leaders as they go out and put to practice what they have learned, and allow them to evolve.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“Evaluation criteria should consider the following questions: 1. First and foremost, did the student make a decision? 2. If so, did the student effectively communicate it to subordinates? 3. Was the decision made in support of the commander’s intent (long-term contract), and mission (short-term contract)? 4. If not, was the student’s solution based on changing conditions that made it a viable decision, even if it violated the original mission order, but nevertheless supported the commander’s intent?”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“The heart and soul of adaptability – a theme throughout an ACM – will be the desired result, not the way the result is achieved. Teachers of adaptability should reject any attempt to control the type of action initiated during a mission because it is counter-productive. The ACM should instead concentrate on instilling in students the will to act, as they deem appropriate in their situations to attain a desired result. The LES should be a “double loop” system defined as “the knowledge of several different perspectives that forces the organization to clarify differences in assumptions across frameworks, rather than implicitly assuming a given set.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“(2) Free play, force-on-force field exercises. These can range from team-versus-team exercises using paintball guns in nothing larger than a room-clearing exercise or small wooded lot, or large platoon or company-sized exercises in the field. Free play force-on-force exercises are the most complex and usually the most resource driven aspect of the POI. Free play force-on-force exercises can be conducted by actual freethinking opponents, such as one student unit portraying U.S. forces, while the other plays the role of the insurgent forces. Or the exercise can be conducted also using opposing sides, but executed using computer simulation without leaving a building. Force-on-force, free play exercises should also occur at different levels of a leader’s development, and the exercises will lends themselves well to higher levels of student education.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“After the TDG is conducted, the TA should require the student to defend his or her course of action. No matter what the course of action, if the student thinks he or she is right, the teachers must require him or her to defend it. Teachers need to divorce themselves from their egos in order to support a student’s decision, even if that decision contradicts the solution the teacher developed before presenting the TDG to the class. The teachers must ask as they listen and guide the cadet during the briefing: is the student’s course of action sound?”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar

“TDGs are common to a wide array of specialties, nationally and internationally. Teachers should introduce students to TDGs with problems they are not familiar with, such as combat troops doing non-combat TDGs, and just the opposite for support personnel. Particular courses or units may develop different operating procedures, but it is inadvisable to argue about specific procedural points. There will be plenty of time for that during the student debrief.182 TDGs do not have to be tactical. Other types of games exist: for example, the Los Angeles, California Fire Department has developed tactical decision games. Even the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps has developed its own games to deal with different scenarios that chaplains may experience.183 Instructors of other Army leader programs have also developed very good games as tools to teach adaptability.”
― Don Vandergriff, Raising the Bar