CASE 12.1 THE U.S. ARMY As I used to tell my kids, “You don't have to make every mistake personally. I've made plenty of them, and if you just let me tell you what they were and how you can avoid them, there's still plenty of mistakes for you to make.” Col. Orin A. Nagel, former director of Center for Army Lessons Learned The first systematic application of management principles in the United States was not by, say, General Motors, but by the U.S. Army. From 1899 to 1904, Secretary of War Elihu Root made drastic reforms in the army's organization and efficiency, established the Army War College, and introduced the principle of the general staff (a group of officers that assist a commander by performing detailed duties of administration, planning, supply, and coordination). The U. S. Army has also been on the cutting edge of information technology ever since 1946, when it unveiled the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the world's first operational, general-purpose computer. Today few institutions, if any, better exemplify the learning organization ideal than the U.S. Army; it is a premier example of a learning organization—in which everyone engages in problem solving.1 This case examines four important ways in which the U.S. Army manages its information in the twenty-first century. After-Action Reports (AARs) Probably the best-known example of leveraging knowledge within a team is the army's use of After-Action Reports (AARs). These reviews had their beginnings in training simulations as a way for a team to engage in a mock battle to gain as much learning as possible from the training. An army brigade of three thousand or so travels to the National Training Center (NTC) in California, where it engages in simulated combat with crack units based at the center. AARs proved so useful to team effectiveness that gradually they began to be used in nontraining situations as well. Today they have spread throughout the army, not because someone at the top has required their use but because the troops find them helpful in getting the job done. Thrust into a new kind of operation in postwar Iraq—certainly not the conventional combat for which they had been well trained—junior officers (lieutenants and captains) illustrate how AARs and the sharing of knowledge can improve a unit's next action. Six features of AARs are worth noting. First, although they are called After-Action Reports, they are actually cyclical—part of a cycle that starts before and continues throughout each campaign or simulation. The AAR regimen includes brief huddles, extended planning and review sessions, copious note taking by everyone, and the explicit linking of lessons to future actions. The AAR cycle for each phase of the campaign or simulation begins when the senior commander drafts “operational orders.” This document consists of four parts: the task (what actions subordinate units must take); the purpose (why the task is important); the commander's intent (wh ...

1. CASE 12.1 THE U.S. ARMY As I used to tell my kids, “You
don't have to make every mistake personally. I've made plenty
of them, and if you just let me tell you what they were and how
you can avoid them, there's still plenty of mistakes for you to
make.” Col. Orin A. Nagel, former director of Center for Army
Lessons Learned The first systematic application of
management principles in the United States was not by, say,
General Motors, but by the U.S. Army. From 1899 to 1904,
Secretary of War Elihu Root made drastic reforms in the army's
organization and efficiency, established the Army War College,
and introduced the principle of the general staff (a group of
officers that assist a commander by performing detailed duties
of administration, planning, supply, and coordination). The U.
S. Army has also been on the cutting edge of information
technology ever since 1946, when it unveiled the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the world's first
operational, general-purpose computer. Today few institutions,
if any, better exemplify the learning organization ideal than the
U.S. Army; it is a premier example of a learning organization—
in which everyone engages in problem solving.1 This case
examines four important ways in which the U.S. Army manages
its information in the twenty-first century. After-Action Reports
(AARs) Probably the best-known example of leveraging
knowledge within a team is the army's use of After-Action
Reports (AARs). These reviews had their beginnings in training
simulations as a way for a team to engage in a mock battle to
gain as much learning as possible from the training. An army
brigade of three thousand or so travels to the National Training
Center (NTC) in California, where it engages in simulated
combat with crack units based at the center. AARs proved so
useful to team effectiveness that gradually they began to be
used in nontraining situations as well. Today they have spread
throughout the army, not because someone at the top has
required their use but because the troops find them helpful in

2. getting the job done. Thrust into a new kind of operation in
postwar Iraq—certainly not the conventional combat for which
they had been well trained—junior officers (lieutenants and
captains) illustrate how AARs and the sharing of knowledge can
improve a unit's next action. Six features of AARs are worth
noting. First, although they are called After-Action Reports,
they are actually cyclical—part of a cycle that starts before and
continues throughout each campaign or simulation. The AAR
regimen includes brief huddles, extended planning and review
sessions, copious note taking by everyone, and the explicit
linking of lessons to future actions. The AAR cycle for each
phase of the campaign or simulation begins when the senior
commander drafts “operational orders.” This document consists
of four parts: the task (what actions subordinate units must
take); the purpose (why the task is important); the commander's
intent (what the senior leader is thinking, explained so that
subordinates can pursue his goals even if events don't unfold as
expected); and the end state (what the desired result is). The
commander shares these orders with his subordinate
commanders and then asks each for a “brief back”—a verbal
description of the unit's understanding of its mission (to ensure
everyone is on the same page) and its role. The second feature
is that AARs are experimental. As a result of the disciplined
preparation described above, the action that follows becomes a
learning experiment. The leaders have individually and
collectively made predictions about what will occur, identified
challenges that may arise, and built into their plans ways to
address those challenges. So when units act, they will not only
be executing a plan but also observing and testing that plan.
Third, AARs are unemotional and egalitarian. Colonels say
where lieutenants made mistakes— and vice versa. Fourth, they
are focused. At the end of an AAR meeting, the senior
commander identifies the two or three lessons he expects will
prove most relevant to the next battle or simulation. If the units
focus on more than a few lessons at a time, they risk becoming
overwhelmed. If they focus on lessons unlikely to be applied

3. until far in the future, soldiers might forget. Fifth, they are
multilayered. Immediately after the senior commander has
identified the lessons and the meeting ends, subordinate
commanders gather their units to conduct their own AARs.
Sixth, AARs are iterative. Those who are experienced with them
know most lessons that surfaced during the first go-round are
incomplete or plain wrong, representing what the unit thinks
should work and not what really does work. They understand
that it takes several iterations to produce dynamic solutions that
will stand up under any conditions. The Center for Army
Lessons Learned (CALL) A second example of the army's
management information system is a center, based at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, founded in 1985. Its initial role was to
capture lessons from NTC. Later, as the army's mission
broadened to include “operations other than war”—interventions
in Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti, plus fire fighting, flood control,
and other forms of disaster relief at home—CALL was charged
with learning from those experiences as well. The model on
which CALL is based involves essentially three steps. The first
step is for senior leaders of the army to determine what
knowledge will be needed for the future and where gaps exist in
current knowledge. That is where CALL focuses. The second
step is observing and collecting knowledge. CALL observation
teams are among the first troops on the ground in any army
operation. They collect on-the-spot information about new
practices, new techniques, problems, and trouble spots;
distinguish approaches that work from those that do not; and
share their findings with others. The objective here is to avoid
the tragedy of having a soldier in one battalion make the same
mistake (perhaps fatal) tomorrow that was made in a different
battalion today. Who are these observers that CALL sends
forth? They are subject-matter experts, on loan from other parts
of the army, including people with expertise in logistics,
communications, linguistics, engineering, and supply. They are
given training in how to be effective collectors of knowledge
data. They gather multiple perspectives on each event,

4. watching, interviewing, and taking digital photographs and
video. They follow decisions that have been made to their
outcomes and backward to discover the reasoning and logic that
led to each decision. In so doing, they tease out tacit as well as
explicit knowledge.2 This information is then sent back to
CALL, where it is analyzed by yet another group of experts who
are responsible for synthesizing a large amount of disparate data
from the multiple observers and then constructing new and
useful knowledge out of it. Their preliminary interpretations are
put on the Internet for comment by other professionals. The
third step is creating knowledge products. Between 2002 and
2005, call catalogued 6,200 battlefield and training ground
observations and produced 400 reports on them. Nancy M.
Dixon writes: By the time the second wave of troops was sent
into Haiti six months later, CALL had developed twenty-six
scenarios of situations faced by the initial troops. These
scenarios became a major training tool for their replacements.
The scenarios included footage of actual events so that arriving
troops were to some extent on familiar ground. Empowering
Soldiers to Contribute Wiki-style The third example of army
knowledge management is only a three-month pilot program but
has interesting implications for many government agencies. In
July 2009, the army began encouraging its personnel—from
privates to generals—to go online and collectively rewrite seven
of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of army
life. The program uses the same software behind the online
encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds
of army guides being “Wikified.” The goal is to tap more
experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than
relying on the specialists within the army's array of colleges and
research centers who have traditionally written manuals. Not
surprisingly, top-down, centralized institutions have resisted
such tools, fearing the loss of control that comes with
empowering anyone among the chain of command to contribute.
Yet the army seems willing to accept some loss of control.
Under the experiment, the current version of each guide can be

5. edited by anyone around the world who has been issued the ID
card that allows access to the army Internet system. As is true
with Wikipedia, those changes will appear immediately on the
site, though there is a team assigned to each manual to review
new edits. Unlike Wikipedia, however, there will be no
anonymous contributors. Advancing Knowledge About How to
Lead a Company3 Young captains who are company
commanders lead between 70 to 200 soldiers in complex, often
dangerous, ever-changing environments. In spring 2000, a team
of officers developed and launched
w-w-w-.-C-o-m-p-a-n-y-C-o-m-m-a-n-d-.-c-o-m- (CC) as a
means of connecting past, present, and future company
commanders in an ongoing conversation about leading soldiers
and building combat-ready units. The mission of the leaders of
CC was to provide cutting-edge, world-class resources for their
colleagues. Use of the Web site spread rapidly. In 2002, the CC
team “gifted” the Web site to the army. As a result, the Web site
was placed on military servers at West Point and given the
“army.mil” URL, but mission and team leaders remained the
same. CC builds on the basic principle that connections,
conversations, and content can work in a mutually reinforcing
manner to enable members of the professional forum to advance
knowledge about commanding a company. More specifically:
Connecting company commanders to each of other gives them
access to the knowledge of the profession. Having a connection
means more than just having contact information-it means being
aware of what the other person knows. A professional
community that is highly connected knows who knows what.
Connections make conversations possible. It is through the
back-and-forth of conversation that context and trust are
established and that knowledge is both shared and created.
Conversely, conversations can create connections that lead to
relationships and learning. Content grows out of conversations.
Content can be both the topic of conversations and an end
product. For example, if five company commanders who have
experience with convoy operations have a conversation, the

6. result is valuable content that is useful to many others. To be
useful, content must be current, rich in context, and relevant to
the immediate needs of company commanders. Relationships,
trust, and a sense of professional community are critical factors
that set the conditions for effective connections and
conversations. Moreover, each positive interaction is a
reinforcing process that creates stronger relationships, more
trust, and a greater sense of professional community. Here's an
example of how relationships can lead to content that sparks
valuable conversation. The Company Command leaders used
their relationships with commanders who had served in
Afghanistan to develop a booking providing valuable company-
level content for company commanders going to Afghanistan for
the first time. Then, they set up face-to-face conversations
among past and future Afghan commanders, and those
conversations were informed by the content of the book. In the
course of these conversations, new relationships formed and
people developed the trust necessary to bring up knowledge that
could sound stupid, like, “Hey, have you ordered mousetraps?
The tents in Afghanistan attract rats, and rats attract snakes, and
you don't want snakes in your tent, so you need lots of
mousetraps to keep the rats away.” Who would've thought that
soliders in Afghanistan need mousetraps? Not the commanders
who had not yet been there. That important piece of knowledge
emerged only from the interplay of relationships, trust, content,
conversation, and context. Case Questions 1. What could other
government agencies and nonprofit organizations learn from the
army? What could individual managers learn from the After-
Action Review process? 2. Although some organizations have
employed AARs quite effectively, most struggle to capture the
true value of such lessons-learned exercises. Why do many AAR
processes fail? 3. What concepts or ideas presented in the
chapter could the army use? Explain how. 4. What concepts or
ideas presented in this case could other government
organizations use? Be specific. What kind of federal agencies
might benefit most from being “Wikified”? 5. According to

7. some experts, the most successful knowledge management
projects are not launched with a top-down, big-splash approach
but rather developed bottom up. Why do you think the latter
tend to be more successful? 6. Discuss the following statement
by Kent Greenes, an adviser to the Company Command project:
Relationships also facilitate the most powerful kind of
knowledge transfer, that which passes directly from one
person's brain into another's, in a conversation where contacts
can be communicated through the back-and-forth exchange.
Knowledge that is codified into content—written down or put
on media—before it is shared is transferred less effectively.
Granted, if people have contexts and experiences very similar to
those of the contributor of a piece of content, they may be able
to use the content as is, but more commonly they can make use
of only some of it. The unfortunate fact is, as soon as you
codify content, it loses some of its meaning. Therefore,
conversation is the most powerful way to transfer knowledge.
Case References Noam Cohen, “Care to Write Army Doctrine?,”
New York Times (August 14, 2009); Marilyn Darling et al.,
“Learning in the Thick of It,” Harvard Business Review (July–
August 2005); 84–92; “Special Report American Military
Tactics,” Economist (December 17, 2005): 22–24; Nancy Dixon,
Common Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard Business School
Press, 2000): 106–8; Nancy M. Dixon et al.,
CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army
Professional (West Point, New York: Center for the
Advancement of leader Development and Organizational
Learning, 2005); David A. Garvin, Learning in Action
(Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1999): 83–90;
Greg Jaffe, “On Ground in Iraq, Captain Ayers Writes His Own
Playbook,” Wall Street Journal (September 22, 2004); Interview
with Lieutenant General Stephen W. Boutelle, Military
Information Technology (July 2004); Lee Smith, “New Ideas
from the Army,” Fortune (September 19, 1994).