military Archives - understand-culture

Crew Resource Management

After the 1977 Tenerife collision, in which a captain began his takeoff roll despite warnings from his first officer and flight engineer, NASA psychologist John Lauber coined the term at a 1979 workshop. United Airlines ran the first airline programme in 1981, and the FAA later made it mandatory.

CRM keeps the command hierarchy and changes what may cross it. Junior crew are trained to question the captain, and — in the phrase used in the training — to advocate for critical information until it is acted upon.

An American industry concluded that its aircraft were failing because information was not moving, and rebuilt its training around the flow rather than around the flying.

SBAR

Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation. A four-part script for handing a patient from one American clinician to another, taught in nursing schools and used in hospitals nationwide. Borrowed from the US Navy, where it standardized reporting to a commanding officer, and adopted in medicine because unstructured handoffs were losing information at every shift change.

The situation report

American military practice produces the SITREP on a schedule — what has changed, what is known, what is expected — and pushes it up and sideways whether or not anything has happened. The report goes out on time even when the content is that nothing occurred, because a gap in the stream is itself information.

Radio silence

Borrowed from military communications and used in American offices about a colleague who has stopped responding. It is a complaint, and it names the absence itself as the problem. Nothing is alleged about why they went quiet.

Need to know

The phrase exists in American English and comes from military and intelligence practice, where it is a legitimate principle. Used anywhere else, it is an accusation. Describing a colleague as operating on a need-to-know basis is a criticism of that person, and they will hear it as one.

The Center for Army Lessons Learned

The US Army maintains a permanent organization at Fort Leavenworth whose function is to collect what units learned in operations and push it back out to units who have not yet deployed. The Army also runs the after-action review as standard practice after any significant event.

The counter-example is instructive. Where the cost of forgetting is measured in lives, the American institution builds the archive deliberately — which suggests the corporate habit is a choice rather than an incapacity.

The OODA loop

John Boyd, a US Air Force colonel, built a model of decision-making out of his experience of air combat: observe, orient, decide, act, then repeat. His central claim was about speed — that cycling through the loop faster than your opponent is what wins, because it leaves them reacting to a situation that has already changed. As a Weapons School instructor he was nicknamed Forty Second Boyd, for his standing bet that starting from a position of tactical disadvantage he could defeat any student pilot within forty seconds.

The model spread from the Air Force into American business and sports coaching. It is a formal argument that acting quickly beats acting correctly.

Disciplined initiative

US Army doctrine, ADP 6-0, defines it as action in the absence of orders, when existing orders no longer fit the situation, or when unforeseen opportunities or threats arise. Mission orders are defined as directives that emphasize to subordinates the results to be attained, not how they are to achieve them.

The Army writes into doctrine a duty to act when nobody has told you to.

The two-minute drill

American football has a distinct mode for the closing minutes: no huddle, plays called at the line, clock managed to the second. Teams practise it as a separate discipline — a whole rehearsed system for what to do when there is no time to deliberate.

The 80 percent solution

American military and business usage: a good plan executed now beats a perfect plan executed later. The claim is not that 80 percent is acceptable, but that the remaining 20 percent costs more in delay than it returns in quality.