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Clabberation
David Schmaltz is a project manager in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Collaborative planning is never a simple process, and nearly impossible to distill into a reliably repeatable process. The fact is, we often marginalize or outright exclude those who frustrate our planning with opposing views. After pushing through the plan, we get to live with the result. But communicating your command intent through “clabberation” — not a tidy plan — might just be the purpose of every project.
When U.S. forces entered Afghanistan in 2001, air support for ground troops still relied upon a tidy, mature planning process that had changed little since the Allied air war over Germany in the 1940s. Producing an Aircraft Tasking Order (ATO) required 72 hours, yet sometimes produced a plan with a useful life of no more than a few minutes.
As described in Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, a recent report from the Department of Defense’s Inspector General in Iraq, the military still struggles with melding their demonstrated ability to plan well in advance of engagements with the absolute necessity for rapidly adapting to changing conditions.
Military engagement increasingly demands what I term clabberation, defined as frustrating but necessary collaboration. Counter-insurgency warfare, for instance, demands the primary involvement of a broad community of non-military personnel far out-numbering the troops: …
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