**Strategic Leadership and the Narrow Mind:\
What We Don't Do Well and Why**

**Col Fernando Giancotti**

Strategic thinking is the heart and soul of strategic lead­ership. And
strategic leadership is, by definition, an extremely valuable, decisive
asset since it orients organiza­tions toward their goals, influences the
actions and lives of many people, and ultimately determines what is
achieved. In military matters, strategic leadership usually equates to
suc­cess or failure, to victory or defeat. Unfortunately, strategic
thinking and leadership often appear to be in short supply in a world
where large organizations grow, multiply, and oper­ate in a complex
environment for very high stakes.

This paper will examine why strategic leadership is such an elusive
skill and will offer some ideas to pursue it. First, we will examine
some biological and cultural limitations affecting our ability to think
and lead in a strategic environ­ment. We will then explore possible ways
to reduce the impact of these limitations on strategic thinking and
leader‑

ship.

**The Birth of the Narrow Mind**

We are often too busy celebrating how smart we are and what amazing
things our intelligence has produced to focus on the limitations of our
minds. However, the challenges and problems that the world we have built
poses for us are such that we need to understand ourselves and our
shortfalls to be able to cope. A review of the origin of our minds is
especially useful for this purpose. To see roughly how human
intelli­gence was shaped, we must focus on the world of early man.^1^
Compared to today's standards, we can say that it was a sim­ple world.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors dealt with a limited time horizon,
characterized mainly by the influence of hunting seasons on their
nomadic movements. They had simple but intense social interaction since
they lived primarily in small groups of 20--30 individuals, with rare
but regular interaction with an extended tribe of up to 500 individuals.
They were exposed to a limited number of contacts, mainly with familiar
people. Small-group dynamics were embedded in their behav­iors, since
group life meant survival. Man had a simple econ­omy, focused on two main
activities, hunting and gathering, supported by the manufacture of
essential tools and, for the

> Col Fernando Giancotti is a graduate of the Italian Air Force Academy,
> the Italian War College, Officer Training School, and the USAF Air War
> College. He is currently a wing commander in the Italian Air Force.

latest species, Homo sapiens, a few ornaments. People were very active
physically. Gathering, tool making, and roaming were mingled with
periods of intense, high-adrenaline, rewarding physical and intellectual
team-hunting activities. They lived in constant contact with the natural
environment.

Exposure to illnesses, accidents, and the environment resulted in a very
short average life and a rapid aging process, and occasionally much
suffering. We can say that our fore-bears, those who survived the many
challenges, led a hard but simple life in the very environment that
molded them. They were exposed to a limited number of interactions and
processed limited information, mainly available in familiar patterns and
in a limited time frame. When they couldn't explain something, they
would turn to deities, which seems very much the case today. Why should
we care about these "ancestral roots" so distant both in time and to our
lifestyle? First of all, because they are not distant at all. In terms
of evo­lution, they are in fact quite recent. Once a hunting-gathering
lifestyle was acquired, humankind maintained it for well over 99 percent
of its further evolutionary history---about two mil-lion years. The gene
pool selected through those thousands of generations has necessarily
been carried on until today since the "explosion" of human culture has
been extremely brief in relation to evolutionary times. Surviving
hunting peoples, left by isolation in Paleolithic stages of cultural
development, have an intellectual potential and gene pool identical to
ours.^2^ A few thousand years, from the Neolithic transition to
agri­culture to the information revolution, couldn't undo what had been
established in thousands of millennia.^3^ We still acquire knowledge
through simple patterns. We break complex prob­lems into simple parts
that can be handled in our very limited short-term memory in order to
understand them through rea­soning (analysis).^4^ Then, we relate the
elements to establish their relationships and understand them as a whole
(synthe­sis) and, possibly, figure out the best way to intervene in the
process to influence the outcome.^5^ We can cope, slowly, with a limited
number of variables, preferably with one at a time. It's hard for us to
envisage indirect consequences, especially beyond the second order.
There is an overwhelming trend to see the world from our personal point
of view. Our judgment is heavily influenced and sometimes totally
overridden by our emotions,^6^ making effective understanding even more
diffi­cult---at times impossible. Evolution has not tailored our brain to
highly complex systems. It has given us basically a sometimes sharp,
narrowly focusing instrument----a limited "wet computer" extremely
dependent on hormonal levels.

This article was prepared especially for AU-24, *Concepts for Air Force
Leadership.*

While our "hardware" may have not changed much, everything else has. We
live in an environment that has increased in complexity many times over
a very short period of time. The industrial revolution and the
subsequent tech­nology explosion have brought about a larger change in
human lifestyle than any that occurred in the 100 previous generations.
The postindustrial information age seems to be fostering an even more
rapidly changing world. And all this makes humans interact with an
environment we are not engi­neered for: one of ever increasing
complexity.^7^

The industrial culture's answer to this complexity was to simplify
through specialization and through compartmental­izing knowledge.
Impressive advances were achieved by the simple focusing power that
specialization implies. But too often this approach led to a fascination
that kept us from see­ing the forest for the trees. We missed many of the
unin­tended consequences and failed to think through solutions for the
problems we were creating.

Thus, technological advance in specific fields has meant devastating
environmental impact elsewhere. Taylor's "sci­entific management" of work
meant widespread alienation. Organizational "rationalizations" resulted
in huge central­ized structures, where individuals felt little
responsibility or sense of belonging. And value systems, the very glue
of soci­ety, seem to be in a permanently unstable balance, as dif­fused
phenomena such as drugs, crime, violence, and the breakdown of the
family too often remind us.

Modern culture has produced complexity. The sheer vol­ume of information
available today is mind numbing. The number of interactions that any
actor, be it a nation-state, a commercial enterprise, a commander, or a
single individual, deals with today is far greater than only a few
decades ago and vastly incommensurate with previous centuries. The
global economy, the telecommunications network, the media, huge
bureaucracies, fast and affordable transportation, the political
dialectic, technology in all fields and especially information
technology, as well as the sheer number of people we interact with, make
life far more complex today than ever before.

Any culture, the understanding of the world that any social body shares
among its members, grows upon the basis of the biological heritage we
discussed. In fact, culture reflects basic human characteristics. Each
culture tends to be self-centered and heavily influenced by collective
emotions. Prejudice is extremely common, and the average level of
analysis (the so-called layman or man-of-the-street under-standing)
typically scores fairly low. Most of the time, the focus is on
particular issues, more than on the "big picture." Our culture,
notwithstanding its impressive technological and scientific
achievements, seems to match its evolutionary matrix toward a default
narrow-mindedness. Unfortunately, strategic thinking and strategic
leadership are not produced in narrow minds. So, what should we do?

**Broadening Trends**

The need to broaden thinking abilities, especially for leadership, is
certainly not a new one. Many institutions and publications concerned
with strategic leadership, especially educational ones, address this
issue. Still, unresolved gaps and contradictions appear in many of the
"strategies" to promote strategic thinking. I will discuss some of these
problems to identify areas where leadership development can be improved.

**"Know Thyself"**

The very first gap is the lack of explicit awareness about "the birth of
the narrow mind" and of its limitations. Not clearly knowing the limits
of the "most powerful factor in the war-fighting equation: the human
mind"^8^ can lead to large miscalculations at the strategic level.
Leadership is basically an "influence relationship with people." ^9^
Knowing yourself and your fellow humans is a skill fundamental to it.
How can it be done? Certainly not by transforming a professional
mili­tary education (PME) system into a social-science academia. However,
between that and almost complete neglect, reason-able options do exist.
It is possible to synthesize the contribu­tion that human sciences, like
psychology, sociology, anthro­pology, and others, bring to leadership
education. These fundamentals of leadership would serve as an enabling
frame of reference for the traditional curriculum, before the posited
lists of precepts or the case studies usually found. New curric­ula can
be designed to effectively contribute to this under-standing. And
understanding the role of our biological and cultural heritage with
regard to small-group dynamics, to ethics, to thinking abilities, and
how all this takes place in our huge organizations, is critical.
Educating leaders to be highly introspective, to be able to detect the
influence of their own emotions on their thinking, and to manage them,
though diffi­cult, is possible and is precious to the clarity of
strategic think­ing. It is also a powerful way to get to know our people
since we share the general architecture of our inner world.

**Historia Magistra Vitae (History Is Life's Teacher)**

Another problem frequently found in the teaching of strategic leadership
is an insufficient emphasis on assuring an understanding of the major
underpinnings of history. The dialectic and contradictory nature of
reality, the adversarial nature of processes, and the relativity of
value systems are some of the breakthroughs of Western philosophical
thought that cannot be ignored by strategic leaders. Again, strategic
leaders don't need to be philosophy majors; however, we must ensure we
don't develop leaders with a "black or white," narrowly moralistic
vision of the world, or with the inability to comprehend the role actors
play in complex processes, beyond personal biases.

**Leadership and Ethics**

Ethics already has special attention in our leadership-development
curricula. However, operating in complex environments where events and
people usually interact in less than a clear-cut manner and where values
appear to be relative increases the risk for ethical uncertainty.
Stepping up to a more comprehensive, less fragile ethic than the "good
or bad" one is necessary to induce ethical, and not cynical, answers to
the ambiguity and contradictions of our era. The conceptual foundation
discussed previously with regard to the understanding of man and history
is necessary for ethics education. If we fail to pursue a deeper level
of ethical awareness, structured to accept truly candid self-assessments
and sharp critical thinking, we end up looking only at the part of the
picture that fits our perspective. This is destruc­tive for any strategic
decision-making process. A deliberate examination of this ethical issue
seems to be overdue in the mainstream of leadership development.

**The Nuts and Bolts of Strategic Thinking**

When we get to the "mechanics" of strategic thinking, there is a lot to
be said. Very little effort is spent in promot­ing "strategic
leaders-to-be" awareness of *how* they think, instead of simply the
*what.* Group discussion of issues is cer­tainly a good way to broaden
perspectives. But what is usu­ally not addressed is how to best do it and
what the factors and the principles that influence the thinking process
are. While a detailed study would be necessary to establish what to
teach for this purpose, we will discuss a few major issues to illustrate
the concept.

**Deductive Reasoning.** Learning to think from big to small (deductive
reasoning) instead of the other way around (induc­tive reasoning), common
at the tactical level, is a must for strategic leadership. The strategic
leader must be a big-picture seeker and must be able to use broad frames
of reference to interpret events and devise plans. John A. Warden III,
consid­ered one of today's strategic thinkers, highlights effectively the
need for this approach in his introduction to his "Five Rings"
model.^10^ The way people think depends both on personality^11^ and
culture.^12^ Understanding individual tendencies and focus­ing on
compensating for personal weaknesses, either in the inductive or
deductive modes of reasoning, are very important for effective thought.
Our military culture seems to need more work on the deductive,
big-picture mode. Emphasis is needed in leadership-development curricula
on this aspect.

**Frames of Reference.** Once the ability to look for the big picture is
acquired, strategic leaders need to seek out as many different ones as
possible. They need to become experts and habitual users of different
frames of reference, capable of relating them together and to their own,
so that they can con­tinuously evolve and improve. Developmental theory
sees leadership development "as adaptive changes to the soldier's
leadership frames of reference as he progresses through suc­cessively
higher organizational levels."^13^ To progress, the sol­dier has to get
used to understanding other points of view,

other frames of reference. Most of the time, frames of refer­ence are
"transparent" to the untrained user. Strategic thinkers, however, need
to be conscious managers of the ones they operate with. We cannot start
teaching these abilities to colonels. Education promoting this unnatural
skill should be formally integrated into the early stages of the
continuum of military education with a proper progression.

**Convergent Thinking.** Learning to "think big" and to habitually refer
to different frames of reference greatly increases the power of analysis
but doesn't necessarily affect synthesis. Leaders must also be good at
"convergent think­ing"^14^ when all the available elements are correlated
and synthesis is brought to bear on goals. Open-ended group dis­cussions,
though a potentially excellent approach to different perspectives, are
not enough to develop synthetic thinking: some shared practice is
required, beyond the process that

takes place in everyone's brain. Synthesis does not mean

"school solution" or "the solution" to the discussion. It does mean
attempting to build, dialectically, a big picture, that can legitimately
be agreed or disagreed upon. Not proceed­ing beyond the analysis level
risks leaving many in the "thinking small" mode (lots of details, no big
picture).

**Thinking "Know-How."** In some fields, principles, pro­cedures, and
techniques are used to assist the thinking process in complex,
ambiguous, volatile, and uncertain envi­ronments. Such an environment
often exists, for example, around the scattered and burning remains of
an aircraft acci­dent. From them, the investigators must put together a
detailed reconstruction of a complex sequence of events, maybe started
years before in a factory, or in the hearts and minds of people now
dead. Principles such as "never jump to conclusions,"^15^ search and
collect all facts and data before even thinking of inferences, look out
for one's own and for the witnesses' biases, and others, are the
conceptual funda­mentals of a professional investigator. In the corporate
world, creative thinking and problem solving techniques have also been
devised. Leadership development is much more than learning techniques.
Nevertheless, when thought is employed on matters of strategic
relevance, there is no excuse for not exploiting the existing "thinking
know-how." Leadership development curricula should then make sure
leaders are able to use such know-how.

**Conflict Management.** "Conflict management" is related to everything
we have discussed so far. We saw how we still share the gene pool of our
hunter-gatherer ancestors. The basic patterns of our social interactions
originate in the small group dynamics of the hunting band. There,
conflict was generally defused by close personal ties, by mutual
reliance for survival, and by constant verbal and nonverbal
communication. But we now work in complex organizations, interacting
constantly with people we barely know and often don't see, and whom
therefore we don't really care much about. Our culture is based on
individualism, on competitiveness, on the mononu­clear family. In this
environment, effective communication is much harder, and its likelihood
decreases enormously. We then search for our "lost band," reverting to
an artificial, con-

tradictory creation of a network of "they-us" dichotomies: "fighters
versus heavies," "rated versus nonrated," "field ver­sus the Pentagon,"
"Air Force versus other services," and so on. This occurs in sports and
at the political, institutional, national, and international levels.
Conflicts, based on the lack of the group trust upon which our survival
once depended, flourish. To operate effectively in this environment,
leaders must thoroughly understand the dynamics of conflict and how to
either reduce it or exploit it for the good of their organiza­tions.
Communication is the primary tool for conflict manage­ment, and
leadership-development courses must assure that its potential and its
traps are well understood. Other techniques for managing conflict can
and should be acquired, together with the aforementioned broad
background of an understand­ing of human nature. In particular,
leadership expertise should include a thorough comprehension of the
"negative feedback ring" or the "conflict spiral." This is the very
common phe­nomenon that often takes place when the *perception* of other
actors' behavior is even marginally negative. It occurs when trust
declines, often for a lack of understanding of the other's perspective,
due to a lack of communication or to cultural biases. The negative
feedback to the perceived misbehavior prompts further negative response,
and conflict soon arises. This dynamic happens from family quarrels to
international conflict. Too often, conflicts disproportionate to the
actual interests at odds arise because of this process, making it the
nemesis of a cost-effective leadership. Self-awareness, the big picture,
and the multiple frames-of-reference thinking advo­cated should help to
prevent it. Strategic-leadership develop­ment can, and should, enhance
the specific understanding of this phenomenon and the capability to
influence it.

**Conclusion**

The basic, plain truth is that we enter the century of inter-planetary
exploration with an original Paleolithic mind. So far, our culture has
largely ignored the limitations and perform­ances of our minds, focusing
instead on its noticeable achievements. Complexity is pushing us to the
limits of our current cultural capability to cope. But culture is by
definition adaptable, and it is in our power to help it. Strategic
leadership is the protagonist of this adaptation, and, among its
responsi­bilities, it has the key one to redefine itself. Our discussion
is just an attempt, by no means exhaustive, to contribute to this
redefinition. It envisages a broader frame of reference, which includes
as a foundation a better understanding of man, along with a deliberate
nurturing of the thinking processes. A multi-disciplinary focus on
leadership issues through the lenses of human sciences and
problem-solving methods is the tool to do that. This may seem to be "out
of the box" thinking. However, Lt Gen Jay W. Kelley stated in his
"Brilliant Warrior" paper for the *2025* study that "understanding why
humans of differ­ent backgrounds and cultures behave the way they do in
dif­ferent circumstances is integral to understanding the sources and
nature of human cooperation, friction and conflict. Military
professionals preparing for success in the far future

must learn more about leadership and human behavior---their own, their
subordinates', and their adversaries'."^16^ Sparse ini­tiatives in this
sense already exist, such as the use of self-awareness personality
testing in PME institutions.^17^

But for the necessary quantum leap to occur, an organic vision must be
thought out and shared, a new cultural basis established, and a
methodology devised. In a word, a new paradigm must arise. Without it
we'll probably remain good at "doing things right," but we'll find
increasing difficulty in "doing the right things."^18^ And the latter is
exactly what strategic leadership is about.

**Notes**

1.  For a clear, updated discussion of our origins, see Richard E.
    Leakey, *The Origin of Humankind* (New York: Basic Books, 1994),
    xiii--xv, 8--9.

2.  Joseph B. Birdsell, *Human Evolution: An Introduction to the New
    Physical Anthropology* (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).

3.  Further discussion on the unchanged characteristics of modern humans
    from at least about 40,000 years ago can be found in Desmond Morris,
    *The Naked Ape: A Zoologist Study of the Human Animal* (New York:
    McGraw-Hill, 1967), 147; Birdsell; and Leakey, 8--9.

4.  For some reference on cognitive behaviors, see *concepts, emotions,
    inferences, long term memory, short term memory, problem solving,
    reason­ing,* and other terms in Michael W. Eysenck, *The Blackwell
    Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology* (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell,
    1990). Other good ref­erences are the comparative study on cognitive
    processes of Joan Markessini, *Strategic Leadership in a Changing
    World Order: Requisite Cognitive Skills,* research product
    (Alexandria, Va.: CAE-Link Allen-Army Research Institute for the
    Behavioral and Social Sciences, 1990); and Elliott Jacques and
    Stephen D. Clement, *Executive Leadership: A Practical Guide to
    Managing Complexity* (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Business,
    Inc.,1991--1994).

5.  This last one is a definition of problem solving. It is interesting
    to note how five major models for human cognitive processes are
    basically identical to the proposed scheme which, by the way, was
    well known since the Greek philosophic thought. See Markessini,
    table 10, 57--59.

6.  Eysenck, 131.

7.  For references on the future and complexity, see John L. Petersen,
    *The Road to 2015* (Corte Madera, Calif.: Waite Group Press, 1994).

8.  Lt Gen Jay W. Kelley, "Brilliant Warrior," in *2025 White Papers,*
    vol. 1 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University, 1996), 239.

9.  Joseph C. Rost, "Leadership Development in the New Millennium,"
    *Journal of Leadership Studies* 1, no. 1 (1993): 99.

10. John A. Warden III, "The Enemy as a System," *Airpower Journal,*
    Spring 1995, 41--55.

11. An interesting insight about the influence of personality on the way
    people think comes from the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). See
    Bill Knowlton and Mike McGee, "Strategic Leadership and Personality:
    Making the MBTI Relevant," in *The MBTI and Strategic Leadership*
    (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, Industrial College
    of the Armed Forces, 1994).

12. A good discussion of the prevalent American cultural perspective is
    in *Air University, International Oficer School Handbook,* 1998,
    3-2, 3-9.

13. George B. Forsythe, "The Preparation of Strategic Leaders,"
    *Parameters 22,* no. 1 (Spring 1992): 38--49.

14. Markessini, table 10, 57--59.

15. This was a refrain, almost a class motto, during the Flight Safety
    Course, Accident Investigation classes at Norton AFB, Calif., 1989.

16. Kelley, 243.

17. MBTI and Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory testing are regu­larly
    performed in PME institutions.

18. Richard I. Lester and John C. Kunich, "Leadership and Management:
    The Quality Quadrants," *Journal of Leadership Studies 4,* no. 4
    (1997): 17--31.