Overview
This paper discusses the origins and evolution of Operations Orders from antiquity to modern times and the impact of Operations Orders on organizational sensemaking. Perspectives from Complexity Science, Organizational Psychology, High Reliability Organizations, Memetics, Logistics, Knowledge Management Systems, and Active Inference frame historical, contemporary, and future requirements and constraints. Traditional military operations orders and civilian counterparts are compared in context; survivability, limitations of existing formats, and facilitator needs inform a proposed operations order format—the Facilitator's Catechism.
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- The authors conclude that ongoing feedback-driven recalibration, clear alignment on values/narrative/goals/identity, and high-quality distributed sensemaking are critical to HRO success and enhanced by a well-formatted OPORD.
- From historical adaptations, they identify that structural changes in warfare or unprecedented uncertainty create the need for a new OPORD.
- The paper proposes the Facilitator's Catechism, an OPORD for Process Facilitators with six sections: Situation, Mission, Potential Avenues of Approach, Milestones, Implications for Outcome, and Administrative/Logistics/Communications.
- The format is designed to circumvent prior OPORD limitations where team composition and members' organizational and narrative alignment are not known before the order is written.
- The authors caveat that impact is hard to predict and measure, and recommend Serious Games (e.g. hackathons) to address sample-size and comparability problems in evaluating it.
Methods
- Historical analysis of Operations Orders from Roman origins to the present — Traced the origins and evolution of military Operations Orders (OPORDs), beginning with the Roman Army, and their civilian counterparts.
- Multidisciplinary synthesis (complexity, HROs, memetics, Active Inference, etc.) — Drew on complexity science, organizational psychology, high reliability organizations, memetics, logistics, knowledge management and Active Inference to frame OPORD requirements.
- Design of a sectioned OPORD template with guiding questions (Heilmeier-style) — Designed a new OPORD format with a header, footer and six sections, each paired with questions modeled on the Heilmeier Catechism.
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- 2020_FacilitatorsCatechism.pdf PDF · 1.89 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
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