While military organizations are often perceived as a highly hierarchical, command-and-order to organizations that is rather conservative, the U.S. Army is, in fact, one of the most advanced and progressive organizations when it comes to developing and teaching alternative ways of thinking, including what we call reframing. The U.S. Army's University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies (UFMSC) - also called Red Teaming - is central to this effort.

UFMSC is one of the few institutions that apply reframing in a more comprehensive and sophisticated way than we do at Schulich. Have a look at the "Applied Critical Thinking Handbook", and you will discover many of the techniques we cover in the course, albeit occasionally with different names, including the 15% Principle (developed by Prof. Gareth Morgan at Schulich, no less), Adopting Stakeholder Perspectives, Frame Audits (reframing through challenging assumptions), Pre-Mortem Analysis, and Asking Provocative Questions. Self-awareness and critical self-reflection are central to their approach.

Red Teaming, by the way, "is a function executed by trained, educated, and practiced team members that provides commanders an independent capability to fully explore alternatives in plans, operations, concepts, organizations, and capabilities in the context of the operational environment and from the perspectives of our partners, adversaries, and others." In other words, the purpose of Red Teaming is to openly challenge assumptions by adopting alternate (stakeholder) perspectives.

Another military related resource is the book Team of Teams by General Stanley McCrystal, the former commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Afghanistan and the former commander of the nation’s premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). In this book, McCrystal explicitly draws on complexity science and translates the lessons learned in Iraq to the challenges many businesses and non-profit organizations face in an increasingly turbulent world.

Here is a link to the Fast Company article Let General Stanley McChrystal Explain Why Adaptability Trumps Hierarchy, in which McCrystal and his co-authors explain how highly adaptable organizations - in the military as well as in business - are far superior to more rigid hierarchies in highly turbulent and unpredictable environments. He calls for team structures to replace hierarchies and suggests to think of adaptable organizations as teams of teams.