Featured Article

Leadership and Adaptability:
Grounded Theory for Values Based Training and Education

Gary Edward Riccio, Ph.D

By 2005, the United States and many other nations had come to understand that a Joint and Expeditionary Mindset is required for the Global War on Terror. This mindset is characterized by adaptability, critical thinking, and the ability to learn with a diversity of others in operational settings as well as institutional settings. In 2008, an improbable diversity of experts from government, academe, and industry came together to identify best practices that can develop individual and collective capabilities for performance in ambiguous and changing situations. The U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) championed the work of this new community of practice. They realized the power of combining science with lessons learned from the Special Operations community to promulgate an integrated approach to training, education, and leader development in the broader community of ground forces.

The AWG Commander had the foresight to commission a monograph from the new science team that would provide scientific gravitas to their work and thus facilitate communication and coordination between the operational and institutional Army. The most noteworthy characteristic of the monograph on “Outcomes Based Training and Education” (OBTE) was that, as a living document, it provided a wide variety of stakeholders with continuous visibility and opportunities for influence on development of the new approach. In a sense, it is a collaborative journal of a continuously changing constellation of participants in a geographically distributed community of practice. It is an innovation in open science that is auspicious for a new Defense Innovation Base. It is instructive for development of talent in sectors far beyond the military.

This chapter of the monograph shows the development of meta-theory that gives the field work deep roots in highly influential bodies of scientific theory and data.

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Army Leader Development
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Grounded Theory for Values Based Training and Education
Grounded Theory for Values Based Training and Education

This chapter describes the initial identification of scientific foundations for OBTE guided by the primacy given to observable interactions with the physical and social surroundings and on the meaning they have for an individual. The three pillars and connecting lines of research begin to establish a balance among the lines of scholarship that address behavior and those that address conscious experience.