Chosen Soldier - Dick Couch [130]
“Special Forces personnel routinely deal with the unfamiliar,” Major Ed Deagle tells me. Major Deagle is a trained psychologist who administered the three-and-a-half-day classroom portion of the ATL training. Deagle is a scholarly man, very approachable, and has none of the rough edges of the men he is training. He has an easy sense of humor, and he’s very perceptive.
“Many of these officers bring with them a set of decision-making skills that’ve proven successful in traditional or more structured situations. The adaptive process is just that. We first want to develop their sensitivity to changes in their environment—changes that may affect their approach to a situation. Quite often, they do what they have always done in a new situation, even when their approach does not apply to the existing conditions. Second, we want them to change or modify their approach in a manner that will be successful—one that will move them to a resolution of the problem or desired outcome. And finally, we want this change in behavior or approach to be driven by some shift in the environment. When things change, so do they.”
“At first, this concept was hard for me to get my arms around,” Matt Anderson says of his ATL training. “I understood what not to do, as I have my own way in which I approach problems or people. I guess we all do. For me, the ATL training forced me to step back a moment and see the problem—to take an additional moment to evaluate the situation and not rely on old techniques. I was one of those guys who would question the problem if my solution didn’t work or was marginally effective. You can’t do that; ATL teaches you to focus on how I can change to better handle the problem. The classroom drills helped a lot.”
One of the scenarios is a negotiation. On one side of the negotiation is the student team leader, who has to arrange transportation for his team across a piece of arid and unfamiliar terrain in North Africa to their base camp location. He has limited funds to make these arrangements, feed his men, and support his mission. He also knows the locals to be crafty, sometimes unreliable, and out to make a quick buck. The trek to the base camp is long and dangerous. The team leader has to make a good bargain and a safe bargain. On the other side of this negotiation is an ATL student playing the part of a local merchant. The merchant has invested his family’s money in trucks and knows the Americans can be profitable customers. He also knows that he has the only trucks available, but the journey will be dangerous, and it would be catastrophic to lose the trucks. Yet he needs to make this deal to stay in business, and it has to be a good deal. Like his countrymen, the merchant enjoys the art of negotiating, and holds those who don’t negotiate in low esteem. The team leader and the merchant enter negotiations. Each has a best deal, an acceptable deal, and a bottom-line deal position. Each knows what, for him, is a bad deal. Under the precepts of adaptive thinking, both have to read the human terrain—the other person—as they work for the best possible outcome.
“This kind of negotiation is very typical,” Ed Deagle says of this scenario. “Special Forces detachment leaders do this all the time. But the thinking behind the negotiation exercise has a much broader application. These ATL techniques will work for solving problems in a range of strategic, tactical, diplomatic, and leadership situations. They are particularly helpful in cross-cultural situations and when stress and emotion are factors in decision making. We try to give these future team leaders the tools to make better decisions. Some of them come to this quickly, and some are very hard to pry out of their old ways of problem solving in a structured environment. A few of them will see this as hocus-pocus