Veteran's Day brought lots of reflection. Although my mind freewheeled through many subjects, I spent some time thinking about the great military leaders of WW II. How unique were their minds when they entered the Navy? What common traits could be found in these men which might relate to their decision making brilliance? Is there something to be learned from them which can be used in the development of future military and business leaders? Off to the library!

I decided to limit my initial study to five-star personalities, since they had, after all, risen to the pinnacle of their military careers. I picked the biographies of Burke, Halsey, MacArthur and Nimitz. I found no commonalties in their backgrounds, in their development as officers or in their mental processes.

From his very birth, Douglas MacArthur, had been treated as a prodigy and mentally challenged by his mother. She consciously groomed him to be greater than his father, relentlessly prodding him in his studies of the arts and sciences.

Admirals Burke, Halsey and Nimitz on the other hand, grew up in modest families under average childhood conditions; they were essentially self-made men. Their insatiable thirst for superior performance, knowledge and the arts was chiefly of their own doing.

The personalities of all these men were very unique and yielded no correlation. The root commonalty in the final analysis, was simply that they had learned -- consciously or by chance -- to optimize their thought processes, each in their own way.

So, it was time to go back to the library for books on cognition and thought processes. In a nutshell, I learned that creativity and decision making abilities are learned skills! Read that again -- it's an extremely powerful statement. It says that we need not play with the cerebral cards we now hold; we can draw ourselves a better hand. Disbelievers, form up and go to the library!

Those of you that are still with me are still doubting though, I'm sure. I heard someone say, "Yeah, but what's the catch? Sure there's a penalty, but you won't believe it. So, I won't tell you at this point. Bear with me. There's hope for us all.

In all the books addressing the science of the mind, there was no disagreement among them. All agreed that thought process skills - not to be confused with knowledge - are not inherited and can be developed at any point in one's life. The good news is, it doesn't take a genius mentality. John R. Hayes states in his book The Complete Problem Solver: "People with below average IQ's tend not to be creative. However, if we look just at people with IQs of 120 or better, there is [very little] relationship -- as if there is a certain minimum IQ required for creativity. . . IQs of such famous people as Copernicus, Rembrandt and Faraday have been estimated at 110 or less!"

Particularly compelling is this excerpt from David Taylor's book titled, Mind: ". . . few people have mastered the skills required for rational analysis. Logical deduction is a slow and difficult process especially if negative or partial information is involved. More difficult still is the use of information about the likelihood of uncertain events, and studies have shown that this kind of information is often ignored in making decisions." The relevance to military planning, strategy and tactics development is striking, not to mention business and personal issues.

Taylor also noted: "Recent experiments have shown that people routinely overestimate their ability to reach accurate conclusions, and that they rarely question their own reasoning even when it fails them repeatedly." When I read this, I recalled many times in my Navy career when I should have had that concept in the forefront of my mind. I also recalled reading about the agony Admiral Halsey suffered when it was obvious to him that he had guided his task force directly into a typhoon for the second time in one season. Halsey underwent a board of inquiry resulting from the loss of lives and ships in the first incident. One would think that, in all his brilliance, he would not have made the same mistake twice. Taylor's point is validated in this example. It stands as a lighthouse against the shoals for the rest of us.

Understanding the science of the mind relative to thought processes can be reduced to a core concept. The very essence of decision making is problem representation. This is the first and most critical step in the process of finding a solution. In order to think about a subject or problem, one must have an internal representation of it -- a mental concept, if you will. This is a highly individualized process and can take different approaches for the same subject by different people. The way a person develops an internalization relates to a complex matrix of stored information relating to one or more senses. External representation can also be used to assist in understanding a problem, e.g., lists, sketches, formulas and diagrams. But, internalization is mandatory and the quality of it determines the quality of the solution. If we must choose one gem amongst the many problem solving tools, internal representation is the one which has the greatest value and shines the brightest.

Skills in representation are the key to logic and creativity. The mechanisms one uses in thought processes relate directly to one's prior experiences and knowledge. The quality and nature of experiences and knowledge obviously bear heavily on the characteristics of a representation. For example, a person who has never traveled outside the U.S. will not internalize a trip to England the same as someone who has seen Buckingham Palace and walked the grounds of the Tower of London. A person who has not studied geometry cannot see a Pythagorean relationship of three points on a plotting board. A person who has studied algebra will solve the "mixture of nuts problem" quite differently than one who has only basic math skills. Both will solve the problem, the difference being the time required to arrive at the solution.

This brings to mind an incident where Captain Arleigh Burke, while Commodore of a destroyer squadron was reminiscing an incident in which his analysis of a tactical situation in combat took just seconds too long, forcing his Commodore to seize the initiative and expose the Commodore's Cruiser. A junior officer happened by at that moment and Captain Burke asked him what difference there was between a good officer and a poor one. Taken aback, the young man thought carefully, then delivered a discourse on various aspects of naval leadership. Arleigh listened patiently until the young man had finished and then offered a shorter answer, "Ten seconds!"

The mind uses multi-sensor information from a vast array of data to form a set of cohesive concepts. John R. Hayes provided an excellent example of this in The Complete Problem Solver. Hayes provided a single sentence which illustrated how one brings far more to an internal visualization than apparent facts themselves convey: "Pedro, Juanita is crying, please change her!" If you had never been exposed to any Spanish people in your life, some of the latent information would be missing in the mental picture. If you had never experienced tending to a baby, most of the concept would be lost. As it stands however, your mind probably envisaged a Spanish father who hates changing his baby daughter's diaper, speaking with an accent to his son (Pedro), asking him to remove his baby sister's dirty diaper and put on a clean one. Note that there was instantaneous interpretation of the context of the word "change." You probably heard the baby crying and smelled the diaper too!

Hayes also offered this powerful paragraph: "Our skill in problem solving depends in a very important way on our store of problem schemas. Each problem schema we know gives us a very valuable advantage in solving a whole class of problems -- an advantage which may consist in knowing what to pay attention to, or how to represent a problem, or how to search for a solution, or all three. Clearly, the more schemas we know, the better prepared we are as problem solvers." Thus, we must feed our minds as we do our bodies, with diversity and balance. Although broccoli may not be one's favorite vegetable, eating it is in the best interest of our body, especially when there is no alternative. So it is with information. I once proudly stated, "I have no time for fiction." Many times I declined to take my wife to movies which I felt offered nothing which was worth my time. I am no longer so restrictive; my brain is hungry for new information!

During internal representation, the mind operates with concepts and patterns, and extrapolates unexpectedly across broad boundaries of information. Knowledge of chemistry, for example, can conceivably provide an insight into a naval tactic.

It is important to note that this discussion does not include rote memory! One should not feel that reading fiction is of no use because one typically cannot remember details of a book after a short passage of time. Studies of Master Chessman indicate that they have well in excess of 10,000 very complex, multi-move patterns stored in memory. They cannot necessarily describe or document even a small percentage of them, but their minds can recognize the emergence of "familiar" patterns at that order of magnitude. These same men and women can forget where they put their car keys.

Admiral Halsey was a master at internalization. He had been accused from time to time of being more lucky than clever, of being impulsive, relying only on hunches and shooting from the hip. Not so! He despised paperwork and laborious plans and relied almost exclusively on his highly developed internal representation skills. Those who worked closely with him gave him full credit for his intellect. They observed his lightning fast assessment of all the factors in a problem. He could often reach a solution while others were still deliberating the elements of a problem. His improvisations in situations which had gone sour were extremely imaginative. Admiral Nimitz said of Halsey, "He has that rare combination of intellectual capacity and military audacity, and can calculate to a cat's whisker the risk involved in operations when successful accomplishment will bring great results."

For strategy and tactics, military history has been important to many great generals and admirals. They have all found great uses for it, sometimes unexpectedly, despite drastic differences in weapons, tactics and geography. General MacArthur was told by the senior Pacific commanders and many on his staff that an amphibious landing at Inchon, Korea was treacherous and nearly impossible. He related to them that the Japanese had done so not once, but twice, in 1894 and 1904. He told of how, in 1759, the Marquis de Montcalm lost Quebec to General James Wolfe under a somewhat analogous situation. The walls of the city adjacent the sheer and hazardous river banks were very lightly defended because Montcalm had decided that it would be militarily foolish, if not impossible, for anyone to attempt an attack up those banks. Of course, explained MacArthur, that is precisely what Wolfe did; Quebec fell. Arleigh Burke, commanding a task group of destroyers in the Solomon Islands, sought the most effective tactics for raiding the Japanese resupply lines of communications, known as The Tokyo Express. He developed a concept based upon ideas resulting from his study of the tactics of Scipio Africanus in the Third Punic War between Athens and Carthage, which took place in 146 BC. Burke's tactics, derived from land battles during ancient times, earned Arleigh the Navy Cross for his brilliance in the Battles of Vella Gulf and Cape St. George.

We can develop our abilities to represent thoughts by expanding our storehouse of experiences and knowledge with high quality inputs. Read, read, read! Fiction and non-fiction. Things you like and things you don't like. Read not for memorization, but for fun, enjoyment, knowledge and stimulation. Take courses across a broad range of subjects. Smell the roses -- go places and see things. Use all six senses whenever possible. Each sense you invoke provides one more neural path to the information which relates to it. If you are reading a mystery which is set in Paris, don't allow a character to merely have lunch. Instead visualize the whiteness of the French bread, feel the crunch of the crust, taste the wine, smell the cheese, analyze the pattern and texture of the lace curtains and absorb the wonderful Parisian architecture. If you are reading Roman history, listen to and feel the rumble of a cart's wooden wheels on the cobblestones, smell the dust as it passes, see the saliva on the horses mouth and later, feel the hot water of the marble Roman baths. While diving in the Florida keys, marvel at every neon color on the reef fishes, wonder about their food chain, be sure to listen carefully to the noises of the grunting fish and hear the clicking from the shrimps. Feel an imaginary sting of a Scorpionfish you see near a sponge. Wonder about the chance for survival of the coral. When reading Admiral Nimitz's biography, look down from his headquarters at Makalapa and see the wreckage at battleship row, smell the Plumeria in his garden, hear the guns and airplanes in the carrier task forces, feel and smell the spray of heavy seas and experience the gut-wrenching decisions he makes.

Go to the library and find books about the mind, logic, decision making and thinking. You will find some are quite pedantic and some are even enjoyable. It is the impact of their practical contents which will excite you and will change you forever. Oh, yes, while you're at it, read some books on thinking positive! Remember, don't just read them, immerse yourself into them. Over time, such zestful and intense visualization of information input will become second nature.

Bon voyage to you on your mental adventures. May fair, balmy winds buffet your face and may you have following seas -- crystal blue, white-capped, roaring and salty to the taste.

Pete Azzole's On-line Library

AFTERTHOUGHTS

Unexpected Lessons from Burke, Halsey, MacArthur and Nimitz