Instructors at a military leadership course gave field grade and warrant officers a lesson in communicating complex ideas in a simple format. Their chosen medium: a haiku.
Haikus are a Japanese style of poem with three lines written in 5-7-5 syllable count and typically focus on nature imagery — not so much the nature of war. (There’s also the ironic turn of writing about a military campaign against the Japanese using their own style of poetry.)
Allyson McNitt, an editor of several Army publications who wrote the Military Review piece detailing the lesson plan said she’s taught similar concepts to civilians and thought it was a novel way to help troops “shrink these big ideas” and learn to communicate better.
“We’ve got a bunch of people that have trouble writing, have trouble being leaders and communicating to people underneath them so this was supposed to be able to tackle that gap where people feel like they fail,” she said.
Haikus were used as a way to teach officers how to “simplify and communicate complex ideas” — a quality that the military expects of its leaders. The poetic exercise was designed to help students improve their creativity around problem-solving and innovative thinking as well as prepare them as future staff planners, according to the Military Review article.
The haiku lesson was part of a 2023 spring semester course at the School of Advanced Military Studies’ based at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Advanced Military Studies Program is designed for majors, lieutenant colonels and select senior warrant officers going into planning roles at the division, corps, or service component command levels. After graduating from the program, students receive a master’s degree in military operations.
The students were also given colored pencils, dry-erase markers, or crayons (yes, we’re still talking about the Army, not the Marines) to draw sketches that “synthesized what each viewed as the key elements of American multidomain operations in the Solomon Islands” on paper or a whiteboard.
“It does seem kind of silly, like, ‘hey, just boil this down to 17 syllables and put them in a poetic form. Oh, and draw a picture,’” McKnitt said. “I think they probably thought ‘this is ridiculous, we’re never gonna have to do this.’ But I think when the point of the exercise really came through was probably at the end.”
McKnitt said she thinks “the best part” or value of the lesson was when students learned whether they effectively communicated a complex thought like multi-domain operations “in this little blurb.”
One of the students, Marine Maj. Joshua Chambers told McKnitt for her piece that the exercise helped him better understand how an audience can have various interpretations of one message.
“The haiku exercise also was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate how the intended message may or may not always be the message received,” Chambers said. “The more successful students were the ones who could better visualize other students’ perspective and attempted to communicate from their point of view. In other words, apply strategic empathy.”
Over the course of three days, students studied and analyzed the U.S. military’s strategy in the Pacific, including the Solomon Islands campaign, the Battle of Guadalcanal and the fall of Rabaul on Papua New Guinea. Students looked at the U.S. military’s multi-domain operations in the Pacific — a timely topic of conversation as the U.S. “pivots” its military strategy towards the region — which led to some brilliant buzz-word poetry.
“Within the Context
Joint Force Capabilities
At Decisive Points”
Students were given 20 minutes to sketch out what they deemed as “key elements” of the multi-domain operations. Then, students were given 15 minutes to study a classmate’s model and write a haiku to interpret their peer’s drawing.
“An understanding
Lost & found, organized by will
Across space, time, mind”
(We’re not sure what this guy was on but we’d like some of that!)
Some haikus closely resembled Pentagon posters at a defense contractor conference: trite and bewildering to the outside world but amusing nonetheless.
“Denied Access to
Find the Equation to Win
Multiplicity”
It’s unclear where the graduates have gone since completing their mil-spec literary studies, but if any were to bring their poetry-writing skills to the Pentagon, they might produce something like this:
Pacing threat is here,
Joint, pivot, lethality,
Clausewitz was right.