The Core Four
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The Core Four — Four Cognitive Traps Killing Military Human Performance
Drew and Alex gave a standing-room-only breakout at the H2F Symposium on this. Now they have time to actually unpack it. Four heuristics that show up everywhere in military human performance — and in every human-run organization. You can't escape them, but you can at least recognize them.
What we get into:
Goodhart's Law — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The AFT was designed to signal readiness. The moment it became an incentivized metric, people started optimizing the score instead of the fitness. Same thing happened in Vietnam with body counts. The cure: use multiple metrics, reward more than test scores, and acknowledge what the assessment was actually supposed to tell you.
McNamara Fallacy — only what can be quantified matters. The first step is measuring what's easy. The second is disregarding what can't be measured. The third is assuming the unmeasurable isn't important. The fourth is deciding it doesn't exist. Sound familiar? Social cohesion, trust, culture, the music playing in the gym — none of these show up on a dashboard. All of them matter enormously. Every minute a coach spends measuring is a minute they spend not coaching.
Hammond's Corollary — what gets measured gets managed, but what most needs managing isn't always measurable. The soldier with a perfect AFT score who can't pick up a ruck without throwing out his back. Fitness versus capability. Athleticism versus fitness. You know it when you see it — and just because you can't put it on a graph doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Nazareth syndrome — no man is a prophet in his own home. The one place Jesus got the most skepticism was Nazareth, because they knew him as the carpenter. The embedded human performance team dealing with real constraints gets ignored. The outside consultant with slick branding and a two-day seminar gets the senior leader's full attention. You can't eliminate this one — but you can use it to your advantage.
Mentioned in this episode:
Drew's article — The Death of Periodization at mopsandmoes.com
Chris Frankel — assessment framework: camera, map, crystal ball, engine
VF Ridgway, 1956 — the actual origin of "what gets measured gets managed"
Justice Potter Stewart, 1964 — the porn quote. You know it when you see it.
The Tyranny of Metrics — Jerry Muller
Long and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic →
Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.
