Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 112

the testing of institutionalized knowledge and the
creation of knowledge-while-practicing, disconfirming old and inventing new meanings in the process of
reflecting in and on action.

Conclusion
Though our institution expects military practitioners and their organizations to routinely face novel
situations vested in highly complex environments,
our traditional military institutional approaches to
training and education lean too heavily on the logico-scientific paradigm. Training and education should
spur reflective practice with the outcome of learning to
learn more effectively while acting. Balanced with the

logico-scientific paradigm (e.g., task-based learning),
professional development must better incorporate the
interpretive paradigm.
In that regard, the concept of action learning is
supportive of the U.S. military’s current themes of
mission command and adaptive leadership.14 The need to
exercise disciplined initiative and critical thinking
when faced with indeterminate zones of practice can
be addressed through these ideals.15 To that purpose,
this essay has proposed that both faces of critical
thinking are required for the betterment of the reflective military practitioner who should strive to oscillate
comfortably between the logico-scientific and interpretive paradigms.

Christopher Paparone is the dean of the College of Professional and Continuing Education, U.S. Army Logistics
University, Fort Lee, Va. He is a retired Army colonel and holds a Ph.D. from Penn State University. His book,
The Sociology of Military Science: Prospects for Postinstitutional Military Design, was published by Bloomsbury,
N.Y., in 2013.

Notes
Epigraph. Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective
and Method (Berkeley: University of California, 1969), 134.
1. Notwithstanding, the Army has developed an exceptional
capability to address both faces of critical thinking in its University
of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies, located at Fort Leavenworth, KS. However, the philosophy and remarkable practices
espoused by this unique organization do not reflect the norm in
the Army.
2. Richard W. Paul and Linda Elder, The Miniature Guide to
Critical Thinking, 4th Edition (Tomales, CA: Foundation for Critical
Thinking, 2004), http://www.criticalthinking.org/files/Concepts_
Tools.pdf.
3. Haridimos Tsoukas and Mary Jo Hatch, “Complex Thinking,
Complex Practice: The Case for a Narrative Approach to Organizational Complexity,” Human Relations, 54(8)(2001): 979-1013. I
must give credit here that the Tsoukas and Hatch article inspired
me to write this article.
4. Donald A. Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner:
Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in Professions (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), 39.
5. Ibid., 986.
6. Thomas S, Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd
ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 175. I restated from
Kuhn’s longer definition where paradigm “stands for the entire
constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on, shared by
members of a given community.”

110

7. Heraclitus was a “Greek philosopher who maintained that
strife and change are the natural conditions of the universe.” The
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth
Edition, 2009 available online at http://www.thefreedictionary.
com/Heraclitean.
8. Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, Sociological Paradigms
and Organizational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate
Life (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1979).
9. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York:
Anchor, 1967).
10. Schön, 28.
11. Karl E. Weick, “Rethinking Organizational Design,” in Richard J. Boland and Fred Collopy, Managing as Designing (Stanford,
CA: Stanford Business Books, 2004): 42.
12. Craig Johnson and David P. Spicer, “A Case Study of Action
Learning in an MBA Program,” Education & Training, 48(1), 2006:
39-54.
13. Anna Simons, Got Vision? Unity of Vision in Policy and
Strategy: What It Is, and Why We Need It (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army
Strategic Studies Institute, 2010), 21-22.
14. These desired aspects of leadership are described in the
Army Leader Development Strategy 2013, http://usacac.army.mil/
cac2/CAL/repository/ALDS5June%202013Record.pdf.
15. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mission Command
White Paper, Washington, DC, 3 April 2012, http://www.dtic.mil/
doctrine/concepts/white_papers/cjcs_wp_missioncommand.pdf.

November-December 2014  MILITARY REVIEW