Military Review English Edition September-October 2014 | Page 64

as easy as holding your brief immediately following an
esprit-de-corps unit run.
Simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional,
and finally, “stories”—we were born to remember a
narrative, but humans must work to remember a list.31
Professional competitive “memory champions” actually
convert anything they want to remember (even random lists of numbers or decks of playing cards) into a
“memory palace,” a kind of story, in order to remember
so many inane details.32 When we hear a well-told narrative, there is a part of our brain that walks through
the story with the teller, and doing that aids understanding and retention.33
It is through this last point, through the telling of
stories, that we are making the major success-driving
change in our weekend safety brief format. The story and
the object lesson become our starting point for engaging
subordinates in a common vision of the Army values.

Telling Transformational Stories
Going back to the beginning of this article, imagine
a new Friday. The unit finishes a motivational morning
run and while soldiers’ hearts are still pumping hard the
commander calls them all into an informal “horseshoe”
formation. He tells them he is not going to insult their
intelligence by lecturing them to do the right thing over
the weekend. They already know what the right thing
is, and he expects them to do it.
Instead, he wants to talk to them about respect. It is
simple because they already have a foundation for what
respect is. Discussing respect is also credible because it
is an Army value. He tells them about his neighbor who
is a blind man with a service dog. That is unexpected,
and because the soldiers realize there is a gap in their
knowledge, their natural curiosity is piqued.
“The other day I saw him leave home to go for a
walk, and when he got about 100 meters from his
house, there was a car parked across the sidewalk in
someone’s driveway.” He is drawing them in to the challenge his neighbor is about to face. “The dog stopped
him short of the car but, having no idea why, my neighbor tried to keep the dog moving. The dog stopped him
three times and he ended up yelling at the poor dog
before running into the car himself.”34
Soldiers might be wondering where this is going, but
none of them have tuned out. The commander continues, “I think there’s a lesson about respect we can learn
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from what happened to my neighbor.” He goes on to
make a connection between the lack of trust the blind
man had for his service dog when something unexpected happened and a young soldier who disregards the
advice of a wise friend or an NCO.
“I want you to imagine your friend is trying to steer
you clear from a bad decision this weekend. What are
you going to do? Are you going to do the right thing?
Or, are you going to walk smack-dab into a parked car?”
He has placed them inside the narrative now, and he
starts to shift them toward commitment. “If you think
respect is simply giving your NCOs what’s due, you are
just beginning to uncover the Army values … .”
This commander has successfully initiated a dialogue through a transformational story. When he
finishes the discussion after a few more points about
respect, he has not told them not to drink and drive
because they already know not to. On a very personal
level, he has reminded them that their off-duty behavior is part of who they are and that he has high expectations of that behavior.35
Every soldier will not walk away from that formation instantly transformed and completely committed
to the Army values, but they will walk away shifted a
little bit more to the right on the spectrum from compliance to commitment. Soldiers who are engaged through
a SUCCESs-based series of transformational stories
may still occasionally hit the blotter report, but, despite
that, leaders will instill in their soldiers something the
old-style weekend safety brief does not: the emotionally
based personal drive to act. Those soldiers will be more
likely to become committed to the professional military
ethic sooner in their careers than others will.
The simplest thing about this concept is that leaders who have themselves shifted from compliance to
commitment to the PME carry with them the stories
that brought them to that point. Without seeking out
a cleverly contrived anecdote or object lesson, most
leaders are capable of relaying to soldiers what it means
to be a practitioner of the Army values from their own
experience and the experiences of those around them.
Additionally, leaders who choose to adopt this method
will find themselves approached by soldiers who are
in the process of shifting to the right with their own
stories to tell.
Changing the weekend safety brief into a weekly
forum to discuss the PME will build the organization
September-October 2014  MILITARY REVIEW