Designing Future Security: An International Roundtable on the Military Design Movement

Summary: Welcome to OTH’s fifth podcast! For this episode we return to the subject of one of our first and most read articles: The Military Design Movement. As the author, Ben Zweibelson, notes at the outset, portions of the international military community have begun to turn toward a multi-disciplinary approach to planning and decision making that breaks from traditional and largely mechanistic methodologies of the Industrial Era. Ideas like complexity theory, alternative managerial theory (change management), instructional design, and post-modern philosophy blend to form a new context for the 21st century military practitioner. Ben is back with us for this podcast and has connected an incredible group of scholars and practitioners of design from Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Canada, Australia, and India. We discuss how each nation and individual came to design, what challenges we face, and what distinguishes each approach. While talking through the unique elements of each effort, we also come across our commonalities in context, struggles, and outlook. What follows is an incredibly rich conversation on the way we need to evolve our thinking to address the complexity and uncertainty of the future security environment.