The nine-session arc
Environment → knowledge artifact → production system → coordination machinery → decision rights → practice → cognition → change → transfer.
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Foundations
The Military as an Organizational Design Problem Why adversarial, degraded, irreversible environments select for a distinctive organizational logic. Extreme-environment contingency theory.
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Knowledge artifact
Doctrine as Organizational Memory Doctrine as codified institutional knowledge — "authoritative but requires judgment." The publication hierarchy, and NDP 1 in 1994 versus 2020 as a controlled comparison.
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Production system
The Doctrine Factory How the institution writes and revises its own memory: the joint doctrine development system, the TRADOC concept pipeline, and the politics of codification.
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Coordination machinery
Command and Control as Communication Design NDP 6 read as an explicit information-system specification: networks, decision cycles, and operating through degraded channels.
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Decision rights
Mission Command: Decision Rights Under Uncertainty Centralized intent, decentralized execution. Commander's intent as an incomplete contract; disciplined initiative as delegated authority.
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Practice
Knowledge Management in the Field The working KM system: NWDC, the Navy Warfare Library, Army KM doctrine, lessons-learned loops — and the friction between publication-centric and knowledge-centric models.
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Cognition
The Leader as Systems Thinker Where individual cognition meets organizational structure: systems thinking as a trainable leader capability.
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Change
Transformation: Innovation as a Multi-Organizational Problem Mandeles' argument that military innovation succeeds between organizations, not within one — and why transformation rhetoric fails without that structure.
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Transfer
Doctrine for the AI-Native Firm The synthesis session: what mission command, doctrine hierarchies, and C2 design teach the designers of human–AI organizations — and what must not be copied.
Reading map: the core corpus and its owner sessions
The coverage audit for the sixteen core sources: each is substantively taught — not name-checked — in the session that owns it. Every session additionally integrates primary sources from a later expansion corpus (see below); each lecture's own reading list and source register carry its full set.
| Source document | Kind | Owner session | Also used in |
|---|---|---|---|
| JP 1, Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States (2013, incorporating Change 1, 2017) | Capstone doctrine | 01, 05 | 02, 09 |
| JP 5-0, Joint Planning (2020) | Keystone doctrine | 03 | — |
| JP 5-0, Planeamiento Conjunto (2017, Spanish edition) | Supplementary | 03 | — |
| Brown, Developing Doctrine for the Future Joint Force (Walker Paper No. 3, 2003) | Monograph | 03 | 08 |
| NDP 1, Naval Warfare (1994) | Capstone doctrine | 02 | — |
| NDP 1, Naval Warfare (2020) | Capstone doctrine | 02 | 05 |
| NDP 6, Naval Command and Control (1996) | Keystone doctrine | 04 | 09 |
| TRADOC, Concept Development Guide | Process guide | 03 | 08 |
| Executing Knowledge Management in Support of Mission Command (18-02 primer, 2017) | Practitioner primer | 06 | 05 |
| A Conceptual Model of Army Leader Systems Thinking | Research monograph | 07 | — |
| Roots of Military Doctrine | Historical study | 02 | 03 |
| Mandeles, Military Transformation Past and Present (2007) | Scholarly book | 08 | 09 |
| Comprehensive Review of U.S. Navy Doctrine and Knowledge Management | Synthesis report | 06 | 02 |
| Navy Doctrine Knowledge Management System (Gemini synthesis) | Synthesis report | 06 | — |
| US Military Knowledge and Doctrine Systems | Synthesis report | 06 | 03 |
| Navy Doctrines / US Military Knowledge System ([mil] notes) | Synthesis report | 06 | — |
Converted corpus
Sixteen core sources plus a fifty-three-document expansion — all full-text OCR conversions.
The table above maps the sixteen core sources. A later expansion added fifty-three more primary documents — the joint doctrine-development regulations (CJCSI/CJCSM 5120), ADP 6-0 and MCDP 6, the CCRP command-and-control research books, the ATP 6-01.1 knowledge-management pair, the Office of Force Transformation artifacts with their GAO and CBO auditors, and the DoD JADC2 and AI-adoption strategies — each woven into the session it strengthens, with source-versus-source tensions surfaced on the page rather than reconciled. All conversions live under ../sources/, organized as joint/, navy/, army/, doctrine_theory/, knowledge_systems/, c2_mission_command/, km_cognition/, and transformation_ai/, with figures extracted alongside. Each session's reading list and source register carry its full integrated set.
The theoretical spine
The seminar reads the corpus against four organizational design axes, following the program's org-theory synthesis.
Axis 1 · Decision rights
Who decides, and with what authority?
Mission command is the military's answer to the delegation problem: centralized intent, decentralized execution, formalized in commander's intent. Sessions 01, 05.
Axis 2 · Coordination mechanism
Standardization as the platform for improvisation
Doctrine is Mintzberg's standardization-of-skills-and-norms at institutional scale — a shared language that makes decentralization safe. Sessions 02, 03.
Axis 3 · Communication design
Channels engineered for degradation
C2 doctrine specifies networks, media, and decision cycles under the assumption that communications will fail. Session 04.
Axis 4 · Knowledge architecture
Memory that outlives its members
The doctrine hierarchy, lessons-learned loops, and KM systems are an explicit organizational-memory architecture — with measurable latency. Sessions 02, 03, 06.
Program context
Where this seminar sits in the org-designs research program.