Groundhog Thinking

Groundhog Thinking is a phrase that arose out of a series of experiments carried out by the military historian, Karl Maschler, in which he asked his students to revisit the Vietnam War at various stages of America’s involvement and develop strategies accordingly.

The first group of students were knowledgeable in the general field of military history but had not studied the Vietnam conflict specifically. Nevertheless, Maschler was somewhat surprised to see the students making many of the same strategic and policy mistakes that had been made during the original conflict.

The experiment was modified and the next batch of students studied the conflict for half a semester. They were given extensive reading lists, given access to RAND reports and Government documents from the time and also watched a number of films and documentaries on the social and cultural costs of the war as well as the financial and military costs.

In addition, the students were told about the experiment they would be taking part in, so they were forewarned to make note of the mistakes and miscalculations that had been made by policy-makers at the time. To Maschler’s astonishment, the students still managed to propose strategies and policies which were either strikingly similar to those which had actually been employed or sought to deviate from original policy mistakes whilst suffering from the same underlying mistaken assumptions.

Maschler tried using the same technique on various disastrous episodes, from the First World War to 9/11 and Iraq. Even with the knowledge of hindsight, and despite a concerted attempt to avoid the known outcome of the original events, the students inevitably repeated many of the mistakes of the key players in those events.

The key characteristic of these sessions was that students, in their determination to avoid the original outcome, were swept up in strategic details without ever stepping back to examine the underlying causes.

Maschler coined the term Groundhog Thinking to encapsulate this behaviour. Named after the hit film, Groundhog Day, in which the central character repeatedly wakes up to face the same day, Maschler’s hypothesis is nevertheless more complex than a repackaging of the old saw that we are destined to repeat the mistakes of our forefathers.

Maschler realized that the students often made the same mistakes not because they had ignored all the evidence but because their knowledge of the Vietnam War was dwarfed in the decision making process by the socialization process to which they had been subject throughout their lifetimes.

In other words, you may know what has happened in the last ten or twenty years, you may know what is happening right now, but your decision making processes are dominated by what has happened in the last two thousand years, by the fabric of the society in which you live, by the moral universe of which you are an integral part.

To develop successful strategies, particularly when dealing with different cultures, Maschler suggested it was vital to escape from Groundhog Thinking and much of his subsequent work has focused on finding techniques for achieving that.

Among the early techniques he found to be successful was the empathy technique. He took a new batch of students and painted a scenario in which their own country was under attack from a much more powerful aggressor which claimed to be acting in their interests. Having encouraged the students to demonstrate how difficult it would be for this aggressor to achieve its objective, he turned the tables and told them that the country under attack was Vietnam. This group of students was the first to unanimously suggest that the US should have recognized Vietnamese independence in 1945.

Perhaps even more successful was the technique that arose out of his attempt to try the original experiment, albeit in much simpler form, on a group of third grade children. That technique was Q & A Strategy.

(coming next - the second part of this post on Q & A strategy)