March 29, 2024

NAWCAD in 2030: The MMOWGLI Assessment

Dale Moore brown bag 3
Posted for The Patuxent Partnership

Results of NAWCAD’s Massive Multiplayer On-Line War Game Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI), otherwise known as crowd sourcing will be presented and discussed March 24, 2015 at a brown bag lunch briefing opening at 11 am and running until 12:30 pm at the Wyle Conference Center North, 22309 Exploration Dr., Lexington Park, MD.

The NAWCAD 2030 Strategic MMOWGLI Game launched in September 2014 with the goal of developing a strategic plan for the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division. The game was open to all players, play ran for two weeks, and the results will be presented and discussed at the briefing.

In this ninth of The Patuxent Partnership’s Strategic Thinking Series Brown Bag Briefings, Dr. Dale Moore, Director, NAWCAD Strategic Cell, returns to present and discuss the NAWCAD 2030 Strategic MMOWGLI Assessment.

There is no cost for this program. Register here.

This was the “the first time a world strategic plan has been crowd sourced . . . [it will] model a new paradigm,” Dr. Moore explained the game last fall.

MMOWGLI is a web-based collaboration tool, developed jointly by the Naval Post Graduate School and the Institute for the Future, which brings together the ideas of large, diverse groups. MMOWGLI games draw and harness the collective potential of the crowd and offer players a more gameful, democratized way of engaging with a scenario.

The message-based game has players put one idea of no more than 140 characters on a card, one thought on each card. Piles of meaningful cards grow, attrition abandons piles of non-meaningful ones. As the cards multiply, the algorithms sort and categorize. But the big deal is that lots of different people contributed ideas.

Historically a limited set of decision makers map the strategies and build the plans that carry forth actions. But problems have increased in complexity. Crowd sourcing, which brings together the ideas of large, diverse groups, is proving capable of creating larger congregates of knowledge than those assembled by specialized, limited sets of experts.

From the Assessment Summary:

The learning that was evident as a result of the virtual dialogue was significant in the idea cards, as well as the development of the Action Plans.

Emphasis includes: a) NAWCAD Upgrade to an Improved Operating System that is needed to out-pace and out-think our peer competitors through 2030 and the need to “rethink/re-imagine” NAWCAD in terms of an organizational “upgrade” to NAWCAD 2.0, that is more strategically aware/informed, cognitively oriented (i.e. improved learning & thinking), knowledge networked, agile, adaptive, anticipatory, analytical and especially technology and innovation-driven;

b) Open Leadership as a psychological, sociological skill, competence and behavior will be required to outpace the threats given the difficulty of the future state Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) challenges. Developing 21st Century, world class  leadership skill and capabilities that focus on the people reflect ‘open’ models similar to the Skunkworks concept versus a hierarchical government bureaucracy;
c) Technology & Innovation leadership at the cutting edge and expanding the trade space are critical to success.
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