Axon - Applying Story Science to Creative Thinking Instruction - Ep 3 Published Feb. 8, 2023 Maxwell Air Force Base, AL -- Axon Podcast with Major Samosorn and Dr. McConnell The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied in this podcast are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views of Air University, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. government agency. Dr. Megan Hennessey Hello and welcome to Axon, the Air University Teaching and Learning Center podcast. I'm your host Doctor Megan Hennessey, Director of the Air University Teaching and Learning Center. I'm joined today by Doctor Richard McConnell, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and current associate professor at the Department of Army Tactics at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Also with us is Major Angela Samosorn, an active-duty Army nurse, serving as the Chief of Clinical Research Supports and Chief of Nursing Research at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research. Welcome to you both. Major Angela Samosorn Thank you. Dr. Richard McConnell Happy to be here. Dr. Megan Hennessey Thanks so much for joining us today. I met you both last year when you submitted a proposal for our military scholarship of teaching and learning forum, and your research on narrative practice definitely stood out as unique and necessary. And I think your session was very well attended and has gotten lots of views since for the recording. So, in a faculty development context, I've been teaching military educators how to use storytelling as an instructional strategy for a long time, but most of what we know about its effect on learning is from civilian corporate settings and creative thinking has also definitely been a topic of interest in our community for years. And I know Marine Corps University in particular has made great strides in understanding how creativity relates to other cognitive processes and operational performance. And we're here today to talk about how your research is unique, and I'm wondering if you can go into more detail about the research design and how it tied both narrative and critical, excuse me, creative thinking together. Dr. Richard McConnell So, I'll start out and I'll hand it over to you, Angela. So, for a little bit of background, one of the first research projects I did after I finished up my doctorate was on wargaming. We had noticed that students that had a chance to play a simple war game called Kriegspiel, which was like considered the first simulation that ever existed in Germany, had a tendency to do better on the wargaming step of the military decision making process. And I looked into it and found that we are really bad at this. I mean, historically, it is one of the biggest complaints from observer controllers at the combat training centers that, the wargaming step for us is our way of pre-morteming, if you will. If it's a term, seeing what will cause the plan to fail. So, in other words to connect it to narrative. OK, the story that we tell about how an operation will happen is the order that we publish, but we all know that these things rarely happen as we expected, right? And everybody says that no plan ever survives the first shot of combat, so the war gaming process is how we tell an alternate story and as we start talking about the narrative story science approach that we applied in this study, you'll see how that is a key part of this. It's the ability to, first of all, take perspectives and secondly, predict alternate futures of unforeseen threats and opportunities. That's what we call exceptional information in the Army doctrine. Exceptional information, loosely defined is, threats or opportunities that you didn't know about while you were planning the plan, but happened during execution and so, in other words, if you can tell an alternate story, not the most likely story, because the plan you came up with, was what you figured was the likely story. The enemy gets a vote. They're going to look for the most predictable thing you're going to do. And so, the hope here is that by teaching people to be better at this narrative perspective taking, they'll be able to anticipate the story that they hadn't predicted. In other words, those threats and opportunities slash exceptional information, so that they can take and create the conditions where the commander could be better prepared for the unexpected and I'll hand it over to Angela. Major Angela Samosorn Exactly, I think with this study in particular, what is really, for me as a qualitative researcher of interest, you know, my background is in education, curriculum and instruction, and simulation. My interest was in how the story is being told but also being perceived. How you perceive the story and the words, because words matter, context matters, and how you interpret that context, largely depends on, you know, your own lived experience, not just from an education and training background that you have, but especially in the Army, you know, what's your job? The field that you work in, kind of the culture that you're grown up in. As an officer it’s very interesting to me, and so how that plays int how you think about the situation that's at hand? How you think about how others think about that situation is really interesting, and I think that that was something that we saw in this opportunity with the narrative storytelling. It's not just necessarily your own perception, but also kind of looking at it from somebody else's point of view and thinking about how somebody else may think about that same situation. And I think that really takes us into that space to be able to, sort of, assess that exceptional information, to be able to make an actionable plan off of that. Dr. Megan Hennessey Yes, so what you're describing probably isn't new to our listeners who have any amount of experience in human intelligence or in psychology, but I can imagine it was a harder sell for those who were looking for “hard science,” right, as they say. So how did you kind of answer the mail on that and design your study? Dr. Richard McConnell This narrative story science approach was pioneered by Doctor Angus Fletcher up at Ohio State University's project narrative. And so, what we did is, we created a lesson, and I provided that to you so you have it. It is basically a script, which is a very different way of teaching than our faculty was used to. And what I found was, there was some discomfort from some faculty members because it was sort of like you're getting people on this story train, if you will. And like Angela was saying, we're, like the process for narrative practice was, if you and I were a team, the first step is you get a prompt and then you tell me how you'd solve the problem. I tell you how I would and we both focus on the other person's perspective, because the second step is, we're going to have a second prompt, and now I read it and now I try to role play you and you try to role play me and we try to come up with solutions that we believe, based on what you and I told each other is, how this would happen? So that's what Angela was talking about, taking somebody else's perspective and then the last part is predicting alternate futures that might change your solution. Hey, did you consider this threat, this opportunity, or some environmental factor? So, there's a lot of really interesting things that could lead to some future studies connected to this. First of all, it requires imagination to be able to do this. I've got to imagine your perspective. You aren't me and I'm not you. So therefore, I've got to imagine somebody else's way of doing things. I've got to be able to be curious. If I'm not curious about other people's perspectives, I'm going to be very bad at this, which is related to something else that me and Angus are thinking of doing. We want to do a survey that he developed in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania. It is a survey that measures perceived levels of organizational curiosity and right now we're considering trying to get that survey done here at CGSC and also with the Joint Special Operations University down near MacDill Air Force Base. So that's some of the stuff that we're attempting to do connected to this. And yes, we had some people that were a little uncomfortable with it, but we also had a lot of people that were very enthusiastic. And a little bit later, we will talk a little bit about cultural indicators, we can discuss how that played out in the numbers. Dr. Megan Hennessey Yes, what you're describing reminds me of the 2015 Officer professional military education policy that had language as an objective to anticipate. And it seems like we could have used this study almost 10 years ago, right? That would have been helpful. So tell me more about your findings. Dr. Richard McConnell What we discovered, in short, let's just put it this way, bottom-line up-front narrative practice works. In every sample we took, we saw improvement in the test group over the control. So, we did a smaller group at Fort Belvoir, VA in May of this last year, and just to give you a couple of ideas of the control group, and the mean, they were rated on a 7-point Likert scale on the variables, novelty, suitability, and feasibility. So, novelty, how new and surprising is it? Suitability, would any commander worth their salt be willing to attempt it? Feasibility, can it work? And the bottom line is, is the test outperform the control in that? So, if you looked at the pre-test, the control got about a mean of 3.90 and they. Did approve a little bit. To 3.96, but the test got a 3.87 in the pre-test and they got a 4.32 in the post test which is a clear improvement in statistically significant. And then when we wanted to see if we could replicate that here at Fort Leavenworth, we isolated a fourteen-person group that had a clear almost 20% increase in creativity of between their pre and post-test. And so, we wanted to see if we could replicate that and so when we got the full sample, the control response rate was 18%. The test response rate was 57% and we ran Cohen's D analysis on this. that measures the magnitude of change and what we found was that Cohen's D for the control. Was about 0.76, which is considered medium. Cohen, D for the test was 0.93 which is large and whenwe split out. Different teams based on response rate and based on participation. We saw some even more pronounced things, but the bottom line is what we're trying to say is to apply a metaphor. This equates to about a 14-point increase in effective IQ at solving complex open-ended problems under a time constraint. Dr. Megan Hennessey Wow, sign me up for that intervention, right? That's clearly significant. How were those three factors evaluated and who evaluated for feasibility, suitability, and novelty? Dr. Richard McConnell On my research team that Angela and I were on was Doctor Ken Long, he was the guy who led the consensual assessment technique team, otherwise known as the CAT. There's a raft of research on its use. It's kind of the gold standard for evaluating creativity. What you do is you assemble a panel of people with a list of credentials that you are looking for and it and what this means is every discipline is going to havea different cat. OK, you're going to have to assemble them. Based on your needs, and what you, your discipline, would see as creative anyway, so Doctor Long ran that whole process and how this worked was, , you get in your, in this case, group of three. You're not going to get every credential for each person, but hopefully in the aggregate you'll get most and basically what happened was, I was the principal investigator, so I would d-identify all of these pre and post-tests. All they ever saw was an admin control number so they had no idea whothey were looking at, or what group they were in and then they were asked to quickly, in about 30 seconds, sort of rate, give a number in each one of those for each instrument, and then they captured that on an Excel spreadsheet in admin control number order, which then we gave to Morgan Cornstubble, who's a former West Point Math professor, who did all the statistical analysis for us and she's the one who created these bar graphs and Excel spreadsheets and did the Cohens D-analysis. Dr. Megan Hennessey Thank you. You shared your findings, were there any cultural indicators? Dr. Richard McConnell Absolutely. We were really curious because it wasn't really obvious. Initially. We were thinking, wow, this really had these really cool bar graphs with Belvoir and with that initial 14 and then what we found was in the 18% response in the control group. They were much more creative. To start with, but their change was not as big as the test. The test had 57%, but they had greater. They started out less creative and so we theorize. Is that perhaps these people that 18% response rate some of those teams you had five or six people participating out of 60? So, we theorized that these people might be just interested or maybe even passionate about creativity and that's why they chose to participate. So, if you were going to use a metaphor, I would sort of assess that the controlgroup was sort of espresso, but the test group at 57% was probably coffee. You had a bunch of people from various backgrounds, and so we asked the question, is it possible that the faculty and leadership in these teams might have affected the outcome. So, what we did is we , identified everybody sort of racked and stacked the control group and the test group starting with the highest response rate at the top for both groups. And what we found was the Cohens Dfor those higher response group rate teams was significantly bigger. So, for example, we had. Team, the most dramatic one was a team that had 43 respondents out of 60. So, 75% response rate. They had a Cohens D of 1.64 which is like double large. OK, but when you looked at the control group you had a similar thing. We had a control group that the largest one had a group of 28. So, in other words, a 48.33% response rate. But they had a 1.06 Cohenss D, so again, we're speculating, or at least theorizing. And this would be something we might be able to study. In future researches, are there cultural indicators where leaders can nurture creativity and curiosity in their organizations that would have an effect of improving curiosity rates? Then I'll throw this over to Angela. Any thoughts on that as well? Major Angela Samosorn Yeah, I sat with the qualitative data for a little bit, and you know, admittedly we asked some post questions to the faculty, not the students. You know just their general overall perception of how it went, things that they liked, things that they didn't like. With the preparation execution both for the test and the control faculty, the data wasn't super robust. I got one-word answers for some things, and so sometimes the context of their answer wasn't necessarily clear to me, but really. Across the board, you know the faculty. Found that the. The way that. Creativity is taught whichever version they had. Either the test version or the control version. Works just fine and I that to me was interesting that you know people the group who've been teaching that our standard creativity curriculum felt that it worked just fine, but then there were a handful in there that thought you know? Oh well, how do I know if this is actually beneficial? And interestingly, the test group asked that same question and you know we're fixated on measurement. I found that in a study I did with war college faculty the biggest thing with creativity is you know, how do you measure it. How do you know it's good and then how do you tell a student that they did a good job with it because everything in these, you know, PME environments, we're measured so heavily on whether or not we're doing it right, or that we're you know, deemed a good, and I think that that was a little bit of a challenge for some of the faculty in really wrapping their arms around and embracing the narrative practice is because the immediate result isn't tangible. Yes, they saw. Some were surprised at the answers that their students gave. Some were surprised that the students were actually interested in it. I have so many more probing questions that I wasn't able to ask, but overall, it was a really good experience for faculty. What they would like is more development. Prior to using this type of curriculum and so you know, I think the biggest way to impact an officer who attends PME at any level is investment in the faculty. Because if you have a faculty member who's confident who understands why the things are being taught, the background behind it. And the delivery message so that pedagogical piece of how to deliver it. But also, why like why is this important? And then believing that it's important, really? We would have a great impact on the students and how they feel about it. You know, just because in general creativity while it's talked about in. In PME it's listed as a thing that we are supposed to show and encourage by Chief of Staff. The Services chief of staff like it's not something that we're totally measuring wholeheartedly. And we're not embracing it across all of our environments. And I think it's just because it's hard to measure and it's something a little bit squishy. And so, I really think that this study what it did was it gave some credibility to the fact that you can embrace and nurture creativity in a way that's militarily relevant, that people who have the expertise in the background or in that type of environment, be it you know, 20 years working as a field artillery officer and understanding when somebody presents an idea or a solution that it does have value and merit and it is maybe potentially not feasible because of a constraint such as time or resources funding or whatnot. But that there is value in what they presented, because they understand the context in which it was being asked. And so, I do think this particular study and the way that we conducted it, and the results that we found, do show that there is a way to measure creative output of students within a PME environment and that it's not super challenging. It wasn't very difficult. We have faculty who are experts in in the areas that they do teach, and so if we teach them how to how to recognize it and how to measure it, I think it just is the start of something that has the potential to be able to be embraced across the enterprise. Dr. Megan Hennessey Thanks. That is super helpful to think about. I know the Army, in particular, has spent a lot of time and resources considering talent management. Are there any downsides to this type of data and how it may be used or not used in a culture that values stratification of performance? Major Angela Samosorn There is probably a little bit of a downside. Of course, one is, you know, just the buy in across. It's going to be very challenging to get a culture change. We are asking for a culture change in recognizing and valuing creativity in an environment where you know doctrine is viewed as a guide. Yes, but also something that sort of confines what we do and don't do. I think that the more that we talk about it, perhaps in this type of way, showing the development faculty development, the results of our study that return on investment. It's a little bit grassroots but also sort of sprinkling from the top as well. That eventually it will catch on and be viewed as something that is really, truly valuable and truly important. I think what we're seeing, you know, in the news every day with what's coming out of Ukraine. Talk about creativity, creative solutions to a situation. I'm hoping that perhaps areas of the military who leaned less heavily on creative, creative output are perhaps starting to see that you know there is value in thinking outside the box, but how do you take the box and use what you have in in a different way? Or bringing two things together? We're not asking for reinventing you know, Kevlar coming up with the next greatest thing that's going to revolutionize military warfare. It's not that big. It's very simple, and I think once we recognize that it'll become I think more widely accepted, but you're right for right now, there is a chance that people are going to kind of poo-poo it and think you know that's too squishy for me. We don't need it. We don't need that. We're not going to worry about it. Right? Or they compete to be the most creative PME student If you go in the opposite, we're creating creativity monsters. Dr. Megan Hennessey Yes, exactly, diving back into the details just because I'm interested. My bachelor's degree is in English. I have a master’s in Shakespeare studies. Does language and word choice matter or did you find that it mattered in the study? Were there words that popped up that were surprises? Were there things you expected to hear, and you didn't in the narrative practice? Major Angela Samosorn I just want to say one thing about words and then I'm going to turn it over to Rich for probably more data-driven conversation. But words do matter even throughout doctrine. How we talk about creativity? It's defined in numerous different ways. As a student. As a general user. If I want to be creative. Like what does that even mean? How is it defined? And so that definition and how the army chooses to define it? I think does matter and how you then go about measuring it utilizing it in. Your daily life. But right now, we have multiple definitions for creativity and not just one solid like, yep there it is. I know exactly what it is. Everything has a little bit of a, you know, the things that we measured, novel, useful and relevant. Those pieces, those tenants like, underline all the definitions, but there isn't one solid, clear definition, and so I think that might be a little bit murky and why, perhaps we don't think about it very often, or why we don't measure it. It's just because we don't really know what it is. Everybody has their own definition or they think it's music or something much more flowery instead of something very concrete, that can be very concrete. And then Rich, do you have any examples from the from the data that you saw? Dr. Richard McConnell I was just listening to this incredible discussion and just, so, some of the stuff that we ran into. This was one of the reasons why I love doing research so much because it's discovering what you didn't expect. When we saw these numbers that we thought might be a cultural indication? We thought, OK, we had these huge Cohens Ds. The numbers for the test and even the high participating control. That said, hey, maybe I mean, back to your comments, Angela on faculty being, , interested and willing and passionate that first fourteen that we isolated. That was a that was an instructor that was very passionate about this lesson and wanted to share. And they got close to a 20% increase in creativity. I don't think that's an accident. And the other thing we looked at from the numbers perspective was we thought OK, , like if you look for example and I go back to what Angela just said. I don't know if you guys saw this, but when Ukraine one of the most recent things they did was you know they're having all these problems with these drones that that the Russians are shooting at them. They have recently obtained World War Two AAA guns, the they're dirt cheap and they're available on the market and the ammo's very cheap, and they basically took a American camera and a Chinese tablet and turned it into an automated weapon system, sort of akin to what's on the striker to make it more accurate. Now that's an extremely creative idea, but it's it. It's a feasible one, and it's a lot of people wouldn't have come up. With it so. I'll quote the the late Doctor Sir Kenneth Robinson when he said, creativity is not just creativity. It's having original ideas that have value that can be applied in the real world to solve significant problems. So one of the things we did look at culturally was. What effect did the higher response rate have on just one variable novelty? The highest participating teams had the highest percentages of increase in novelty scores. The 86% team had a 42% increase. The 75% team out of 38% in. And even a team at 34 had an almost 20%, nineteen point twelve. So I look at that as a as an amazing increase and just this ability to be novel or surprising. Because if you look at the OPP map guidance, one of the things they want is to make it so that our officers are not as predictable. Well, novel ideas that the opponent can't anticipate, , and that's that, relates to another little piece here that and I know you're going to be want to know if they have or are we going to repeat the study and the answer to that is yes, but we've also replicated these. Findings in two different populations already. Doctor Fletcher has replicated these findings. With elementary school students in Ohio and with ROTC cadets in North Carolina and then the numbers that they've obtained are very close to what we have, which is a bit shocking to be honest, because the cat that they constructed in Ohio were a bunch of educators. and the cat that they constructed in North Carolina were mostly NCO's. I think with one captain who were working as ROTC instructors and the numbers are very similar.The other thing that they added as a variable was resilience, right? So one of the things they tried on the elementary school. Students was on their post-test they when they came with a response to their post-test they were told hey, your solution isn't going to work. You gotta try another one. When they started the experiment, 50% would give up, get angry. But by the end of the experiment, 100% refused to give up because they found that their second, third and 4th solutions were often way better than their first one, which was the more obvious, and I think that has some really good applications going forward for military thinkers because oftentimes here's how you can apply this course of action. Development if we come up with a really obvious course of action, it's also the most obvious the enemy will think of, and they will be prepared for it, so being able to be novel and come up with things that aren't necessarily our first idea, nor maybe not even our second idea but one. I'm already applying this in the classroom. We just got done with an iteration of the military decision making process, and I said OK, that COA isn't going to work. Come up with something else and the next one they came up with was much more creative and innovative than what they had originally speculated on trying. Dr. Megan Hennessey Have you by chance included the enlisted force in your sample? Dr. Richard McConnell Not yet. That is something that we intend to do because when I first presented these findings to our leadership here in the school, General Foley, our Sergeant Major was like, hey, we need to get this to the PME because NCO's and enlisted folksoftentimes one of the things that Doctor Fletcher has said on more than one occasion that he admires about us in the military. He says military leaders don't get to choose the problems that they solve. Typically, they're given a problem and then they have to solve it well. Enlisted folks. That's oftentimes what they're doing too, so I would imagine the way this level of creativity might be expressed at the enlisted and NCO ranks. Might yield some really interesting findings that we have not yet discovered. For example, I saw this when I did 3 assignments in the Mission Command training program here at Leavenworth when I was on active duty. And so I got to do multiple exercises over multiple years, seeing leaders and Staffs, and oftentimes you find some of these junior enlisted or. Junior NCO's have some innovative ideas based on stuff that the senior leaders hadn't even noticed. And oftentimes they sit on that information, and it's a. It's a chore to get it. Out of. Them so again, back to cultural issues if we could find ways to stimulate people to hey share this idea, you may think it's a wild idea, but let's have a culture where we can. I came up with a recommendation for this in in an earlier writing that built on this study, which was an article called Connecting the Dots is it's a second and a three article series related to the war gaming study. Where we could use the concepts of exercise design? To help Staffs while doing operations. We have a person who comes up with some sort of a threat or an opportunity that is simulated that they introduced to the oncoming shift in a command post. And this could be one of your junior folks writing this, and you give them maybe some guidance on. Hey, here's a learning objective that we want to stimulate, right? An inject that would stimulate that and then that person gets to use their imagination and their creativity to come up with an alternative future that stimulates that oncoming Shift to maybe start a battle drill, or even better, discover a battle drill we need but don't have. And I've used this already in the classroom. I do this every time we do a simulation, I have somebody whose job it is to write a learning objective that the student leadership approves and then comes to me with. Hey, here's the injects and We're going to insert these to try to stimulate this learning objective, and I find the buy in First off for the simulation is much higher. And everybody now understands, hey, we're sort of all building our learning environment together and we're using creativity and imagination. And it starts. With curiosity I mean, what are we curious enough to know what our weaknesses are, and then find ways to strengthen those and make them better? Dr. Megan Hennessey Thank you so much. I think what I respect most about this conversation and your research design and your responsible and creative use of the data is that it's not just an isolated empirical inquiry, right? It seems like your team has made great strides in thinking about actionable recommendations for military education right from the start, and then it's been baked into everything that you have done thus far. So, I know that this is probably just the beginning and you could probably spend the rest of your careers analyzing this data. Speaker Oh yeah. Dr. Megan Hennessey Congratulations on the strong start. To wrap us up here today, is there anything else you'd like to share? Dr. Richard McConnell Just to let you know, we have multiple organizations. We've got people at Texas A&M's engineering department that are interested in continuing this work. Ohio State University's engineering Department is interested. University of Pennsylvania. Wharton has voiced some curiosity about this, and the more we share this across the military. Institutions, the more interest we've got folks from the air defense community. That wants to be involved. We got people from the explosive ordnance discipline interested so and here at CGSC. We are including this new lesson in our curriculum. We're going to publish with the Association of Business Simulations and experiential learning. There is a teaser article. A 14-page summary. Article that should be published with Ohio State University's project narrative. Their journal is entitled narrative, and it should be out this month. In January of 2023. So we're going to continue to build on this, and what I'd encourage anybody who's listening? I welcome anybody to contact us and ask us. Questions be inquisitive. Be curious about how can you employ this. In your institution, cause in and this is the thing that Angela and I and everybody. I mean. This is a team of nine people on this project, and basically, we're all very passionate about. We don't see that creativity is going to be optional in the future. If you take a look at what's going on in Ukraine right now, you can see the delta between a creative organization and one that is not, and I would tell you that organizations under totalitarian regimes kill creativity. And so, it is becoming very obvious that the Russians are struggling because they are. They're not very curious. They've got loads of problems they aren't aware of because they aren't curious enough to go look and find out what's busted. That's one aspect of curiosity that can be applicable to operations, but also, they can't anticipate what their opponent is about to do. Andthe Ukrainians are doing a much better job in that regard, so I think this is a cautionary tale for us in in the United States. Department of Defense. We have got to become more creative not just because we were told to in the Officer Professional Military Education Policy, but because going forward we have got to come up with new fresh innovative novel. Suitable and feasible ideas. Major Angela Samosorn I would say also for faculty and anyone who's responsible for growing and nurturing and developing junior officers and officers alike and enlisted soldiers, just to recognize that creativity is everywhere we have. Inherently creative people within our ranks. We have folks who are who may think they're not creative, but it turns out they actually are. And so. Kind of. Encouraging the fostering of that environment and also recognizing that the beauty of creativity is, you know, in environments of PME or even professional development, the day-to-day operations of a unit, it's pretty low threat, and you can kick around some really great stuff. And it doesn't have to be right, and it doesn't cost anything. Chasing unicorns every single day is actually all right, so that you have some pretty solid way. These to present those courses of action that have been really well thought out when the time is right, but just encouraging it and recognizing it and realizing again it does not have to be right, there's no right or wrong answer, and letting that be OK, I think is really. Something that I just would love for everybody to really wrap their arms around and embrace in this environment is that it's OK to be wrong. It's OK to not have all the answers, and it's OK to just think way out there, but also realizing that you know and at the end of the day it has to be. Novel, suitable and feasible, but what that feasibility looks like may not be something that's super evident to us right now. Dr. Richard McConnell Well, just to add on to that one, and that is what I would really like to see us be more willing to do is experiment. You know what? What I'd like to try to tell my students is your order that you wrote for this operation is your research protocol. This is what you think is going to work, but it might not, and if you're not curious enough to look at it. You know you're not going to find that next best, novel idea that's going to work. That will take the enemy by surprise, and I again to quote Sir Kenneth Robinson again, he's like if you want to come up with something creative and innovative, you've got to be prepared. To be wrong. And I say this is an artillery person, and I know aviators that would say the same thing for shooting cannons and rockets and flying an airplane. We do want to have a checklist. There's certain things that we do want to be prescriptive on. But we become sometimes so wedded to that we can't see the value of being creative enough to come up with. You know that flight of fancy that Unicorn that hasn't been discovered yet but is there for us to use, and so I think that's what we need to start challenging our leaders and are enlisted in NCO leaders to try to find to spread your wings and find out how creative you can be. Because I think what we discovered with when we started looking at up these offerings and the post tests. It was really easy. To see the ones that were obviously creative. And these are amongst just regular folks that are coming to CGSC. These are our people that are coming up with these creative ideas. Dr. Megan Hennessey Yes, I think, you know, narrative and sea stories from my naval perspective-- and war stories-- are not anything new to the military. It's baked into our culture, but what you all have done with your team takes it to the next level in a way that can be so useful to military education, so thank you both for joining me today and good luck with your future research. Dr. Richard McConnell Thank you so much for having us. Major Angela Samosorn Thank you.