Jarnhamar said:
It's okay to make mistakes and fail. (teaching someone how to deal with failing is important too Imo)
I don't think this is just a little mistake. That should lead to a big discussion on whether someone is ready or capable of being a leader.
A little mistake is not a fail, so if you're saying you only deserve a second chance after "little" mistakes, you have fallen victim to our failure-adverse institution. Big mistakes are fails, and the biggest learning opportunities. If you bury people after they fail, you'll have outed every bit of *experience* and left yourself with a bunch of people who only do cookie-cutter solutions because they are too boring to actually stick their neck out and do something useful.
There doesn't need to be a discussion because of one hard fail. Sometimes people need that experience of freezing up just to wake them up. That's literally how you develop people, you challenge them. You have to expect them to fail sometimes if you're doing it right. They get three attempt built into the system. If they fail hard *three* times and each attempt shows zero growth, then there can be a discussion (and there will be, it's called a "
progress review board" for a reason).
All of this PLQ talk about how the non-combat arms types don't learn anything from combat arms tasks, I would argue the benefit is they actually get to solve novel problems. It's the checked out combat arms person who solves problems which are not novel to them for the entire course that should be complaining about the uselessness of the course.
In fact, as I read the thread and we were talking about how the assessment is not on tactics, but on planning, battle procedure, communication, etc... I thought of my BMOQ where we had to do the Leadership Assessment Course. These were weird small-party tasks, where the goal was to use your section to move an object from one side of a sandbox to another (without touching the sand), which was essentially a puzzle, with odd obstacles and different variety of tools at your disposal (ropes, 2x6, etc.). I can't remember how much time we had, something like 10 or 15 minutes from the time you saw your task to the time the buzzer went and you were complete.
Thinking of that experience, perhaps PLQ would be better served using a similar tool as the "novel problem." If the goal really is to learn how to plan, how to communicate, how to lead, etc., this type of task (it could be something a lot more substantial than 15 minutes), then this type of task if perfect. You won't be able to use an orders template, you will have to learn how to make SMESC really work for you. A combat arms-type can't just mail it in on something he's done 100 times before. The non-combat arms types can stop complaining that they are being assessed at something they aren't used to, because everyone else is too.
Then we can deal with ensuring each person has the required military skill sets separately. Instead of worrying about assessing those in leadership positions on section attacks as an "assessment tool," we can just frigging train them on how to do section attacks, given that they've proven their ability to lead, plan, communicate, etc. through an actual novel problem.
etc the numpties that have big ideas won't have the cash cow anymore.
