The Assumptions of Success
Abstract
COL Ned Marsh’s critique of the Army Special Forces model raises a challenge that extends well beyond force design: successful organizations and leaders alike can adapt continuously while becoming increasingly optimized for conditions that are themselves changing. This article examines how assumptions forged through success become embedded in organizational culture and professional identity, making them progressively harder to examine even as circumstances evolve. The central task is not adaptation itself, but the discernment required to distinguish enduring principles from context-dependent models before changing realities expose the difference.
The Question Beneath the Debate
COL Ned Marsh’s recent article, The Last A-Team: Special Forces Aren’t Special Anymore, presents a compelling argument regarding whether the current Army Special Forces model remains optimally aligned with the demands of an increasingly contested and technologically sophisticated operating environment. Much of the discussion surrounding the article has understandably focused on force design, unconventional warfare, and strategic competition. Yet embedded within Marsh’s critique is a broader observation that extends well beyond the Special Operations Forces (SOF) enterprise.
One of the more interesting aspects of Marsh’s argument is that it challenges a common assumption about adaptation itself. Institutions are often criticized for becoming stagnant, complacent, or resistant to change. The implied solution is straightforward: adapt, innovate, modernize, and evolve. Marsh describes a different phenomenon.
The force he describes did not remain static. Throughout the Global War on Terror (GWOT), Special Forces expanded, refined capabilities, accumulated operational experience, and responded to an extraordinary operational demand signal across multiple theaters. In many respects, it did exactly what successful organizations are expected to do.
The question raised by the article is therefore not whether adaptation occurred. Rather, it is whether adaptations reinforced during one strategic era remained optimally aligned with the realities of another.
This distinction matters because it shifts attention away from the presence or absence of change and toward the assumptions guiding change. At its core, Marsh’s argument suggests that organizations may adapt continuously while becoming increasingly optimized for conditions that are themselves evolving.
Although Marsh’s focus is organizational, the phenomenon he describes is not unique to military institutions. Successful organizations and leaders alike eventually confront the same underlying question: how do you recognize when the assumptions that contributed to previous success no longer fully explain the realities you now face? Organizations encounter this challenge through doctrine, culture, incentives, and force design. Individuals encounter it through professional identity, accumulated expertise, and deeply held beliefs about leadership, contribution, achievement, meaning, and purpose. The mechanisms differ, but the challenge is consistent, and understanding why it occurs requires understanding how successful assumptions become embedded in organizations and individuals alike.
From Success to Assumption
Successful organizations operate according to assumptions about how success is achieved. Some assumptions concern strategy, others technology, leadership, culture, risk, or organizational design. Initially, these assumptions function as working hypotheses. They are tested against reality and retained when they consistently produce desired outcomes. Organizational scholars have called this the “competency trap”: the dynamic by which success with one approach makes alternatives appear progressively less attractive, even when those alternatives hold greater long-run potential.
Individuals undergo a remarkably similar process. Professional assumptions do not emerge in isolation; they develop through repeated interaction with particular environments, responsibilities, incentives, and challenges. For Special Operations leaders, those assumptions are often forged through years of deployments, team leadership, mission planning, problem-solving under uncertainty, and service within organizations that place extraordinary value on competence, trust, and mission accomplishment. As leaders encounter increasingly complex problems, assume greater responsibility, and experience success within those contexts, they naturally construct explanations for how contribution is created, how leadership is exercised, and how achievement is attained. Because these explanations are repeatedly reinforced through experience, they become increasingly persuasive and increasingly integrated into professional judgment.
In both organizations and individuals, assumptions that initially function as tentative explanations gradually become accepted explanations for why success occurs.
The process extends far beyond conscious decision-making. Assumptions that repeatedly produce desired outcomes rarely remain isolated observations. Organizations begin building systems around them. Training, doctrine, promotion systems, resource allocation, and professional norms gradually evolve in ways that reinforce assumptions associated with success. Leadership selection often amplifies the process by rewarding individuals who demonstrate proficiency within those frameworks. Over time, as Edgar Schein observed, assumptions become so thoroughly embedded in organizational culture that they cease to be recognized as assumptions at all and are treated as features of reality itself. Leaders who fail to surface these embedded assumptions, Schein warned, will ultimately be managed by them rather than managing them.
A parallel process occurs within individuals. Approaches to leadership, decision-making, and contribution that repeatedly produce success become increasingly integrated into professional identity. Confidence grows not merely because these approaches are familiar, but because they have consistently worked. Research on professionals navigating major role transitions confirms this pattern: the identities and frameworks that leaders carry into new circumstances are not neutral tools but deeply constructed explanations, shaped through experience and validated through outcomes, that continue to exert influence long after the environment that produced them has changed. Over time, assumptions about how success is achieved become intertwined with assumptions about who one is.
One reason this process is so powerful is that success creates evidence. Organizations and leaders naturally develop confidence in assumptions that repeatedly produce desired outcomes. A senior SOF leader who has spent decades solving increasingly complex operational, organizational, and strategic problems naturally develops confidence in the frameworks that helped produce success. Those frameworks were shaped through experience, validated through outcomes, and reinforced by increasing levels of responsibility and trust.
Success answers one question: what worked? It also raises another: why did it work? As successful outcomes accumulate, confidence grows not only in particular actions but also in the assumptions used to explain them.
Eventually, success stops being treated merely as evidence that an action worked. It becomes evidence that the assumptions behind that action accurately describe reality itself.
Marsh’s argument is compelling precisely because it challenges the conventional assumption that adaptation is synonymous with relevance. Organizations are frequently warned about stagnation. Special Forces did not stagnate. It expanded, refined capabilities, developed expertise, and met operational demand. In many respects, it did exactly what successful organizations are expected to do. The question Marsh raises is therefore more difficult. Can an organization become increasingly effective while simultaneously becoming increasingly optimized for a strategic environment that is changing?
The same question can be asked of individuals.
Consider a Special Operations leader who has spent decades learning that contribution is measured through responsibility, operational effectiveness, and mission accomplishment. Those assumptions may be entirely appropriate within the environment in which they developed. Yet changing circumstances may eventually require new ways of understanding contribution that are less connected to operational responsibility and more connected to influence, mentorship, family, community, or other forms of service.
Similarly, a leader who has spent years operating within highly structured organizations may develop assumptions about authority, decision-making, and impact that function exceptionally well within that context. When circumstances change, the challenge is rarely abandoning those assumptions altogether. More often, it involves determining which aspects remain useful and which reflect conditions that no longer fully exist.
What Changes and What Endures
One reason assumptions become difficult to examine is that principles and models are often conflated. Principles tend to remain relevant across environments because they reflect enduring truths about leadership, service, responsibility, stewardship, courage, contribution, and human flourishing. Models, by contrast, represent attempts to express those principles within a particular context. They are shaped by the realities, demands, constraints, and opportunities of a specific environment. Peter Drucker observed that management principles should not prescribe permanent solutions but instead serve as boundaries that prevent disastrous actions, because universally applicable best practices routinely fail in complex, dynamic environments. The same logic applies to the models through which leadership principles are expressed: their validity is always partly a function of context.
Principles and models do not change at the same rate. Principles often remain remarkably stable, while models frequently do not.
Military service, command, operational leadership, and mission execution can be understood as models through which deeper principles are expressed. The principles themselves may endure long after the conditions that shaped their original expression have changed. Service remains valuable even when the form of service changes. Contribution remains important even when the mechanisms through which contribution occurs evolve. Responsibility, stewardship, and purpose often persist even as the contexts in which they are exercised shift dramatically.
The challenge for both organizations and leaders is that successful models can become difficult to distinguish from the principles they were designed to serve. Because a model proved effective in one environment, it becomes tempting to assume it represents a permanent solution rather than a context-dependent expression of a deeper principle. Research on organizational learning confirms the pattern: When an organization performs well with a particular approach, it naturally accumulates experience with that approach. Over time, that experience can crowd out engagement with alternatives, even superior ones. Loyalty to the principle can gradually become loyalty to the model.
At the organizational level, this raises a strategic question. How do successful institutions distinguish between enduring principles and context-dependent assumptions? A military organization may remain committed to service, stewardship, mission accomplishment, and leadership while simultaneously needing to reconsider the structures, capabilities, and operating models through which those principles are expressed. United States Special Operations Command’s (USSOCOM) rapid expansion during the GWOT era demonstrated precisely this tension: every service grew its special operations component in response to demand, winning lavish resources and influence, yet that success embedded assumptions about operating environments, threat types, and organizational structures that the post-GWOT strategic environment has since called into question.
This challenge becomes particularly important during periods of strategic change. Organizations that successfully adapted to one operating environment may find that the assumptions underlying those adaptations no longer align fully with emerging realities. The question is not whether previous models were effective. The question is whether the conditions that made those models effective continue to exist. The ability to distinguish enduring principles from context-dependent assumptions may therefore represent a critical component of long-term institutional relevance and adaptation.
The same challenge exists at the individual level.
Leaders do not simply acquire skills throughout their careers. They develop assumptions about contribution, leadership, achievement, purpose, value, and identity. Most are forged through experience and repeatedly validated through success. That validation is precisely what makes them difficult to examine. The frameworks that leaders carry into new circumstances are not neutral tools but deeply constructed explanations that continue to shape perception and judgment long after the environment that produced them has changed.
A Special Operations leader who spent decades creating value through operational responsibility may eventually encounter circumstances in which contribution is expressed through mentorship, family leadership, teaching, community involvement, or entirely different forms of service. The principle of contribution remains intact. The model through which contribution is expressed may change.
Marsh’s argument focuses on the assumptions embedded within an institution. Yet many of those same assumptions become embedded within the leaders who spent decades succeeding within those institutions. Organizations develop operating models; leaders develop professional identities. Both are shaped by the environments in which success occurs. Both can become increasingly difficult to examine when those environments begin to change.
This helps explain why changing circumstances can be experienced as more than a practical challenge. The issue is rarely determining whether service, contribution, responsibility, or purpose remains important. The deeper challenge is determining whether the models through which those principles have been expressed remain sufficient for emerging realities.
What ultimately requires preservation is not necessarily the model. It is the principle the model was intended to serve.
The Challenge of Discernment
The implications of mistaking context-dependent models for enduring principles extend well beyond professional performance. For many Special Operations leaders, years of service do more than develop expertise. These experiences also shape a deeply entrenched understanding of contribution, purpose, and identity. Human beings tend to organize experience into narratives that answer fundamental questions about who they are, how they contribute, and why their efforts matter. Within elite military organizations, those narratives are forged through shared hardship, operational responsibility, mission focus, and a culture that places extraordinary value on competence and service.
When environments evolve, the task is not merely learning new skills or adopting new behaviors. It may also require reexamining assumptions that have shaped one’s understanding of contribution, purpose, and success for many years. Studies of military-to-civilian transition have found that reintegration can pose personal, social, and financial challenges because it requires individuals to navigate multiple, sometimes competing identities at once. What is often framed as a professional transition is, at least in part, a process of reconsidering the framework through which identity, meaning, and value have been understood.
The challenge is not determining whether those assumptions were wrong. In many cases, they were entirely appropriate for the conditions in which they developed. The more difficult question is whether they remain sufficient for the realities now emerging.
When assumptions about contribution, purpose, and value become intertwined with identity, changing circumstances can feel less like a practical challenge and more like a challenge to one’s understanding of self. Ibarra’s research on professionals navigating major role transitions found that this experience is not unusual among high-performing leaders: the very frameworks that enabled success in one context continue to shape perception and judgment in the next, often without conscious awareness. The resulting uncertainty is often interpreted as a problem of direction when it may, at least in part, be a problem of interpretation.
The question is not simply where to go next. The question is whether the assumptions used to explain previous success remain adequate for the realities that come next.
For many senior leaders, uncertainty is not simply a function of unclear circumstances. It may also reflect uncertainty regarding assumptions that have long served as reliable guides for understanding contribution, success, and purpose. Careers characterized by increasing responsibility, competence, and achievement naturally reinforce confidence in the frameworks used to navigate them. When changing realities begin to expose the limits of those frameworks, the resulting discomfort is often interpreted as uncertainty about the future. It may instead reflect uncertainty about the assumptions being used to understand what the future requires.
The challenge confronting both organizations and leaders is fundamentally one of discernment. The question is rarely whether previous assumptions were correct. In many cases, they were entirely appropriate for the conditions in which they developed.
The more difficult questions concern whether those assumptions remain adequate for emerging realities. Having established that principles tend to endure while models reflect the conditions that produced them, the practical challenge becomes one of accurate identification. Which assumptions belong to the first category, and which to the second? Which still provide useful explanations of current conditions, and which have quietly become explanations of a world that no longer fully exists? Which elements of a successful model remain essential, and which emerged in response to demands that are now changing? Taken together, these questions resolve into two practical judgments that every leader and institution eventually faces. What should be preserved because it reflects something of enduring value? And what should be reconsidered because it reflects a context that is evolving rather than a principle that endures?
These questions become increasingly important when personal or organizational realities evolve more rapidly than the assumptions used to interpret them. Schein argued that cultural change, at the organizational level, succeeds or fails precisely at this point: surface-level adaptations that leave underlying assumptions unexamined tend to produce change that is real in appearance but limited in substance.
The challenge is not abandoning what previously worked. The challenge is determining what remains relevant, what requires refinement, and what may no longer be sufficient for the conditions emerging ahead.
Conclusion: Preserving Principles, Reconsidering Models
Marsh’s article focuses on whether the current Army Special Forces model remains aligned with the demands of a changing operating environment. Its broader significance, however, lies in a challenge that extends far beyond any single military organization.
Successful organizations and leaders alike eventually encounter circumstances that expose the limits of assumptions forged through previous success. The organizational learning literature has long recognized this dynamic: success reinforces existing routines, and those routines become progressively harder to examine or revise precisely because they have seemed to work thus far.
The challenge is not simply deciding how to adapt. For organizations and leaders alike, the more fundamental task is examining the assumptions that shape what adaptation appears necessary in the first place, returning always to the distinction between principles worth preserving and models worth reconsidering.
For institutions, that work happens through doctrine, force design, and strategic reassessment. For individuals, it happens through the harder and more personal work of examining assumptions that have become intertwined with identity, purpose, and an understanding of what it means to contribute. That work is rarely comfortable, precisely because the assumptions most in need of examination are those most thoroughly validated by a career of genuine achievement.
Viewed through this lens, the challenge confronting Special Forces is not merely one of modernization. It is one of institutional discernment, applying the principles-versus-models distinction not as an abstract framework but as a practical capability. The same is true for the leaders who built their careers within that institution.
Ultimately, the challenge is not preserving a particular model of success. It is preserving the principles that gave that success meaning while remaining willing to reconsider the models through which those principles are expressed. The assumptions that create success can become increasingly difficult to examine precisely because they created success.
