For this year’s movie episode, we elected to take on a video series used during World War II to help socialize US Army rules and procedures among forces either deployed or getting ready to deploy. Private SNAFU was a series of at least 26 black-and-white animated shorts of three to five minutes in length recounting various misadventures of the title character as he goes to war. The purpose of the training videos was to socialize and reinforce the importance of adherence existing Army policies and procedures and helping to introduce soldiers to potential hazards and challenges that they would face in combat.

Produced by Warner Bros. who used a Looney Tunes animation style, the shorts used comedy to get the points across. Private SNAFU was a clueless and reckless soldier prone to malingering, cutting corners, paying no attention to surroundings, or directly rebelling against and breaking rules. Each video put SNAFU in a common wartime situation where he would make the wrong decisions that risked the rest of SNAFU’s unit or the overall mission. In the end, he would either mend his ways or face dire consequences. The use of comedy helped make the content accessible to an audience that was dealing with a lot of fear and uncertainty in the wartime environment while facing a determined and resourceful enemy. Soldiers would learn to not want to be like SNAFU and instead see following the rules as necessary for surviving and getting home after the war was over.

The video series would be well-remembered although the films would disappear from public view for decades after the war, resurfacing through social media in the early 21^st century. It serves as a good case study for socializing organizational policies and procedures more generally to a reluctant audience, after all, mandatory training is known for both its importance in organizational life but also as drudgery and a bane of the workplace environment. The Private SNAFU series may have succeeded in maintaining the soldiers’ attention, but some of the tactics used (sexist and racist tropes) would not be considered acceptable at workplaces today.

Which leads to important questions about what kinds of media and approaches would be most effective and most efficient, given the increasing breadth and complexity of workplace rules and policies that need to be socialized among the workforce? Training that appears to only satisfy a legal requirement and does not engage the workers may be resented. Training that only preaches the policy could be ignored and quickly forgotten. Training that emphasizes style over substance, on the other hand, could muddle the message. Finding the suitable balance thus is a major challenge for training material developers.

You may also download the audio files here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Supplement

Watch with us:

“Private SNAFU Collection,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqqqqZrD37h57uFAKgONMwT9gTZtqmihS

To know more:

Kaufman, M. D. (2015, March 25). Ignorant armies: Private Snafu goes to war, Public Domain Review. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/ignorant-armies-private-snafu-goes-to-war/

Related episodes from the Talking About Organizations Podcast:

None.