The Foundations of Innovation: Groups (Part 4 of 7)

“Other officers told me how they had seen the Hussars charging into the Jerry tanks sitting on the tops of their turrets more or less with their whips out. ‘It looked like the run-up to the first fence and the point-to-point’ the adjutant described it. The first action was very typical of a number of those early encounters involving cavalry regiments. They had incredible enthusiasm and dash, and sheer exciting courage which was only curbed by the decreasing stock of dashing officers and tanks.”

Robert Crisp, North Africa, 1942, quoted in Williamson Murray’s Military Adaptation in War (With Fear of Change)

(Note – all bolded passages within quotes are highlights by the author of the post)

It takes a network to create an innovative idea, and it usually takes an even larger network to put that idea into action. You need to execute change through groups, but groups tend to resist change by their very nature. As Williamson Murray put it in his book Military Adaptation in War (With Fear of Change):

One of the most serious impediments to effective adaptation is that human institutions, particularly the bureaucracies that run them on a day to day basis, do not exist for the purpose of adapting to a changing and uncertain world. They aim at imposing order and form on a world that is inherently disorderly and ambiguous. They exist to act as a brake on significant changes that upset current patterns of behavior. In fact, most bureaucracies oppose change, because it represents a direct threat to their position.

There is a double irony here, because a bureaucratic system is an absolute necessity for successful adaptation. Nevertheless, at the same time, the rhythms and culture of most bureaucracies are antithetical to successful adaptation…By their nature, bureaucrats are loath to make decisions, especially when the results may in the end be attributable to them. Far better to reject proposals coming from below and thus not expose oneself to opprobrium on the part of their superiors…Of course, it is the cultural and political framework that allows genius either to flourish or to wither. 

At the inaugural Defense Entrepreneurs Forum Conference in 2013, Naval historian BJ Armstrong gave an excellent presentation on “The Gun Doctor” Admiral William S. Sims, describing his fight to improve the accuracy of naval gunnery at the turn of the century as a young officer. Sims spent over two years trying to convince his superiors in the US Navy to implement improvements in aimed fire, but instead met intense institutional resistance to change, despite the facts that the British had already adopted the practices, and that Sims had collected incontrovertible empirical evidence that new aimed fire techniques produced superior results to the Navy’s current practices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOxzMS718Mc

Sims story was also the subject of an outstanding case study by Elting E. Morison featured in the 1966 book Men, Machines, and Modern Times. In it, he described the social dynamics behind the Navy’s resistance to change in a summary that still resonates today in how they describe how nearly all bureaucratic institutions react to change:

Why this deeply rooted, aggressive, persistent hostility from Washington that was only broken up by the interference from Theodore Roosevelt? Here was a reform that greatly and demonstrably increased the fighting effectiveness of a service that maintains itself almost exclusively to fight. When then this refusal to accept so carefully documented a case, a case proved incontestably by records and experience? Why should virtually all the rulers of a society so resolutely seek to reject a change that so markedly improved its chances for survival in any contest with competing societies? There are obvious reasons that will occur to all of you – the source of the proposed reform was an obscure, junior officer 8000 miles away; he was, and this is a significant factor, criticizing gear and machinery designed by the very men in the bureaus to whom he was sending his criticisms. And furthermore, Sims was seeking to introduce what he claimed were improvements in a field where improvements appeared unnecessary Superiority in war is a relative matter, and the Spanish American War had been won by the old system of gunnery. Therefore, it was superior even though of the 9500 shots fired at various but close ranges, only 121 had found their mark.

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A less obvious cause appears by far the most important one. It has to do with the fact that the Navy [or any service] is not only an armed force; it is a society. Men spend their whole lives in it and tend to find the definition of their whole being within it…The opposition, where it occur, of the soldier and the sailor to such change springs from the normal human instinct to protect oneself, and more especially, one’s way of life. Military organizations are societies built around and upon the prevailing weapons systems. Intuitively and quite correctly the military man feels that a change in weapon portends a change in the arrangements of his society…What then happens to your society if the ship is displaced as the principal element by such a radically different weapon as the plane? The mores and structure of the society are immediately placed in jeopardy. They may, in fact, be wholly destroyed…There is, as everybody knows, no place like home. Who has ever wanted to see the old place brought under the hammer by hostile forces whether they hold a mortgage or inhabit a flying machine?

This resistance to questioning the ideas that become part of one’s personal identity can have fatal effects in the extreme when anachronistic notions of what elevates one in the eyes of their social groups meet opposing innovations that invalidate the old paradigms that the social culture was built around. The crux of overcoming resistance to organizational change is dismantling psychological barriers within the minds of the individuals who define the group’s identity, and conversely, find their own identities within the context of the group.

As Simon Sinek remarked in his book Start With Why, the two things that people crave most in social situations are a sense of meaning within groups, and stability. Innovations force them to question both, asking “Will this change affect my standing in the social order?”, and “Will I have to learn something new?”, both creating cognitive anxieties that people will often deny reality to relieve.

So, how does an innovator overcome these institutional inertias? One critical way is to secure sponsorship from a senior leader with the power to force change, usually one above and outside the organization. This is what ultimately assisted Sims – the President of the United States himself, Theodore Roosevelt, put Sims in charge of naval gunnery after Sims wrote him a letter after years of being ignored by his superiors in the Navy. Given that this is not a highly replicable scenario (or survivable one in a career sense), what other approaches can one take?

Interestingly, one of the most prescient treatises on promoting organizational change is a very short book filled mostly with silly pictures that the author described as “a liberation manual for the chronically entangled and the relentlessly oppressed."

In Orbiting the Giant Hairball, the late Gordon MacKenzie describes his struggle to “subvert the stupefying power of corporate culture and provoke the emancipation of creative genius” at Hallmark” as “the bridge between Hallmarks creative forces and its executives” in a position that he created for himself, the “Creative Paradox”.

So, what is “the Giant Hairball”? As MacKenzie described it:

A hairball is an entangled pattern of behavior. It’s bureaucracy, which doesn't allow much space for original thinking and creativity. It's the corporate tendency to rely on past policies, decisions, and processes as a formula for future success.

http://www.fastcompany.com/32950/how-your-company-giant-hairball

As the creative director in charge of developing new ideas for a large and established hairball, namely the Hallmark Co, MacKenzie saw the primary challenge of being an innovator as learning to “Orbit the Giant Hairball” without either getting sucked into the Hairball and it’s suffocation of your creative side, or alternately, being seen by the Hairball as a foreign object and sent into escape velocity:

You have to find your creative genius in such a way that you still have a relationship with concrete, established norms but are not bound by them.

Besides being filled with a multitude of insights and explanatory metaphors, MacKenzie’s book offers one jewel of a takeaway for the young military innovator who lives in an organization where we literally wear our own corporate identity on our sleeves, lapels, and hats:

Any time a bureaucrat (i.e. a custodian of the system) stands between you and something you need or want, your challenge is to help that bureaucrat discover a means harmonious within the system to meet your need.

Essentially, your task is to ask for something new in the old language, expanding stories and concepts that the people who are in the organization are already comfortable with. Even better, if the innovator can tie the reason for change into the personal and collective “hero stories’ of the group, the difficult road to constructive change quickly becomes much, much smoother.

And you usually can’t do this alone – you need alternative viewpoints to help to shape and share your arguments for change, usually conducted in groups of collaboration outside of the official channels where status quo threatening ideas are more often put to death than allowed to flourish.  General Curtis LeMay described these groups of loyal rebels in his book America Is In Danger in the chapter on “The Impact of Organization”:

Every institution, whether it be a government, a military service, a business, or a university has two kinds of organizations. One is written – established by a constitution, charter, laws, regulations, written policies, or something of this kind. This is the conscious organization, the one people believe controls the activity of the institution. The other organization is unwritten, often unvoiced, and sometimes even unrecognized. It might be called the unconscious or hidden organization. It consists of the customs, traditions, habits, value patterns, and standard practices of the institution’s members, and it is usually far more significant than the written one. Because it is hidden from view, the unwritten organization is harder to cope with.

The hidden organization is one of the major influences leading to reorganization of the formal system. When the formal system becomes completely meaningless, there is nothing left to do but change it to conform more closely with the practical hidden system. Reorganizations that fail to consider the hidden organization are generally unsuccessful.

To achieve an organizational evolution, then, it would seem logical to work on the informal level as a first step. If customs and habits can be formed, the formal endorsement will eventually follow. Some major cultural changes have been accomplished in a short period by strong men who have enforced their wishes on a whole people and made them stick. Kemal Ataturk’s Westernization of Turkey and his insistence on a new alphabet is an example. But such instances are rare even in history, and certainly not in consonance with the American democratic philosophy. Cultural changes – changes which affect hidden organizations such as those found in the military – are evolutionary in American society, although they do come about to some degree by conscious campaigns of persuasion.

Next in the series: We’ll continue exploring the model of innovation, continuing with Tools.