The Foundations of Innovation (Part 1 of 7)

Lt Col Dave Lyle, USAF

Innovation is a major theme in our organizational strategies and strategic communications in both the Department of Defense and the Department of the Air Force, and for good reason: 

• Our era of protracted conflict shows no sign of abating, while great power rivalries are increasingly coming to the fore
• Our current plans for force structure and employment are unsustainable given our internal fiscal situation, and may not be relevant given our anticipated threats even if we can resource them
• Changes in technology are driving changes in the way we socialize, and are also disrupting traditional balances of power in ways that we cannot yet grasp or adequately anticipate

Why Innovation?

But putting our specific defense challenges aside for a moment, we might start a discussion on innovation with a more basic question. Why do some people innovate, and embrace change with enthusiasm, even if not all of us do so?

Because it is in our nature to innovate.

Adaptation - the ability to reconfigure individual fitness and responses to successfully withstand the challenges of the external environment – is crucial to the survival of both inorganic and organic systems, and does not necessarily require conscious thought and response. Innovation is about the conscious human responses to the challenges of adaptation, whether they be deliberately sought out, or serendipitously discovered by people with the right mindsets to see both new connections and resultant new possibilities. The story of human ascendance on the planet Earth and our initial voyages beyond it - despite relative our physical fragility compared to the harsh environments we now explore – is based upon our ability to innovate successful ways work together, share ideas, and collectively cope with a myriad of challenges and shocks in the external environment.

And whether one believes it came via design or evolutionary accident (or perhaps even combinations of both), both cognitive neuroscience and our experiences of everyday life shows that our brains are wired to experience satisfaction in making new and useful connections. Innovators often experience a rush of pleasure and relief - the “A Ha!” moment – after seeing existing things combined in new and interesting ways. And as we’ll see in this series, innovation is much more about mindset and culture than it is about richness in resources and technologies.

Because innovation is crucial for successful adaptation in hostile and competitive environments, and is crucial if you want to have a say in your own destiny via the practice of strategy.

Successful survival in any sense comes from the ability to adapt - to adequately match your response to the challenges that the environment presents, challenges you can never perfectly predict in advance, or sense in the present. The best way to hedge against this uncertainty is to have a variety of potential responses ready, or to design in the capability to rapidly develop adequate ones when a possible threat becomes an actual one. In an organizational sense, we can characterize this organizational ability to adapt as having strategic agility.  But agility does not simply mean having many different types of technology available to you – it means being adaptive along the entire process of change within social systems, which we will discuss in this series. And if you want to positively influence the unfolding of the future to create outcomes you desire in the face of opposition – that is, if you’re going to think and act strategically – you must understand the crucial role that innovation plays in competitive contests.  

Because we have no other choice if we want to survive.

The world is constantly changing around us, in part because the outside world is adaptive too, and constantly responds to the choices we make or avoid making. We must be adaptive just to keep the things we already have in a world that is constantly changing around us, but having a positive role in shaping the future requires more than just maintenance of the status quo. In many areas of national interest,  it’s becoming increasingly clear that our current plans and methods are not keeping pace with the rates of change either internally or externally, and our only way out of some of the vicious cycles we’re currently stuck with or in will be successful innovation.

What are our challenges to successful innovation?  

In his book Military Adaptation in War (With Fear of Change), Williamson Murray summarizes the primary challenges that make innovation difficult for many military organizations:

The greatest difficulty clearly has to do with the fundamental nature of war itself. Second, human nature – especially when the egos of leaders at the highest levels become involved – places considerable difficulties in the path of understanding the tactical and operational issues military organizations confront. Without that understanding, adaptation to the actual conditions of conflict simply cannot take place, or even worse, will follow the wrong path.

Making change more difficult is the harsh fact that incompetence, rather than competence, lies at the heart of man’s character. Inevitably, a few individuals possess the clarity of vision, the self-discipline, the imagination, and the toughness of mind to understand the daunting problems that war creates. Moreover, effective performance at one level of war rarely guarantees success at the next level…That is why there have been so few great captains in military history…The few competent can see the forest and the wider landscape of war; most, however, see only the details and the irrelevant.

Exacerbating the difficulties that military institutions face is the fact that, more often than not, they reach decisions by corporate agreement. And there are few institutions in human life more dysfunctional in reaching clear, distinct, purposeful direction than committees.

Finally, and perhaps most daunting, is the fact that war inevitably involves issues at the political, strategic, operational, and tactical levels. That spread of perspective invariably presents contradictory choices to military leaders. Moreover, the qualities that provide for excellence at one level may prevent adaptation at the other levels. 

If Murray is correct, it’s clear that the challenge of innovation goes far beyond investments in the right tools and technology – it requires deliberate engagement along the entire process of change within military societies, to include how the groups that use the technology are formed, and how they think.

How this Series will Describe and Explore the Foundations of Innovation

• We’ll provide a three part model of innovation and change based around the mutual evolutions of Ideas, Groups, and Tools, and show how we derived it from the literature of strategic studies
• We’ll provide examples of innovative ways to look at some the challenges discussed in the “Foundations” series using examples from some notable books on innovation
• We’ll provide some practical advice for those actively pursuing innovation in military circles today

Recommended Reading

The essays in this series will provide evidence from three noteworthy case studies on military innovation, one book on innovation in general, and one brilliant gem written by a self-described “corporate fool”. 

The first is Elting Elmore Morison’s Men, Machines, and Modern Times, complied in 1966.

Morison was an author of non-fiction books, an essayist, a United States historian of technology, a military biographer, an MIT professor emeritus, and was notably the conceiver and founder of MIT's interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology and Society (STS), through which MIT faculty and students focus on the ways in which scientific, technological and social factors interact. During World War II he served in the Naval Reserve.

The Second is Williamson Murray's 2011 book Military Adaptation in War (With Fear of Change).

Murray has taught at the United States Air War College, the United States Military Academy, and the Naval War College. According to the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, he "also served as a Secretary of the Navy Fellow at the Navy War College, the Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, the Matthew C. Horner Professor of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University, the Charles Lindbergh Chair at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, and the Harold K. Johnson Professor of Military History at the Army War College". He previously served in the US Air Force, including a tour in SE Asia with the 314th Tactical Air Wing (C-130s).

The third is Stephen Peter Rosen’s 1994 book, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military.

Stephen Peter Rosen is Harvard College Professor and Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard University, was a professor in the strategy department at Naval War College, and was director of political-military affairs at the National Security Council in the Reagan Administration. 

The fourth is Steven Johnson’s 2011 book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.

Steven Johnson is a contributing editor to Wired, he writes regularly for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and many other periodicals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0af00UcTO-c

Johnson is also the host of the television series How We Got To Now, a documentary on the history of innovation that aired on BBC and PBS in 2014.

https://www.pbs.org/show/how-we-got-now/

And finally, Gordon MacKenzie’s 1998 book Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace.

Gordon MacKenzie was an artist and card designer for Hallmark Corporation who established Hallmark’s Humor Workshop, and eventually created his own position as a “self-styled corporate holy man” and “loyal subversive” for Hallmark with the self-created job title of “Creative Paradox”, who served as the the “liaison between the chaos of creativity and the discipline of business”.

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

Enjoy the series!  Reach back in for part 2!