The Foundations of Innovation (Part 5 of 7) – Tools

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

Of the three components of our model of innovation, Tools - and more specifically, artifacts of technology that allow us to do things that we can’t do with our physical bodies alone - are usually the one most easily associated with innovation. They provide tangible evidence of growth and progress, with their importance as visible symbols power and pride often eclipsing the importance of the tool’s functional utility.  For the purposes of our model, tools include not only the physical artifacts that we use to improve the capabilities of our physical bodies, but also the analytical and computer tools that we use to assist and enhance our processes of cognition. 

While it’s common for military and defense leaders to talk about the primacy of people and ideas in importance when seeking to build a strong military, a look at our budgets often tells a different story – as the Biblical admonition goes, “Where your treasure is, there is your heart”.  In Western militaries, maintaining technological advantage remains one of the highest priorities, especially as resources diminish, and defense leaders seek to reduce growing personnel costs to maintain programs and readiness. This line of thinking is reflected in the Third Offset Strategy proposed by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, harkening back to the previous offset strategies from the 1950s and late 1970s. Secretary Work issued the following challenge to graduates of the National Defense University in 2014:

In order to maintain our technological superiority as we transition from one warfighting regime to another, we must begin to prepare now.  In addition to new technologies, a third offset strategy will require innovative thinking, the development of new operational concepts, new ways of organizing, and long-term strategies.  So consider this your first student assignment.  As future strategic leaders, you need to ask: How should we prepare for a future where new and disruptive technological developments are continuously occurring?  What policies are needed, what investments are warranted?   

http://www.defense.gov/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1873

The Challenges

As we consider Secretary Work’s challenge, it behooves us to look at the role of technology in past periods of innovation, in order to look for instructive lessons that will help us make the appropriate investments in a world increasingly described as complex and uncertain.

Writing about technology in his case study driven book Military Adaptation in War (With Fear of Change), Williamson Murray observed the following:

In the modern period, when machines and technology have become crucial enablers for those who do the fighting, the concepts and innovations of peacetime invariably get much of the next war wrong. Two factors are significant here: first, how well one estimates the impact of new technologies on the battlefield, and second, how well one closes the gap between the initial estimates and assumptions and what turns out to be reality. The first factor has proven particularly difficult in the twentieth century, because multiple technologies and tactical conceptions have come into play simultaneously, while multiple actors are adapting at the same time. Military organizations have had to estimate not only the impact of technology but also the synergy of multiple technologies as well as how their opponents will utilize them. 

This illustrates the fundamental challenge of choosing which technologies to pursue amidst uncertainty, which was also echoed by Stephen Peter Rosen in Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military, in which he states “Technological innovation is strongly characterized by the need to develop strategies for managing uncertainty”.

Potential Pitfalls

Overemphasis on technology at the expense of ideas and groups, or technological proposals that do not address defense challenges in a holistic manner, will likely create more problems than they solve. As Williamson Murray describes it:

For a number of pundits in the 1990s, it seemed as if technological advances would provide a silver bullet to escape the difficulties that have pervasively handicapped the employment of military forces throughout the centuries…The experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan have dissipated that fog of willful ignorance about the fundamental nature of war, not to mention historical experience. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, with the possible exception of nuclear weapons, technology has been an enabler and driver of change rather than its determinant. Even more important than technology in innovation and adaptation has been the creation of military cultures amenable to careful historical and experiential learning, honest analysis, and imaginative, realistic thinking about the future possibilities of weapons systems.

This sentiment was described by the former National Security Advisor and then Lieutenant General HR McMaster as “the vampire fallacy”.

 http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/discussing-the-continuities-of-war-and-the-future-of-warfare-the-defense-entrepreneurs-foru

While McMaster does not provide evidence of specific contemporary military leaders advocating such views, the admonition that innovation in technology tends to be more easily emphasized than innovation in ideas and groups is valid from a psychological sense – it’s much easier to concentrate on things that you can see and measure (tools) than things that you can’t (ideas and group dynamics).  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and while it’s occasionally possible that a “game changing” technology has arrived truly arrived on the scene. But more often than not, such claims are made to inoculate a proposed technological approach against historical criticism.  Anytime someone tries to sell you a technological solution to military problems that have existed since the days of Thucydides, it’s highly likely that they haven’t thought the entire problem through.

While we consider our future force structures in terms of which tools we invest in, we also must guard against assigning undue emotional attachment to the tools themselves, which may cloud our judgment about their effectiveness, and perhaps even blind us from the realization that they have become obsolete, and need to be replaced.  Murray goes on:

A primary source of conflict and tension in our case study appears to lie in this great word I have used so often in the summary, the word “identification”. It cannot escape notice that some men identified themselves with their creations – sights, gun, gear, and so forth – and thus obtained a presumed satisfaction from the thing itself, a satisfaction that prevented them from thinking too closely on either the use or the defects of the thing; that others identified themselves with a settled way of life they had inherited or accepted with minor modification and thus found their satisfaction in attempting to maintain that way of life unchanged; and still others identified themselves as rebellious spirits, men of the insurgent cast of mind, and thus obtained a satisfaction from the act of revolt itself. This purely personal identification with a concept, a convention, or an attitude would appear to be a powerful barrier in the way of easily acceptable change.

As discussed in the “ideas” segment, it’s always a struggle to disaggregate one’s culture from the tools that spawned it – as Steven Johnson describes it with the “10/10 rule”, it usually takes ten years for a new tool to reach maturity in development, and another ten for the tool to become widely adopted. This is not a problem exclusive to the military, nor is it exclusive to tools – as the Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Planck once said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Another potential pitfall from technology is choosing technological approaches that limit our options by their very design, or ones that create “blindness from abstraction” by oversimplifying the problems that they’re designed to solve in ways that may not be visible to us. Whether using thought experiments or formal analytical methods and tools, one must necessarily simplify the complexity of the real world into manageable levels of abstraction so that different potential options - combinations of ways and means at varying levels of risk - can be evaluated against each other. In the future, automation and “intelligent machines” will be increasingly capable of taking on tasks that can only be done by humans at the moment. But when it comes to addressing complex, nonlinear, and ambiguous social problems, it’s unlikely that all of the relevant nodes, patterns, connections, and associations will ever be sufficiently captured and replicated inside of a decision support tool, requiring us to use our own intuitions to make the best  choices,  or settle on the “least bad’ ones. 

The last potential pitfall we’ll mention is the decrease in our own cognitive abilities that we experience as we delegate more and more of our thinking to our tools. 

http://theweek.com/article/index/243813/8-drivers-who-blindly-followed-their-gps-into-disaster

While many of our readers are probably good enough navigators to never replicate these mishaps, the author challenges any of the ones with smartphones to consider whether or not they have memorized any new phone numbers (besides their own) since acquiring it.

Successful strategies for technological innovation

So how should we inoculate ourselves from unhealthy attachments to our old tools, and the sometimes seductive novelty of new ones? And how should we choose which technologies to invest in given fundamental uncertainty which prevents specific prediction of our future competitive environments? Rather than to analyze the efficacy of our tools separate from the contexts in which they will be used, we should mirror those contexts as closely as possible in experiments, tests, and wargames. As Elting Morison describes it based on several case studies in Men, Machines, and Modern Times:

In each case [successful innovations after “experimental demonstrations” in the case studies] when confronted by mechanical novelty men made the effort to provide interested members of the immediate community with the opportunity to get evidence on how the new instrument worked, to assess its meaning in the community, and to determine for themselves the acceptance, rejection, or modification of the new condition offered them…In all the areas of difficulty and doubt…the development of a series of small experiments, with the means available for observing the evidence produced and analyzing the results, would produce a set of alternative solutions and the data necessary both for fuller understanding of the nature of new situations and for intelligent selection among the alternatives…Each experiment should be small enough in scale and sufficiently detached from existing practice so that the continuing state of things would not be disrupted. In addition, in each area of interest there should be not one, but a good many different experiments of differing design so that a suitable array of alternative solutions could be offered. There should also be enough of them in all parts of our life to demonstrate that the society is proceeding, as a whole, in the mood of the experiment…The creation and preservation of this experimental mood may in itself be of the first importance. It suggests that members of the society can have a direct part in the decisions affecting the shape of the society; by offering the possibility of reasoned change, it may measurably reduce the natural human resistance to changes not fully understood.

Rosen also affirms this experimental strategy for determining which technologies to invest in:

Analysis of current environments can narrow the range of possible futures, but imaging the future involves asking a series of “what ifs?” and thinking through the implications of those answers. Simulations have been useful in this process, but simulations are not predictions, and should not be treated as such. All simulation can do is identify a range of potential military requirements. In some cases, simulation and analysis was used to narrow the range of alternatives enough to permit the commitment of a service to the creation of a new capability.

Ultimately, when choosing which tools to invest in for the future, your decision should be based on the best possible systemic understanding of what the potential combinations of ideas, groups, and tools will be, balanced against the fundamental constraints of your total resources. It’s ultimately about the social contexts that tools can help to create, not the capabilities of the tool devoid of context, which counts in the long run. 

Next in the series: We’ll conclude our exploration of the model of innovation.