The Foundations of Innovation (Part 7 of 7) – Current Applications of the IGT Model

By: Lt Col Dave Lyle, USAF

In the classic September 1974 Harvard Business Review article “The Skills of an Effective Administrator”, Robert Katz described three main areas of expertise that define the competency of a good administrator, based not on the personal qualities of the executive, but rather upon what good executives do, and the “three basic developable skills” they need to do them:

It is assumed here that an administrator is one who (a) directs the activities of other persons and (b) undertakes the responsibility for achieving certain objectives through these efforts. Within this definition, successful administration appears to rest upon three basic skills, which we will call technical, human, and conceptual. It would be unrealistic to assert that these skills are not interrelated, yet there may be real merit in examining each one separately, and in developing them independently.

When multiple experts in their fields all come up with a similar “big three” formulation to describe the challenge being strategically effective, and develop them in presumed isolation from one another (See Part 2 of this series), you can be confident that you have a useful model with which to study your own challenges of organization and leadership.  Each theorist we’ve discussed may define the three major “IGT” elements slightly differently (in Katz/s case above, Ideas = conceptual, Groups = human, Tools = technical), and we can probably learn something valuable from exploring each different theorist’s ideas in detail. But the resonance of the parallel big picture insights illustrates the value of our IGT model as a general theoretical construct that complements the specific framings of the other models. Now we can apply the IGT model to some of our current challenges. 

Framing the Current Big Picture Challenge using IGT

If we had to describe the current “IGT balance of advance” of modern society, we might say it this way (and let’s flip “IGT” to “ITG” for a second):

Ideas: The new ideas are out there, and have probably been out there for decades if you study classic literature, and especially science fiction.

Tools: The new tools are coming so fast that they’re almost inventing themselves, and in the case of machine learning algorithms, they are literally inventing themselves.

Groups: Our bureaucratic processes - and especially our systems of governance and laws/regulations - are still largely stuck in the industrial area, and we’re not sure how to respond to all of this new complexity.

In Thomas Friedman’s recent book Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Friedman interviews Google X’s “Captain of Moonshots” Astro Teller, and asks him provide a big picture description of the current state of human affairs. Teller responds by drawing the following diagram:

From Thomas Friedman’s Thank You For Being Late (Fararr, Strauss, and Giroux, 2016), p.32

In this case, we can compare Teller’s diagram with the IGT model by equating Technology to Tools, and Human Adaptability to Ideas and Groups combined. As we discussed in Part 2 of this series, while the Ideas to develop and use new tools often come quickly, our ability to see how the new idea influences other Ideas, and how new Tools developments will impact the relationships and power structures of our Groups, often lags. We invent the new world much faster than we can make sense of it, and that’s perhaps the defining characteristic of what some (including Friedman) call the “Age of Accelerations”.

Increased levels of connection between different social ecosystems are part of what makes this process of sensemaking difficult – the more things are connected, the harder it is to break the systems into smaller, more easily digestible parts and solve them individually.  And as anyone who has ever tried to assemble furniture has found from frustrating firsthand experience, it’s usually not a good idea to tighten down one screw or bolt before figuring out if the others line up, or if the other parts are in the right configurations. Similarly, the same challenge exists if you try to “solve” a problem within Ideas, Groups, or Tools without considering the systemic impacts in the other areas.

Current Department of Defense Challenges

If you have been following the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford’s strategic communications for the last several years, you’ll notice that one of the things he constantly talks about are Transregional, Multidomain, Multifunctional challenges, and how our current Ideas, Groups, and Tools are insufficent, and need to adapt to the requirements of operations that can’t be confined to one warfighting domain, one armed service, or one command’s area of operation. It’s not that these challenges are new – the United States has had to balance such challenges for most of its existence, most notably in World War II as the “Arsenal of Freedom” supporting allies and fighting across the globe. But what has changed in the information age is both the character and degree of connection that we see between activities. Connection has brought great advantages and efficiencies, but it has also brought great vulnerabilities and new forms of contagion.

Part of the challenge any social organization has is that we must constantly balance our perspectives between the general and specific in our thinking (ideas), so we create pockets of specialization to encourage people to become specialist thinkers, doers, and innovators within their niche area of interest. When you want to promote specific Ideas, you need Groups who incentivize, promote, nurture, and protect that behavior from outside threats – groups are where ideas become cemented in the psychology of social identity, perhaps the most powerful force guiding both deliberate and unconscious human action. We need “silos” of specialization in order to produce the best innovations we can in specific areas, usually brought on my people who are very passionate about what that silo is designed around. And we want to encourage diversity in those silos – nature itself shows us that resilient biological systems survive not by being monochromatic, but by balancing levels of diversity that enable living systems to take a hit in one area that does not spread to disrupt all areas.

Successful survival to a constantly changing world requires that you have something in your toolkit to deal with the challenges you actually face, vs the ones you planned on having, or hoped to have. By promoting diversity by design, like the Constitution of the United States does with its three branches and systems for elections, and like the Department of Defense does by sustaining several unique military branches under one Department of Defense roof (to include different service cultures, identities, and core competencies), we make sure that a problem, a deficiency, or narrow groupthink in one part of the system doesn’t necessarily take down the entire system.

But there’s a flipside to silos and tribes – what makes sense within them doesn’t always produce the kinds of enterprise level results that you wanted within the larger ecosystem in play. Peter Senge wrote about this two decades ago from a business systems perspective in his book The Fifth Discipline, and recently Gilian Tett wrote The Silo Effect, incorporating the new knowledge from cognitive neuroscience that is broadening our understandings of the dangers of having silos and stovepipes without some kind of central oversight watching how all of the individual contributions are combining to create an emergent effect at the enterprise or global level. 

At every level of organizational scale, the DoD is increasingly struggling with the Silo Effect as decisions in one silo  - whether that’s divergent programming decisions between the Title 10 services, incompatible war planning assumptions and operational demand signals between the Unified Command Plan geographic and functional combatant commands, siloed concepts being developed mostly by individual services, etc. Decisions made in one silo are increasingly impacting the others as technology connects us, and these trends will continue to do so in the future as we become more, not less, technically interdependent.  But it’s not that we don’t have a clue about this – we have been developing ideas that specifically address these silo issues, and also imagine new opportunities.

The big ideas that we’re currently all talking about in the US joint services are Global Integration and Multi Domain Operations. General Dunford has already provided his guidance on what the services should do to tackle these issues in a recent Joint Force Quarterly article, giving us the “Ideas” and indicating to some degree what kinds of “Tools” we’ll need to achieve the aims of global integration and multidomain operations, but now the key question is this – can we get the overall balance we need with the groups as they currently exist, as described by US law?

There are two notable attempts to update the group structures to facilitate the new ideas, and to buy the right tools for a highly connected future, effectively “bridging the silos” withhout trying to destroy them (we still need and want specialist silos!). The first is the Integrated Operations Division on the Joint Staff (J35), and the second is the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability (AFWIC).

The Integrated Operations Division

The creation of the Integrated Operations Division in the Joint Staff J35 seeks to provide an enterprise level look at US global operations, including unique planning capabilities,  for the Secretary of Defense in a way that hasn’t been done before. But there’s a structural challenge built into the “groups” side of our IGT model – the laws that currently define the relationship of the Chairman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Staff specifically separate the Chairman from the operational command and control chain between the Secretary of Defense and the combatant or “warfighting” commands described geographically and functionally in the Unified Command Plan (EUCOM, CENTCOM, INDOPACOM, STRATCOM, TRANSCOM, etc). The Joint Staff and Chairman do currently recommend the apportionment and allocation of US forces to the combatant commands from the perspective of Global Force Management, matching the ready forces the US Title 10 services present to the warfighting commands requirements, and making the tough calls when multiple warfighting commands are all asking for the same assets and capabilities at once. But this role in apportionment and allocation stands at odds with the idea of the Chairman and his/her staff providing “best military advice” outside of the operational chain of command.

So from a “groups” perspective, the Joint Staff is currently organized more like a traffic cop than an urban planner: they don’t fully anticipate what the demand signals will be and seek to drive them, they just throttle the responses to what the combatant commands are requesting. But the kinds of operations the Chairman says the DoD writ large needs to be able to handle requires something more proactive, and a mindset that thinks above the silos of the combatant commands or the services, and also needs a capability to set common standards that all of the silos must respond as they plan their future strategies and procurement. Can this be done under the current “groups” construct and authorities? The Joint Staff is doing their best to do this under the current construct, but others are not so sure that this will be enough, and think that a new groups construct – captured by new legislation such as a new National Security Act – will be required to truly incentivize the practice of globally integrated strategic design at the top of the DoD, and back it with Groups constructs that protect the people who learn to think and act this way.

Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability (AFWIC)

At a level of echelon down from the Joint Staff, the individual services also deal with their own version of the silo effect, in which the groups as currently organized do not necessarily deliver the enterprise level synergistic capabilities that are needed by the joint force. The Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff of the Air Force recently realized that several “groups” changes were needed to promote synergy rather than the old Core Function Lead construct in which a lead command focused on building the best capability that they could from within their silo perspective, but no one was really looking across the silos to identify commonly required investments (e.g. precision navigation and timing, command and control) that a higher level of systemic analysis would highly prioritize for the whole force, even if the individual Major Commands all put the same things just below their own priorities. This year the Air Force stood up a new “group” on the Air Staff, the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability, or AFWIC. AFWIC was built under the A5 to serve as the Air Force’s design team, empowered to think and act from a cross portfolio perspective, providing advice directly to the Chief and Secretary on what the best mix of investments could be to straddle the challenges of current operations and readiness, while still responding to the future challenges described by the new National Defense Strategy.

Part of the genesis of AFWIC was the realization that under the old system, it was easy to build parts of a force within the old MAJCOM led Core Function Lead silos, but it was difficult or impossible to assemble all of the separately developed pieces of the force into something that didn’t resemble Frankenstein’s monster in the end, with awkward fits and an insufficient ability to swap out parts once the old ones had become eclipsed by either the state of the world or the state of technology. The other thing that was realized was that under the old system, no one was incentivized to suggest that the Air Force stop doing anything, despite the fact that it already have more taskings than it had the resources to fulfill. This change is still in it’s early stages, and transitions are always hard, but perhaps the real question is this – assuming that the AFWIC concept is wildly successful, and helps the SECAF and CSAF make better cross portfolio trades, won’t it only highlight the need for joint level trades for which no JWIC currently is stood up to recommend to SECAF? Ultimately a lack of group flexibility can administratively kill idea and tool innovation, especially if the needed forum for discussion and acknowledgement of the core sources of our problems does not yet exist.

And the list of silo effect challenges goes on…

As we’ve seen from the two examples here, the “silo effect” is here to stay, and again, we need silos to prevent common contagion and groupthink. We just need some entity who can coordinate their activities at the top without destroying the goodness inside them. And you may need to incentivize a different culture at the top where we specifically design our force management structures to encourage those charged with making cross portfolio recommendations to ensure that they can be domain agnostic and still progress within the system to both assignments and responsibilities that appeal to them, which will probably involve staying in jobs that require multidisciplinary skills rather than focused tactical ones. And at times, we’ll still need to create some new silos to make sure that we have the kind of specialists we need.

This is essentially the crux of the current Space Force/ Space Corps debate – is it better to do as much as we can with the current group constructs we have, or do we truly need to pay down on the costs of change to create a new internal incentive structure that protects the new kinds of specialization that we need? It’s not a matter of optimization – there is no perfect answer between specialization and generalization, just a skillful bureaucratic management of needed tensions that seeks to balance between order and chaos, which is always where the really interesting things happen at just about any level of analysis.

The Deeper Reason We Fall for Silos

Part of our problem is that we need both specialists and generalists, but we tend to design human capital management plans that focus on siloed tribal identities rather than cross cutting synthesis and strategy, and it’s a common problem shared systemically across all of the US armed services. You can’t get people who see the entire Sufi Elephant from Part 3 of this series if you require them to spend most of their career becoming certified experts in spears, ropes, and trees…but that’s where our current hero stories (and hence the organizational internal incentives in the groups) lie, usually indicated anytime a senior leader raised as a tactician uses the following hero story affirming “humble brag” in a public address, which goes something like  “I’m just a knuckle dragging [insert the tactical community that gave you your hero story here], but…”

In the end, the IGT model won’t give you general prescriptions for success, but as we hopefully demonstrated above, it will give you a much better grasp of the tensions and tradeoffs in play as we seek to balance the rates of adaptation and adoption between our ideas, groups, and tools given specific contexts. If you’re doing due diligence to all three areas, you’re much more likely to proceed more evenly in the inevitable process of managing change via a strategic rather than reactive process, and you’re also more likely to understand why attempts to solve problems in only one or two parts of the model aren’t generating the systemic results that you desire or require. When you think of it, strategy is really a specific instance of trying to deliberately plan for strategically advantageous innovation, or more precisely, to create the social conditions that enable innovative advantage to emerge – that’s the trick to getting human adaptability back up to the tech curve in Astro Teller’s graph from earlier. By taking the ecosystems based mindset implied by the IGT model, we’ll be much better equipped to fall for the cognitive trap of solving parts of connected problems one at a time.  Ultimately we find that addressing many issues at once, while conceptually and culturally demanding up front, ultimately generates far more satisfying outcomes with less cognitive dissonance, and also gives us our best hope of reducing the overall effusion of our precious blood and treasure as we seek to adapt and compete in an increasingly connected world.

Thanks for the read.  Share the 7 part series with your innovation squad.