The Foundations of Innovation: Synthesis of the IGT Model Insights (Part 6 of 7)

Change has always been a constant in human affairs; today, indeed, it is one of the determining characteristics of our civilization… More important for our immediate purpose, America is fundamentally an industrial society in a time of tremendous technological development. We are thus constantly presented with new devices or new forms of power that in their refinement and extension continually bombard the fixed structure of our habits of mind and behavior. Under such conditions, our salvation, or at least our peace of mind, appears to depend upon how successfully we can in the future become what has been called in an excellent phrase a completely “adaptive society”.   

- Elting Morison in Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 1966

Again, as Michael Howard has pointed out on a number of occasions, military organizations inevitably get the next war wrong. Their business is then to adapt as quickly as possible and at the least cost in their soldiers’ lives to the actual conditions that they confront.

  - Williamson Murray in Military Adaptation in War (With Fear of Change), 2011

Almost everything we know in theory about large bureaucracies suggests not only that they are hard to change, but that they are designed not to change.

- Steven Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War, 1991

Those who fear the new are the ones who have mastered the old.

- Simon Sinek, Facebook post on Aug 29, 2014

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

If the easiest thing to do is the same thing you did yesterday, then the deck would seem to be heavily stacked against the would-be innovator, with the challenge of complex security environments making it even worse. But as we’ve already established, innovation is not optional, and must be embraced the areas of Ideas, Groups, and Tools.  Let’s see what conclusions our highlighter authors came up with, as they reflected on the collected evidence from their case studies.

Ideas

First, we’ll hear from Murray:

The Evidence presented in this book suggests a consistent pattern of behavior on the part of military organizations. Inevitably, senior leaders, even the most effective, build a picture of what they think future war will look like and then confront combat realities that differ substantially from their assumptions. The magnitude of the disparity can vary. The more realistic military organizations are about future war, and the more honest their evaluations of peacetime exercises, the quicker they will adapt.

In some cases, the difference between vision and reality is not so great as to obviate prewar concepts. But adaptation will have to take place. Effective military organizations adapt their prewar assumptions and concepts to reality. However, most military organizations and their leaders attempt to impose prewar conceptions on the war they are fighting, rather than adapt their assumptions to reality. In this case they adapt only after great losses of men and material treasure.

It’s very difficult to challenge the ideas that made you individually successful, and some leaders inevitably see challenges to those ideas, or suggested changes to the system that they were promoted for building, as being an indictment against themselves. This is why Morison said this:

It is possible, if one sets aside the long-run social benefits, to look upon invention as a hostile act – a dislocation of existing schemes, a way of disturbing the comfortable bourgeois routines and calculations, a means of discharging the restlessness with arrangements and standards that arbitrarily limit.

Rosen piles on, bringing some “Old School” into the conversation:

All social innovation is difficult. Machiavelli noted over four hundred years ago that ‘there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit from the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit from the new order…[because of] the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.’ Today, Machiavelli might be even more pessimistic, because the task of political innovation no longer involves social change alone. The particular problem facing men and women involved in the study and practice of modern politics is how to get bureaucracies to innovate.

So ultimately, innovation requires leaders who are willing to question themselves, who can separate the ideas from their personal identity.  Murray again:

…similar factors drive successful innovation in peacetime as drive successful adaptation in war. Both require imagination and a willingness to change; both involve imagination as to the possibilities and potential for change; and both demand organizational cultures that encourage the upward flow of ideas and perceptions as well as direction from above.

And innovation requires leaders to approach change with the humility to know that no matter how talented or smart they are, they’ve only seen a few slices of the elephant themselves. More from Murray:

A crucial piece of the puzzle for successful adaptation lies in the willingness of senior military leaders to reach out to civilian experts beyond their narrowly focused military bureaucracies. No matter how expert senior officers may be in technical matters, they can rarely, if ever, be masters of the technological side of the equation. Thus, real openness to civilian expertise in the areas of science and technology must form a crucial portion of the process of adaptation.

And above all, successful innovation must have a good model of the world, understanding not only what the pieces are and how they are connected, but how they interact and change over time. It’s these understandings that allow leaders to ask the right questions, and to solve for the root causes of the problem rather than to engage in a never ending – and sometimes self-feeding - series of “repair service” actions that only address the symptoms. Murray once more:

But it is the asking of the right kinds of questions that is the essential first step to any successful adaptation to the problems raised by a particular conflict. Nor should one forget that when the assumptions are flawed, the approaches and adaptations they suggest and the directions they provide will inevitably prove dangerously irrelevant. Only the right questions can lead to successful adaptations.

To sum it up – the main impediments to successful innovation – and successful strategy making writ large – are failures to grasp the true complexities of the problems we’re trying to solve, and a lack of awareness of the often subtle and unconscious cognitive biases that tend to blind us to the former impediment. Morison provides a suggestion to alleviate both:

It appears, therefore, if I am correct in my assessment, that we might spend some time and thought on the possibility of enlarging the sphere of our identifications from the part to the whole…So I would suggest that in studying innovation, we look further into this possibility: the possibility that any group that exists for any purpose – the family, the factory, the educational institution – might begin by defining for itself it’s grand object and see to it that that grand object is communicated to every member of the group. Thus defined and communicated, it might serve as a unifying agent against the disruptive local allegiances of the inevitable smaller elements that compose any group. It may also serve as a means to increase the acceptability of any change that would assist in the more efficient achievement of the grand object.

Groups

Successful innovation requires exploration. In an often paraphrased quote, Einstein said that "a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move towards higher levels". If only conformity with status quo is rewarded by the internal incentives of groups – that is, if the groups don’t change – you will never get improvements in your ideas or tools. This is why Murray commented that:

Among other qualities, curiosity about new possibilities is crucial to successful change and adaptation. In effect, the organizational culture of particular military organizations formed during peacetime will determine how effectively they will adapt to the actual conditions they will face in war. Equally important is how honest they prove to be in examining past lessons and the results of war games and exercises.

It’s also important to realize that some forms of intellectual stagnation may be generational, and that sometimes it’s the newest members of the organization who will be free of the cognitive blinders that “experts” are not even aware of.  Murray again:

Particularly important is the need for senior leaders to encourage their staffs and subordinates to seek out new paths. Both involve intellectual understanding as well as instinct and action. As Clausewitz notes, “in our view even junior positions of command require outstanding intellectual qualities.” Thus, it would seem that education of the force and preparation of its leaders should become as important as the training regimens of the services and the joint force.

Rosen echoes this in his conclusion from his case studies of peacetime innovation:

Rather than money, talented military personnel, time, and information have been the key resources for innovation. The study of peacetime military innovation showed that when military leaders could attract talented young officers with great potential for promotion to a new way of war, and then were able to protect and promote them, they were able to produce new, useable military capabilities. Failure to redirect human resources resulted in the abortion of several promising innovations.

Tools

It is very difficult to imagine the net change that the introduction of new tools will bring within the total social system of innovation. The best way to scope the ranges of possible changes in all three areas that could result from the introduction of new tools and technology is to simulate and experiment the changes – as inexpensively as possible - with the people whose culture will be impacted by the tool. This allows them to make the necessary and inevitable cultural adjustments, and to accommodate themselves to the fact that continuous innovation is required as new challenges present themselves, often invalidating past technological advantages. As Morison describes it:

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.

Murray reinforces the need to think beyond just the tool when evaluating possibilities of new tools:

What matters in technological adaptation as well as technological innovation is how well new and improved technologies are incorporated into effective and intelligent concepts of fighting: it is not the technological sophistication that matters, it is the larger framework.

Conclusion

We seem to be internally divided on change – while we resist it individually, we tend to embrace it as a culture, especially in the United States.  Morison comments on the latter, and offers a hint at the mindset that we would most profit from by adopting:

Change has always been a constant in human affairs; today, indeed, it is one of the determining characteristics of our civilization. In our relatively shapeless social organization, the shifts from station to station are fast and easy. More important for our immediate purpose, America is fundamentally an industrial society in a time of tremendous technological development. We are thus constantly presented with new devices or new forms of power that in their refinement and extension continually bombard the fixed structure of our habits of mind and behavior. Under such conditions, our salvation, or at least our peace of mind, appears to depend upon how successfully we can in the future become what has been called in an excellent phrase a completely “adaptive society”… By the word adaptive is meant the ability to extract the fullest possible returns from the opportunities at hand: the ability …to select judiciously from the ideas and material presented both by the past and present and to throw them into a new combination. “Adaptive”, as here used, also means the kind of resilience that will enable us to accept fully and easily the best promises of changing circumstances without losing our sense of continuity and our essential integrity.  

This has been from the very beginning an experimental society.   By virtue of geography, exploration, immigration, the tradition of free inquiry, the nature of the federal political system, the episodic nature of the developing technology, it has always had in the past a continuous array of novel proposals to choose from. The opportunity for free choice within a broad band of alternatives is in fact the essence of the democratic process.  

Adaptation and agility go hand-in-hand, with both requiring sufficient variety and responsiveness to cope with emergent external conditions that are that impossible to predict ahead of time. This is why Rosen says:

A strategy that would prepare military innovations for this new world has to focus on the management of uncertainty, rather than on the construction of new capabilities tailored to predictions of what future wars would look like. It would be a mistake to construct a single scenario for a war with any of the new powers and then build new capabilities based on that scenario. A more effective strategy would be to buy information about a range of uncertainties and then defer construction of new systems until new strategic requirements had become better defined. A necessary aspect of this program would be to make preparations for the rapid construction of the new systems.

This speaks volumes to the kinds of decision and procurement processes we need to develop in order to quickly accommodate ourselves to the changes as we encounter them, especially in a world where high costs and diminishing resources increasingly limit our options.

Finally, Murray hammers home the criticality of innovation when facing complexity and irreducible uncertainty:

In the end, the most important attribute of military effectiveness is the ability to adapt to the actual conditions of combat and the conflict. There is also a direct connection among peacetime preparation, the willingness to innovate in an imaginative fashion, and the culture of military organizations and their ability to adapt when they confront the actual conditions of wartime employment. Those military organizations that display imagination and a willingness to think through the changes that occur in the tactical, operational, and strategic levels in peacetime have in nearly every case been those that have shown a willingness and ability to adapt and alter their prewar assumptions and preparations to reality.

We’ll give Morison the last word, making it clear that the foundation of innovation is an interactive process of mutually adapting ideas, tools and groups, not the artifacts that are easiest to observe and quantify.

If the preceding statements are correct, they suggest that we might give some attention to the construction of a new view of ourselves as a society which in time of great change identified with and obtained security and satisfaction from the wise and creative accommodation to change itself. Such a view rests, I think, upon a relatively greater reverence for the mere process of living in a society than we possess today, and a relatively smaller respect for and attachment to any special product of a society.

We hope you have enjoyed the innovation series, and gotten something that you use to improve your own processes of innovation inside your organizations. But this is just the beginning, not the end, of the conversation. Where were we wrong? What did we miss? Let us know in your own contributions to this community of interest blog. - Dave Lyle