The U.S. Navy is living through another turbulent period—decreasing budgets, personnel drawdowns, scandals involving our most senior leaders, and the proliferation of sophisticated weapons. In the midst of the tumult, innovative changes are under way to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Deployment schedules are being rearranged. Waiver requests and reinvention laboratories are allowing us to examine, then remove, self-imposed Work impediments. Women are working side by side with men on combatant ships. Ratings continue to be disestablished or merged in response to technological advances.
All this activity could convince anyone that the Navy understands and is dealing with the social and political changes taking place all around us. But do not be deceived—any change, no matter how big, that does not also change the organization’s architecture will not endure.1 To remain a credible military force, we must embark on a fundamental reworking of our command structure, both to distribute information more widely and to build a Navy of competent decision makers.
The Driving Force
Look around: the traditional, hierarchical forms of governing and organizing people are failing. Venerable business organizations—IBM, GE, AT&T—are “deconstructing” as fast as they can. All are discovering that smaller, freer, less rigid organizations are better suited to survive in today’s environment.
Without question, the greatest force in the breakdown of old, hierarchical organizations is computer- based technology. Electronic information processing has tightened the link between organizations and their environment, meaning that changes in society will be felt more rapidly by organizations.2 The rate and flow of information demand more flexible means of processing information and making decisions within organizations. Concentrating power at the top, while sometimes needed, puts too many decisional eggs in one basket. The result is “decision overload.”3 Whenever a relatively few decision makers are overloaded by the complexity and sheer volume of information, their decisions are likely to suffer as a result.
Information and its effects are, if anything, more applicable to warfare than to business. Operation Desert Storm revealed an increase in the velocity of warfare spurred by computers, telecommunications, and satellites.4 Technological tools tightened the link between military organizations and their environment by making more information available more rapidly. Naval Doctrine Publication 6 emphasizes the effects of information in modern naval warfare:
Revolutionary advances in the technologies of surveillance, communications, information processing, and weapon systems are increasing the pace and reach of warfare exponentially. Future warfare will take place in an expanded battlespace, characterized by rapid, simultaneous, and violent actions across all dimensions—air, land, sea, undersea, space, time, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Naval forces will operate with increased speed, lethality, and effectiveness, massing firepower against the adversary’s critical vulnerabilities. The complexity of warfare will increase dramatically, placing greater demands on our ability to command and control forces.5
Today, extensive operational information is (or soon will be) readily available to our units. Joint maritime command information strategy (JMCIS), Link-11 and -16, cooperative engagement capability, radar, electronic warfare information, sonar, satellite communications, and written messages all tighten the relationship between a naval unit and its environment. The amount of information available to a single warship is nearly overwhelming, and the trend is toward more information technology, potentially thickening the fog of war through a blizzard of information. The possibility of information overload is compounded by the speed at which information arrives. In the information-rich battlespace, opportunities and threats will develop rapidly, and decisions must keep pace.
Tempo of operations and information overload demand that personnel throughout the battle organization make rapid, informed, autonomous decisions keyed to well-understood goals. Appealing to a single decision center for permission to act on information gained during combat may have been appropriate when most combat was fought within sight of the enemy and the threat of destruction developed slowly. Today, it could slow combat response—with potentially lethal consequences.
The Chain of Command Works against Success
Naval units are completely hierarchical. We organize our work efforts through functional departments and divisions, but work processes usually cross departmental and divisional boundaries. We emphasize rank over roles. We expect communication to flow only in rigid paths, and punish sailors who violate the communication chain. We give orders from the top down.
With commands flowing down, and very narrowly defined information flowing up, feedback of many kinds is blocked. Overpowering hierarchy is a knowledge-restricting device, forcing information into predefined compartments or cubbyholes, restricting information to official channels, and delegitimizing informal communication and organization.6
The chain of command works against combat success by instilling a day-to-day, peacetime routine of restricting information and decision-making authority to relatively few personnel. Frequently, those below the leadership level are given just enough information to enable them to do their jobs, while information available to those at the top is very broad.7 This situation undergirds a separation between “deciders” and “doers” that carries over to the battlefield.
Self-Organizing Complex Adaptive Systems
Twentieth-century science has taught us that everything in our universe is in constant motion. Everywhere scientists look, they see processes, complex systems, self-organization, prediction and feedback, and continual reshuffling of elements. Everything goes in circles, is reciprocal. Things do not come and go, but are constantly doing both in the sense of physics and the conservation of matter and energy; living systems are constantly evolving.8 In addition, co-evolutionary systems have processes and relations that change in unforeseeable ways.9
Insights from co-evolution are also changing the way we perceive life. Observers are discovering that the physical system is just a pattern, a physical representation of the processes occurring within the system.10 For example, a tree is not an object, but an expression of processes, such as photosynthesis and extracting nutrition from the soil." The processes within an organism create its structure, its physical form.
This concept of processes creating structure—whether it be an organism or an organization—is the process of self-organization.
Social scientists applying co-evolutionary and self-organizing concepts to social issues come away with the startling realization that healthy social structures exhibit the same characteristics as the physical universe. Human social systems, like an immune system, ecosystems, and ant colonies, are self-organizing complex adaptive systems that share certain crucial properties:
- Each of these systems is a network of many agents acting in parallel; each agent is constantly interacting with other agents in the system.
- Control of complex adaptive systems tends to be highly dispersed.
- Complex adaptive systems are constantly rearranging their structures as they make predictions, receive feedback, and gain experience about their environment.12
These new views of reality may seem peripheral to sailors’ concerns, but they are in fact deeply important, because they provide hints about creating relationships that can prevent information overload:
- Reciprocal influence creates systemic arrangements that evolve over time. Organizations holding fast to only one structure will become stagnant by failing to adapt to changes in the environment.
- Processes create structure. Therefore, processes occurring within the organization should dictate the organization’s structure.
- Control systems and decision making within an organization should be distributed—not concentrated in any single authoritarian decision maker.
Growing a Culture of Deciders
Day-to-day, peacetime interactions create and reinforce behaviors that carry over to wartime. Our current peacetime culture, both explicitly and implicitly, conditions junior personnel to “wait to be told.” We may be unaware of how much Navy culture reinforces the message, from khaki uniforms versus dungaree to Morning Quarters, where sailors passively receive only the information needed to complete daily tasks, to rank and its concomitant authority to punish. In our daily behavior, we create relationships between people that are exactly opposite of those needed for combat success: distributed decisions made by individuals comfortable with large volumes of complex information.
To grow a culture equipped to deal with modern warfare, peacetime access to information formerly reserved for senior leaders must become widely available. All sailors must have access to all important information regarding their own commands. From day one, all sailors must be exposed to large amounts of diverse information and encouraged to make decisions about their daily activities. These simple adjustments, along with rigorous battle-simulation training, eventually will develop sailors who are able to make autonomous decisions in a rapid, information-rich battlefield.
Changing organizational culture to develop a Navy of “deciders” means everything we do must be open for examination. We must reveal and reevaluate our deepest, most fundamental beliefs. Proprietary meetings among a command’s top leaders must be reformatted to be more inclusive. Zero-defect and “by the instruction” procedures must be rethought to view innovation and mistakes as the price we pay to develop a culture of experienced “deciders.” The role of military leaders must evolve. Position-related power must be redefined. Eventually, we must reexamine the merits of the officer/enlisted system. Information and its consequences in modem warfare require novel approaches to make best use of our most precious warfighting resource—our personnel.
At times when the organization’s past no longer guarantees success and the future is unclear, it is natural for people to cling to what is familiar. But we must change the way our Navy organizes the work of people, and we can change if we decide it is important enough.
1 Christopher Meyer, Fast Cycle Time (New York: The Free Press, 1993).
2 William A. Pasmore, Designing Effective Organizations—The Sociotechnical Systems Perspective (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1988).
3 Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Creating a New Civilization (Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1994).
4 Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War (New York: Warner Books, 1993).
5 Naval Doctrine Publication 6: Naval Command and Control (Washington: Department of the Navy, 1995).
6 Toffler, Creating a New Civilization.
7 Sally Helgesen, The Web of Inclusion (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1995).
8 Richard B. Norgard, Development Betrayal (London: Routledge, 1994).
9 Ibid.
10 Fritjof Capra and David Steindl-Rast, Belonging to the Universe (San Francisco: Harper, 1991).
11 Peter M. Senge, et al., The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1994).
12 M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of the Order and Chaos (New York: Touchstone Books, 1992).
Lieutenant Parry is System Test Officer on the Stethem (DDG-63).