Innovation is hard, but with enough channels for creative thinking, a strong program of experimentation and prototyping, and a willingness to take risks, the Navy might wind up with a force structure different from—and better than—it ever envisioned.
Military innovation has taken some novel forms over the years. The following excerpt from the book The Lusitania describes some of Britain's antisubmarine warfare defenses during 1914:
Britain's first thought for submarine defense was a boom designed to stretch across the Channel, hung with nets and festooned with mines. It was a costly failure and abandoned. The only answer was intensive patrolling and the use of mines. Along the shoreline and off the Irish coast a new system was devised that spoke only too eloquently of the minds of the senior staff of a navy which had not seen a general action since Trafalgar, apart from minor gunboat forays and naval bombardments in support of Pax Britannica. A coastal yacht and motorboat patrol was established under the command of sixty-one-year-old Admiral Sir Frederick Inglefield. However well intentioned it may have been, its efforts were largely ludicrous. Only one in ten vessels was armed and then with little more than a rifle. One ship in eighty-five was equipped with a wireless. The rest depended on enthusiasm and imagination.
The imagination took some novel expression. It had been realized that though Inglefield's forces contributed a presence, they had no method of dealing with a submarine should they find one. Teams of two swimmers were organized in each motor launch. One man carried a black bag, the other a hammer. The plan was that if a periscope was sighted, the launch would cruise near to it as possible, then the swimmers would dive in, seize the periscope, and after one man had placed the black bag over it, the other would attempt to shatter the glass with the hammer. Inglefield's other brainchild was to attempt to train sea gulls to defecate on periscopes, and for a short while a remote comer of Poole harbor in Dorset was littered with dummy periscopes and hopefully incontinent seagulls.
It is easy to laugh, but the point is that innovation is hard. According to two business analysts, "the brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail." The problem is that the military fears failure. This is one reason why the Navy's research-and-development budget increasingly has focused on improving established or programmed systems rather than on developing new technologies. As a result, fewer prototypes are being built, and that, in turn, means fewer opportunities for naval personnel to experiment with new "toys." Recent studies on innovation indicate that having such toys is a critical component of the creative process.
Andrew Hargadon and Robert Sutton describe an innovation framework used by companies dedicated to creating new products for their customers. It is a four-step process: (1) capturing good ideas, (2) keeping ideas alive, (3) imagining new uses for old ideas, and (4) putting promising concepts to the test. They claim "the best innovators aren't lone geniuses. They're people who can take an idea that's obvious in one context and apply it in not-so-obvious ways to a different context. The best companies have learned to systematize that process." A Naval War College task force established in response to tasking from the Secretary of the Navy recommended how this process could be adapted for the Navy.4 Even though the group was keenly aware that innovation in large organizations—especially hierarchical and rigidly structured ones such as the armed forces—is difficult, it was sanguine that the Navy could systematize an innovation process.
Finding the Innovators
The search for good ideas starts with a search for the kind of people who have them. The Naval War College task force recommended focusing on identifying and fostering, rather than trying to create, innovative people for the simple reason that the latter cannot be done. You cannot order someone to be creative. You cannot teach genius. You can, however, provide an environment in which creative people blossom.
Today's flag ranks are filled with successful implementers. These can-do admirals and generals have proved themselves operationally, often under very trying conditions, and their skills are needed for the military to remain strong and ready. Nevertheless, two types of individuals should be found among the flag ranks: those who can generate creative and innovative ideas and those who know how to implement them. It takes a different set of skills to be a successful implementer than to be an innovative thinker, and one should not be valued over the other. A few rare individuals possess both, and when identified they should be treated as national treasures.
Innovators bring new ideas to the table, but they often treat all of their ideas as priceless gems; the best implementers are able to recognize the good ideas and their potential value and separate them from the bad ones. Hence, a complementary approach for selecting future flag officers must be pursued. Generally, the path to flag rank for innovators will not be through operational command. It may be through the program management process (where innovation can be bolstered by a supporting team of good managers) or it may be through the doctrine development process. The point is, paths must be generated that reward creative thinkers.
Capturing Good Ideas
The best way to foster innovation in a large bureaucracy is to create enclaves that operate as small organizations. The Naval War College task force recommended creating several of these organizations, including:
- An Innovation Capital Group: Exploring and implementing new ideas costs money. The task force recommended that the Navy accept this fact and budget for it by establishing an innovation capital group. Unlike venture capital groups, this group would fund ideas not companies. If the ideas prove promising, they compete for additional funds through the established budgeting process like any other program. The board of directors for this group should be independent from the service (i.e., not active-duty officers) so it could judge proposals objectively, unconstrained by programs already on the books.
- An Experimental Squadron. A new, multiplatform experimental squadron was one of the most avidly supported recommendations, for several reasons. First, task force members believed that the pressures of routine operations and emerging missions will never permit operational commanders to conduct the kind of far-reaching experiments necessary to transform the service. They recommended that Fleet Battle Experiments continue but felt the exercises need to be complemented by an organization dedicated to experimentation. Second, they championed capability demonstrations and prototypes, believing them essential to innovation as well as to securing funding for further development. An experimental squadron would be the ideal home for such activities and hardware. Finally, the task force accepted some conclusions posited by Clayton Christensen and his colleagues, foremost among them that "every company [in the commercial sector they studied] that has tried to manage mainstream and disruptive businesses within a single organization failed." Christensen's recommendation was to "create a new organizational space where [innovative] capabilities can be developed." By separating equipment and experiments aimed at transforming the Navy from the main operational forces, many of the risks highlighted in Christensen's work could be avoided. The experimental squadron would operate as a small organization and would provide—even promote—a risk-tolerant environment.
- An Operational Strategic Studies Group (SSG). The officers who command the ships in the experimental squadron would form an operational Strategic Studies Group and hopefully enjoy the same kind of promotion rates to flag rank as the current Chief of Naval Operations' SSG. Christensen and Michael Overdorf note the importance of developing such teams: "new team boundaries facilitate new patterns of working together that ultimately can coalesce as new processes." The experimental squadron/operational SSG combination also provides an outlet for innovative ideas coming from the fleet, from industry, and from academia, as well as for ideas developed internally.
With these three organizations, plus the CNO's Strategic Studies Group, the Navy Warfare Development Command, the Center for Naval Warfare Studies, Federal Executive Fellows, and the CNO's Executive Panel, the task force members believed enough channels for creative thinking would be available to enhance innovation from within the Navy. They also believed traditional sources of innovative thought such as think tanks and laboratories should receive adequate funding support.
Keeping Ideas Alive & New Uses for Old Ideas
To help maintain organizational memory, the task force recommended that the experimental squadron retain a core civilian staff tasked with keeping old ideas alive. Hargadon and Sutton note that old ideas are the best source of new ideas, but that they "can't be used if they are forgotten." Prototypes and hardware demonstrators help build the stockpile of ideas. The task force also recommended that the permanent staff be bolstered by temporary personnel from business and academia, to provide a perspective generally missing from military circles.
Putting Promising Concepts to the Test
There is historical evidence that competition—both inter- and intraservice—is good for innovation. The organizations recommended by the task force should be chartered to run intraservice competitions. Ideas would win or lose, but not the individuals whose ideas were tested. For them the process should be constructive. If those who promoted losing ideas are tarred with the brush of failure, the Navy will set back innovation for a generation.
Head-to-head competition is one of the best means the services have to prioritize ideas. It also would help cultivate the proper outlook. Successful innovators, according to Hargadon and Sutton, have an "easy come, easy go" attitude about ideas. They "rarely keep trying to make something work in the face of evidence that it won't. They focus on finding the best ideas for solving the problem, not on solutions they can claim glory for."
Protecting Innovators
Men and women who would risk their lives for their comrades in battle have demonstrated an enormous aversion to risking their careers in peacetime. This mentality tends to stifle innovation.
One of the reasons why the task force recommended establishing organizations peripheral to the operating forces was to help assigned personnel understand they would be working in a risk-tolerant environment. Because the organizations are separate from the main warfighting organizations of the Navy, they can try new concepts without risking the Navy's, the nation's, or their own futures. The transforming effects on the fleet would occur when these officers reported to follow-on assignments, bringing with them the best innovations that emerge from the crucible of simulations, games, and experiments.
These new organizations would help the Navy learn that sometimes failure is as instructive as success. Proving a new idea is bad and keeping it out of the fleet is just as important as getting a new good idea in. But if you pursue a "big bet" strategy, don't bet the entire organization on the first roll of the dice. At Southwest Airlines in the early 1990s, a manager by the name of Matt Buckley recommended the company get into the shipping business. It did and it lost money (but it didn't risk the company). Instead of firing Buckley, Southwest's management praised him for his initiative and "to this day, whenever a Southwest employee offers a daring new idea—good or bad—it's called a 'Matt Buckley." By any measure, that demonstrates a healthy attitude toward innovation.
The services are great at rewarding success (medals, promotions, etc.), but they have no system to reward those who try new things but fail. They generally reserve their obloquy for such individuals. That will have to change if a culture of innovation is to be developed.
Prototypes & Serendipitous Discoveries
A robust prototyping program should be at the heart of any systematized process of innovation adopted by the Navy. As Hargadon and Sutton point out, a good idea isn't worth much by itself; it needs to be turned into something useful. The companies that are most successful at turning ideas into products use prototyping and modeling. The process helps innovators learn valuable lessons, even when an idea is a complete flop. This holds true for the military as well. Once a prototype of a piece of equipment is available to try out, the military often finds new ways of using it that had not occurred to developers.
This pattern is found in all fields of endeavor. Penicillin was discovered during a search for an antiseptic based on nasal mucus. Chemists who were trying to invent an alternative form of freon instead invented Teflon. Rayon and nylon were fashioned by mistake. "Gresham's law," writes Gregg Easterbrook, "holds that bad ideas drive out the good. Sometimes a bad idea points the way to a good one." Either way, ideas need to be tested before they are sent out into the fleet as a whole.
Prototypes also foster simultaneous development of technologies and concepts, sometimes with startling effects. In the oil industry, for example, the 1970s fear that the world would run out of oil around the turn of the century has proved unfounded. In fact, "the world's proven oil reserves are about half again as large as they were in the 1970s, and more than ten times as large as in 1950." What happened? "There was no quantum technology leap," writes Jonathan Rauch, "no blinding breakthrough. Instead a suite of interlocking technologies improved incrementally, but to revolutionary effect." He continues,
To view these technological developments as a series of coincidences is to miss the story. Measurement-while drilling, directional drilling, and 3-D seismic imaging not only developed simultaneously but also developed one another .... None of the technologies was anything like new when, collectively, they took off. What was new was the way in which they energized one another, and then chased one another upward in a virtuous spiral.
Various acquisition strategies have been forwarded that take advantage of simultaneous development. One, dubbed spiral acquisition by Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, begins with a promising high-risk, high-payoff concept. Because the concept is so far "out there," it has little chance of achieving its full potential as a short-term program, so it is taken to industry and opened for bids. Contractors are asked to prepare an estimate of what they think they can produce in one or two years and the best proposal is funded. At the end of that time, the Navy takes whatever the contractor has come up with, buys an appropriate number of units, and refines the concept, adapts it, or remains with the original and again opens the process for bids, using the last contractor's product as the start point. The process continues until the objective is achieved or the program terminated.
Admiral Dennis Blair, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, champions a similar approach he calls active acquisition. "The goal is to act quickly to field prototypes and early versions of proposed systems with operational units. That will allow the military to address current needs while refining the system's overall requirements over time as newer versions are built." The value of these approaches is that they encourage industry partners to stay in the process by permitting them to sell limited amounts of equipment at the same time they continue to refine them.
With a Little Luck
Changing the culture and structures of a service is difficult, especially when a complementary objective is to maintain what is good about service tradition. Christensen and Overdorf assert, "If an organization faces major change .. the worst possible approach may be to make drastic adjustments to the existing organization. In trying to transform an enterprise, managers can destroy the very capabilities that sustain them." Such a result not only would be bad for the service; it would be bad for the country.
The Army is trying to transform more completely, radically, and quickly than any of the other services, but it is enhancing its chances for success by taking a top-down approach. Christensen and Overdorf note, "In our studies of this challenge, we have never seen a company succeed in addressing a change that disrupts its mainstream values without the personal, attentive oversight of the CEO." For the services, the CEO may be the chief of staff, but the service secretary also could play this role. For the Department of the Navy, the secretary must be the champion if the Navy and Marine Corps are to transform in complementary ways.
Innovation will never occur, however, if support fails to expand beyond a handful of wishful thinkers. Most innovations are adopted because their proponents convinced others that the approach was just a better way of doing something the service already was tasked with doing. Machiavelli understood this when he wrote, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in success, than to take in hand the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new." In practical terms, this means avoiding the rhetoric of revolutionary transformation; people are looking for "new and improved" not "revolutionary" ideas. A concomitant lesson is that trying to use a new lexicon to sell an idea can inhibit its acceptance.
The new-and-improved approach also is accepted more readily because it is so American in nature. As an Economist editorial noted, the "real American way" involves "adapting quickly, adapting constantly."
Members of the Naval War College task force did not recommend wholesale changes, believing that transformation in the military is an iterative process. By institutionalizing paths through which creative ideas can be put forth, and by giving creative thinkers avenues to table, experiment with, and implement ideas, the services may well end up with a different (and better) force structure than they envisioned. In that respect, the process of innovation involves both determination and luck. Garrison Keillor got it right: "Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known." With luck, the services will use wisdom in fostering and adopting innovation, preserving what is best about military traditions while changing what needs changing in their culture.
Professor Hayes is a senior strategic researcher in the Decision Strategies Department of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies, Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.