It is often said that the best teams are more than the sum of their parts. In an age of austerity, the world’s best Navy must be more than the sum of its budget. As Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus in his “Innovation Vision” suggests, the U.S. Navy has always been “agile, innovative, and adaptable.”1 Yet with dwindling numbers of ships, bloated programs of record, and an uncertain budget, sailors can no longer rely on Congress or civilian leadership to purchase the tools and publish the practices required to win the battle. It is sailors themselves who must become “agile, innovative, and adaptable.”
Innovation in the Navy will exist only as a buzzword until leaders can prove its value to their subordinates. Sailors see innovation more as nifty gadgets than as a daily operational principle. To change this culture, the Navy must define what it means by “innovation” and deliver a persuasive argument for the kind of innovation it seeks to foster in the ranks.
The Navy is arguably successful in communicating strategy, as the recent unveiling of A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (Revised) and the CNO’s “Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority” seem to suggest. On the topic of innovation, however, the Navy is less successful. While the quantity of communication to the force has been evident since the beginning of Secretary Mabus’ “Task Force Innovation” in January 2014, the quality of that communication has been lacking.
Defining Innovation
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of communicating about innovation is grammatical. When we talk about innovation in the Navy, do we mean it as a noun or verb?
As a noun, an “innovation” is a new or improved product, or improvement in a process. One can imagine a more efficient unmanned aerial vehicle or useful app for a smart phone as examples. This definition of innovation favors the tinkerers and experimenters—those who took random household objects apart as children to see how they worked, those who thrive in new-age places like Maker Spaces and Fab Labs. While this kind of innovation is important, it is not the crux of the culture change required within our service.
As a verb, “innovate” may seem more difficult to grasp, yet the Navy has been talking about it for more than a century. In Navy boot camps, prospective sailors are introduced to Elbert Hubbard’s pamphlet “A Message to Garcia.” This story has attained mythic proportions, but its message delivers perhaps the closest definition of the kind of innovation our service is looking for: “The world bestows its big prizes, both in money and honors, for but one thing. And that is Initiative.”2
Innovation is initiative. No one will order you to fix a flawed process or create a better system; the impetus for change is intrinsic. This spark, when combined with constructive action, is initiative. It is what naval legend William S. Sims remarked on when he said a sailor’s objective is “in being the first to recognize, the first to experiment with, and the first to adopt improvements of distinct military value.”3
While innovation may be initiative, it is not that simple. The Navy has learned the hard way—through loss of life and limb—the importance of safety and doing things “by the book.” Sailors achieve qualifications; aviators demonstrate rote proficiency in their aircraft; submariners fastidiously watch the gauges of the reactor—all based on meticulously organized manuals.
How does a sailor weigh taking initiative—doing the right thing, finding a better way—against following precise procedures? This is both a question that sailors must learn to answer for themselves and a collective educational challenge for our service.
Inspiring Innovation
To execute strategy, organizations must develop buy-in at all levels. Successful strategies rely on personnel of all ranks eschewing excellence in support of higher objectives. In the Marine Corps, this reality is underscored by the concept of the “Strategic Corporal.” Rye Barcott, a former Marine officer, described this concept in the Harvard Business Review:
The lowest ranking noncommissioned officer in the Marine Corps, a corporal typically has at least two years of service and leads small teams of three to nine Marines. When deployed overseas, corporals often lead their teams and squads on patrols in dangerous places that are at times far from direct supervision. Corporals have to make quick decisions, some of which can carry strategic implications.4
Where the Marine Corps has the “Strategic Corporal,” the Navy must have the “Innovative Petty Officer.” The Marine Corps is the world’s finest fighting force thanks in large part to its ability to instill a common understanding from the beginning of an individual’s service. The missing ingredient in the Navy’s recipe for innovation is a similar sense of purpose. The actions of each corporal can have a profound effect on the rest of the Marine Corps and beyond. The Navy’s need for innovation may not necessarily be as immediate, but is no less critical.
Innovation is not another collateral duty. Just like quick decision-making for the corporal, innovation is an innate skill set that is the product of trying and trust. It is about sailors taking the initiative, and leaders at all levels empowering them—truly trusting them and backing them up—to take their units and our Navy to greater heights.
This kind of innovation—and these kinds of people—are essential to our service. In an age of big data and rapid information exchange, our enemies are outpacing us; they are getting inside of what Colonel John Boyd termed our “Observe, Orient, Decide, Act” or “OODA” Loop. The more quickly an enemy can make decisions and bring effects to bear in the battlespace, the more lethal he will be. We need “Innovative Petty Officers”—and even “Innovative Commissioned Officers”—to tip the scales back in our favor, to provide the critical edge in the heat of combat.
Empowering Innovation
To empower innovation, we first must educate our sailors on what it means to be innovative from their earliest exposure to the Navy. Luckily, our accession programs already feed “A Message to Garcia” as standard fare, and certainly sailors remember one of their basic responses is “I’ll find out, sir/ma’am.”
While this is a good start, we must do more to impart permanence. All sailors know the Navy’s core values of “honor, courage, and commitment.” Perhaps it is time to add to those a new list: “A Sailor’s Core Attributes.” Among the descriptors in this list might be “initiative, resolve, and integrity.” These describe the traits of a successful sailor: an innovative individual who will never give up and always do the right thing.
While our system of ranks and billets exists to provide order and structure to the force, we must recognize that innovation and innovative ideas are not the sole purview of one rank or one group. The CNO’s Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC), for instance, includes both junior enlisted and officers. They produce outstanding work on issues of major importance, such as unmanned vehicles, sensors, and the Navy’s talent management system. These sailors did not wait until they were staff officers or admirals to innovate, and our service is stronger today for their willingness to act.
The CRIC shows how we can become a service of Innovative Petty Officers when each sailor learns that his or her value is immense. Mentorship and education are key. One of the most important questions a sailor can ask is, “Why do we do it this way?” Most often, this is asked after an individual has achieved mastery at a task and can intuitively identify better ways to do things. If our natural reaction to this sailor’s question is irritation, we are missing important opportunities. We must become a service that welcomes questions and encourages answers that challenge the status quo.
Next, we must free individuals and teams to be creative. The most innovative sailors tend to be self-selecting. They might be predisposed to tinkering, have a penchant for improving processes and organization, or simply sailors who want to actively contribute to the course of their Navy. Commanders, department heads, and division officers—everyone O-6 and below—must encourage this creativity to occur. Remove the stigma from those who seem “different.” These sailors are not an annoyance, they are tremendous assets.
Some will argue that anything less than the rote method is against good order and discipline, or even dangerous. With any good idea, there are bound to be others who will take advantage of it for their own selfish gain. While one should not allow for creativity without controls, innovation is, at its very heart, a leadership issue.
One of the most laudable examples has been the Athena Project, started by the sailors of the USS Benfold (DDG-65) under the command of Commander Rich LeBron. This effort allows sailors “to pitch innovative ideas to improve their command or the Navy in an open forum to fellow sailors as well as leaders of industry, academia and government.” To facilitate this, “sailors are given a day off their traditional duties to focus on the development of their big idea. In exchange for the idea development time, they must present their concept without the use of PowerPoint in a five-minute pitch in a casual environment, followed by a five-minute question-and-answer session from the crowd.”5 This is one method of encouraging sailors to take the initiative.
Fostering Ingenuity
We will become a service of Innovative Petty Officers when unit-level supervisors and leaders serve to empower—not restrict—the ingenuity of their people. That means that failure, too, must be welcomed. This is a major change for a service that views failure as final. There is a balance between keeping our planes flying and our ships operating safely and effectively, and allowing our people enough freedom to get the most out of them—or even to develop new platforms and procedures. If a sailor is discouraged from making an attempt at improvement, that may be a larger “failure” than the attempt being unsuccessful. The resilience of our people and our service after failure speaks more to our strength as a navy than in never failing at all. We must have a larger conversation on risk as a service, and fear not for the retribution to our careers, but the retribution to our country should we fail to risk when the stakes are highest.
Finally, we must promote and challenge our most innovative sailors. The best way for the Navy to signal its seriousness about innovation is to turn today’s innovators into tomorrow’s project leaders, commanding officers, and flag officers. Ironically, the same excuses for keeping many of these sailors out of future leadership positions—an administrative bureaucracy and the tyranny of “timing”—can be solved by the very same innovative sailors.
Presumably, the “Sailor’s Core Attributes” described a large percentage of our current leaders. To increase this percentage and change our culture, however, our promotion and selection boards must look at more than summary group averages and verbiage on a fitness report or evaluation. We must consistently delve into the actions our prospective leaders are taking to actually improve the Navy and empower the sailors they lead.
Further, we must expand the horizon of matching talent to opportunity. Many are familiar with an officer’s “golden path” to command, whereby he or she seeks a limited selection of “command track” opportunities. Accept a graduate education opportunity or non-traditional billet out of turn, and your career is stunted. This is a disincentive to innovation, as it promotes stovepiping and discourages the cross-pollination of ideas that happen when a surface warfare officer with an expeditionary background wants to work on an MBA at a prestigious civilian university, or a pilot wants to explore and experiment at the Office of Naval Research. Because our system cannot grade these assignments consistently against the more familiar, rote billets, it too often discounts the former, to our Navy’s great peril. We will only become a service of Innovative Petty Officers when we put our innovative personnel in positions of most sacred trust, and when we allow our personnel systems to match their unique talents.
In the end, we cannot force innovation in our service. Sailors must learn when to abide by the rigid conformity required of military service—“Keep your eyes in the boat!”—and when to advance an idea that could drastically improve their ship, the service, or the course of a battle. This cognitive dissonance is hard, but the Navy must be willing to embrace the challenge, provide mentorship, and inspire its Innovative Petty Officers to succeed. By instilling in our force such a sense of initiative and pride, there is no enemy we cannot vanquish, no sea we cannot sail, and no horizon we cannot reach.
1. “Department of the Navy Innovation Vision,” Navy Live, 15 April 2015, http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2015/04/15/department-of-the-navy-innovation-vision.
2. Elbert Hubbard, “A Message to Garcia,” Philistine, March 1889, www.foundationsmag.com/garcia.html.
3. Benjamin F. Armstrong, 21st Century Sims: Innovation, Education, and Leadership for the Modern Era (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015), 119.
4. Rye Barcott, “The Strategic Corporal,” Harvard Business Review, 21 October 2010, https://hbr.org/2010/10/the-strategic-corporal.html.
5. “What is Athena?” https://athenanavy.wordpress.com/about.
Lieutenant Misso is a naval flight officer in the E-2C Hawkeye and currently works in the Pentagon. He is a 2009 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and the former director of the Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference.