The U.S. Navy is preparing for a potential future war against a near-peer competitor at a time of rapid change in technology and military capabilities. Amid such volatility, one important question is how the service can make its systems more adaptable, user-friendly, and resilient.
I wrestled with that question in my time as a program manager for the Navy’s Command and Control Systems Program Office (PMW 150). One of the most intriguing potential answers I found was that of antifragility, a concept proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.
Taleb coined the term “antifragility” to describe an extreme resilience that rests at the far end of a range from fragile (things that are negatively affected by volatility) through robust (things that are unaffected by volatility). Antifragility refers to things that are positively affected by volatility. In nature, antifragile systems include bones that grow stronger when stressed; antibiotic-resistant bacteria; and immunity or resistance to toxins and diseases. Taleb acknowledges that antifragility is only valid within limits—too much stress will break a bone—but within those limits, antifragile systems not only withstand volatility, but grow stronger because of it.
The advantages of producing antifragile systems are clear, especially in an environment of growing threats. But antifragile systems are not enough—the Navy needs to build an antifragile culture.
Not a Problem
To illustrate what such a culture might look like, consider how program offices and in service engineering agents (ISEAs) respond to casualty reports (CasReps, the reports used by Navy ships and shore platforms to report malfunctions or failures of critical systems).
Most programs of record almost always have open CasReps to address and will handle each according to the severity of the malfunction and the criticality of the affected system. As such, each CasRep is considered in isolation. The focus is on fixing the individual platform, and CasReps are in competition with each other for time and resources.
Occasionally, someone notices patterns: A certain problem seems to occur multiple times on multiple platforms within a relatively short period of time, or a particularly high-profile issue demands root-cause analysis, prompting a dive into the data. These systematic approaches are the exception, rather than the rule, and they tend not to be considered when they do not help solve an individual ship’s issue.
In an antifragile culture, volatility drives improvement—and CasReps and trouble tickets are a form of volatility. Instead of treating each case as a separate problem to be solved, an antifragile Navy might approach all cases as valuable datapoints to further improve the design and maintenance of systems. The focus would not only be on solving each ship’s problem, but also on using each breakdown as an opportunity to improve a capability. Root-cause analysis would be a matter of course. Operators would search for patterns rather than waiting for them to become obvious. Instrumentation and monitoring of systems would dramatically increase. These actions would yield better information about the systems the Navy wants to improve.
(Savannah Hardesty)
Of course, the ship with the CasRep must be addressed, and the needed capability restored as quicky as possible, so the immediate actions in response to a CasRep or trouble ticket would not likely change dramatically, especially at first. But there would be additional steps to follow. More important, how the program office and ISEA think about the CasRep would change substantially. So would the office’s overall behavior, and the long-term performance of its systems.
Designing a Culture
Conway’s Law suggests that a system’s design reflects the structure of the organization that created it. Melven Conway first proposed the law in his 1968 article “How Do Committees Invent,” and if he was right, the effects of the cultural shift proposed here would be profound. Navy systems would begin to display the following characteristics:
More modular designs, intended to allow for easy modification and modernization.
More heavily instrumented systems capable of detecting changes and anomalies earlier.
More automated routines, allowing systems to restore functionality without operator or maintainer intervention, thereby reducing strain on overtaxed crews.
More collaborative development among engineers, developers, and users to make systems easier to use, maintain, repair, and update.
Heavier use of model-based systems engineering in designing, testing, and updating.
Even when Navy programs consider the above characteristics in their system architecture and designs, such as Maritime Tactical Command and Control and the Ship’s Signals Exploitation Equipment family of systems, they are generally seen by the resource sponsors and program offices as “nice-to-have” features. An antifragile culture would see such characteristics as foundational constraints, making them high priorities for design and development teams.
In a 2013 Harvard Business Review article, Michael Watkins writes that “Culture is consistent, observable patterns of behavior in organizations,” and quotes Aristotle as saying, “We are what we repeatedly do.” The culture of any organization, then, is formed by rewarding desired behaviors, discouraging unwanted behaviors, and discussing the reasons. Leaders can create an antifragile culture by consistently encouraging teams to consider disruptions to their plans—such as CasReps and trouble tickets—as data to help them improve, rather than annoyances to be tolerated or transient problems to be solved. Reward individuals and teams when they do so, and challenge teams when they continue to treat those perturbations as isolated problems.
Leaders seeking to drive this change can ask questions such as: “How can this help us improve the system?” “How can we use what we are learning to make this system more resilient?” or “How can we make it harder for a sailor to make this mistake in the future?” By focusing on the longer term—improving the system or adding safeguards—leaders can create a new standard response in the organizations they lead.
Changes to naval warfare are happening fast, which means naval leaders must prioritize this cultural change for the Navy to stay ahead. The Navy must make it easier to collect and analyze data on anomalies; remove policy barriers to consolidating the necessary information; and prioritize resources toward any re-architecture work required to allow rapid incorporation of improvements to systems across the force. Making existing systems more flexible, installable, and upgradable should be prioritized above the introduction of any but the most crucial new capabilities. Indeed, with this change in culture, new capabilities will be more easily and quickly introduced, allowing the Navy to tighten its design, development, and production OODA loop more quickly than its adversaries.
I sought, as a program manager, to make systems more antifragile, but I did not succeed. Fortunately, in pursuing that goal, I did drive the culture of the office to be more antifragile. I didn’t fully grasp the need to think of setbacks as beneficial. I strongly encouraged appropriate risks, recognizing that experiments that did not pan out were still valuable, and remaining focused on why the fleet needed the capabilities we provided. As a result, the team successfully upgraded or replaced almost every Link 16 terminal in the surface fleet in less than 18 months; delivered the first over-the-air, fully containerized program-of-record application to more than 30 ships; and dramatically shortened the time it took to deliver new fixes or features to almost every program in the PMW 150 portfolio. With a more explicit focus on establishing an antifragile culture, other Navy leaders can take their organizations even further.
