Читать книгу The U.S. Naval Institute on Naval Innovation - John E. Jackson - Страница 10
Оглавление1 “INNOVATION: THE FATHER OF ALL NECESSITY”
(Selection from chapter 13 of The Accidental Admiral: A Sailor Takes Command at NATO)
ADM James Stavridis, USN (Ret.)
Admiral James Stavridis, USN, is widely recognized as one of the brightest military officers of his generation. He is an operator, a thinker, and a writer who has found ways to express his ideas in print throughout his extremely successful naval career. His reputation for trying new ideas and adapting old ones to meet the requirements of evolving situations are legendary. In this chapter from his recent book, Admiral Stavridis discusses the need for innovation, and some ways in which change can be accommodated within military organizations.
“INNOVATION: THE FATHER OF ALL NECESSITY”
(Selection from chapter 13 of The Accidental Admiral: A Sailor Takes Command at NATO) by ADM James Stavridis, USN (Ret.) (Naval Institute Press, 2014): 156–66.
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.—Abraham Lincoln
During my years as the supreme allied commander at NATO I kept a sign on my desk visible to everyone who walked into the room. It was another quote from Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity; if you would test a man’s character, give him power.” This is a truism that applies not just in the military or politics but in every aspect of civil society, and indeed in our families.
I like that quote for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it reminded me every day that jobs steeped in power come with a built-in responsibility to exercise it in responsible, honest, and transparent ways. Second, and more subtly, the quote conveyed to me the ever-present need to overcome the day-to-day challenges—the adversities of the moment that constantly press in on a leader in any truly significant job. And frankly, while most men (and women) can stand adversity, it takes a lot of iron in your soul to step up and actually overcome the challenges and succeed at accomplishing the tasks at hand. It has been my good fortune to work with a lot of men and women who did overcome the adversity. A central lesson I took away is the value of innovation in success; whether in the military, government, or business, there are valuable lessons here. Let me explain how I arrived at that conclusion.
The central question for any leader, whatever the size or shape of his or her organization, is how to overcome adversity. What are the leadership and management tools that matter the most? There are many candidates: teamwork, drive, determination, civility, alignment, presentational skills, and strategic communications, to name a few; the list of useful tools and skills goes on and on. All are important. But at the top of my list is innovation. This was not a sudden epiphany that came upon me like enlightenment came to Paul on the road to Tarsus. Indeed, I came to the view that innovation is the critical ingredient in overall organizational achievement relatively slowly over the course of a couple of decades.
As you start out in the military, there is an enormous and obvious premium placed on repetitive training in order to improve. If a military organization wants to “up its game,” the normal prescription is lots and lots of practice, drills, and exercises. And of course this makes sense. To use a sports analogy, if you want a better jump shot, go out and shoot jump shots—thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Think of Larry Bird as a boy in his backyard in Indiana spending hour after hour shooting baskets. It works. Slowly. In that sense, many organizations—particularly military ones, with a predisposition for uniformity and conservative approaches, but also civilian and governmental enterprises—are seduced into regimes that focus almost entirely on repetitive training to improve.
But what if you added innovation to repetition?
Back to Larry Bird. How about new technology? Suppose he had been given a pair of brand-new, spring-loaded, light-yet-tough Nike Air Jordans. Would they have given the aspiring ballplayer that extra bounce, that modicum of support that could help improve his shots? You bet.
Or how about technique? What about a change in procedure, breaking the wrist in a more pronounced way, applying more backspin to the ball and a slightly higher arc, taking advantage of a “larger” target by a sharper angle of descent to the rim? Would that innovation in technique have a positive effect? Clearly it would.
The problem, of course, is that most organizations don’t devote enough resources to the innovation part of their games, especially to disruptive technologies or disruptive innovations—technologies or ideas that essentially create a new market by changing a fundamental value equation, thus reshaping an existing marketplace, usually rapidly and somewhat unexpectedly. Clay Christenson, a noted thinker and writer about innovation, has repeatedly pointed out the need to find, evaluate, and embrace disruptive innovations and technologies—even when it is not obvious that their time has come.
An example of disruption would be the arrival of the telephone during the era of the telegraph. Telegraph lines already crisscrossed the country, and there were trained operators, delivery boys to run the messages, huge investments, and lots of profit in all that. Why would anyone want to have a telephone? But the technology enabled the innovation of real-time conversation, thus reshaping the marketplace for communication. Such marketplace innovation has occurred often through history and seems to be accelerating in the twenty-first century.
I began reading and learning about innovation seriously about twenty years ago, and the more I look at big organizations and how leaders manage them, the more I believe in the need for it. The most important approach to innovation I’ve employed over the years is the use of “innovation cells.” This means simply carving out a few very bright and mildly untethered people from the organization and giving them the authority, resources, and above all the charter to find and try new ideas. I tried this first about fifteen years ago when I was a young captain at sea in command of a group of about a dozen destroyers. I had a good group of ship captains in command of the individual ships, but I saw no real innovators among them, so I asked each of the ship captains to propose a junior officer for my innovation cell. I did the same with the various aircraft squadrons that were part of my command. After interviewing all of the candidates, I chose five of them, attached them temporary duty to my staff, and told them to think about antisubmarine warfare and strikes at sea on enemy combatant ships.
“Your job is to make everyone upset with your crazy ideas,” I told them. “And don’t worry if most of your schemes fail. In fact, I expect most of them to fail. This is like baseball—if you’re hitting .250, and one in four of your ideas bears some fruit, you’re having a solid season. You hit on one in three and it’s .333—a career year for almost any ballplayer. Anything better than that is a Hall of Fame year, which I’m not expecting (but it would be nice).” I gave them a small budget, the luxury of time to work on their ideas, and turned them loose.
Many of their ideas were goofy and unmanageable. I remember one proposal to use old fifty-gallon oil drums tied together to simulate submarines for target practice. They tried to attach unclassified communication devices to our military systems in ways that would have violated every element of policy and regulation on the books. And they had lots of other unworkable ideas.
But they also came up with several new ways to employ our detection systems in synergistic ways, fusing the data. This means taking input from various sensors—such as a radar, which uses electromagnetic radio waves to measure a physical object; a sonar, which uses sound waves to do the same; and infrared detectors, which measure heat—and merging them together to create a coherent location and picture of a target. We did this both at sea and on the ground in Andean and Central American jungles.
The team did some superb work using emerging technologies, including tiny unmanned air vehicles dubbed “wasps” and real-time translation devices that we called “phraselators.” They also explored ways to attack very low radar cross-section high-speed patrol craft, an increasing threat in coastal warfare.
Above all, the innovation cell had a synergistic effect as people throughout my command—about three thousand folks in all—saw that the leadership valued (indeed demanded) innovation. People who were not part of the innovation cell started to talk about new ways of doing business as a matter of routine. Ideas were batted back and forth across the wardroom table and in the squadron ready rooms. It was an awakening of sorts. And of course we continued to do the basic blocking and tackling that comes with the job of military preparation. But by adding to our effort through innovation, we were able to bring our game up to a new level.
That experience made me a believer. In each of my subsequent jobs I set up an innovation cell of some sort and tried to encourage new ways of thinking, reading, writing, and sharing ideas on innovation.
For the military broadly, of course, all this came into sharp focus after 9/11 when we were suddenly confronted with a very new sort of opponent—essentially a network of opponents who were superb innovators. Gradually over the post-9/11 decade our own innovations began to kick in, and we were able to create new ways of thinking about conflict and the tools, techniques, and procedures necessary to construct our own networks (leveraging special operations forces); deploying new types of sensors (unmanned vehicles, especially armed drones); collecting intelligence through big data (the cyberworld); using existing platforms in new ways (intercontinental ballistic missile–launching submarines converted to Tomahawk cruise missile shooting platforms, large deck amphibious ships providing “lily pad” bases for special forces); describing and implementing new ways of looking at conflict through international law; and other innovations.
Indeed, after the 9/11 strikes on New York and Washington, it was clear that we—the military—needed to develop very new ways of thinking about conflict. I was asked by Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, to stand up an innovation cell. We built Deep Blue (after the IBM chess-playing machine and also a play on words connoting the deep ocean) on the backbone of the Navy Operations Group, the small think tank that Rear Adm. Joe Sestak had created immediately after 9/11. Our job at Deep Blue was to come up with new ideas, forging them in the intensity of what we felt at the time was a new era of warfare.
Some of our ideas failed; for example, a “sea swap” to keep ships forward deployed and fly their crews back and forth—although the concept is getting a new look in view of today’s more resource-constrained environment. We designed new types of combat groups (expeditionary strike groups) centered on large amphibious ships combined with destroyers and submarines, carrying drones and special operations forces. Another idea was to repackage communications using chat rooms, e-mail, and primitive versions of social networks to leverage lessons learned operationally. We looked at unmanned vehicles on the surface of the sea, below the ocean, and in the air. We created training simulators using off-the-shelf video games as bases. And Deep Blue also looked at the idea of the “expeditionary sailor,” reflecting the fact that tens of thousands of sailors would soon be serving far from the sea in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. How to train, equip, and prepare them for duty like that? Innovation!
Around this time I attended a conference at which all the Navy flag officers were present. I was a newly minted one-star admiral heading up Deep Blue. It was a memorable meeting for a couple of reasons. At one point a vastly senior four-star admiral approached me during a coffee break. He was a naval aviator, and he was very displeased with the emphasis we were placing on drones and other unmanned air vehicles. His comments, in a nutshell, were that I was “standing into danger,” as we say in the Navy, in a career sense. And being a typical aviator, he was not subtle. “Stavridis,” he said, “your career is over unless you learn how to stay in your lane.” That was fairly unsettling but not entirely unexpected. When I mentioned this to a senior surface officer, a three-star who was a mentor and leader in the community, his comment was, “You better trim your sails, Jim.” Hardly reassuring.
The other memorable revelation at the all–flag officer conference was delivered by the CNO. He talked at length about a study of flag officer traits that he had commissioned by a well-regarded consulting firm specializing in leadership training. The results of that study were compared with those of similar studies of very senior executives in private industry. The Navy admirals scored very high in almost every desirable trait: leadership, organization, dedication, energy, alignment, and peer review. But there was an exception to this parade of good news: Navy admirals scored the lowest in . . . willingness to take career risk—essentially the willingness to try new things, to champion innovation and change. I found it extremely ironic that this group of admirals—all of whom had demonstrated extreme reserves of physical courage in flying high-performance aircraft, spending months at sea, and conducting dangerous special operations—were simply afraid to take the bureaucratic risks that come with innovation.
Despite these obvious indications that I was perhaps not in the mainstream with my colleagues in this regard, I continued to try to build my innovation cell and hoped for the best. After all, I had never planned to make it past lieutenant, so I was playing with house money. Luckily for me, the CNO was a fan of what we were doing at Deep Blue, and my career did not come to a screeching halt. Shortly thereafter I was sent back to sea, perhaps before I could annoy the entire senior leadership of the Navy.
My new carrier strike group command in Florida was an ideal position for me: back in my home state; away from the two big fleet concentration areas of Norfolk and San Diego, where plenty of senior admirals would have been watching me a little too closely; and in the middle of the first few years of the post-9/11 era. I set up the innovation cell and turned them loose. By this time, a spirit of innovation was actually beginning to take hold in the Navy, pushed by a new generation of young commanders facing operational challenges of a different sort.
We sailed to the Arabian Gulf with a major load of innovative gear and ideas to try, including a midsized unmanned surface boat, the Spartan Scout; the phraselator translation devices mentioned earlier; several types of unmanned air surveillance vehicles of various sizes; simulator software to train our tactical watch officers “in stride”; and a group of young junior officers we called “innovation fellows” who came to the flag staff with a ton of good ideas. Not all of it worked out; in fact, we probably batted around .300 or a little less. But we learned a great deal, we failed fast, and our partnerships with other organizations tasked with innovation (e.g., the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) were very productive.
By the time I got to my first four-star job at Southern Command in Miami a few years later I had a mini-network of bright, disruptive thinkers at my disposal. People such as Capt. Kevin Quarderer, call sign “Q,” brought a fusion of technical and tactical acumen to the idea of innovation. Kevin had been with me on several innovation cells earlier in my career, and he held several advanced technology degrees as well as a true bent for challenging the given orthodoxy. He brought other thinkers on board, and we set out to use innovation to tackle the challenges of drug smuggling and hostage taking through the jungles of South and Central America. Among many other ideas, Kevin developed new detection systems that could at least partially “see through” the thick triple-canopy jungle by fusing several different sensor inputs—radar, heat seeking, and biological. We used a high-tech high-speed surface ship, the Stiletto, to literally run down the drug boats. I gave this innovation to my two-star Army general, Keith Huber, and he proved to be a pretty good sailor, using the Stiletto in lots of creative ways in shallow water that would have made a more traditional ship handler blanch.
We used commercial satellites to map the region and find anomalies as well as to respond after disasters such as fire and flooding so that we could sharpen our reactions. The innovation cell turned to business leaders and asked a group of them to function as a mock drug cartel and model for us the business case and transportation/logistic concepts that the actual cartels might be using—after all, business is business. That enabled us to essentially reverse-engineer the trafficking routes and methods and apply our resources to killing them. Some of what we did is highly classified, but I can say that our innovation techniques and ideas had a powerful impact on stopping narco-trafficking: we took down the largest levels ever recorded in 2006–9 using these innovations.
When I took on the job as SACEUR in 2009, I found myself in the middle of one of the most conventional and conservative organizations in the world: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Founded in the early 1950s, it remains steeped in tradition. The large and heavily bureaucratic structure at NATO headquarters in Brussels includes nearly four hundred standing committees ready to parse the smallest detail of any idea of change—and then usually block it. Every decision has to gain the approval of all twenty-eight NATO nations, a process described technically as consensus but more accurately depicted by picturing a steering wheel with twenty-eight pairs of hands on it. I knew that bringing innovation to NATO was going to be a supreme challenge.
Luckily, I quickly found a pair of very bright officers: Navy captain Jay Chesnut and Air Force colonel Pete Goldfein. Both were career aviators, but in smaller communities—Jay was an antisubmarine warfare expert flying the S-3 Viking, and Pete was a special forces aviator who flew a wide variety of very special small aircraft. They brought a sense of partnership with private sector entities as well as working closely with DARPA. Over the course of our time in NATO they were able to bring along several key innovations. The most interesting was a biological sensing system that could be used to detect humans moving through unmanned zones—highly useful in everything from counterterrorism to stopping human trafficking.
In the end, of course, innovation is not all about technology. Chesnut and Goldfein were also both instrumental, along with Cdr. Tesh Rao, an electronics warfare pilot, in redesigning the entire NATO command structure. I had been tasked by the secretary general to figure out how to reduce the size of the standing command structure—the many headquarters scattered around Europe and the world. It was big and unwieldy, including as it did more than 15,000 officers and enlisted staff members across 11 major headquarters. I wanted to reduce our size by at least 20 percent, and was willing to consider cuts up to about one-third. I turned to my innovation cell and brought in other collaborators from across the NATO enterprise. We considered using a contractor to examine solutions with us, but I have always shied away from bringing in “outside experts,” which seems to me almost a contradiction in terms for a military organization—we have to be our own experts.
In order to bring this bureaucratic innovation home, I tried to build a shared sense of the value of change. Lots of the NATO nations wanted to reduce overhead and save money, and their ambassadors were amenable to some fairly radical redesigns. Other nations were more traditionally rooted in the defensive structure of the alliance (and liked having jobs for their top military officers), so I offered them the allure of new technologies that could streamline our ability to respond to twenty-first-century challenges—not a sudden invasion of NATO from the East, but rather the endless crises of Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, piracy, Syria, and so on that kept popping up in small, fast, discrete firestorms.
In the end, my innovation cell brought together a new plan for redesigning the overall command structure, closing 6 of the 11 headquarters, and reducing manpower from 15,000 to just under 9,000 personnel “on watch” assigned to some headquarters at any given time. Not too bad, really, for an organization with three million men and women under arms and twenty-eight nations engaged. We sold the plan to the top leadership—not without arguments and pushback—and the secretary general moved it in the political sphere with the help of the ambassadors from the leading nations. Secretary of Defense Gates came in as the closer and delivered the product. We also added several smaller, lighter, faster command elements to balance the loss of the big headquarters. For example, we closed a major land force HQ, a large maritime HQ, and one of our two air defense HQs—but we added a very lethal special forces HQ, a lighter strike HQ, and added significant missile defense technology to the remaining air HQ. Essentially, we moved from the lingering Cold War structure into an organization better prepared for twenty-first-century conflict. It all worked out fairly well.
What do I take away from all these years of trying to build innovation?
First, it is crucial to recognize the importance of innovation and the value of change. Leaders should emphasize it at every turn, pointing out historical examples (both from broader society and from the organization’s own history). For example, I often spoke about the post–World War I 1920s–30s period of naval innovation led by Billy Mitchell and other early pioneers of aviation at sea and on nascent aircraft carriers. They overcame the entrenched bureaucracy of battleships and essentially invented the U.S. Air Force. Self-talk matters. What we say about ourselves at every level in an organization—communicated through briefings to the team, Web sites, annual “state of the command” addresses, videos posted on YouTube, and personnel policies—constitutes the internal strategic communication. This is particularly important coming from the leadership. Self-talk about innovation can be worth its weight in gold.
Second, you have to work hard to find innovators. This is difficult. At NATO (and indeed earlier) I tried to mine the small and somewhat disadvantaged service communities; for example, people from aviation communities that were “going out of business” but previously had performed somewhat oddball missions: special forces pilots, electronic warfare operators, tactical communication platforms. Generally (and there are, of course, exceptions), people in the “mainstream communities” of high-performance fighters, Aegis missile defense ships, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and so forth are less inclined to embrace change and innovation. Why? Because they are doing just fine in their careers given the high premium paid to them by the standing organization. Searching out the officers and enlisted personnel who are just a half beat off the music and don’t always stay in their lane is a valuable exercise.
Third, the innovators must report directly to the top of the organization. Reports filtered to the top through intermediate levels are “dumbed down” to the lowest common denominator by the time they reach it. There will be institutional resistance to doing this. I can’t count the number of times my front office team came to me with proposals to downsize, eliminate, or reassign the people and resources devoted to the innovation cells. This also means the organization’s leader must find the time to take the innovation briefs, evaluate them and decide where to put emphasis, and then move the idea into the mainstream—where it will again encounter resistance because it was “not invented by the main staff.” The imprimatur of the leader is crucial to keeping innovation alive in an organization.
Fourth, resource the innovators! This means carving out sufficient amounts of money, people, and time to allow your innovation cell to flourish. It does not mean huge levels of resources; for even very large organizations, a relatively small number of people (say a dozen) can achieve big throw weight. Deep Blue in the Navy, Checkmate in the Air Force, the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, and Google Ideas within Google are all examples of this. In terms of money, the best approach is to encourage (and sometimes require) the innovation cell to reach out in entrepreneurial fashion and find “other people’s money” to fund their ideas.
Fifth, reward them appropriately. This can range from cash and bonus awards for civilians to better evaluations and medals for military personnel. And again, this kind of message moves through the organization, and people begin to know that the leadership and the organization itself reward those who take the risks of innovation—despite their frequent failures.
And speaking of frequent failures, sixth, accept that many ideas will fail. Not every well you drill will be a gusher—but a handful of successful wildcat wells can make you rich. Encourage recognition of failure early in the process—the so-called fail fast approach that many corporations take today. Don’t keep hammering away when something isn’t working—move on to the next good idea.
Seventh, publicize successes in real time. This means up, out, and down: talking about the wins within your organization, as we did frequently at NATO; telling your bosses (in my case both the NATO secretary general and the U.S. secretary of defense) about them in weekly/monthly “innovation alerts”; and briefing subordinate commands about the good ideas (and encouraging them to use them) at command conferences, semiannual gatherings, and in annual reports such as the posture statement required to be submitted to Congress. The occasional blog post, social network tweet or post, and even articles in traditional journals all help.
Finally, recognize that there will be doubters, skeptics, naysayers, and the occasional ad hominem attack associated with trying to change things. For instance, I gave a talk at the 2012 TED Global Conference. TED—Technology, Entertainment, and Design—is an annual gathering of innovators who give eighteen-minute talks on “the idea of their life.” My subject was open source security: trying to create security in the turbulent twenty-first century through a fusion of international, interagency, private-public, and strategic communications in a “smart power” approach. I’ve received plenty of positive feedback, but the hundreds of thousands of hits have also included lots of “this will never work” and “who the hell is this guy and why is he so foolish and naïve.”
Jonathan Swift, the great satirist, lampooned those who sail against the wind by depicting them as believing that “so shall ye know a genius is among you: there will be a confederacy of dunces allied against him.” I am far from a genius, and those disagreeing with me are seldom dunces, but I am willing to suffer the slings and arrows of public criticism to champion the occasional disruptive innovation or technology.
In the end, much of human progress comes because of people who could never quite stay in their lane, as annoying as they can be. The trick, as always, is balance: find the way to maintain the value of current innovations and technologies, resource the disruptive possibilities, understand how the value proposition changes, analyze the market, and then bring the new online while gracefully removing the old. Of course it doesn’t always go smoothly. As in mountain climbing, it is good to have a firm grip on the next rock before you completely let go of the one you have. But to get up the mountain you have to climb, not just cling to a couple of rocks. And remember that the top of the mountain is where the strongest winds blow.
