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2 “A TIME TO INNOVATE, A TIME TO STEAL”

LT Scott Cheney-Peters, USNR

Lieutenant Cheney-Peters is a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve. In this article, he advocates that leaders should be willing to ignore the “not-invented-here syndrome” and willingly borrow (or steal) ideas that have worked elsewhere. He believes that, without shame or regret, they should avoid “re-inventing the wheel” and capitalize on the innovations of others.

“A TIME TO INNOVATE, A TIME TO STEAL”

By LT Scott Cheney-Peters, USNR, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (July 2014): 78–80.

At a meeting of the Disruptive Thinkers group in the summer of 2013, attendees were asked to name the most innovative military leader they knew. I have to admit, I was stumped. Others produced tales of front-line leaders developing creative solutions to near-insurmountable obstacles. The only answer I could immediately conjure was Lieutenant Commander Thomas Dodge, Kelsey Grammar’s submarine commander in the movie Down Periscope, who, among other exploits, disguised his World War II–era diesel electric boat as a fishing vessel—complete with drunken strains of “Louie, Louie”—to avoid detection by a Navy patrol.

My inability to name a real-life Lieutenant Commander Dodge wasn’t because I have known no great leaders. In my naval service I have encountered outstanding leaders—male and female, officer and enlisted—but no particularly innovative ones. This apparent disconnect is all the more perplexing given the recent emphasis on developing a culture of innovation in the Navy. The truth is a good leader does not need to be innovative, and an innovative leader is not necessarily a good one.

It is important to define “innovative” as a leadership trait. An innovative leader develops new methods and solutions to tasks and problems. This is an admirable characteristic, and one the Navy needs within its ranks. However, the Navy is best served when the burden of innovation does not fall to the leaders of its front-line operational units. Quite simply, the time and energy they spend developing original solutions to problems would be wasted if an effective answer already exists. Instead, the Navy should encourage these leaders to “steal” what works best until something better—and proven—comes along.

Good Leaders Innovate; Great Leaders Steal

A leader adept at stealing requires an awareness of existing solutions, receptiveness to others’ ideas, and the humility to adopt methods that are not one’s own. The aim is to reduce duplication and extra work—not only for leaders, but also for those they lead. From shipboard instructions to training-team scenarios, great leaders know how to copy what works and are willing to do so, liberally dispensing credit as they go. They also require keen judgment: to determine the methods worth taking, to identify those most applicable to the situation at hand, and to know when to ditch the stolen goods for something better.

At the same time, no two situations, and therefore no two problem sets, are identical. Nor can any method or solution, such as a ship’s force protection plan, hope to cover every conceivable scenario. To deal with a steady stream of new situations, it would appear at first glance that good leaders must be innovative. For example, a unique pier set-up might prevent the deployment of jersey barriers as required by the force protection plan. When such a seemingly original situation is broken down into its fundamental parts, however, few truly new elements emerge. While the force protection plan as written might not incorporate the pier set-up, adhering to the force protection principle of distance suggests implementing something else to separate the ship from potential threats.

Here again a great front-line leader acts as a thief, aware of others’ “jewels”—existing solutions and approaches to this more generic problem of creating separation—and intelligent enough to know which to grab in the circumstances. Granted, an innovative operational leader might come up with an interesting approach to the composite issue, and the trait would indeed be useful for truly new and unanticipated needs. In the great majority of situations, however, the operational leader is better off copying another’s work because it is already known to be effective, or applying proven principles to address the component parts of a problem.

In the midst of the response to November 2013’s super typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, the U.S. Navy faced the challenge of quickly and simultaneously filling multiple water containers. Hull maintenance technicians (HTs) on board the USS George Washington (CVN-73) used their ingenuity to devise a system they called “the Octopus” by welding together water distribution piping that could fill up to eight containers at once with fresh water. Upon completion it was flown to a shore location to aid in assistance efforts.¹

This story was heralded as a model of Fleet innovation on the fly, yet observers noted that a similar need and set of solutions arose during previous U.S. Navy disaster-response efforts. For example, during the relief operations after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, HTs on board the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) built two 12-faucet fresh-water dispensers.² While the similarities should not detract from the innovativeness of the George Washington’s crew, they were denied an opportunity to consider the experience of their counterparts and had to spend time “re-inventing the wheel” with the real possibility of not meeting their objective. The anecdote also illustrates what Rear Admiral Scott Jerabeck meant when remarking that the Navy has lessons logged, not lessons learned, and the failures of its current infrastructure for capturing, validating, and disseminating those lessons.³

A History of Thievery

The Navy must do two things to support thievery in the Fleet. First, it needs to inculcate a spirit of humility and receptiveness among operational leaders toward ideas that are not their own. Training should focus on breaking problems into their component parts and on the methods for finding and selecting something worth stealing, applying it, and determining when to ditch it.

Second, the Navy must ensure that organizational infrastructure supports this type of leader. The Navy needs a centralized, well-publicized den of thieves, a place where those in search of answers can find and copy from those who have already done the work of testing and validating an approach. A leader can’t steal existing solutions they don’t have access to or can’t locate across fragmented individual databases.

The Navy has long supported thievery, from the study of naval history and broad military principles to attempts to capture lessons learned on the operation of specific weapon systems. Deckplate gouge is a time-honored example of informal attempts to pass on solutions, but technology offers the possibility of leveraging informal networks to do more. The Navy has begun pursuing internet crowd-sourcing efforts such as Massively Multiplayer Online Wargames Leveraging the Internet and the CNO’s Reducing Administrative Distractions website.⁴ In fact, many ideas on the latter site centered on the desire to make this form of information swapping and locating easier.

Whatever form this infrastructure takes, it needs more than just thieves. For front-line leaders to focus on applying proven approaches developed elsewhere, there has to be an “elsewhere” that focuses on developing the approaches. While this has traditionally taken the form of experts and academics in development groups, schools, and research facilities, it is increasingly the province of volunteers on the internet. Innovators are also needed to mitigate predictability—one of the dangers of using only the best approaches, especially as applied to tactics against an enemy—by generating multiple validated approaches and keeping new ones on file in case those in use lose their utility.

Conversely, innovators need feedback. This means that operational leaders at times need to validate innovation or provide a point of departure for innovators to refine. Communication is crucial in this partnership, including an awareness of the range of resources—or lack thereof—front-line leaders have at their disposal.

Having developed, tested, or validated an approach—whether original or stolen—the best leaders freely encourage dissemination of their findings. Richard Gallagher, author of a book on workplace leadership, believes that people gain more leadership credentials by encouraging others to spread their ideas than by squabbling over credit. “When you openly encourage people to steal your ideas and get in the habit of stealing from others and crediting them, wonderful things happen to your career that you could never imagine when you try to be the lone ranger with a great idea,” Gallagher says.⁵ Here the Navy’s role is to provide efficient infrastructure for that dissemination so that it’s easy to find and see.

The Navy is trying to sustain its commitments with less resources, a situation that typically equates to less time for front-line leaders. They have less time to practice and perfect their mission areas, less time to meet their operational requirements, and less time to lead. To succeed, they must steep themselves in the art of stealing to obtain tested means to achieve their objectives. They need to know that they don’t have to create everything from scratch themselves, and the Navy must support their efforts with training and infrastructure.

Good leaders and innovators, while distinct, are interdependent. Good leaders need innovators to develop the methods, the tactics, and even the administrative forms they steal. Yet while feedback and innovation from the Fleet are always welcome, the Navy should not emphasize it as the focal point of development. Innovation must exist to support operational leaders, not vice versa.

It is better for an operational leader to copy than create, to steal rather than innovate. By doing so they are more likely to have the time—and the proven tools—to succeed.

Notes

1. MC3 Peter Burghart, “George Washington HTs Pump Out Aid,” www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=77655, 15 November 2013.

2. MC3 Shentel M. Yarnell and MCSN Heather Roe, “Carl Vinson Sends Desperately Needed Water Ashore,” www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=50661, 20 January 2010.

3. RADM Scott Jerabeck, Lecture at Surface Navy Association, Hampton Roads Chapter Lunch, Hampton Roads, VA, 20 November 2013.

4. Massively Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet: Wargames run by the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Campaign now concluded, formerly at http://navyrad.ideascale.com/a/pages/about.

5. Rachel Zupek, “When a Co-worker Steals an Idea,” CareerBuilder.com, http://msn.empleoscb.com/CBMiniSite/SharedPages/PrinterFriendlyArticle.aspx?articleID=395.