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.
