Tag Archives: Innovation

Seamanship and Leadership

People Not Parts: Returning Ingenuity and Tenacity to our Officer Corps

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By Ian Akisoglu

Since the end of the Second World War, the military dominance of the United States has rested on its relative technological superiority over its adversaries, what has been underwritten by its impressive economic strength and high-tech domestic industries. For the first time in seventy years, the United States military is forced to contemplate a long-term strategy without the implicit guarantee that it will enjoy decisive technological superiority as its most likely adversaries come closer and closer to achieving parity in both technological and economic strength. In order to remain viable in future conflicts, the American military will have to rethink its operational paradigm and learn to rely more heavily on the creativity and individual zeal of its leaders and less on its hard assets.

For much of its history, the American military has fought its major conflicts without the overwhelming technological and financial superiority that it has enjoyed since the end of the Second World War. I believe that this phenomenon can best be explained by the following paradigm: raised in an age where American military power was relatively lacking on the world stage, the American officer corps did not possess any of the bad habits or laziness of thought engendered in today’s officer corps. Looking down on the rest of the world’s militaries from a plateau of overwhelming superiority and relative security, we have become haughty and ignorant of our peers’ capabilities. Previously generations of American military officers were forced to contend with a world in which the United States Army and Navy were not the best – indeed, not even in the top ten at times.

This forced American military leaders to develop and utilize a currently unimaginable level of organizational, operational, and strategic creativity comparably unknown to the armed forces of today, where an over-reliance on financial superiority has led to an over-reliance on technological superiority, which has led to an over-reliance on established procedures and doctrine. In order for the armed forces of the United States of America to continue to enjoy success in the future, both on the battlefield and as a viable instrument of soft power, American military leaders must look to lessons from the past and re-learn how to plan and fight wars without the assumption that they will always enjoy superiority of force.

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A humorous quote from a European officer highlights the benefit of this, “One of the serious problems in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals nor do they feel any obligations to follow their doctrine.” This emphasizes the extensive freedom of judgment American commanders previously enjoyed while executing missions in complex operational environments. From the author’s perspective as a contemporary unrestricted line officer in the U.S. Navy, this freedom of judgment is virtually non-existent nowadays. Instead, American military commanders are so hamstrung by strict adherence to the protocol and procedures that have been enshrined throughout their military upbringings that they are often afraid to rely on their own intuition, experience, and creativity. This risk aversion is not unjustified since the risk to reward ratio for officers willing to try new ideas has shifted so heavily to the risk side, that many deem the potential gains not worth imperiling their careers over. The main problem with this method of doing business is that operational arenas are not the static playing fields that we presuppose them to be in most exercise and operation briefs. They are constantly evolving, which requires adaptability and ingenuity instead of a flow-chart approach to missions.

Members of the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 2014 participate in the Oath of Office ceremony at Tecumseh Court. (U.S. Navy photo by David Tucker/Released)
Members of the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 2014 participate in the Oath of Office ceremony at Tecumseh Court. (U.S. Navy photo by David Tucker/Released)

This is not meant to be a rebuke of procedural compliance – far from it. Procedural compliance is important to ensure the safety and proper execution of our technical missions: safety and maintenance. However, it is important to also recognize its inherent limitations, and understand that it’s impossible to write “winning a war” into procedural compliance, since procedures only extend to the realm of what is known, and war often devolves into the area of the unknown. Simply put, officers should be proficient at procedural compliance and planned execution, but once the situation is no longer covered by procedures, strategic entrepreneurship and improvisation must take over seamlessly. If we consistently deny our Navy leadership the ability to improvise and test their creative problem solving abilities for fear of imperiling their careers, how and when can this creative solution seeking process be fostered?

The key question then is how do we recapture the ingenuity of the individual officer? I assert that it must start at the earliest possible point in the officer’s career – for creativity once lost is nearly impossible to rediscover. The Navy should develop programs that both encourage and train officers to think of creative solutions to problems early on in their careers. The best time to start this is at the O-2 and O-3 levels, directly after the completion of an officer’s initial warfare qualifications and first operational tour.

The importance of instilling and encouraging the idea of creative thought early on in the officer corps cannot be overstated. Senior officers that attend the Naval War College relatively late in their careers to explore ideas on war and its strategic theory have already come to depend on the rigidity of the Navy establishment for their paychecks and lifestyle, and thus are less willing to question the institution or its authority. The junior officer, relatively fresh and with fewer mental harangues, owes no such allegiance to the organization and does not see it through the same cynical lens, allowing them to see the flaws in our organization much more clearly than a dyed-in-the-wool career officer. These junior officers are still willing to question the military’s fatal deficiencies and flaws before becoming completely indoctrinated into the system.

One way to implement this would be to establish a school that officers attend with peers from their warfare areas concentrated around every major career milestone. The goal of such a school would be to gather high-flying officers into small groups where they would be posed complex operational problems. However, they would face them with handicaps and constraints put in place, making normal doctrine and pre-planned responses obsolete, and forcing them to develop creative solutions to real world problems. Officers would return to the course at every major career milestone, such as in between division officer tours, prior to starting their department head tours, prior to beginning their XO/CO fleet-up, and prior to achieving flag rank.

One of the most resonant lessons that has been gleaned from the attacks on the USS Stark, USS Samuel B. Roberts, and USS Cole is that in unexpected situations, conventional procedures often are inadequate, and improvisation dominates. Generations of American military officers have become complacent through the knowledge of their nation’s technological and financial superiority. It is time to train them to think and fight absent this implicit safety net once again. It is better to start learning these critical skills now, while remaining in control of the pace, than to be forced to learn them under fire in a future conflict.

Capt. Frank Olmo, deputy commander, Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC), introduces SMWDC and the new career opportunities it provides junior surface warfare officers (SWOs) during a brief aboard USS Bunker Hill (DDG 52). U.S. Navy photo).
Capt. Frank Olmo, deputy commander, Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC), introduces SMWDC and the new career opportunities it provides junior surface warfare officers (SWOs) during a brief aboard USS Bunker Hill (DDG 52). (U.S. Navy photo).

Secondly, while an understanding of mathematics and the sciences remain ever important in an increasingly technical and specialized military, officer programs must also recapture the emphasis on liberal arts education and creative thinking that has steadily dwindled in the twentieth and twenty-first century formation of modern military officers. At the United States Naval Academy it is a requirement that sixty-five percent of those graduates must complete degrees in the science, technology, engineering, or mathematics disciplines. Of students commissioning from ROTC programs around the country – which, combined with the Naval Academy, contribute roughly two thirds of new officer accessions the fleet each year – eighty-five percent of available scholarships are rewarded to those students who choose majors in the STEM fields. Those remaining fifteen percent who do express interest in studying disciplines outside of these fields, ignominiously referred to as “Tier 3” majors, find their options for earning scholarships and commissioning more limited.

Technical courses do an excellent job training officers to operate complex combat systems and nuclear reactors, where every aspect can be distilled to checklists and procedures, but do a poor job in training strategic and creative thought. Such critical thinking skills are ultimately where officers render the greatest value to the armed forces as leaders and warfighters, not technicians. At a minimum, a certain number of liberal arts courses in subjects such as philosophy, history, literature, and economics should be required for certain officer programs in just the same way that calculus, physics, and other mathematics and science courses are. An officer able to harness the problem-solving ability taught by an education in engineering with the propensity for creative though that comes from a study of the liberal arts would be the best equipped to execute all of the Navy’s missions.

Thirdly, the United States military must push decision-making back down the chain of command to the unit level. In our age of global real-time communication we have achieved the ability to control even the minutest detail from the highest level. We must resist the temptation to do so, for this robs on-scene commanders of the crucial experience that comes from tense, independent decision-making. Instead, we must once again become comfortable with giving commanders autonomy over their units and operations, giving direction only in broad strokes and leaving the details to the “man on the spot,” who is inevitably the subject matter expert on what is happening within and directly around his unit. In today’s fleet, the number of daily updates that a deployed warship is required to provide up the chain of command off-ship has become a full-time job on top of the full-time job of running the ship and executing its mission. No effective leader has two full-time jobs.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt on the steps of the Naval War College.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt on the steps of the Naval War College.

And all of this for what? It is absolutely ludicrous to imagine that a remote commander and their staff, often years detached from single-unit leadership, require or need all of the information now required to be tracked on a daily basis. The massive off-ship administrative burden that this places on the wardroom of an operational unit, simultaneously interfering with their ability to effectively do their job within the lifelines of the ship, significantly degrades morale and unit-level success. By fostering a culture in which officers are afraid of making even the smallest decisions themselves, we are handicapping the abilities of junior officers to develop leadership skills and to learn to take the initiative, resulting in the ones who adapt to this climate being cautious to a fault for the rest of their careers, and inducing those individuals who want more control and autonomy to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Finally, the United States military must consider drawing talent into its ranks from untraditional sources outside the military and recognize that its rigid and traditional career path that exclusively emphasizes hiring and promotion from within might have to change. This is not entirely without precedent – the Navy already does this for many of its staff corps officers who have demonstrated experience and proficiency in their civilian careers. There are many individuals with different backgrounds and specialties who hear the call to serve their country at different points in their life. A master software engineer at Google with ten years in the industry would be an incredible asset to the military’s cyber warfare communities, but at that point in his career he would likely be too old to enlist and would have his talents wasted as a newly-commissioned ensign while also being grossly under-compensated. Instead, why not bring this cyber star in as a Lieutenant Commander? This arrangement would offer significant benefits and opportunities to both the military and the individual.

If the United States wants to avoid catastrophe on the battlefield in the coming decades, it will need to come to terms with the fact that having more money and better technology will no longer be enough to win the next war against the next foe – who may very well enjoy parity in these domains, if not even superiority. Accepting this, rather than continuing to do the same thing while expecting a different result, is a required preliminary step.

Deputy Secretary of Defense presents a Master of Science diploma to Ken Thomas at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work presents a Master of Science diploma to Ken Thomas at the Naval Postgraduate School.

The United States military must fundamentally change the way it does business and drive its officer corps to rediscover skills that gave way to technology and money when they seemed to no longer be needed or valued. In order to do this, we must encourage creative thought in our officers starting at a very junior level – both by commissioning a greater portion of our officers with backgrounds in the liberal arts as well as technical majors, and by creating incubator programs at multiple levels of officer career tracks to cultivate and stimulate creative thought. The military must also learn to re-delegate greater amounts of control and authority to unit commanders while unit commanders must learn to do the same to their subordinates. This ensures that if subordinate commanders are fighting a conflict in which they are cut off from communication with headquarters or things are not going quite as they had expected them to, they aren’t paralyzed with indecision, experiencing what is in effect their first ever real experience with high-stakes decision making.

Finally, the United States must harness the huge pool of potential talent that exists in the form of civilians who want to serve but don’t fit into the current recruiting construct. By allowing experienced non-military personnel to enter the organization at mid and even upper-level officer positions, the military can harness a huge untapped reservoir of private sector talent. The same skills that our military forefathers used to achieve victory on the battlefield when outclassed in technology, money, manpower, and weapons – creativity, zeal, initiative, and guile – are needed once again. All that is lacking is the will and tenacity to bring them back.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Ian Akisoglu is a Surface Warfare Officer living in Norfolk, Virginia.  He graduated from American University with a Bachelor of Arts in economics and history and was subsequently commissioned through Officer Candidate School.  The views expressed here are his own and do not represent those of the U.S. Department of Defense or the Department of the Navy.  He can be reached at [email protected].

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Bibliography:

Kimbrough IV, James M. MAJ, USA. (2008). Examining U.S. Irregular Warfare Doctrine. 14.

United States Naval Academy. (2015). Academics – Majors and Courses.

Population Representation in the Military Services FY 2013 Report: Appendix B: Active Component Enlisted Accessions, Enlisted Force, Officer Accessions, and Officer Corps Tables.

United States Navy ROTC. (2015). Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps Scholarship Selection Criteria.

Long, Roger D. The Man On The Spot: Essays on British Empire History. (Ed.), Praeger, First Edition (Sep 26, 1995).

Events

A Post-It Rebel Goes to Sea

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This article originally appeared on Medium and was republished with the author’s permission. You can read it in its original form here. 

By Anne Gibbon

Design thinking is beloved by many, and is more than a flash in the long list of new management tools. Why? Because it’s embodied learning. In recruiting your body, emotions, and rational brain to explore problems with others, we get to better solutions than pondering them alone in a cubicle. But for messy problems and large bureaucracies, design thinking alone isn’t sufficient. Systems dynamics appears to be the discipline of choice, but up to this point, the theoretical underpinnings have been developed to the exclusivity of embodied exercises.

This is my story of learning to facilitate design thinking as an embodied experience, rather than an intellectual exercise, and to begin to include systems thinking into the work. I have faith that the small prototypes will eventually snowball and make a greater impact than well written policy think pieces alone.

I confess, I put bandaids over my piercings. I never should have done that, I should have just taken them out — but the piercings are more me than the uniform these days.

Thirteen months after finishing ten years of service in the Navy, and days after finishing a fellowship at Stanford’s Design School, I put my foot down and really stretched my rebel wings. I got a very small nose piercing and three studs in one ear, most people don’t even notice them. But to me they are freedom. My problem: I still had to show up at Navy Reserve drill weekends with a proper uniform on. Too bad I never did ‘uniform inspection’ very well. One weekend someone complained about my pink nail polish and the gold ball earrings that were 2mm too big; I think she would have fallen out of her chair if she had discovered the band aids weren’t covering scratches.

The author leads a workshop at the Silicon Valley Innovation Academy in July 2015
The author leads a workshop at the Silicon Valley Innovation Academy in July 2015

For the last two years of running design thinking workshops for various ranks and departments of the military, I have done the equivalent of putting band aids on piercings. We used Post-It notes and sharpies, but I usually left the improv at home. And the effect was an often neutered process. I led the groups through exercises and talked about modes of thinking — deductive, abductive, and inductive — as a way to make the creative, messy work more palatable to people who spent lives in frameworks so narrowly defined that playing at charades with their colleagues would have represented an existential crisis.

November 2013, our d.school fellows group hard at work

Design thinking has been the bright shiny magic wand that somehow hasn’t lost its luster. HBR gave it some east coast gravitas by featuring the process on the cover of their September issue. Popular in many management and product design circles, design thinking continues to spread. The White House just published a post about the use of Human Centered Design (HCD) by the USDA and the Office of Personnel Management’s Innovation Lab to improve the National School Lunch Program. My parents are still confused that I make a living writing on post its, but I feel lucky to be one of the many professionals using this process and adapting it for the real world. Fred Collopy, a professor of design and innovation at Case Western University has spent a career immersed in the theories of decision science, systems thinking, and design. He makes the point that design thinking has been so successful as a practical tool to effect change in organizations precisely because practitioners engage with it first by doing — not by thinking through the associated theories. Fred makes the point that systems thinking failed to spread widely as a management tool, not because it isn’t applicable, but because the discipline didn’t make the leap from theory to embodied exercises. The arcane details of the theories were and are hotly debated by a few, with the result being that the practical exercise of the main concepts are lost to the rest.

In large part, design thinking has avoided this trap because some of the most successful schools teaching the process are schools of practice, not ivory towers of thought. While I personally love dissecting the minutiae of different modes of thinking, the advances in neuroscience that allow us to explore augmented sensing, and the role that the autonomic nervous system plays in reaching creative insight, I reserve that for my fellow design practitioners. I’ve learned that when I’m leading a workshop, my job is to be the chief risk taker for the group, the leader in vulnerability. Their job is to embody each step in the process, and by fully immersing themselves, stumble into surprising reframes, 1000 ideas for a solution, and a few brilliant, wobbly prototypes.

While Fred’s article describes design thinking more as an evolution to systems thinking, I see them as complementary disciplines. Systems dynamics is worth plumbing intellectually, but for the purpose of emerging on the other side with methods and exercises that can be used as tools in the world, similar to the 5 step design thinking process from Stanford’s dschool. The complex theories associated with systems thinking and systems dynamics have at their root a set of ideas very similar to design thinking — engaging a broad set of stakeholders, using scenarios to explore them, reframing problems, and iterating. I want to explore what they might do together, with both disciplines having a rich underpinning of theory and accessible, embodied exercises.

Over a period of about seven months this year, I consulted (civilian role, not reservist) for the Pacific Fleet. I worked for a staff function in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and got the best of both worlds — the camaraderie that is a unique joy known to those who have served, and the luxury of wearing hot pink jeans to work. I learned a lot about myself as a designer and a facilitator. At the end of those months, I wrote a long report on how design thinking and systems dynamics might serve the vision of the Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Swift. The staff that hired me didn’t ask for any insights on systems dynamics, but I gave it to them anyways.

Natural Resources in the South China Sea, Courtesy CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative http://amti.csis.org/atlas/

The Pacific Fleet needs uniformed practitioners of design thinking and systems dynamics who understand the theoretical nuances and who can also lead the embodiment of the exercises. They need this because the messy military problem they concern themselves with — maritime security — can’t be silo’ed into the pieces that only relate to the military, leaving other aspects to diplomats and environmentalists. Maritime security in our era is about rapidly declining natural resources, extreme climate events, rising levels of violence at sea, but more importantly, these different forces affecting maritime security are so interconnected that they require intense collaboration with unexpected partners. I fear that if we frame the problem of maritime security as an issue between great powers best left to great navies, we will miss the dynamics influencing the global system that supports human flourishing — our food, our climate, and many people’s freedom. (Did you know about the extent of slavery at sea?)

Global Fishing Watch, the prototype from Google, Oceana and SkyTruth to use open source satellite data to identify illegal fishing.
Global Fishing Watch, the prototype from Google, Oceana and SkyTruth to use open source satellite data to identify illegal fishing.

I don’t have a suggestion for how to frame the problem of human flourishing and maritime security in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. I have my own opinions, but I would rather they be challenged and iterated on through a process that mixes systems and design thinking. How should the Pacific Fleet approach the challenge of understanding and leveraging the system of maritime security in Indo-Asia? Instead of policy, I suggest behaviors I think Admiral Swift would want to observe as patterns in his Fleet.

  • Encouraged collaboration — Leaders emerge from the crowd, assume the role of creative facilitator, and ensure collaboration when it’s needed.
  • Innovation at sea — Sailors innovating ‘just in time’ on deployment lead to non-traditional employment of fielded capability.
  • Using patterns — Sailors provide context, not single data points. Leaders guide the mastery of knowledge and foment the curiosity to identify and exploit patterns of action.
  • Decentralized Execution — Leaders prepare subordinates to be decision-makers, challenging them to gain insights on context and patterns.
  • The crowd organizes itself — Communities of interest will proliferate, building networks between the silos of the operational, maintenance, and R&D force.
  • The crowd learns together — The Fleet leads the debate of war fighting instructions and populates a shared electronic repository of FAQ’s and how-to resources.

My contract ended with the Pacific Fleet at the end of July, and in keeping with my commitment to spread my wings, I’m leaving for New Zealand to work and play with food and agriculture technology and innovation ecosystems. But first, my own embodied prototype of decentralized execution. On October 26 and 27, a couple friends, a senior officer at the Department of State and a PhD futurist, and I will co-facilitate a design workshop in San Francisco on maritime security. We’re inviting a wildly diverse group of participants and we’re going to test new methods for embodied systems thinking. There’s no contract guaranteeing pay and no senior leader who has promised to take the prototypes from the workshop and shepherd them to execution.

Which means there are no rules on this adventure. We’ll publish the exercises mixing systems dynamics and design thinking, and we’ll share the prototypes — hopefully you’ll test them. Please get in touch if you’re interested in more detail.

Events, Seamanship and Leadership

OCT 2: Athena East Innovation Competition

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If you are in the Hampton Roads area, come join CIMSEC, the Hampton Roads Surface Navy Association, and USNI for a the free-to-attend Oct 2nd Athena East Innovation Competition in Norfolk from 1600-1800 , at the downtown Norfolk restaurant “Work \ Release.”

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EVENTBRITE REGISTRATION

From new tools, maintenance processes, software, to new concepts in everything from administration to tactics… This event is to display and engage naval Innovation from the ranks of our institution, in and out of uniform.

There are still plenty of tickets for audience members, and we are still taking idea submissions for the 5-6 innovators who will present to the assembled crowd and our “Shark Tank” board of naval leadership. Send Presentation Submissions to [email protected].

We will have a series of prizes for audience favorites:

1st prize: 1 yr membership to the 757 Makerspace workshop
2nd prize: 6 mo membership to 757 Makerspace
Consolation Prizes: 1 Semester of Improv 101 at the Push Comedy Theater in the Norfolk.

However, the real “so what” (aside from the good company, good food, and good drink) is the opportunity to present your ideas to the folks who can potentially implement it, namely our “Shark Tank” Board.

-CAPT Robert Bodvake – Surface Warfare
-CAPT John Carter – Surface Warfare
-CAPT Sean Heritage – Cyber & Intelligence
-CAPT Jeffrey Sheets – Maintenance & Fabrication
-Professor Jennifer Michaeli: Director of ODU’s Naval Engineering and Marine Systems Inst.
-Brett Vaughn: S&T Advisor to OPNAV N2/N6 and member of TF Innovation Implementation Group

Our board covers ship to shore naval leadership, figures of authority disposed to innovation who are looking to both provide guidance, and find ideas from presenters that are applicable and workable to their organizations. There may well be others in the audience seeking good ideas as well.

Ground Rules: NO “death by PowerPoint” eye-charts or lists – use of PowerPoint is limited solely to pictures to provide a picture of an invention or concept demonstration. Demonstrators are also encouraged to get creative, whatever that might entail. All told, presentations are limited to 5 minutes, with 5 minutes following of questions from the board, and 5 minutes of audience questions.

It’s important to remember: innovation isn’t just fun, it’s a mission requirement. This is a fantastic opportunity to break away from the daily grind – to  grapple with some of the more fun aspects of the maritime profession: looking forward to the possible. Hell, even more than the ideas presented, we can enjoy the discussion had between enthusiastic and different-minded naval professionals over a beer.

Work Release will be offering Happy Hour prices on food and some drinks – so bring your appetite.

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