Throughout history, culture has affected military effectiveness and innovation. Yet today, modifying culture is not a line of effort for addressing the challenges of great power competition. It takes a back seat to modernizing and growing the force to outpace emerging threats. The Navy has emphasized people, platforms, programs, and technology to drive innovation, but it has not addressed how its culture must change to successfully compete in the 21st century.
Effective commanders create an environment that guides, shapes, and influences culture to prevent undesirable behaviors and encourage others. The response to the 2017 collisions between U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyers and civilian merchant ships involved well-deserved scrutiny of the culture on those ships and the entire naval force.1 It is just as important to consider culture in setting the Navy’s future course as it is to consider it as a contributing factor in past events.
U.S. service members have the ability to adapt and to apply new technology. Military innovation, however, has sometimes been slow. Long recognized by business leaders as a key to innovation and competitiveness, cultural change might be what is missing in the Navy’s attempt to become more agile and adaptive in the 21st century.
Innovation: Culture, People & Technology
In a world where change is accelerating, rapid adaptation is key to maintaining a competitive advantage. In A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority 1.0, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson called for “learning at every level” to make the Navy into a high-velocity organization. Steven Spear’s The High Velocity Edge (McGraw-Hill Education, 2010) appeared on the desks of naval officers throughout the Pentagon and on commanders’ reading lists, and the Navy began to take advantage of new technology to improve learning and training. This included the reinvigoration of the Navy’s warfare development centers, the expansion of the Fleet Experimentation Program, and increased investment in live virtual constructive training.
Yet, it is unlikely Admiral Richardson achieved the pace of change and rate of learning he envisioned. In December 2018 he released A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority 2.0, assessing that “the pace of competition has accelerated in many areas, achieving exponential and disruptive rates of change” and calling for the Navy to become “a dominant naval force that produces outstanding leaders and teams, armed with the best equipment, that learn and adapt faster than our rivals.” He mandated the stand-up of a director of warfare development (OPNAV N7) to exploit capability and concept development.
A focus on learning and the development of offsetting technology are necessary in this strategic environment, but shifting paradigms to accelerate change requires both inspiring and motivating changes to happen, as well as removing deeply embedded cultural impediments. Failure to keep pace with emerging technologies could cede advantages to adversaries in future conflicts.
History abounds with examples of cultural impediments to military innovation. Culture helps to explain phenomena such as the Mamelukes refusing to fight with firearms, the French adherence to defensive doctrine during the interwar years that left them unprepared to face German forces in World War II, and the Japanese embrace of a militaristic foreign policy, kōdō, or the “Imperial Way.”2 Others have used culture to explain different approaches to innovation across militaries. Dima Adamsky assessed the role of military culture in the adoption of innovation in the United States, Soviet Union, and Israel during the revolution in military affairs (RMA)/military-technical revolution (MTR).3 Carl Builder, in his classic The Masks of War, demonstrated how cultural differences among the military services influenced policy and strategy decisions.4
History also provides cases where small groups of people or individuals overcame cultural impediments to field innovations. Examples include future admiral and president of the Naval War College William S. Sims pushing advances in naval gunnery through the Bureau of Ordnance as a lieutenant in the early 1900s, Admiral Hyman Rickover’s development of the nuclear Navy, and the arming of the MQ-9 Predator by a small group of dedicated Air Force officers and civilians.5
Why Not Focus on Culture?
So, if it is obvious that culture matters, why is leading cultural change not a key line of effort in the Navy’s attempt to compete in the age of accelerating technological change? Perhaps culture is neglected because of the assumption that service members already are sufficiently adaptive. Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter referred to people as “our secret sauce.”6 Given the history of U.S. ingenuity, senior leaders place a lot of faith in the adaptability of the American people, from the sailors on the deckplates to scientists in laboratories. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work believes that in future conflicts, service members growing up in the “iWorld” in the United States will have a distinct advantage over Russian or Chinese service members of their generation.7 In addition, many insights about the adverse effects of culture are only recognized or fully understood in hindsight.
Another possible reason culture is neglected may be that it is too all-encompassing and takes too long—sometimes generations—to change. Even Williamson Murray, who explained that “military culture may be the most important factor not only in military effectiveness, but also in the processes involved in military innovation,” argued that changing military culture requires years or decades.8
Certainly this is the expectation.9 However, if Navy leaders challenge this assumption—that culture must evolve slowly—they may be able to accelerate cultural shifts for strategic benefit. Fortunately, there is much in business leadership literature to suggest how leaders can influence culture to make their organizations more adaptive and outperform competitors.
Change for Competitive Advantage
In an age when businesses repeatedly are disrupted by technological innovation, organizations must learn to adapt. Businesses must focus on developing new business models, networks, ecosystems, and partnerships; reinventing cultures; promoting continuous learning and skills development; and ensuring data security and privacy protection in pursuit of optimization, improved decision-making, plans, and strategies.10
This requires developing new knowledge and skills and creating capabilities to exploit computers, big data and analytics, machine learning, platform technologies, and artificial intelligence. As organizations learn and think through the impact and implications of these shifts in knowledge, they also will need to have a more entrepreneurial mind-set to experiment, innovate, and adapt.11 Salim Ismail from Singularity University coined the concept of an “Exponential Organization (ExO)” to capture the nature and character of organizations that are leap-frogging the competition and accelerating innovation by creating new organizational characteristics and a culture that supports change and transformation.12
The concept of an ExO is rooted in a “massive transformational purpose” that inspires and motivates. An ExO leverages both sides of the brain—the left, which establishes order and control to ensure stability, as well as the right, which leverages creativity and growth and thrives in uncertainty. One could argue that Admiral Richardson articulated the Navy’s massive transformational purpose as the “End State” of Design 2.0, and also in the “The Future Navy,” which called for shaking “off any vestiges of comfort or complacency that our previous advantages may have afforded us, and [moving] out to build a larger, more distributed, and more capable battle fleet.”13 This is a critical first step, but it is not sufficient to give rudder corrections or a new course to steer. Success requires an organizational culture that can support the new strategy.14
For more than a decade, business leadership and management curricula have included case studies that demonstrate the importance of aligning strategy and culture. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” a phrase credited to late business management consultant Peter Drucker, is a recurring theme.15 Comparing an industrial-era “linear” organization with a knowledge-era emergent “nonlinear” organization suggests that the Navy has identified many attributes required for success but is only beginning the transformation.
Research has shown that the key to a successful transformation is to articulate why the change is needed, express its urgency, and take a holistic approach to address culture, strategies, plans, activities, and ways of operation.16 In the digital era, this should include promoting learning and innovation, encouraging smart risk taking and experimentation, creating seamless communication channels enabled by trust and mutual respect, and empowering employees. To remain competitive in the emerging global marketplace, organizations must focus on their strategic environment, emerging opportunities, and novel approaches; divest from declining sources of competitive advantage; and prioritize early adaptation and adoption of technologies that outpace threats and create disruptive advantage.
Linear Organization Characteristics |
Exponential Organization Characteristics |
---|---|
Top-down, hierarchical |
Autonomous with social technologies |
Driven by financial outcomes |
Dashboards measure continuous progress |
Linear, sequential thinking |
Experimentation, autonomous decision-making |
Innovation from within |
Innovation at the edges, staff on demand, leveraged assets |
Strategic planning extrapolating the past |
Strategic awareness and thinking |
Risk intolerance |
Experimentation and prototypes |
Process inflexibility |
Delegated authority, agility |
Large numbers of full-time equivalents |
Algorithms, crowd on demand |
Controls/owns its own assets |
Leverages others’ assets as needed |
Strongly invested in the status quo |
Constant change and transformation, experiments |
Adapted from Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone, and Yuri van Geest, Exponential Organizations (New York: Diversion Books, 2014), 113. |
The Recipe for Success
Culture is the underlying operating system that can unleash the potential of individuals to create and sustain organizational change. Service members are innovative, and U.S. universities, businesses, and research centers are the world’s leaders in technological innovation. Yet, the United States’ military advantage is challenged by strategic competitors. The new Chief of Naval Operations should focus on creating the cultural conditions and attributes that will accelerate innovation and the adoption of new technology. The Navy should remove cultural barriers to unleash human potential, motivation, and ingenuity. A greater emphasis on leading and managing cultural change and transformation will enable the Navy to become an agile, adaptive, and accelerating organization.
As long as war remains a human endeavor, leading exponential change will require an unwavering focus on changing the mind-sets and mental models that guide behaviors and action. Developing a culture of learning, experimentation, and rapid adoption of technology will unleash the creativity and adaptiveness of individuals and organizations. The Navy’s people are its secret sauce, but focusing on culture is the recipe for success.
1. LCDR Erin Patterson, USNR, “Ship Collisions: Address the Underlying Causes, Including Culture,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 143, no. 6 (August 2017).
2. Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 100; Elizabeth Kier, “Culture and Military Doctrine: France between the Wars,” International Security 19, no. 4 (Spring 1995): 65–93; Theo Farrell, “Culture and Military Power,” Review of International Studies 24 (1998): 407–16; Carl Boyd, “Japanese Military Effectiveness: The Interwar Period,” in Military Effectiveness, vol. 2, The Interwar Period, Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds. (Boston: Allen & Unwin Inc., 1988), 131–68.
3. Dima Adamsky, The Culture of Military Innovation: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia, the U.S., and Israel (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).
4. Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
5. Elting Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1966).
6. Ash Carter, “Remarks at the Military Child Education Coalition Training Seminar,” Washington, DC, 31 July 2015.
7. Robert Work, speech delivered at CNAS Defense Forum, Washington, DC, 14 December 2015.
8. Williamson Murray, “Does Military Culture Matter?” Orbis 43, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 27–43.
9. Murray, “Does Military Culture Matter?” See also Thomas P. Ehrhard, “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the United States Armed Services: A Comparative Study of Weapon System Innovation,” PhD dissertation (Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, 2000); and Greg Smith, “Organization and Innovation: Integrating Carrier-launched UAVs,” Naval War College Review 43, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 79–100.
10. George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee, Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).
11. Eric Ries, The Startup Way (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2017).
12. Salim Ismail, Michael Malone, and Yuri Van Geest, “Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster and Cheaper Than Yours (And What You Can Do About It),” Singularity University (2014).
13. ADM John M. Richardson, USN, “The Future Navy,” 27 May 2017.
14. Julie Goran, Laura LaBerge, and Ramesh Srinivasan, “Culture for a Digital Age,” McKinsey Quarterly, no. 3 (2017), 57–67.
15. Torbin Rick, “Organisational Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner,” Meliorate, 11 June 2014.
16. John Kotter, Leading Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996); Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (New York: Portfolio, 2011).