Technology, Innovation and Modern War — Class 17 — Organizational Design — Safi Bahcall
By: Steve Blank
Tags: Defense, Teaching, Military, Higher Education, National Security

This was our next -to-last class. While this class focused on the impact new technology and operational concepts and modern war, we thought it was important to have our students understand the organizational and cognitive barriers that make adopting new technologies difficult. Our guest speaker was Safi Bahcall,author of Loonshots.

The pre-class assignment was to watch Safi’s video about Loonshots.

In addition to our speaker, today was presentation prep day for our students’ final papers. We met with all the teams and reviewed their final summaries. (A description of their final assignment follows the summary of Safi’s presentation.)

I’ve extracted and paraphrased a few of Safi’s key insights and urge you to read the entire transcript here and watch his video.

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Invention versus Innovation

As I’ve been sitting in the back of the class for the last couple of months, I’ve seen great speakers on strategy, on technology, on invention. I’m using the word invention deliberately — not innovation — because invention and innovation are different things. That point is at the heart of the problem with innovation inside so many organizations.

Invention is having an idea. For example, in the 1920s, when Robert Goddard showed that we could propel metal tubes by exploding liquid fuel inside them, he invented jet propulsion. That was a great invention. It didn’t become an innovation until it was developed and deployed at scale. In the case of jet propulsion, it wasn’t the U.S. that innovated. It was Nazi Germany with the V1 and the V2 missiles, and the Messerschmitt 262, the first jet aircraft.

So what’s at the core of the problem for national security organizations? What’s stopping them from innovating faster and better? It’s not strategy. The 2018 National Defense Strategy explained very clearly and effectively what needs to get done. It’s not technology. The military has 76 innovation labs. It’s not leadership. Leaders across every service are pounding the table about innovation.

Organization Design

The military has three of the four pieces of the puzzle you need: strategy, access to technology, leadership. The fourth, however, is missing. And that’s organization design. Good teams will kill great ideas, no matter how smart the strategy, how enticing the technology, or how much leaders insist on innovation. Why that’s the case is a longer story, which I’ve written about, but the bottom line is that we need to design our organizations to solve that problem — the adoption problem. If we don’t do that, we will lose.

I’ll give you an example. For close to 60 years, IBM dominated the IT industry. The industry was known as IBM and the Seven Dwarfs because IBM’s competitors were so far behind. If there was a superpower in any industry, it was IBM in IT. There were a couple of little competitors in the 80s, who didn’t seem like much. A little company in Seattle called Microsoft. When they did their first partnership with IBM, they had just 32 employees. There was another little company in Santa Clara called Intel. They were running out of cash. Little competitors that IBM disregarded.

Does the story of a superpower ignoring distant threats from seemingly weak competitors sound familiar from the class discussions on China? For IBM, strategy was not the problem. Invention was not the problem. Just like the DOD, IBM has tons of innovation labs. Many widely used technologies originated at IBM. Leadership was not the problem. IBM has been pounding the table about innovation for years. But if you look at IBM today, it’s 1/10th the value of Microsoft, it’s half the value of Intel. Strategy, technology, leadership — those were fine. But good teams kept killing great ideas. That’s the adoption problem.

So what can we do? There are some ways. They’re not obvious. They’re not what you read about in glossy magazines. They have nothing to do with fuzzy words like culture.

It’s About Creating The Structure for Adoption

It’s about structure. How do you create the right structure that helps with adoption? One of the things I found very encouraging over the last couple years in speaking with leadership in military or intelligence is their curiosity about what’s happening in the private sector, outside their usual sandbox.

When I sat down with Admiral Selby, we talked about Google. Google, at the time, was overhauling the back end of their search engine. They built their search engine 20 years ago. And they needed to fix the guts of it because it was out of date. Not unlike big legacy systems in the military. Google was getting that job done in blocks of six months. Selby pointed out that nothing like that could get done in the military in six months. It might take six years, if not 60 years. So how does Google get it done in six months? And what can the military learn from that?

We don’t have time to get into all the details we discussed, but I’ll give you a flavor.

Five Patterns that Impede Adoption

I’ll start with five patterns I’ve observed across the service branches, and what we might do about them.

The first is a preference for big versus small. Many of your previous speakers have talked about that. Bigger jets, bigger engines, bigger ships, as opposed to the small changes that can make an enormous difference. The second is a preference for product over strategy. A preference for things that you can touch — ships, guns, planes. As opposed to new strategies that are less obvious, less glamorous, but can make an enormous difference. For example, the tank was invented in the mid-1910s. And it was used in World War I. But it wasn’t the tank as a technology, by itself, that allowed Nazi Germany to take over Western Europe in a matter of weeks. It was their strategy, the Blitz. Focusing on technology alone, getting caught up in the shiny glamour of it and neglecting the less glamorous strategies on how to deploy those technologies creatively, is a common trap. Not just in the military, but also in Silicon Valley, where it dooms otherwise successful companies. The third is a focus on technology as opposed to transfer. In other words, a large investment in acquiring sexy new technology. With much less energy and attention on identifying and navigating the internal barriers to adoption. Assuming that good ideas and technologies will win the day, by themselves, and neglecting the often-hidden sources of internal resistance, agendas, misaligned incentives, legacy stakes. You can spend billions on great technology, on dozens of innovation labs, but if you don’t put energy and creativity into winning those internal battles, the technologies will die. The fourth is a focus on prototyping as opposed to pretotyping. Pretotyping is about what to do beforethe minimum viable product. How to test hypotheses incredibly fast. In one day for $100. Doing it well bakes into the system a preference for hypotheses rather than opinions; fast experiments rather than big plans; and testing ideas and strategies, not just products and technologies. And the fifth pattern is a focus on minimizing as opposed to maximizing risks. By which I mean maximizing the intelligent risk-taking you need to discover important breakthroughs. I see this all the time in mission-driven, as opposed to profit-driven, organizations. When lives are at stake, there’s an enormous focus on reducing risk. In the military, you don’t want a lot of risk in your parachutes, or in your nuclear silos. But if you want to discover a new technology before your competitor, you want risk. You want to fail. A lot. If you only try things that don’t fail then you won’t discover the truly important breakthroughs, the ones where everyone gave up because they didn’t think it could be done. And who will discover them? Your adversary, who is taking those risks, who is working through the nine failures to get to then 10th iteration, the one that works. And you’ll see that 10th iteration when it’s too late, when it’s a bullet coming at your head.

Three Solutions

I’m not going to talk about reforming the acquisition process, which many of your class speakers have mentioned and does need to get done. Doing that is like turning an aircraft carrier. It’s incredibly slow, because of all the stakeholders. I’m going to talk about some things that are easier to do. More like a surgical strike.

1 is measurement. If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Conversely, the things you measure well, with easily understood and visible metrics, tend to improve without much extra push. So how you do that with innovation? Follow the money is the bottom line. But the fact that we aren’t doing that at all is a real problem. I remember speaking with someone senior at the Joint Chiefs of Staff who said, “We have no tangible way of knowing how we’re doing on innovation across the service branches. Absolutely no idea.” If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. 2, rewards. A quote from a major in the Air Force, “You get promoted in the Air Force by not screwing up. Trying something new means risking failure, scaring people around you, and therefore risking advancement. Do what the guy did before you and train those below you to do what you do.” A widespread mindset in the DoD is that the №1 priority is don’t get fired. What are the implications of that mindset? How much risk will people take? I mean among the people that you want to be taking intelligent risks, the ones that you want to discover new technologies and strategies before your adversaries do? Do you want the №1 priority in the minds of those people to be how do I play it safe? The need for a “special forces” for innovation. Not another innovation lab but standing up a new functional combatant command of program champions who can identify the internal barriers to adopting new technologies, come up with solutions, and get the job done. With representatives from each of the service branches. A joint surgical strike on innovation, rather than a disconnected massive attack.

There’s a widespread failure to understand that being a good inventor and a good champion are vastly different skill sets. The idea of radar was discovered by a pair of scientists in the Naval Research Labs 18 years before World War II started. They were great inventors, but lousy champions. The idea sat there for a decade until a naval officer named Deak Parsons discovered it, went around to every bureau chief, pounded the table on why it mattered, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, until he got them to cough up a check for $5,000 to fund the project. Robert Goddard was another great inventor, lousy champion. It’s because there was no good champion for that idea here in the U.S. that the Nazis — who got the idea from Goddard’s papers — developed missiles and jet aircraft first.

You heard in an earlier class from General Shanahan about a bullheaded Colonel named Drew Cukor who pounded the table to stand up Project Maven and JAIC to bring AI to the military. Cukor is the most recent in a long line of internal champions, like Deak Parsons or Vannevar Bush, or Schreiver with ICBMs, or Moffett with aircraft carriers, or Rickover with the nuclear Navy. They were all great champions. Not inventors.

What we need is a new functional combatant command to attract, train, and deploy great champions. To develop the next generation of Drew Cukors or Deak Parsons or Bernard Schrievers, rather than hoping and praying that maybe we’ll get lucky and another disrupter will come along in time and modernize the military. We no longer have that luxury. We cannot afford to start our conflicts with yesterday’s technology and hope that we will catch up. Not in the era of data and algorithms. Chris Brose was quoting was John McCain when he said, “Hope is not a strategy.”

We need a separate command for the same reason that we need cyber or special operations as a separate command. The problem is endemic to all the service branches, not specific to just one. And there’s a unique skill set that needs to be developed. Good champions need to be mediators, buffers between technologists and soldiers. They need to be bilingual, to speak the language of each side fluently. They need to understand product market fit: why some ideas will get traction, others won’t. They need to identify hidden organizational barriers and come up with solutions. They need to understand horizontal influence: how to influence people over whom they have no direct authority. All of those are special skills, with best practices and useful lessons to be learned from years of examples across the different branches. Yet no such training exists today.

Google does it. Microsoft does it. They’ve understood the importance of having a special forces unit for innovation champions and have done it well. They create a career ladder to retain people in the role, to build experience and skill, to convey prestige and respect. They keep the role neutral, like Switzerland, neither on the research side, nor on the operation side, but in between, like a mediator needs to be.

If you create a joint special forces for innovation Sherpas, for program champions, you not only gain the ability to innovate faster and better as an organization. You improve your ability to attract, retain, and motivate talent. When I put out that War on the Rocks article, I got emails from very impressive people, with an entrepreneurial bent, who had left the military, but clearly wanted to contribute. They said, “If that division was there, sign me up.” You put a purple rope around it, you make that command hard to get into, you make it as cool as SOCOM.

Read the transcript of Safi’s entire talk and watch the video below.

If you can’t see the video click here.