I also worry whether DoD’s culture is a threat to national security. Culture is the system of values and norms that govern behavior. How we do things around here. Culture can shape whether organizations are built to last or doomed to perish. I believe DoD culture stifles innovation.
In the DoD, innovation mostly discussed as new technology. But innovation ultimately rests on people. Buying all the advanced machines in the world doesn’t guarantee that people will rethink old strategies and develop new ones…
We know that good management is the lifeblood of innovation. There’s evidence from the software industry, for example, that managers have tripled the impact of individual innovators on performance. But I’m afraid that the DoD is by and large still doing 1950s-era management.
… There’s a lot that DoD can learn from other cultures. The fact that something wasn’t invented here doesn’t mean it won’t apply here. We need scouts and ambassadors outside the government to explore new management practices. We also need them to study the range of practices in the DoD itself. DoD is not a single culture. It’s full of sub-cultures. And one of the silver linings of being a massive organization is that there are always bright spots — pockets of excellence. Some DoD examples I’ve seen include Kessel Run, Defense Innovation Unit, National Innovation Security Network, AFWERX, NavalX, and the new Army Software Factory.
… You can find some who are encouraging people to take risks, rethink best practices, and learn from beyond the defense industry. If I were in your shoes, I would start by identifying those leaders and studying what they do. I’d work to disseminate those better practices and give those organizations additional people, resources, and flexibilities. These bright spots exist in spite of the institutional resistance, which exhausts their people and sometimes imperils their survival. It’s time for DoD to embrace these outliers and strive to build a culture where they are the norm, not the exception.
That was Adam Grant, professor of management at University of Pennsylvania at a SASC hearing on defense management. Grant spent time on the Defense Innovation Board, and it seems his comments were mostly about acquisition matters considering the organizations he chose to highlight.
While I agree that Kessel Run, DIU, AFWERX, NavalX, and Army Software Factory are interesting, none of them has existed before 2015 and none have tackled a major complex program (except perhaps Kessel Run which has released an MVP for Air Operations Center and supported F-35 ODIN). Even if you grow them in an absurd way they can hardly make a dent in DoD’s larger mission.
I think there are other pockets of innovation that look more traditional, like Army’s PEO Soldier, PEO GCS, PEO Aviation, the Navy’s NWIC, PEO IWS, PEO USC, the Air Force’s NGAD/Skyborg programs, RCO, Big Safari, PEO Tankers, PEO Digital, and then of course SOCOM, JAIC, DTRA, SDA, SCO, and others.
But all of these organizations are stifled by the 1950s style of management that Grant pointed out. In the classic debate whether regulations or culture has to change first to get the flywheel going, I think it has to be regulations. As Grant mentioned, many smart people have tried to innovate in DoD but have become exhausted and imperiled for their efforts.
Even with substantial top-cover from leaders, there are hundreds of thousands of pages of process and implementation guides that the mid-level guys have to deal with. Innovators will keep banging their heads against a wall as they have for 60 years until DoD and Congress decide it is time to tackle the most important relic of the 1950s era, the PPBE/program budget process. This is the system of analysis and decisionmaking that actually punishes programs for delivering value faster and cheaper, while rewarding programs who continually fail to deliver. It looks nothing like management practices found in leading commercial companies around the world, let alone other nation’s defense agencies.
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