Washington DC 22 APL 2023
Military planning and operations are learning activities.
Creativity does not just happen. Nor is it black magic. Conceptually, it is easy to envision but very hard to achieve in practice. MILabs has developed a specific set of innovation tactics, techniques and procedures (ITTPs) designed to break planning teams out of the box of conventional hierarchical top-down obedience structures which are so necessary in many other aspects of military activity, but are the exact opposite of what is required for creativity in strategic thought.
Regardless of echelon, the leader of the military innovation activity has to provide the group with an innovation permission structure. Then it has to be continually cultivated until thinking differently becomes organic to the team and its members. This is achieved by engaging in counter-cultural and unorthodox behavior. Other than the leader, traditional social norms associated with rank, status, and hierarchy, have to be thrown out of the window. It is perhaps ironic that hierarchical leadership is essential to imposing a “creative” free-flowing, flat, networked thinking style. Old techniques are necessary to force change in a fixed system. Once ITTPs are established the leader switches to what MILabs calls an “air-traffic control” role, rather than overt director of activities.
ITTPs will almost certainly create a sense of unease and discomfort at first, which is why it is incumbent on the leader to ensure the MIL ITTPs system is imposed on the planning cell until such time as the ITTPs become natural and used without hesitation by all members.
How To Build A Creativity Culture: the ITTP syllabus
Phase I
Leadership
Build a Team
Rules of the Road
Phase II
Open Thinking - Humor, Fun and Play
Closed Thinking - Implementation and Data Collection
Phase III
Innovation Design - Open Loop - There are only hypotheses never conclusions
Oscillation from open to closed thinking via a modified OODA loop
In the next series of articles, MILab will follow the creativity culture syllabus, starting with exploring Phase I operations. These include detailed activities for innovation leaders - including how to get a group of competitive military leaders to bond and devote themselves to the task of creativity. Team selection and team building is critical. Complex joint military operations require an array of skillsets, so genuine diversity is key. Next, the rules of the road - the innovation permission structure - will be outlined in detail. This is the heavy lifting. Get it right and things take on a life of their own thereafter. Get it wrong and you may have to start over.
Phase II is how to run a planning team doing the actual work of innovation. This applies to the first time a team attacks a problem or the return of an established team to new challenges. Here method is critically important. MILab goes deep into what some call “the scientific method”. There is a perception that the military knows what this is and does it in planning teams. The problem is complex human interactions are invulnerable to scientific measurement and analysis by calculation. MILab explains this and provides a solution that planning teams can use to great effect.
Phase III Unlike traditional military planning processes that have a beginning and end, innovation is a design technique that is iterative, cumulative, and never ending. There is no end state there is only a ‘next state’. There are no conclusions, there are only ‘refined hypotheses’ that keep getting fed back into a modified OODA loop where they are tested or observed in the wild, reevaluated, checked and refined to be fed into the system again.
Winning wars is a learning activity. Being around a lot of smart people, MILab has learned advancing hypotheses that are open to challenge and interpretation, instead of hard, fixed, positions; has been vital to providing MILab and the team with what Sun Tzu called a golden bridge. Not for retreat, but to advance toward a new way of thinking altogether.
In the next article MILab will explore the roles and responsibilities of the team leader in creating the team and rules of the road to the embark upon applications of ITTPs to real world challenges.
The removal of friction in any learning setting is contingent on listening, mutual respect and empathy. Easy to say, hard to do with head-strong competitive Alphas. The fastest way to get bring people together, either to break the ice or tension, is to use humor. This will be explored in the article after next.