Army Chemical Review presents professional information about Chemical Corps functions related to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, smoke, flame, and civil support operations.
Issue link: https://chemical.epubxp.com/i/759309
15 Winter 2016 By Colonel Andrew L. Miltner T he attacks on 11 September 2001 and the decade and a half that followed represent a period of American military history when Army professionals were forced to innovate to defend the homeland and effectively take the fight to the enemy. A crisis served as the catalyst for innova- tion, but developing and executing untested and unproven plans were the tasks of bold Army leaders. Some of the plans worked, and some did not—but our Army learned how to be successful as a result of these efforts. The next generation of Soldiers will undoubtedly be required to respond to an equally challenging set of com- plex circumstances. Future Soldiers will need to set aside previous assumptions and boldly risk failure to continue to take the fight to the enemy. By its very design, our Army is averse to innovation, but innovation and adaptation to the changing environment will be as essential in the future as they have been to every generation of American Soldier. If we overlay an average 18-month Army training and readiness cycle with an average 24-month unit leadership turnover rate, we see the effect that operational and admin- istrative limitations have on unit level innovation. Addition- ally, if we assess how the Army measures success within this continuous cycle, we begin to understand how, and po- tentially why, Army culture has institutionalized a way of thinking that protects and reinforces established systems and guards against disruptive agents. The medical commu- nity might refer to these disrupters as "free radicals." Steve N. Zeisler, a renowned innovation author and business ad- visor, describes this way of thinking as thinking in his continuum of innovation. Inside-the-system thinking focuses on strengthening existing systems or capa- bilities through reductive or renovative actions. 1 Although creative thinking and creative problem solving have roles in this model, the results are more often limited to evolu- tionary improvements of existing capabilities. 2 On the op- posite end of the innovation continuum, Zeisler describes thinking as thinking that challenges existing capabilities and systems that form institutional paradigms. 3 For the Army, outside-the-system thinking might challenge such traditional methods as best practices, lessons learned, Army doctrine, the Defense Readiness Re- view System, and even the Army acquisition process. Blas- phemy! Rolf Smith established an innovation model that he re- fers to as the 7 Levels of Change. 4 Smith's model proposes that, in order for an organization to operate well in a dy- namic and complex environ- ment, the organization cannot simply continue to strive to achieve benchmark standards. Benchmarks reinforce known or projected variables, or what the Army might describe as planning assumptions. Smith explains that change is often associated with doing things differently, even though the outcome is similar. He argues that true change involves doing the "impossible"—things that are often unrelated to current assumptions or estab- lished operating parameters. Former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was much maligned for referring to unknown-unknowns when describing threat variables during a Department of De- fense news conference on 12 February 2002. 5 In fact, he was referring to a self-awareness methodology developed in 1955 by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ing- ham. 6 The special operations and intelligence communi- ties adopted this methodology decades ago as part of their mission analysis procedures to assess information gaps. Changing the Army culture that dismisses or undervalues outside-the-box thinking as irrelevant or disassociated will be an important first step toward force readiness in the next decade and beyond. This ability to quickly depart from estab- lished planning assumptions, or what Luft and Harrington refer to as known-knowns and known-unknowns, is essen- tial for identifying innovations that will help us to get inside the enemy decision cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act (or the OODA Loop). Crises commonly act as environmental "Future Soldiers will need to set aside previous assumptions and boldly risk failure to continue to take the fight to the enemy."