[by J. Scott Shipman]

This is cross-posted at http://tobeortodo.com

Earlier this week I had the privilege of speaking at the Navy Expeditionary Forces Conference (NAVEXFOR 2012) in Virginia Beach, VA. The theme for this year’s conference was “innovation in constrained environments.” In my talk, I focused on potential internal cultural constraints and deliberate actions to mitigate resulting threats. Not surprisingly, other speakers focused on our enemies and the constraints they place on our forces, and the fact those enemies impose constraints with innovative methods and weapons like roadside IEDs.  Yesterday, through a friend on Twitter, I learned that insurgents in Iraq had used cell phone geotags to destroy AH-64’s; innovation, indeed.

One speaker made the comment in this post’s title: “Our enemy is adaptable, we must be, too.” He went on to characterized their adaptations as “simple.”

Using this description, through simple adaptation, our enemies disrupt our activities, destroy our equipment, and kill or maim our service members using cheap, simple, but deadly tools. The resulting affect isn’t limited to physical casualties; their innovations also disrupt our ability to control the initiative, and perhaps just as importantly our sensemaking abilities. The ability to alter an opponent’s sensemaking will inform and increase the complexity of an already complex environment, so adaptability is essential.

In most situations we counter these simple adaptations by employing complex and expensive solutions. This has been accurately called, “adaptation at acquisition speed.” Those expensive and complex solutions must make it through byzantine acquisition processes rife with political maneuvering, operating in a culture of “no,” which results in increased costs, schedule, and ultimately our frequent inability to be responsive to troops in field. Institutional inertia in the defense bureaucracy prevents significant change in the short-run, so these facts must be considered an on-going constraint.

In spite of these constraints, our troops are thinking and acting—they are adapting, using simple tools, like remote control vehicles.  This “toy” was used to inspect vehicles and detect IEDs. Instead of an expensive long lead-time solution, they went to Radio Shack—and the vehicle lasted for several years—so they got another. According to the report, at least six lives were saved as a result. Not surprisingly, the folks closest to the problem produced an effective solution. No doubt there are other stories of ingenuity and adaptation, but this story exemplifies the possible. The underlying point is this soldier was thinking and acting—he was adapting in a way that allowed him and his colleagues to remain more safe.

Sun Tzu and the ultimate in adaptability

The speaker’s quote reminded me of this quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Chapter VI Weaknesses and Strengths (page 153 in the Samuel B. Griffith translation):

Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness.

And as water shapes its flow in accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy.

And as water has no constant form, there are in war no constant condition.

Bear with me, as I like word pictures and synonyms and what follows is a bit like “plodding,” but I’ve found adjacencies in language illuminating (if I could draw this, I would). Water as a metaphor for adaptability presents any military force (or any other group) a daunting task. Considering the physical qualities of water several synonyms come to mind:

• Water is transparent, so to be adaptable, we need to promote and practice clarity in internal communications and actions. Keeping ambiguity to a minimun is one method of promoting clarity, and practicing honesty is a good way to practice.
• Water is physically cohesive, while being ultimately pliable. Think about it; put water in a jar, it conforms to the jar, pour it out, it follows gravity, and water surrounds whatever is submerged in it. Water moves as one, just as a group adaptability needs to be a key characteristic of any successful team. But in a larger sense, when one considers what I call the “bordering language” of synonyms, one discovers a greater depth to the concept of coherence, words like intelligence, comprehensibility, understandability, intelligibility, decipherability,  conncinity (my favorite),  unity, and harmony—just to name a few. Concinnity is a harmonious arrangement of things; where a culture is arranged and led in such a way as to promote and sustain harmony. My friend Ed H. has the best working definition for harmony that I’ve found. Ed derived his description from the novelist Douglas Adams and French impressionist painter Georges Seurat:

You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Harmony is the marriage of the contrary and of the similar; marrying discordant elements, regardless of tone, of color, of line, of thought and of purpose…

• Water as described by Sun Tzu is fluid. Fluidity can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, fluidity implies adaptability, flexibility, fluency, smoothness, and ease. On the other, fluidity implies instability, unstableness, fickleness, inconstancy, changeableness, shifting, and flux. For cultures in a competitive environment, having the first form of fluidity is desired, while inflicting the second on the competitor. In addition, fluidity’s synonym fluency implies an eloquent and skillful use of language—or mediums of exchange. Fluency is possible only through practice, lots of practice. So much practice the skill becomes tacit knowledge, thus simple (effortless?)…even intuition.

Simplicity

Articulation in language and action are elements of simplicity. Simplicity implies tacit. As simple as the force of gravity directing water down a hill, going around and engulfing obstacles, thus is the potential of a group that has made their purpose/mission tacit and have the freedom to act. In fact, the sum of the skill sets may be so simple as to defy explanation—and more often than not in these cases, others learn by close association; watching, failing, learning, and making tacit those capabilities needed to cope and adapt. Boyd said as much in the abstract of Conceptual Spiral:

To flourish and grow in a many-sided, uncertain and ever-changing world that surrounds us, suggests that we have to make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need to meet the exigencies of that world.

“To make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need” implies the development and nurturing of habits that will enable us to adapt.That which is habitual becomes simple (and as mentioned above, yet another route to tacit).

Close

To the troops using the remote control vehicle mentioned above, the solution was obvious, and seemingly simple. Importantly, they were in a unit where they could act on their idea—and they did so outside the bureaucracy at little cost, and saved six lives (maybe more).

Taking a riff from the conference title, our leaders should be checking to make sure the rules of engagement (ROE) and other rigid rule sets aren’t implicitly making their folks hopelessly incapable of adaptability. As we increase adaptability, the more adaptability becomes a habit—and when it is a habit, it becomes simple. Just a thought.

Postscript:

The best short book I’ve read on tacit knowledge is Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension, the best long book on the same topic is Personal Knowledge by the same author.