“I don’t know what the h*** this ‘innovation’ is that Marshall is always talking about, but I want some of it.” If Admiral E. J. King were alive today, perhaps this would have been the quote left behind with his legacy.
Innovation is talked about endlessly from its use a strategic tool such as the Third Offset Strategy to use at the tactical level, where promising service members are provided the opportunity to complete “Tours with Industry,” with the goal of creating officers “who think differently and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo” as Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Admiral Bill Moran said when announcing the program in late 2015. There is no question that innovation is a highly desired “capability” U.S. Navy leadership sees as crucial to maintaining a military edge, but does the current culture and personnel management system allow for the innovation to grow within the ranks?
The concept of innovation is not uncommon in society today. From the rapid evolution of iPhones to the novel concept of Google Glass, innovation is occurring regularly in the private sector. And on the public face, we mainly see the successes of new innovations hitting the market. However, behind the scenes, innovative ideas were researched, developed, tested and invested with time and money, that don’t prove to be worthwhile products. To companies in the research and development industry, including the federal contractor sector, failures in development are part of the innovation process of bringing new products, concepts, and designs from idea to market.
As innovations are developed for the U.S. military, the failure process is carefully watched by media and government watchdogs on the prowl for waste and ineffective program management. Failures on government sponsored programs, such ones that have occurred in the F-35 and littoral combat ship programs, receive noticeable amounts of negative press. (One can only wonder how much more negatively the Google Glass project would have been viewed if it were done with federal funds and subject to the same transparency laws.) Despite failure being a crucial part of the innovation process, the reality of the process is at odds with the negative attention that goes along with it. And within the cadre of service members in operational units, the mentality that failure is not an option clashes with the failure that goes hand-in-hand with innovation.
There is no question that the Navy is full of intelligent and dedicated people with innovative ideas about everything from logistics to maintenance to warfighting. With significant tactical experience on the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the non-kinetic realm of operational and strategic level staffs and in the variable irregular and hybrid warfare environments, there is a unique perspective vital to the future of military innovation among our service members on the bridge, in the air, under the water, on the construction site, in the field, and on the flight deck. But the culture of failure avoidance, continual drive to bring risk down to zero, and how failures are dealt with in the promotion and evaluation system do not encourage service members bring forward innovate ideas.
The FITREP and evaluation system is full of written and unwritten rules which can have specific impacts on a service member’s career. Something as simple as not going “down and to the right” (continually improving individual trait average under the same reporting senior) or an “air-gap” (1 of 1 MP on a departing EVAL or FITREP) can halt a career. And since both of those errors can occur unintentionally or intentionally, it is easy for a reporting senior to take their subjective view of their subordinates’ failures and use them for the good of their sailors as well as for bad. Combine this with the linear promotion system of the Navy where a single body of people annually decide who is worth promoting and who is not with no alternate path to promotion, the chances of promotion and a successful career diminish quickly when a negative FITREP or EVAL is seen by the promotion board.
With innovation and failure closely linked, and a promotion system in which failure can have a monumental impact on career progression, the effort to drive innovation from operational units is difficult. Unless a service member is assigned to a unit where innovation or research and development is a part the command’s mission or the Commanding Officer and his seniors place specific consideration on encouraging innovation and failure, new ideas bring a lot of personal risk for potentially little reward. The option of maintaining the status quo vice the risks associated with presenting innovation is the safest route to promotion and a successful path to retirement. There is no quick fix to how the promotion and evaluation system can better stimulate innovation, but understanding how it affects the prospect of putting forth innovative ideas can help us better determine how to encourage innovation out of those who have first-hand knowledge of how it can help our service the most.