Effects based operations is fuzzy enough. At least effects based leadership isn’t a thing, but it looks like someone is trying.

I had to read this three times from today’s news delivered by our friend Sam LaGrone before I started to see what was actually going on.

The Department of the Navy is developing a new digital tool for commanders to better understand the behaviors of sailors and Marines, better predict the effects of command climate on a ship or a unit, and prevent behaviors that could lead to suicide and sexual assault, the acting Secretary of the Navy told reporters on Wednesday.

Based on a Department of Defense data analytics tool called Advana, the Navy’s Jupiter dashboard will pull information from dozens of databases to create a picture of a unit’s health, acting SECNAV Thomas Harker told reporters.

Not every problem has a data driven solution, but in a Navy with an institutional bias towards STEM major thinking, it isn’t shocking that people will try to convince themselves there is. The hard work of getting to know and understand your very human Sailors and the complicated relationships they create to make our Navy work is just that, hard work. You have to get out of your office. You have to talk, listen, mentor, follow up. You have to use something hard to quantify such as intuition and judgement. Heck, you might have to even take a risk and socialize with them or … horror of horrors … meet their families.

No, it is easier just to log-in, look at a stoplight chart or barometer, and feel you understand your people. Sure the numbers may be aggregates of other reports of questionable utility compiled by people unaccountable to you, but you figure mixing a bunch of spotty data with other batches of spotty date devoid of messy context will shake out perfect data, right? Anyway, you now have an excuse – I mean a tool – to give yourself cover if something unpleasant happens. Right? That’s the goal?

You are doing something, but you are not leading. You are engaged in management instead … especially micro-management. That is what is enabled when people are depersonalized and broken down to numbers. Predictive analytics are useful with large numbers and mechanical processes, but not at the individual level with Sailors. That is what you really rely on a good Chiefs Mess and an attentive wardroom for.

Numbers. “Commanders” eh? I guess we need to define our echelon;

The Navy and Marine Corps dashboards will include regional military justice cases, results from unit-level command climate surveys, training and other statistics that will gauge a unit’s health.

“It’s also something that senior leadership can look at and go in and say, ‘ok, when we look at the Department of the Navy, you know, we’re at 76 percent for training — we should be a lot higher than that.’ Go in and understand, okay, which units are a hundred-percent great, which units are not at a hundred percent, how do we focus some effort downhill to get people to improve?” Harker said.

Weaponize already problematic command climate surveys? “I’m sorry Lieutenant Smithers committed suicide, but his command’s suicide prevention training was at 100%. What more could we do?”

This is a delicate area to go feeling around with such a ham-fisted concept. There is a fine line between looking for causal factors and creating a dystopia of precrime. What we are developing seems to be something of little to any use to unit leaders.

What it seems to be is more a 3,000 nm screwdriver enabler and less about making a CO’s job better. Less improving deck level leadership, and more about enabling second guessing and micromanagement at the highest echelons.

The tell comes at the end;

Key to the dashboard effort will be incorporating a watchlist of behaviors the DoN determined from a 2018 survey were likely to lead to a climate of sexual assault.

“The watch list is something that, you know, grew up in part of our nuclear community, as they look at watch lists, things for them to be concerned about. And it’s something that resonates with our force,” Harker said.

“There are five key areas where there’s increased risk for sexual assault. If sailors experienced sexual harassment or gender discrimination, or if there’s a lack of responsibility and intervention, or lack of respect and cohesion, or if there’s workplace hostility. Those five things all increase the risk for sexual assault significantly for both men and women.”

OK, let’s pull that thread. Where are the metrics coming from and who will enter it in to the dashboard that will tell a CO that Sailors experienced sexual harassment or gender discrimination in their command in time for them to take action? Access to something they don’t already have? How about the red line that signals if a command has a lack of responsibility and intervention? What about respect and cohesion? A metric for workplace hostility?

Is taking the very hard math of nuclear power and trying to spot weld it on to the very soft edges of the human condition really a leadership best practice?

Who thinks this will actually work?

Does a CO, XO, and CMDCM need a dashboard to know this? Of course not. So, we know this really has nothing to do with them.

This is about something else.

This is about putting a finer edge on an already weaponized command climate survey, IG, hotline, and related creatures in that part of the ecosystem.

It gives senior leaders – the ones with people who write their speeches and are driven around by duty drivers – an option to avoid having to be personally told there are issues with real people by real leaders. They won’t have to say, “I have determined…” no … they can deflect that, “The dashboard informs us that…”

We’ve gone from intrusive leadership to intrusive metrics in a generation.

Don’t think this won’t be used in a precrime mindset. This forces it. “If the dashboard says I no longer have confidence in a person three echelons below me, then I don’t. Better 10 good COs be relieved for having the wrong colors on their dashboard than for a senior leader get one letter from Congress asking why they didn’t react to the dashboard signals in time to prevent the latest liberty outrage in Okinawa. If we’ve learned anything it is that a middle aged guy who hasn’t deployed or left the DC area in a decade is much better at preventing sexual assault than unit leaders in the field. This is a no brainer.”

Is this really a leadership tool, or is this a way to depersonalize the chain of command and deflect responsibility for knowing and trusting your subordinates? Why not have it write FITREPS and decide rankings too?

An interesting secondary story; how much money is being spent for this and which companies is it going to? Who owns and stores the data collected? What are the nationalities and security clearances of those who are writing the code? How secure it data stream and storage? Who has access to it? How interconnected are the networks?

Heck, watch the video of the broader program yourself. Admiral Adama does not approve of this CONOPS at all.

Instead of the marketing analytics firm Advana … would the fleet be better served by this Advana? Perhaps.