The Secret Sauce to Innovate in the Military: Make Doubt and Failure Fun

By James Holmes,The National Interest

Strategy is about forming good habits, and so is innovation. If we want our services to innovate as a matter of course, we need to foster an institutional culture that makes doubt and failure fun.

Innovation lies downstream of organizational culture. Shape how people view the strategic environment and our profession, as culture does, and you shape debates about strategy, operations, and force design. If we want our navy and fellow services to make a habit of innovating, we need to nurture an experimental cast of mind in our sailors, marines, aviators, and soldiers. The habit of cooking up hypotheses, testing and scrapping most of them, and having fun while failing, adjusting, and trying again is a habit worth cultivating.

In other words, we need to refresh the scientific habit of mind within our institutions.

How do we do that? Let’s take a quick look at those three factors that foster innovation—doubt, failure, and fun—through the eyes of giants of philosophy, the natural sciences, and naval warfare.

Start with fun. Strategy is a serious matter, but we need not go about it with a dour heart. In fact, we shouldn’t. Innovation is about change, and Eric Hoffer, America’s self-made longshoreman-philosopher, teaches that change is an ordeal. None of us much likes it. So a culture that discourages change only reinforces the natural conservatism encoded in us all—and stasis prevails.

That being the case, innovative ages are ages that reduce the ordeal of change—or, better yet, make it a joy. Such times overcome that built-in preference for what is over what might be. A “playful mood” is the rule in such times, and freethinking flourishes. No one discourages, deters, or crushes the crank who conceives of some harebrained idea, formulates a hypothesis, puts it to the test of reality, discards it in part or in whole if it doesn’t pan out, and moves on to the next harebrained idea.

And if field trials do vindicate the hypothesis, inhabitants of such an age relabel the misfit a genius and shower him with honors. They reward unorthodoxy. Hoffer lauds the golden age of Athens, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment as unusually dynamic times. These were epochs when dogma and groupthink found little purchase. We should strive to replicate that buoyant ethos within our sea, air, and ground forces, and within the Pentagon. Let’s make change fun—and reawaken the spirit of invention.