As a retired Army officer who served active duty around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan, I know from experience the winner on a battlefield isn’t the person who fires the first bullet or even who wins the first battle – it’s the person who can adapt and change the fastest.
I see a similar truth in my work as an entrepreneur – adaptation is the key to survival and eventual victory. Unfortunately for the military and for business, technological dominance is fleeting at best, and all too often, our systems set us up for failure. They rarely allow us to be agile enough to change course when we need to. To successfully solve challenges in the 21st century, we need a different mindset, and to do that, we need to start elevating a quality that is often overlooked – ingenuity. This is what drives the ability to adapt, innovate, adopt and succeed.
I had a conversation with Ryan Connell on his Defense Mavericks podcast to share what ingenuity means in the context of mission acceleration and solving challenges, and why traits like cleverness, inventiveness and originality need to be recognized and nurtured for better outcomes.
When America forsook ingenuity in place of innovation
Entrepreneurs are masters of manipulation, recruitment, and problem-solving. They have the skills and traits to navigate complex systems and achieve goals. In the late 19th century, ingenious individuals were the driving force behind America's industrial revolution. Not having a prescribed roadmap meant there were no constraints, and technological advances happened in real time. In that period, the word "ingenuity" was far more prevalent than "innovation," reflecting a focus on practical problem-solving rather than grand visions. The concept of ingenuity as a skill, however, has fallen by the wayside in modern times.
As a nation, we've missed something by assuming that the world's inventors and problem-solvers will emerge naturally without a concerted focus on creative development, which includes nurturing ingenuity. All too often, decisions are made within the siloes or stovepipes we create in our organizations – whether it’s between government agencies or corporate teams. Information is restricted within the stovepipe, which increases the odds that not only do you not understand how your solution might play out across the organization, you might not even be solving the correct problem.
Getting people to work together, socializing across stovepipes creates a culture where people can come together faster, create a hypothesis, experiment, and produce results, even if it involves setting aside normal conventions. Rules and systems have their place, but we also need ingenious people at the helm of the teams responsible for delivering results. Organizations talk about fostering cultures of innovation, but what they actually need is a culture of ingenuity.
Ingenuity takes shape in the hot seat
The battlefield is a prime example of where ingenuity is cultivated out of necessity. Soldiers learn to adapt and overcome challenges in high-pressure situations, developing a deep understanding of problem-solving and resourcefulness. This is especially true when it involves life-or-death decisions.
One thing most civilians don’t understand is in war, the side that can muster the biggest show of force doesn’t guarantee a win. Often it’s the side in the greatest danger and the most to lose because they have the biggest incentive to change the fastest. They find the best tech, and immediately start adapting it to the circumstances they’re in.
Here’s an example from Afghanistan: In 2010 we needed to intercept radio chatter and geo-locate handheld radio networks at the tactical level. While an intelligence agency had this capability, only Top Secret Clearance-holders were allowed to operate the system. Unfortunately that prevented the solution from being used at scale. Not willing to do without, a group of Soldiers built their own system using parts from Radio Shack. Their boss let them test it in a training environment and sure enough it worked well enough to get the job done.
Flash forward a few years and that system is now a program of record (POR). In this case it took the ingenuity of young, creative problem solvers to go out on a limb, and a senior leader to give them encouragement while moving the bureaucracy out of their to get this smart, life-saving solution into the hands of our warfighters. America’s defense department shouldn’t make it this hard.
The hype-cycle of Organizational innovation
Soldiers in the heat of battle can invent and solve problems effectively like this because they need to act quickly and they know the problem intimately. For innovators back home, it’s a different story. We have perfected the art of reinventing the wheel in the government. We characterize this as “innovation theater” – the charade of trying to solve a problem with new ideas but not actually delivering anything valuable because we missed the point, misunderstood the problem or couldn't find a solution fast enough to make a difference. It’s a flurry of activity that goes nowhere. Once we learn to avoid the theater and actually start to make progress on delivering what matters, senior leaders rotate out and the problem’s champions are lost. The bureaucracy steps back in and the innovators are beaten down until they simply give up and move on to another job.
We call this constant rotation of theater, learning, changing leaders and ultimate return to the status quo the “hype-cycle of organizational innovation.”
It’s a cycle we can and must stop by nurturing people who know how to rapidly build specialized teams around specific problems, find solutions, and then deliver those solutions at the speed with which they need to be delivered.
This level of mission acceleration requires ingenious thinkers who dig into the problem at the tip of the spear, and question the status quo. It doesn’t dismantle systems already in place – it runs parallel with them to allow for mission acceleration so government and commercial organizations can keep up with the modern battlefield, literal and figurative. Rewarding ingenious thinkers at all levels, in the battlefield and in the lab, will help us keep our technological edge and conquer the challenges we face today.
For more from my Defense Mavericks podcast interview, skip to the time stamps below:
1:37: The evolution of Hacking for Defense
3:53: Problems are like fish bait in Silicon Valley
9:41: Building interdisciplinary teams
14:39: The difference between innovation and ingenuity
18:28: Important takeaways from Ukraine battlefield
20:48: Acquisitions are not the problem
32:38: How to professionalize the building of people
