Z.13: Islands of Innovation

Sulu Archipelago, Philippines. Author’s photo, 2022.

My go-to first move for improving any unit I'm assigned to is ‘find ways to use the data we already have’. It’s not exactly superhuman innovation, but you’d be surprised how much return you can get on such (obviously) low hanging fruit.

Implementing new systems and gathering new data takes a lot of work. You’ve got to identify what you need and how you’re going to get it, then build a system to receive that data and a way to leverage it — we’re not hoarding data for data’s sake after all. You also need to find allies to help you roll out the new system and, if you’re not a complete idiot, you need to test out betas early to get customer feedback to improve the whole process. That all needs to be done before you get a single piece of new data. It’s also work you should keep doing as you gather the data, but that’s for another post.

This upfront time and effort cost is a large part of why most organizations don’t innovate much. Think about all the annoying frictions in your day: the password or PIN you constantly have to reenter, the ancillary or irrelevant information that you have to constantly retype into forms, the coversheet checklists that some faceless office makes you fill out before you can get your leave approved. All the dumb ‘we’ve always done it that way’ time wasters we all endure. Every. Single. Day.

Someone should fix them. Someone certainly can. Just not… us. Because we’re too busy. We’re sinking in a leaky boat and all we have to bail ourselves out is a sieve. There is no small irony in an organization too busy to stop wasting its time.

‘I’m Going To Make You 100% More Efficient’

This is why my go-to move is to usually start with time wasters. I dive right into data my unit has but can’t seem to manage. When I became a battalion XO back in 2015, our personnel shop (S1) was notoriously bad. HR often gets a bad rap, mostly because a lot of their job is like ice-skating uphill. They’re never getting to the top, they’re just trying to stay as far off the bottom as they can. But I can freely admit, in 22+ years of army, that 2015 S1 shop was the worst I ever worked with. And when I became the XO, that made me part of the problem.

So we started with the easiest fix first: digitized awards. 22 years after the PDF was invented, our battalion S1 was still hand processing all the awards on paper. Mind you they weren’t being hand written. The awards were being filled out by soldiers on digital PDFs. But the S1 shop would only accept them as printed out copies, where upon the rest of the process was done entirely by hand.

Step one in our battalion S1 shop’s analogue process appeared to be: lose the paper copy. Well, that’s not entirely fair; they often skipped ahead and completed almost all the subsequent steps first. They’d get the award proofed and get the intermediate signatures done. But then, right at the end when the award was almost complete and just needed the commander’s signature, they would promptly lose the paper copy. Our S1 shop appeared to have an almost perfect ‘lose the award’ track record. Nearly every single award submitted got lost at least once, forcing everyone to start all over. Some were lost multiple times. I had to respect their consistency.

On my first day as XO, I sat down with the young captain in charge of the shop and told him there was no room for negotiation. Change was going to happen. ‘I’m going to make you 100% more efficient,’ I told him, which garnered a skeptical look. ‘No seriously, the math checks out’.

I mapped out how much time they spent processing the award on a white board. Then I drew a big sweeping arrow back to the beginning, showing how, when they lost the paper copy, they had to then spend all that time again. As I erased the ‘lose the paper copy’ arrow, I reran the numbers. ‘See? 100% improvement.’

To the poor captain’s credit, he did have one argument on his side. ‘The commander only reviews paper copies’.

‘That’s my problem, not yours’. And it was — one I mostly solved with assumption of command orders.¹

Turning Islands into Archipelagos

Most of the systems we built back in 2015 — the ones that tracked our manning, updated our PERSTAT, and tracked our budget — leveraged data the battalion already had.² No one had to input new information, no need to reinvent any wheels. We had the answers we wanted already, we just needed to link them up better.

The S1 shop out in Oki did exactly that five years later, which I wrote about back in September.

Bryan and his team jumped into the problem with both feet and in no time had a no-code digital solution to our inprocessing. They did it all with no budget either, speeding up the whole process by leveraging data and, in particular, the data they already had. This allowed their S1 shop to skip wasting a ton of time doing rote and repetitive tasks. Instead they focused on doing things only humans could do.

They also innovated a lot of other admin processes. Once the boat’s no longer sinking — when you stop trying to bail yourself out with a sieve — everyone on your team gets a pause to look around. They often start wondering what else they can do. What else is wasting their time? What else is ripe for a rethink? The returns on time saved quickly start to compound.

But all this only helps out that unit. Plenty of units in the army are trying to reinvent the broken wheels in their own processes right now. It’s a start, but it’s not maximally efficient. What we really need is a way to better share these ideas and techniques. We need to establish trade routes between all these islands of innovation.

There’s been a lot of top down effort to improve innovation, with mixed results. There’s a lot of Field of Dreams-esque efforts that try to develop new ‘Innovation’ offices. Some are producing results, some aren’t. This is in part because these units are trying to add a new thing on top of an existing one. That can work, but it needs support and a commander to make it happen.

Meanwhile, USMC Colonel Jerome Greco suggests a great way to better capture and share all the military’s innovations. It’s cut from the same ‘leverage what you’re already doing’ cloth I’ve been using. His insight is to use the command inspection program (CIP).

For those who aren’t familiar, every unit in the military, regardless of service, gets a visit from some sort of CIP team. These happen at least once during a two-year command. A cabal of different staff section inspectors comes out and proceeds to inspect your battalion on literally hundreds of checklists. All your administrative stuff, security, jump logs, maintenance logs, safety programs, anti-terrorism, SHARP; literally all the things. When the inspection is done, they give you an 100+ slide executive summary of their findings. That’s the executive summary version.

When the CIP team came out to Oki, Bryan’s S1 shop drew special compliment. Not only had they smoked the inspection side of the visit, the CIP team was genuinely surprised by the innovations the Oki S1 team had created. Unfortunately, aside from the compliments, there was no system in place to steal those good ideas and replicate them across the rest of the regiment. Too often Oki was an island on its own (pun intended).

But as Greco suggests, it wouldn’t take much to leverage the existing CIP process to capture how units are innovating. Currently, most units see these CIPs as largely annoying: inspections with hundreds of ❌ and ✅. What if they were instead caravans that could bring with them the latest great ideas? What if in addition to just telling you what your unit wasn’t doing well, these same CIP teams became innovation talent scouts who promulgated the best of our ideas while simultaneously championing the units that made them?

We don’t really need to add anything to the existing process, which is what makes Greco’s idea such a great tweak. He’s right to caution about the concerns around ‘innovation theater’, which we already see in some of the bespoke innovation teams units have assembled. But CIP mitigates a lot of this risk by actually capturing staff level innovations.

And the CIP process is examining a lot of the exact time wasting systems that are our worst time vampires. Out in Oki I fought, and lost, the idea that we still need to keep paper jump logs. CIP cited a regulation I couldn’t overrule; but I can’t be the first commander to argue that if I can swipe an ID card at the chow hall, I shouldn’t be felling forests worth of trees just to keep paper copies of what should be a digital logbook.

Read Greco’s whole article. He has a lot more than just that CIP idea in there. He explains how to do more than just label one of those Greek columns 'Innovation' on your newly minted vision statement. He lays out solid outlines for both the different kinds of innovations and, critically, how to create the culture and systems that actually generate them. And he backs up all of this with solid research and sources.

Spoiler alert: commanders play an outsized role. It’s on commanders to get their team’s the time savings they need to start innovating.

1. In the army, every unit has a commander, always. This means when the actual commander travels or goes on their own leave, that command is delegated down to the next most senior officer. Whenever our commander traveled to supervise training, which he did a fair amount, I managed to make significant headway in the backlog of awards by signing them myself.

2. PERsonnel STATus, or a list of where everyone in a unit is at any given moment.