The Future of Work is Leaving the National Security Bureaucracy Behind

Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant caused a stir in April when, in testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said the “Department of Defense’s culture is a threat to national security.” Grant went on to describe that culture as one simultaneously overconfident and risk-averse, whose entrenched habits, values, and practices stifle the very innovation successive Secretaries of Defense have said the Department so urgently needs. And it’s true; from talent management to budget building and program execution, DoD’s organizational structures and administrative procedures have hardly changed in the past half-century, a fact that has inhered an organizational culture wholly unsuited for competition in the digital age.

It is as if Robert McNamara’s Pentagon had been sealed in amber when he resigned way back in 1968, leaving behind a living museum to the workplace culture and processes of the Mad Men era. The department remains rigidly hierarchical, where modern organizations have long embraced flatter organizational structures that facilitate faster — and often, better — decisions. It remains obsessed with protocol, where modern organizations have become not only more casual, but more diverse, inclusive, and dynamic — all of which facilitates creativity instead of dampening it. It remains burdened by the strict adherence to slow, sequential processes, while more contemporary workplaces have learned that parallel, simultaneous, and asynchronous methods dramatically speed their delivery of value to customers. The bottom line is that while military strategists can argue all day long about whether or not the nature of war is changing, there’s no doubt the nature of work is — and the Pentagon’s turgid bureaucracy is falling farther behind every day.

In fact, there is a workplace revolution of sorts underway, one that’s overturning more than a century of management theory and transforming both workplaces and the very way in which work itself gets done. Partisans of this revolution call it by many names; agile, lean, and design-thinking, are just a few. They can be found in nearly every sector of the burgeoning knowledge economy — from the usual suspects in Silicon Valley startups to newer converts you might not expect, including stalwarts of the manufacturing, finance, information technology, and consumer services industries. I’m not talking about remote work — at least, not solely. The work-from-anywhere movement is having a moment, and is certainly one of the revolution’s fronts — but distributed work and the necessarily more hands-off approach to management that accompanied it over the past year has only served to accelerate what has been gathering momentum for years.

The revolution began in the software industry, where its earliest ideologues found that it was simply impossible to develop modern code using the last century’s rigid style of management. They learned that as the work they were doing grew less routine and more complex, what they’d been taught about managing organizations in business school just didn’t seem to cut it. They discovered that by instead removing unnecessary layers and empowering those who knew the work best, they not only dramatically improved performance, but also fostered more cohesive, enthusiastic, and creative teams. Their success led others to adopt the tenets they were developing — tenets like authenticity, individual agency, and the collaboration of small teams, to name a few. As software began to ‘eat the world’ in the aughts, the revolution that had begun with a few ideas about making workplaces a little bit better evolved into something like a new philosophy of work itself — a fundamentally different way of thinking about how people come together and collaborate to produce value, one that allows organizations to thrive in an era of instability and persistent change — at scale.

Traditionally, management’s role had been seen as enforcing rules that ensured a given product met some acceptable standard of quality and was created with the least amount of waste. This doctrine was informed by a 19th-century pseudoscience named after its principal author, Fredrick Winslow Taylor. Taylorism’s goal was to achieve machine-like efficiency with human workers — first on the factory floor and then later in the office. It was predicated on two ideas: strict control by managers, who it presumed knew best, and strict compliance from workers, who it presumed didn’t know much of anything. It made a clear distinction between the supposed “thinkers” on one hand and the “doers” on the other, who were seen as naturally indolent, prone to wasting company time absent the manager’s watchful gaze, and in great need of careful instruction to guide their efforts. As companies became conglomerates and multinationals throughout the 20th-century, the number of managers proliferated, eventually directing the activities of millions of workers but never quite accomplishing the goal of turning human beings into cogs in a great machine. They did, however, promote a culture of presenteeism and the proliferation of “busy work,” or tasks that look like work and certainly waste time, but ultimately have little substance or value.

Organizations that remain stuck in the old ways of doing work are falling farther behind every day. Uncomfortable with the radical transparency and all-to-all connection of this new era, they too often find themselves struggling to justify the status quo on the one hand, and racing against the Red Queen on the other. With disengaged workers who have to be told what to do, they are structurally unsuited to respond to swiftly emerging risks and opportunities alike.

Today, smart organizations all over the world are responding to the complexity, speed, and uncertainty of the 21st-century by eschewing much of what was until recently accepted wisdom and adopting the revolutionaries’ principles instead. Based on everything we’ve learned in recent decades about human and organizational psychology, they are actively reinventing themselves — integrating functions that were once siloed, accelerating decision-making by granting more authority and resources to those with the most information and greatest competency, and growing organizational cultures that are more open, transparent, and human-centric. They’ve recognized that even — perhaps especially — in an era of big data and smart machines, it is an organization’s people that determine whether it will succeed or fail and that people do their best work when their talents are cultivated and coordinated — not commanded and controlled.

In this light, consider the Department of Defense. With nearly a million civilian employees and an annual budget approaching a trillion dollars, it is by almost any metric the most powerful institution on earth. But as anyone who’s worked there knows, getting anything done is less like pulling teeth than volunteering for a root canal without anesthesia. One senior official recently described work at DoD as “disconcertingly retrograde,” going on to detail pitiful scenes of employees huddled around those few areas of the Pentagon’s 6.5 million square foot building that have even a trace of cellphone reception — forget about Wi-Fi — and enduring day after day of perfunctory, if not outright performative meetings whose sole purpose often seems to be the aggrandizement of senior executives.

Stolid managerialism is the default. Founded upon a doctrine of hierarchical control that was informed by both military tradition and the ‘scientific management theories of the 19th-century, it has elevated conformity to virtue. Information flows up or is “staffed” in defense parlance, and power trickles back down. Important leaders choose less important leaders; everyone else competes within the rigid confines of a civil service that we’ve known to be fundamentally broken for decades. Compensation is commensurate with status and tenure, not talent or contribution. Tasks are assigned, performance is evaluated, rules are promulgated — inhering a culture of risk aversion that makes maintenance of the status quo a much safer bet than attempting to challenge it. This system excels at stifling dissent; initiative and creativity are just collateral damage. Pentagon reporter Jeff Schogol perhaps put it best when he compared the Defense Department to “…a Sears mail-in catalog that is struggling to stay relevant in an Amazon Prime world.

All of which is to say the national security bureaucracy we’ve inherited — of which the Pentagon is but the largest and most influential component — is founded upon outdated and frankly counterproductive notions of work. The existing system was designed for an era during which the rate of change was much slower and the centralized management of large bureaucracies more feasible. It was not designed for one like our own, one that’s characterized by relentless and accelerating technological progress, growing uncertainty, and the intersection of a host of proliferating risks. The complexity of today’s global competitive space makes it quite impossible for any individual leader, no matter how sharp or experienced, to keep up with every challenge — or, even with the scope of work of their own organizations.

To be fair, there are some promising experiments underway. Newer organizations with department-wide remits, such as the Defense Digital Service and the Defense Innovation Unit, are working to challenged ingrained habits and question long-held assumptions about defense procurement. They, along with their service-specific counterparts, outfits like the Air Force’s Platform One and AFWERX, are already having a noticeable effect on how the DoD does business, at least as far as software development and acquisition goes. Unfortunately, these experiments remain just that and have little effect on the larger administrative procedures of the department writ large. Despite real successes, they are largely disconnected from the bulk of work the department does, so many islands of occasional excellence that sometimes make progress despite continuous pushback from institutional antibodies.

Similarly, much has been made of ongoing and troubled efforts to modernize the Pentagon’s information and communications technology infrastructure. The DoD and the rest of the intelligence community are making big investments in digital communications, cloud computing, and, of course, artificial intelligence. But even if they could somehow swap their legacy systems with cutting-edge cloud platforms complete with artificial intelligence to manage them tomorrow, it would not avail us as much as you might think.

Since America no longer has a technological edge (or won’t for much longer, anyway) and rival great powers all now have access to roughly analogous capabilities across every domain of warfare, completive advantage follows not from the technology itself, but instead, as even the authors of the 2017 National Defense Strategy themselves put it, the side that “better integrates [technology] and adapts its way of fighting.”

The evolving character of war and an ongoing reframing of national security will require a more complex and adaptive defense enterprise whose workforce is empowered to collaborate across functions and silos, at scale. Fifth and sixth-generation telecommunications technologies, along with more widespread, useful artificial intelligence will together drive both an untethering from fixedness in terms of location and accelerate the pace of data delivery — allowing enterprises to become more distributed, asynchronous, and flexible. The frictionless exchange of information will become more important than stratified layers of review that now too often serve to render any decision, once made, irrelevant because events have already overtaken it.

Reaping the speed and efficiency gains that these technologies allow, however, requires an administrative overhaul that gives more agency and autonomy to individuals and teams within a given organization. In tightly-managed Taylorist hierarchies, information is filtered, distorted, or lost at every rung on the organizational ladder before it reaches someone with enough authority to make a decision, and then once again as decisions flow back down to those who implement them. Defense and intelligence agencies are currently structured as parallel competing hierarchies, each with their own parochial perspectives, their own data they treat as proprietary, and their own budgetary interests to defend. Simply put, they lack the sort of streamlined organizational structures necessary to take full advantage of accelerated data delivery and all-to-all sharing that modern enterprises employ to create decision advantage. Necessary investments in communications technologies without commensurate investments in organizational and administrative modernization are akin to building a modern interstate highway system that’s only meant to be traveled by horse-drawn buggies.

So, what can we do?

This, of course, is an essay meant to stir conversation and not a detailed policy proposal. The large-scale organizational modernization of an enterprise the size of the DoD would be a tough slog, to put it likely. It would require both visionary leadership from the White House in addition to concerted and sustained effort from senior leaders across multiple offices and defense agencies, not to mention the support of far-sighted oversight committee members in Congress.

There is hope. The fact that other large institutions in the private sector have made similar transformations proves it can be done, so long as there are incentives to do so. For these organizations, the choice was often clear: adapt, or die. While the choice is not yet so stark for defense and other national security institutions (and let’s hope it stays that way), there is a growing recognition that “business as usual” is no longer sufficient for the challenges we face. In time, this increasing frustration with ingrained maladaptive practices may prompt true systemic reform, the kind that only happens every century of so in this country.

Ultimately, the future of defense and national security work is going to be the same as the future of any field of knowledge work — that is, it will be increasingly transparent, distributed, and collaborative. Bureaucracies like DoD can either embrace and prepare for this future now, or struggle to catch up once it’s already passed them by.