Too Much of a Good Thing? The Armed Forces’ “Can-Do” Culture

Our ‘Can-Do’ culture needs to go.  Defence is simultaneously trying to do too much and yet not achieving enough.  Almost as paradoxically, the solution lies in trying to do less and achieving more.  

This is the secret to success in Agile methodologies like Scrum, so beloved of senior leaders in Defence at the moment.  In his book SCRUM (the Gospel according to St Jeff, Chapter 5), Jeff Sutherland exhorts teams not to multi-task.  Focusing on the highest priority and then moving to the next one once it’s completed in successive sprints, with multi-disciplinary teams dedicated to rapidly developing the product.  That’s the key.  The book claims that applying this, and other elements of the methodology, will allow organisations to achieve ”twice as much in half the time”.

Defence is its own worst enemy

Perhaps so, but Defence has an extremely large and complicated portfolio and needs to do lots all at once.  It’s hard to find someone in Defence who only has one job! Nonetheless, in trying to apply such lessons, Defence is its own worst enemy.  We always try to do too much.  We just can’t help ourselves, which is why we end up with an overheated equipment programme and burnt-out Armed Forces that have a dreadful material state, overworked people, and poorly provisioned stockpiles.

The incoming Defence Ministers will need to address this if they are to put the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces on a sustainable footing and ensure that they are ready for future conflict.

“All positive traits, states and experiences have costs that 

at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.¹

Can-Do Culture

The Armed Forces’ “Can-Do” attitude and culture, which it actively seeks to inculcate into its Officers, Sailors, Soldiers, Aviators, and Marines, is the sort of advantageous characteristic that can become a hindrance by its predominance.  Whilst this behaviour is vital at the Tactical Level, i.e. ‘cracking on’ against the odds, it becomes positively damaging, despite laudable intentions, when applied at the Strategic Level in anything but the most exceptional of circumstances.

The Armed Forces have a proud history of tactical and operational aggression in the face of the enemy, including an expectation that its personnel will press home an action against the odds.  Indeed, so fervently does the Royal Navy believe in this culture that it once executed a senior officer, Vice Admiral Byng, for withdrawing in the face of a superior enemy.  Despite this event occurring over 260 years ago its effect still resonates in the Service today and has been institutionalised as the “Can-Do” culture.

So what’s the problem? 

The Armed Forces are overstretched and suffering from decades of ‘running hot’.  They are short of money, particularly in the ‘support’ part of the budget; spares, ammunition stockpiles, maintenance provision, and so on.  And they are short of people.  The rate of service personnel voluntarily leaving the Armed Forces is unsustainable – the failure to balance available resources against the demand is the root problem.

This fundamental issue manifests itself thus: all organisations have a finite capacity to deliver their outputs.  The more complexity in an organisation, the less clear it is exactly where these limits are. And Defence is a highly complex organisation.  This means that there is uncertainty as to the actual capacity of Defence – how far can the elastic really be stretched?

If the organisation is run at the maximum edge of its capacity envelope, which is uncertain, then it can be expected that the demand will exceed the sustainable output capacity for a good proportion of the time.

If you want assured output, you run a system within its known safe envelope, not at the uncertain limit condition.  In this marginal situation, failure (or less pejoratively, the occasions when the demand exceeds the output capacity) will come unpredictably and uncontrollably.

It isn’t a matter of chance

This will not be graceful degradation, nor will there be the opportunity to make informed and prioritised choices about where the constraints on the output will come.  Failure will come at the most inopportune moment, when it is most politically embarrassing or operationally crucial.

Since the most operationally essential or politically sensitive matter will have been given the highest priority, one can reasonably assume that this will be the last place that failure will come, i.e. the last place where other options have been exhausted.  Indeed, if all of the resilience in the organisation has already been eroded, this is the only place where the failure can manifest itself.  The phrase “one brick thick” is often heard, for example, in the Royal Navy’s HQ when describing the state of any particular facet of the Service.  This, it could be argued, is not a healthy place for a Service whose nature demands it to be resilient and able to respond in an agile and decisive manner in times of crisis.  In military terms, the lack of strategic depth is stark.  This is true across the Front Line Commands.

Organisational capacity isn’t immutable, of course.  There are lots of ways one can expand the envelope to allow for greater output.  But just wishing it were so and working the organisation ever harder isn’t a sustainable way to do it; deliberately expanding its size and capacity through managed growth and investment is.  Implementing nifty management methodologies can make some difference of course, but, generally, if there was an easy magic formula someone would already have implemented it – these are not new problems.  Even once the envelope is expanded, there is still a limit and so the logic of this article still applies.

When an organisation is working at or beyond its maximal capacity, it is necessary to work extremely hard to militate against the system’s frailties so that failure can be averted.  This is a Sisyphean task.  The effect manifests as people working harder than might reasonably be expected under peacetime conditions and doing so in circumstances where the avoidance of failure rather than the pursuit of success is the predominant driver.

Voting with their feet

Under such circumstances, our servicepeople’s quality of life will inevitably be eroded as the relentless, burgeoning requirement to deliver the unresourced activity necessary to keep the show on the road is satisfied.  Such conditions are likely to lead to dissatisfaction, a loss of motivation, and ultimately an increasing number of individuals choosing to exit the organisation for alternative employment.

An organisation in such a condition will have a seemingly intractable retention problem.

There will always be occasions where local circumstances will necessitate a temporary over-commitment of resource.  Well-motivated teams will rise to the challenge knowing that this is an exceptional occurrence.  The UK’s Armed Forces excel in such circumstances, and long may they continue to do so.  But running like this in perpetuity is a recipe for failure.

If it’s so terrible, why does it happen?

In a competitive promotion system and where Officer tenures are brief (often less than two years), the incentive is to encourage short-term delivery at the expense of sustainability and resilience.  Given that the system tends to promote those that outperform their peers (in the eyes of their reporting officers), the short-termist determination to ‘not fail on my watch’ is propagated into the higher reaches of the Service.  People thus want to do more, launch more initiatives, and make more announcements; they don’t want to trim their ambition.

This is a normalisation of deviance.  It is having a profound effect on the capability and sustainability of the Armed Forces, especially the ability to deliver its acquisition programmes, retain its people, and sustain resilience in its logistics.  And thus on the UK’s readiness for conflict.

It will take visionary and uncompromising leadership to change the paradigm and fine judgement by tactical commanders to understand those circumstances where tactical expediency is necessarily prioritised over sustainability–such as in combat–without this reverting to being the norm.

The Armed Forces’ purpose is not only to shape world events on behalf of HM Government, but also to respond in times of crisis.  Even locally, the unexpected can happen at any time and without warning.  These moments can be defining for the individuals, units, and nations involved.  When the moment arrives (and it will) the Services must be ready.

“We are what we repeatedly do. 

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” 

~ Aristotle

They can only hope to achieve this if Defence makes excellence its habit in all that it does: operations, planning, training, engineering standards, maintenance, administration, military bearing and our overall conduct.  By being as ready as possible, events can be met on the front foot with the flexibility to seize and retain the initiative.

Operating the Armed Forces at or beyond their sustainable limit conditions prejudices the maintenance of such standards and thereby the likelihood of the Services prevailing in future conflicts.  The maintenance of standards does not happen by magic. It needs resources, most notably time and money, to make it happen.  Where inadequate resource is allocated, the conditions for strategic failure are set despite increased short-term outputs being achieved.

In conclusion

The ‘can-do’ culture is a vital element of the Armed Forces’ fighting ethos at the tactical level.  Yet, when carried through to the strategic level, it gives rise to operations that extend the Armed Forces beyond its sustainable capacity.

The current incentive structure focuses on short-term outputs and thus drives the behaviour of commanders accordingly.  This cuts against the grain in terms of the drive for ever greater “productivity”.  We need to be strategically more intelligent about what that means vis-à-vis readiness for contingency operations.

Only by creating an incentive structure that rewards the husbanding of the long-term health of the Services above the delivery of short-term outputs, except in extremis, will behaviours be adjusted and Defence returned to a sustainable footing.  This will take leadership, moral courage, and an acceptance that saying ‘can’t do’ is sometimes the right answer.

This is the most urgent factor that the new Defence Ministers must address if it is to truly get to the heart of sorting out the Ministry of Defence.  Real strategy means making choices, and hard choices will be needed to do less but thereby achieve more.

 

Image credit: MOD

1. Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant, “Too Much of a Good Thing: The Challenge of Opportunity of the inverted-U,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (January 2011): 61-76; cited in Malcolm Gladwell, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants,” Penguin Books: 2013, p52.