How The Navy Created A Culture Of Innovation In Big Bureaucracy
How do you run a huge bureaucracy designed to avoid mistakes, and make sure that the organization is ready to innovate at a moment’s notice? That’s James “Hondo” Geurts’ mission. He’s served as the Undersecretary of the Navy since January, but before he’d spent the last four years creating a culture of agility at the Pentagon among the Navy’s leadership. How he’s done it is a lesson in innovation.
The challenge begins with the nature of a large organization. “Bureaucracies are all about constraining decision space and reducing risk,” says Geurts. And that means they tend to over-manage downside risk while missing out on upside opportunities. “You’ve just got to fight your way through that by lots of different means. It’s a constant journey and I’m learning every day as I go through it.” slotpg
“If you are going to be competitive, especially in the military, you’ve got to have pivot speed and adaptability,” says Geurts. Neglecting to develop adaptability is a risk we often fail to take into account. When organizations don’t build in the ability to pivot quickly, Geurts says they, “become very brittle… We talk about the risk of doing something differently, but we don’t talk about the risk of not doing something differently, which over time will create brittleness.”
