The Role of Leadership in Innovation Diffusion Across Government
John (Jack) Shanahan, Lieutenant General (retired), United States Air Force, retired in 2020 after a 36-year military career. His final assignment was as the inaugural Director of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Center (JAIC). Jack served in a variety of operational and staff positions in various fields including flying, intelligence, policy, and command and control. As the first Director of the Algorithmic Warfare Cross- Functional Team (Project Maven), Jack established and led DoD’s pathfinder AI fielding program charged with bringing AI capabilities to intelligence collection and analysis. He is currently enrolled in North Carolina State University’s Master of International Studies program.
Jack Shanahan, Lt Gen, USAF (Retired)
Inaugural Director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Agency (JAIC)
Bio | LinkedIn
Agencies and organizations across the United States government, and especially throughout the Department of Defense, are facing a 5-10 year window to inculcate a culture of innovation — or risk the inability to keep pace with the ramifications and implications of emerging and disruptive technologies. Absent major changes, the combination of legacy systems, legacy workflows, lack of a data-centric culture, and failure to appreciate the magnitude of organizational, cultural, policy, and technical retooling required for the digital age is a recipe for disaster.
The consequences of this failure would be dire, up to and including the possibility of losing one important element of the strategic competition against China. Such a setback would reverberate for the next fifty years. This outcome, however, is hardly a foregone conclusion. Indeed, the concept of a culture of innovation in the institutional bureaucracy does not have to be an oxymoron!
Many individual components across government have successfully embraced and amplified a culture of innovation over the last five years. Think of the Air Force Rapid Capability Office (RCO), Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Kessel Run, Common Mission Project, Project Maven, Defense Digital Service, BMNT, and Hacking For Defense (H4D), to name just a few. Yet the efforts of these small organizations or sub-organizations, led by unique disruptive innovators, have necessarily focused on limited numbers of small-scale pilot projects and prototypes. As impressive as the results have been, they will never scale rapidly across large bureaucracies without major changes elsewhere throughout the parent organizations and agencies.
For the past few years one of the most frequent criticisms levied against the Department of Defense and most of the rest of the government has been that these organizations do not have an innovation problem. Instead, they have an innovation adoption problem. This is entirely fair criticism. Across the government there is an entirely new generation of people thirsting for the opportunity to display their innovation skills but who simply lack the resources, leadership advocacy, and environment needed to thrive.
Achieving the necessary speed and scale of fielding emerging technology capabilities, while fostering the development of novel operating concepts that integrate those disruptive technologies, will depend upon a bedrock of innovative leadership at every level of the organizational ladder.
The recipe for moving beyond pilots and prototypes to widespread innovation that can be sustained over the long term comprises the following people-centered ingredients: a classic change agent or disruptor; bottom-up innovation; leaders to provide top-down pressure, top cover, advocacy, and oversight; opinion leaders distributed throughout the organization, most often in the middle management layer; essential bureaucrats — in the positive not pejorative sense — who understand the inner workings of ‘the system’ and similarly know how to work ‘the system’; and transplanted commercial technology leaders who import industry best practices into government. The good news is that several crucial elements of this recipe are already in place. For example, it was increasingly apparent to me in my final year at the JAIC that there are more than sufficient numbers of people in the first two categories. Unfortunately, some other key elements are still sorely lacking.
At the top, we are seeing a renewed interest in and emphasis on innovation, agile software practices, and emerging and disruptive technologies. This extends all the way to the Service Secretary, Chief/Commandant, Director, and Agency head levels. Yet as I can personally attest from my own shortcomings leading Project Maven and standing up the DoD Joint AI Center (JAIC), these senior leaders do not have the requisite education and training crucial to bringing innovation across wide swaths of their organizations simultaneously.
At the same time, we are now beginning to see more evidence of the enormous inherent value in those informal and formal leaders who carry into the government with them extensive commercial industry experience product development, product management, digital engineering, and other emerging technology expertise. They bring an entirely different mindset and culture, which is proving to be instrumental in accelerating innovation adoption. While there are still not nearly as many of these leaders to go around, there is a silver lining; namely, the extraordinarily high return on investment the government receives for each one of these transplanted industry leaders.
This leaves the much-maligned middle management layer of any bureaucratic ecosystem, sometimes even derogatorily referred to as the ‘frozen tundra’. The people in this layer invariably reflect the priorities as promulgated from above, and as advocated for from below. They can indeed become risk averse, usually because of a whipsaw effect from the combination of seemingly continuous leadership changes above them, the lack of empowerment or trust from above or below, and good old-fashioned self-preservation.
Yet this layer invariably contains the formal and informal opinion leaders of an organization. The kind of people who are capable of providing the necessary connections and establishing crucial networks both within and between organizations. Ultimately, these opinion leaders will largely determine whether or when the slope of the innovation diffusion S-curve takes off in an exponential way or remains perpetually flat. Numbers matter, and there are more of these types of potential leaders across the government than any other. Hence, it is entirely appropriate to focus on this layer when exploring how to bring innovation to entire organizations. I contend that when — and only when — the leaders at the top place the appropriate emphasis on and advocate for an innovation culture through explicit resource commitments and positively-reinforcing personnel actions, the majority of the middle management opinion leaders will begin to reflect those same priorities. And in the words of Everett Rogers — the American sociologist who literally wrote the book on the diffusion of innovation — “after the opinion leaders in a system adopt an innovation, it may be impossible to stop its spread.”
Leaders at the highest levels of every agency and organization must commit to a new future of emerging and disruptive technologies. Followed by action, not rhetoric. Leaders who place the appropriate emphasis on and who are the strongest possible advocates for developing and sustaining a culture that allows innovation to thrive. Who demand an intense focus on hiring practices, to find people who are willing to challenge the orthodoxy, who are comfortable with being uncomfortable, and who genuinely embrace innovation. They provide top cover and advocacy, empowering people at every level while establishing inviolable core priorities and setting high standards. Such leaders adhere to organization-wide innovation adoption principles. They treat middle management as true opinion leaders and key participants in the diffusion of innovation, rather than as obstacles to be removed or circumvented. They trust the people around them, and the people around them trust them. And they not only accept a risk-tolerant attitude; they insist on it and reward it. They also insist on ensuring sufficient education and training for everyone in the organization, to include themselves.
The changes required in the pervasive middle management layer — the kind of changes that will transform managers into influential opinion leaders — will be more far-reaching and take much more time to mature. Such changes include the less tangible aspects such as understanding and reinforcing the priority accorded to innovation adoption by the organization’s top leaders; receiving and granting greater empowerment and latitude to take more risks; and seeking out the needs of and feedback from the end-users of new technology.
Admittedly, not everyone will adapt. One of the hard parts of leadership is understanding when it is time to move the people in this category to where they are better suited, or even when it is time to let them go.
There is also a need for more legislation, updated policies, and new authorities allowing rapid cross-flow of people between industry and the government — the flow must be bi- directional for maximum effectiveness. This process must be faster, easier, and sustainable. Congress has consistently indicated an appetite to take on these challenges. There must be a commensurate demand signal from across the government, reinforced by the executive branch’s full support.
There are actions underway across the government to address a number of the steps needed to create the environment necessary to allow innovation diffusion. Some are being driven by Congress; others by outside bodies such as the Defense Innovation Board, Cyberspace Solarium Commission, and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (AI); some by the executive branch through Executive Orders; and the rest within agencies and organizations themselves. It must all move faster, however, to avoid being forced to make wholesale changes all at once in the aftermath of an exogenous shock, such as losing the strategic competition against China a decade from now.
Absent the kind of changes described above, most change agents and innovators will leave the government — forever disillusioned about the ability of large bureaucracies to remain relevant in the digital age — while potential opinion leaders in the middle management layer never flourish.
Finally, one of the more important systematic institutional changes will be to create a new pipeline that grows a much larger and broader base of people at every level who will accelerate adoption and integration of emerging technologies. Just as early examples of artificial intelligence are no longer called AI, the goal must be to make innovation such a normal part of the fabric across government that it is simply referred to as standard operating practices. The National Security Commission on AI recommended that the DoD create an emerging technology certification process that resembles today’s requirements for joint duty qualification (as legislated by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act). Personnel would earn their emerging technology certification by serving in emerging technology-focused fellowships, private sector talent exchanges, positions within government, and by taking courses focused on emerging and disruptive technologies. This is a commendable idea. Other agencies and organizations across the government should adopt similar practices.
The challenges of making the epochal shift from an industrial-age, hardware-centric government to an information-age, software-centric, user-focused, more risk-tolerant one are daunting. Yet they are also surmountable. It is time to move beyond disruption to focus on reimagining and reinvention. The magnitude of change required will take years to play out, and will demand forging stronger partnerships between the government, academia, and industry. The perceived risks of moving too quickly, however, will always pale in comparison to the risks to the nation of not being bold or agile enough.