Pentagon Launches Study on AdaptationApril 29, 2010

 

The Pentagon's chief weapons buyer wants to identify the attributes that foster adaptability in large organizations — especially in the private sector — and then transfer those traits across the military.

"Adaptability must be a key determinant of what the Department buys, how it trains and develops personnel, how it develops intelligence, and how it operates," wrote Ashton Carter, undersecretary of Defense, in a memo.

Carter launched a study to identify fundamental attributes that make an organization adaptable.

"It should identify successful examples of adaptation, both commercial and non-commercial, and what made them successful, and also unsuccessful examples and the factors which contributed to unsuccessful adaptation," Carter wrote in an April 12 memo that DoDBuzz.com posted.

He said it is critical for the military to enhance adaptability of its forces to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. Carter added that the study should look at any commercial examples of adapting a capability or technology to something beyond its original intent. "This should include examining how any such commercial examples were quickly brought to market."

In his memo, he provided a partial list of areas that needed to considered, as follows:


  • Personnel development: Determine how to develop and retain an agile military and civilian workforce. This would include developing new recruitment sources, especially in emerging technologies and cultures, and languages of interest. The study would also examine how to retain relevant institutional knowledge from departing workers.

  • Training: Assess techniques to quickly train and educate current and future workers.

  • Acquisition: Tailor the acquisition process to acquire capabilities as new challenges are identified and to extend legacy capabilities when cost effective. Most importantly, this would require open systems and architecture to allow various systems to interface.

  • Degraded operations: Plan to adapt to a hacked or destroyed U.S. Cyber network, sensors or any other critical information.

While such studies can be useful, Christian Terwiesch,  Wharton Professor of Operations and Information Management, warns that they can often suffer because of problematic methodology. Terwiesch noted that the survey sample can bias the report from inception. Wide participation in the study is critical but often only successful companies respond. It is not clear whether patterns observed in one industry apply to other industries, he added. "The success factors in the auto industry might be different from high-tech companies," said Terwiesch. "So there is no point in creating a study that lumps this stuff all together."

Terwiesch also warned that subjective data too often colors the results. He said that when studies ask questions like "How much uncertainty do you face in your industry?" or "How important is flexibility?" the problem is that the questions themselves are very subjective.

"I have seen food and beverage companies argue that they are in fast-paced, highly uncertain industries. Well, they might feel this way. But compare this to bio-tech, Web 2.0, or fashion," said Terwiesch. "This is all relative, subjective, and hard to compare across industries.”Often, you are much better off to measure objective data, such as lifecycles, price decay or technological change," he added.

Eric K. Clemons, Wharton Professor of Operations and Information Management, noted that finding patterns is just the start of a more complex analysis and implementation of the findings.
"The most difficult part of this is figuring out which patterns are useful and which patterns are merely deceptive and dangerous," said Clemons. He noted, for example, that if military logistics and supply commanders were to decide to adopt a Japanese just-in-time supply-chain approach, based on stable, known, and predictable demand, "a lot of troops would find themselves without ammunition at the start of hostilities."