When innovative, visionary leaders attempt to make truly sweeping, genuinely transformational changes to large organizations, their biggest obstacle is resistance. Personally, I’ve witnessed this at least three times over the years. For speechwriters and staffers, it’s a post-doctorate-level education in leadership and change. For those upon whom change has to be forced, it’s sometimes a traumatizing fight for survival.
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY TRANSFORMATION
The 34th Chief of Staff of the Army General Eric Shinseki launched the Army’s transformation at the turn of the century. A tangible, early sign that the Army was changing was the black beret. Many misunderstood the logic behind the decision and recoiled. Some few—active duty and retired—preferred revolt to such a relatively simple change. For some it was about sacred traditions. For others it was about rice bowls they wanted no one to touch, sometimes for perfectly noble reasons. And there’s no question that the beret change affected moral and took time and intellectual energy that could have been better spent innovating and transforming. But in my opinion as a student learning about leadership from the sidelines, Shinseki’s logic was as brilliant as it was inarguably correct.
CHALLENGE OF CHANGE
If the Army couldn’t do something as simple as don the black berets—that is, change an article of the uniform—then we didn’t have the intellectual capacity and deep commitment necessary to truly transform the Army. Institutionally, the black beret is a simple prospect, Shinseki used to explain, compared to the enormous difficulty of achieving the kind of sweeping cultural change necessary to keep the Army relevant in an exponentially more and more rapidly changing world—that was, for instance, to prepare the Army to deploy quickly and to fight and win in a place like, like . . . there, there on the map. Afghanistan. “Who wants to go to Afghanistan?” one asked. “I don’t know,” Shinseki replied, “But what if we had to?”
RICE BOWLS & SILOS
In another case, in Afghanistan, then-Lieutenant General David Rodriguez was building a new intermediate headquarters, a cornerstone of Stanley A. McChrystal’s efforts to change ISAF strategy from a conventional fight against insurgency into a counter-insurgency fight against insurgency.
Rodriguez designed his intermediate operational headquarters around cross-functional teams rather than straight-line, silo staffs proven incapable of sharing information at a pace necessary to anticipate and execute counter-insurgency operations rather than react, react, react. Near revolt.
The cross functional team construct contradicted the fundamental organization and traditional functioning of the NATO headquarters. Rice bowls again. Love of traditional, comfortable—though largely irrelevant and ineffective—lines of authority and expertise combined with a paralyzing fear of change.
One small, beret-reminiscent example of the transformation Director Brennan is leading at the CIA are his own cross-functional teams, called mission centers. Mission centers bring a range of expertise and perspectives to bear on particular regions and challenges, rather than relying on a single operator attempting to manage the area alone from a narrower perspective. “[F]ive main directorates . . . provide the personnel needed by each regional mission center.” Altogether, “Brennan created 10 new ‘mission centers’ where CIA spies, analysts and hackers work together in teams focused on specific regions and issues.”
Brennan’s new approach is about destroying silos and rice bowls for the sake of relevance in a changing world.
FEAR OF CHANGE
As Reuters’ David Rhode reports it, the CIA is experiencing a similar reluctance. “The reforms,” reports Rhodes, “have hurt morale, created confusion and consumed time and attention at a time of myriad threats, according to interviews with ten former officials… [Brennan’s reforms] have sparked a mixed reaction among directorate of operations officials who believe human intelligence is getting short shrift.” “At a time when the agency needs to refocus its efforts on human espionage . . . the concentration of power in the new mission centers weakens the ability of the Directorate of Operations to produce a new generation of elite American spies.” Rice bowls and noble reasons.
CHANGE OR DIE
The world as we know it has changed, radically. Brennan and many other leaders would argue that old ways of doing business, of working together—or not working together—simply will not work. According to Rhodes, Brennan believes, “Twentieth century American government management practices are being rendered obsolete in the digital age.” Transformational thinking and revolutionary action are necessary for the sake of relevance in the cyber-sphere in which we live, like it or not.
Read about progress in Director Brennan’s year-and-a-half fight to transform the CIA. I can imagine Shinseki advising the CIA, if you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
