Defence Enterprise culture: The most important capability
The total Defence Enterprise workforce is the delicate system at the heart of Defence capability. There’s no value in elevating one part to the exclusion or diminution of the others. If one fails, it all fails.
The Mandarin first published this essay. Authors: David Schmidtchen and Sally Dorsett.
There’s more intense competition in our region, the risk of conflict is rising, strategic warning times are collapsing, non-military ‘grey-zone’ activity is increasing, and threats to human security in the form of pandemics and natural disasters are escalating. It’s a bleak and uncomfortable national outlook.
Defence is racing to catch up to its ever-changing environment. The Defence Strategic Review is the latest to be charged with getting a firm grip on a slippery situation.
All military conflict involves high levels of ignorance and uncertainty. Confusion, surprise and luck are persistent characters in military history. This is the situation we find ourselves in today, anticipating conflict while the lack of knowledge eats away at our confidence and infects decision-making.
Before the actual test, everything is an estimate, an assumption, a guess, a prediction, a hope or a fear. Ignorance and uncertainty are at the heart of every decision.
The philosophical question confronting Defence leaders is: What is the capacity of Defence Enterprise to change at a rate faster than the environment? How can it quickly learn what has not yet been taught through practice? How does it resist the natural tendency of all large organisations at times of uncertainty to turn inward and focus on the comfort of bureaucracy?
Questions of the speed, capacity and capability required to maintain the strategic edge are often framed in terms of technology – most recently, ships, submarines and drones. But always at the centre of military conflict is the complex, vital, unpredictable and delicate system at the heart of innovation, opportunity and luck – people.
People will make decisions, interpret uncertainty, act to force change and stubbornly do the impossible in the most uninhabitable circumstances. Defence strategic planning should pay closer attention to this capability system.
Here, we might withdraw sagely into the warm comfort of leadership as the balm that soothes all. Leadership is essential, but it isn’t everything.
The Defence Enterprise is so much more. The interaction and intersection of social patterns and practices are systemised into organisations and expressed as capability. Imagination, innovation, readiness, discipline, obedience, hierarchy, connection, relationship, knowledge and learning. It’s all bound to the idea of culture. A word that is simultaneously everything and nothing.
Culture can’t be separated from technology and structure, governance and leadership or adaptation and resilience. Culture is enmeshed as an enabler of performance and the achievement of the Defence mission. The importance of culture is unseen until it fails. Then, we must acknowledge that ‘this isn’t who we are’ and ‘this isn’t who we want to be’.
The Defence Strategic Review might consider investing in culture as a capability. It might ask two questions:
What causes the Defence Enterprise to be more resilient and its culture to be more robust?
What causes the Defence Enterprise to be frail and its culture to be brittle?
The answers may differ, revealing the need to invest in different ways.
As Defence leaders contemplate how to increase the size of the ADF and APS by 12,500 over the next decade and another 6,000 over the decade after that, in what is likely to remain a worsening labour market for core workforce capabilities, it might be worth focusing on how Defence Enterprise culture not only attracts and retains the workforce but also how contributes to the performance existing workforce. To do this, they must unlearn traditional responses to culture and consider it a potent capability.
Defence Enterprise culture needs to be reframed as a capability that addresses the core characteristics of the strategic environment – the ability to work with uncertainty and respond effectively.
Defence Enterprise culture needs to have a strong sense of urgency and innovation at its core. Learning and doing should confront unrelenting bureaucracy at every turn.
Defence Enterprise culture needs to be forward-focused, challenging and vibrant. It needs to position Defence to make its luck.
Defence Enterprise culture needs to focus on clear measures of progress rather than increasingly refined process measures.
Defence Enterprise culture must encourage familiarity with the non-linear. This will be a skill in demand should the strategic environment deteriorate.
The observant will have noticed that we haven’t referred to or singled out the ADF. Conflict will require the whole enterprise to act with shared intent. The ADF is a critical part of that capability, as is the APS and industry.
The total Defence Enterprise workforce is the delicate system at the heart of Defence capability. There’s no value in elevating one part to the exclusion or diminution of the others. If one fails, it all fails.
Today, we watch the war between Ukraine and Russia play out at a distance. Historians, armchair generals and strategic analysts are like sports commentators forecasting the next moves and marking the key plays.
But as we watch how that grotesque conflict impacts people on both sides, we see the importance of people and culture in conflict. We see the resilience from national and military culture, the systems that undermine the will to fight and the imagination and innovation that make the most of luck and opportunity.
Where will the Australian Defence Enterprise draw its resilience and imagination in the face of the deep uncertainty that marks our need to prepare?
