By James Boyd
I remember doing my first inventory preparing for deployment. It was 2008, the first iPhone had just been released, and I was new to a Special Forces Team. I spent days sifting through reams of paper filled with “HEADSETS, VARIOUS TYPES, MISC”, rummaging through boxes of seemingly identical equipment intermingled with dead rats in forgotten closets, striving to reach 100% accountability. I inventoried morse code equipment that we weren’t trained on, weren’t ever going to use, but for some reason of unknown doctrine or policy was still stuck on our property books. Our engineers missed time with their families, instead staying late at work manually preparing stay/go lists, DD1750s (packing lists) and DA2062s (hand receipts). This was time I could have been getting familiar with the theater comms architecture, or they could have spent with their kids.
As a warfighting institution, we’ve learned to “embrace the suck”. We’ve instilled in our people a mindset that rewards endurance, grit, and accomplishing the mission. We celebrate the difficulty of the task, the herculean labor involved, and overcoming the odds. This is inherent in the psyche of the soldier – the show of resolve, strength, and self-sacrifice. We even use the phrase, “soldiering on”.
But when we apply this same mindset in the wrong situation, we normalize the suck, and teach ourselves that this is just the way it’s supposed to be. Pain drives change, but institutionally we have numbed ourselves to the pain because we haven’t trained our people to choose the mindset to match the mission.
I’m not talking about low-crawling through the cold mud at night as we prepare troops for the rigors of war. That’s a place to “embrace the suck”. I’m talking about the death of the soldier’s soul caused by a thousand papercuts from bureaucratic burdens. We’ve come to tolerate the day-to-day inefficiencies that waste time and energy otherwise spent on training, and preparing for war. The drag and operational friction caused by inefficient processes is a direct cost to combat effectiveness, and this won’t change until we change our mindset towards it.
It’s not all supposed to suck.
How We Lose
Think of the cognitive dissonance experienced by the soldier who spends countless hours at the range honing precise movements and weapons drills, mastering their trade to the highest level of proficiency, repeating the mantra – “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”. Yet, this same soldier is expected to spend days mind-numbingly copying and pasting text between PDF documents on a painfully slow computer, with each click of the mouse reinforcing a mindset of “high drag, low speed”.
What signal does this send? Plain and simple it tells the soldier that the Army doesn’t value their time and skills as a professional.
This hurts recruiting, but it kills retention.
How We Win
When tolerance of inefficiency is the norm, it takes a rebel to start the change. Last month, an 18C, a Special Forces engineer sergeant, was splitting his property books to prepare the company for deployment. Let’s not lose sight of where the real warfighting value is here – it’s applying expertise and experience to figuring out what gear you are going to need and take with you for the mission. The documentation is important and necessary but it is not the main effort.
The problem is that the documentation takes such a long time, it has turned into the main effort.
Normally generating the documentation is a tedious, high friction process consisting of several days of painstaking data entry, copying and pasting between windows, and wrestling with printers to generate reams of paper that are then reviewed by hand. There is no captured data, and god help you if you have a slow computer.
But instead of accepting his fate, the 18C took the initiative, looked for a different way, and found a software application that automatically produced the documentation, reducing the task from days to minutes. This application not only streamlined the process but also built a database of clean, tagged, and labeled data so that when someone asks the question, “Where is the CABLE ADAPTER ASSY MISC”, he won’t be sifting through binders of paper to find the answer, he’ll have results in seconds at the tap of a button.
The time saved on paperwork is time the 18C can invest in training, deployment prep, or maybe even going home a few days earlier to be with his family before the deployment. But in a culture where bureaucratic inefficiency is normalized, it takes a rebel to not just think, but do things differently.
The Cultural Shift Needed
A culture isn’t defined by values painted on a wall or motivational posters in the hallway, it’s defined by the actions taken by personnel every day, by the behaviors that leaders demonstrate and the practices the institution tolerates. When we ask professional soldiers to spend hours toiling on mundane tasks like paperwork, we teach them that their time isn’t valuable. When we tolerate manual, pen and paper processes, we teach them that it’s acceptable to throw away data that could be used to improve operations and readiness. When we tell people “this is the way it has always been done”, we undermine any culture of learning, adapting, and improving.
We have misapplied the mindset of “embracing the suck”.
We are facing significant recruiting, retention and demographic challenges as a nation, and we aren’t going to scale our way out of inefficiencies with more personnel. It’s going to take a mindset shift to develop a culture of smarter operations that make the best use of our soldiers’ time and talents – removing friction and increasing effectiveness.
If we can’t make this cultural shift to valuing our troops time and skills, how are we going to recruit and retain increasingly high demand talent in fields such as cyber, data, and AI?
Key Takeaway
To change our effectiveness, we have to change our expectations. To change our expectations, we have to change our culture. To change our culture, we have to change what we do. We must challenge old beliefs, and reject the notion that inefficiency and friction is an unavoidable part of the military life for our soldiers and their families. We must set higher standards for effectiveness, so that every aspect of military life reflects the excellence we demand from our soldiers.
This is a change that is going to take bravery because it’s challenging the very identity of the institution – one whose culture of bravery is reflected in movies like “Black Hawk Down”, and culture of inefficiency is reflected in Bill Murray’s “Stripes”. At first it’s going to be led by rebels – by the small unit leaders who work side by side with the soldiers toiling in inefficient processes, and by the senior leaders at echelon who recognize the impact at scale of spending more time on training and less time on paperwork. But once the idea is planted, it grows, and the change gathers momentum. This past February, I saw first hand the lone rebel – one E7 – automate their property paperwork. In the last month hundreds of soldiers from dozens of units across the world have started to do the same.
For us to be brilliant at the basics, we need to spend more time on them, and creating that time is going to take a change of mindset. It’s not all supposed to suck.
Change Mindset is a Growth Mindset
15 years ago I was doing inventories rummaging through reams of paper, and it’s still the same way today. If we don’t change the mindset, we won’t change the organization. If we don’t change the organization we won’t be able to compete with our adversaries. This change isn’t just about pacing. This is about defending our way of life.
James Boyd is co-founder and CEO of Adyton PBC. Alongside co-founder JJ Wilson, James established Adyton to build resilient and adaptive mobile software products for the US armed forces and partners around the globe. A Stanford graduate, James previously served as a Special Forces Communications Sergeant in the U.S. Army before going on to lead Palantir’s business with Special Operations.
