The document discusses how the U.S. Navy promoted organizational learning through its approach to complexity. The Navy used collaborative sense-making to explore opportunities and plan. It provided goals and objectives to subordinates and allowed them flexibility in determining how to meet them. This fostered safe-to-fail experimentation and creativity among teams. The Navy also created heuristics, or simple decision-making patterns, to help solve challenging problems and avoid rote solutions. This balanced exploration and exploitation, encouraged variability from experimentation, and created a regular feedback loop, thereby developing a learning system within the Navy.
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Trent Hone
• Agile Coach with Excella
Consulting, Arlington, VA
• 20+ years of
development experience
• Award-winning historian
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What is Complexity?
What are its Implications?
How can we promote learning
and innovation in complex environments?
Complexity in Action
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Biological systems are complex
Human systems are complex
Your organization is complex
Many of the challenges we face are complex
Complexity is not new…
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What is Complexity?
• Systemic and synergistic
• Path dependent
• Context-sensitive
• Emergent future
Boulton, Allen, Bowman, Embracing Complexity
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Mahan and the “New” Navy
• President of Naval War College (NWC)
• Feared “techno-centric” solutions
• Naval command as “art”
• Apply principles in context
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NWC “Conference Method”
Collaborative
“Sense Making”
• Evaluate plans
• Develop options
• Understand context
• Agree what to do
Psychological Safety
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“Estimate of the Situation”
• Fractal “command canvas”
• Flexible plans and orders
• Express “Commander’s Intent” &
Tell subordinates what not how
• Today called “Mission Command”
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Sims and ”Doctrine”
• Atlantic Fleet Torpedo Flotilla
• Commander in Europe, 1917
• Promulgated a Doctrine to
guide his subordinates…
What’s a doctrine?
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Doctrine is a set of Heuristics
• Daniel Kahneman:
Thinking Fast and Slow
• A heuristic is “a simple procedure
that helps find adequate, though
often imperfect, answers to
difficult questions.”
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Doctrine as Heuristics
• Doctrine is a pattern of decision-making
• It is “the set of implicit and explicit assumptions that
govern the behavior of an organization.”
• “It is what we fall back on when precise instructions
are unavailable.”
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U.S. Navy Tactical Heuristics
• Aggressive Action to Seize the Initiative
• Attack Effectively First
• Long Range Gunnery
• Carrier Strikes
• Night Battle Practice
• Decentralized Decision-Making
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Example Agile Heuristics (Doctrine)
• Always Pair on the
JavaScript Objects
• Have a Script for
Every Release
• Talk through
challenges on a walk
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The U.S. Navy’s Approach
• Use collaborative sense-
making to explore
opportunities and plan
• Provide goals and objectives
to subordinates, allow them to
determine how to meet them
• Foster safe-to-fail
experimentation and
creativity of teams
• Create heuristics to help
solve challenging problems,
eschew rote solutions
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Creates a Learning System
• Balance between Exploration and Exploitation
• Variability from safe-to-fail experimentation
• Regular feedback loop from annual exercises
• Fostered the emergence of new approaches
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The U.S. Navy’s Approach
• Use collaborative sense-
making to explore
opportunities and plan
• Provide goals and objectives
to subordinates, allow them to
determine how to meet them
• Foster safe-to-fail
experimentation and
creativity of teams
• Create heuristics to help
solve challenging problems,
eschew rote solutions
