Former Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Bill Lescher learned about risk over a 40-year Navy career that included flying helicopters from destroyers and frigates, serving as an experimental test pilot, and commanding at the Squadron, Wing and forward-deployed Expeditionary Strike Group levels. He also served broadly in resource, acquisition and strategy assignments with the headquarters staffs of the Navy, Joint Staff and Secretary of Defense.
Across this experience, he consistently saw the powerful connection between between velocity of experimentation and innovation, and encouraged leaders to act strongly to increase velocity of experimentation from the tactical edge to the laboratory in order to generate operational advantage at speed.
A key element commonly suppressing leader initiative in moving to meaningfully experiment, learn and innovate has been lack of familiarity and comfort with purposeful experimentation, too often leaving leaders thinking of marginal innovation initiatives not strongly focused on driving learning, resulting in weak or no improvement to status quo performance.
The Navy’s flight-test community has developed significant expertise in the practice of embracing risk and uncertainty in order to drive learning at speed and innovation. Key principles include:
- Incrementally expand the envelope of change, the learning being explored, in order to develop multiple, high velocity, cycles of learning. Control both the pace of change and the number of parameters simultaneously being changed, sizing the scope of experimentation to drive velocity of learning as a key outcome. Modify experimentation plans based on this ongoing learning.
- Make embedded assumptions and tradeoffs explicit, forcing open consideration in place of unexamined or unchallenged consensus. Assertively challenge and understand every assumption.
- Attack change with stability in key parameters: leadership, scheduling and routine, and equipment and crew preparation.
- Accelerate learning with event or sprint debriefs as thorough, or more thorough, than pre-briefs.
- In controlling for the downside risk of any experimentation, always leave yourself an out — anticipate “worst case” scenarios and develop appropriate operating margins, or appropriate recovery options when these margins are unknown or are being probed.
- Communicate fearlessly – verbalize to each other what you see and assertively engage on deviations from your expectations. In particular, when first perceived, immediately and aggressively arrest trends toward extremis (deviation from the plan in a substantially negative way), using the options and branch plans updated from previous learning cycles.
- Above all, consciously and continuously make informed risk decisions throughout the experimentation, the cycles of learning. Do not leave events or schedules on autopilot, gaining momentum on their own.
These principles collectively serve to increase margins and options over the course of a well-designed experimentation initiative – using the tools of the test pilot in boldly experimenting to learn and innovate. Learn more about Admiral Lescher.
