The Art of Maneuver: Recent Episodes
Patrick Edwards
The Art of Maneuver is a series of mini podcasts that demonstrates how to defeat the bureaucracy, using principles inspired by maneuver warfare. Patrick Edwards and Brandon Newell are two thought leaders and veterans of the US military, who are now sharing their earned wisdom of how to take on the bureaucracy - and win - using your best asset: your passion and your authentic self.
When the time comes for you to leave an organization, don't count on the next person owning your ideas and initiatives the way you did. Don't count on them at all - the bureaucracy doesn't rise to the occasion to replace you well. Designate a natural stopping point while you're in the seat.
So what should you look for? Look to naturally culminate components of what you've created by the time you leave. You have built tools and a brand that they can use in their own way. If you want them to be impactful, you need them to be agile for the way the next person wants to use them - not scripted for them. Use your success to enable the next person to be a founder.
Don't let the bureaucracy over-invest in you. The bureaucracy will want to kill you. Think of Sun Tzu and the Art of War. Don’t let your adversary know you are it's adversary. Don’t skyline yourself as an innovator, or the bureaucracy will train its eyes on you to defeat you. Practically, it also puts too much pressure on the innovator if you are skylined too early. Innovation is about iterative design. Don’t force yourself as the innovator to defend yourself during the iterative process. Wait until your solution is too good to ignore.
Don’t build programs, find innovators and disruptors. Invest in them. You can manufacture them. You identify them. Pour the support you would have had for the founderless innovation office, into the next disruptor.
“Innovation” offices cannot survive beyond the founders, they simply become part of the bureaucracy at that point. Think of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. He only invests in companies that still have their founder. His philosophy is that once a Founder is gone, they never truly innovate again. They might maintain market share and come out with interesting products, but they won’t come up with a revolutionary product.
Once an exciting new innovation program is handed off from its founder, you can't expect the new leaders to truly own and lead the program. It’s not human nature to inherit something and truly make it one's own. Innovation is meant to disrupt the bureaucracy, but these offices that remain simply bloat the bureaucracy over time.
Don't try to be something other than what you are. Don’t listen to that voice. It's distracting you from being you. You will be a horrible version of someone else. You're an incredible version of you. If you are truly you, if you embrace your skills, your authenticity and fully own that - you will bring the best version of yourself, and no one can compete with that. It's your competitive advantage. Build a world around your strengths. People will respond to that - because it's real, and people crave real.
An innovator must be a wolf, bucking the security of the system. A wolf must be a risk taker. A dog has chosen the security of an owner. It will never understand or embrace the actions of a wolf. Don’t waste your time.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” - Maya Angelou.
You must be able to read people. If they show indicators that they are a bureaucrat, never build a plan that requires them to be innovative, or even just flexible. Listen to your intuition. If that means you must walk away from an opportunity, then do so. Don’t toil endlessly “hoping” they will see the light. There are other opportunities that deserve your attention and time. Remember, prescriptive paths lead to bogs in the bureaucratic swamp.
People are what they are, especially in a bureaucracy. Don’t expect them to change. When you have an opportunity, but you need a person in a critical position to do something to make it happen, you must take stock of them. Are they the type to go on a limb? Is it the environment for them to do so? You can usually tell right away. A Colonel that is retiring within a year, is no longer trying to make his mark on the institution. He may see great merit in your cause and has a desire to help, but you can see from your first interaction whether he has enough self interest in the project for him to step up to that cause. Typically it’s no, despite his best intentions. Don’t build programs or projects that rely on people to fight their own human nature.
Head nods from your audience prove you connected with them over a shared belief, value, or knowledge. Storytelling is all about connecting with your audience. Audience head nods are like the person at Disney Land that boarded a roller coaster. Your story is the roller coaster, their head nod is them sitting on the ride. Now take them on an enjoyable ride of discovery.
We are educated on facts without context. Your brain can't process disconnected facts, it needs a story arc. Don't let decision or meetings be governed by diving in to standalone facts. Storytelling is leadership, because you're creating structure, and giving people a foothold on their place within the structure and the vision. Your audience is only there if you bring them there.
Storytelling is the key to success. Get people to believe with a story. When you're telling a story, everyone can follow the story arc. They can believe their own version of the story, but they can't take your testimony from you. People don't remember facts, they remember stories. They will stand on the story in different parts than you will, and that's what you must count on. It allows them to tell the story in their own way within their own organization.
There is more knowledge at are finger tips than ever before. We don’t lack knowledge, we lack wisdom. We hear voices from every direction. You must learn to discern what is wise and what isn't. That’s where your values come in. Look to the source of your values for perspective and judgment, rather than some fad of what is smart today.
You must make sense of it in your own mind, or you will not be successful. People often ask Brandon how he can speak to so many topics of emerging tech in public forums, how does he hold so much information in his mind? The key is how you sort your information. Create a logical framework for every category you are working. Each of those categories must fit into a logical framework of organizational mission, or personal interests. Then as you ideate around a specific area, say 5G, your engagements with partners, and your refinement of the use cases naturally populate knowledge into the appropriate place within your mind.
Make decision on wisdom, not emotion. Be grounded in some vision of the future that allows you to see your efforts clearly. It's not about removing emotion, but achieving clarity of thought about what our objectives are, what our environment is. Decisions based on fear or ego or uncertainty or other emotions compromise your judgment.
To lead, you must create order out of chaos in your own mind. No one can follow you into the unknown, if they only see chaos. You must think hard to create order when others only see chaos, if you are to lead them. Otherwise they will resist you with every “what if”. But clarity of thought, enables your own wisdom and decisiveness.
Every pilot should improve your technical understanding. Are you doing science projects, or are you actually achieving something? Everything sounds good, but is it shiny, or is it worth your effort? It's only worthwhile if there's a catcher's mitt for all the energy you've expended. You must have an understanding of how this will help advance your understanding.
Get out there and create something, never wait for permission. If your design has merit and you are wise in execution, then your results will stand on their own merit. The currency in a bureaucracy is words, but out here in the real world, we have to execute. Wisdom is best wielded in action, not words. Who cares if they don’t believe, prove it.
You won’t have time to exploit, if you are spending your time exploring. Outsource the exploring. You still want people to know you are open for business, but you can no longer be the greeter at the door. “Be Too Busy to “Do Coffee” from Naval Ravikant
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/naval/id1454097755?i=1000437527357
Recognize when you should be in the Exploration stage and when you should be in the Exploitation stage. You must go through an exploration stage first, where your knowledge and intuition is built up. But then you must transition to an exploitation stage where you simply trust your intuition and act on the wisdom. Don’t be sucked into exploration any more. Know what is worth exploiting and what efforts simply don’t produce much opportunity. It is a natural progression. It’s like the difference in the “sewing” season and the “reaping” season. Then you learn what is worthy of your time and how to choose fertile soil for “sewing” next season.
Work on a specific idea or collaboration to find a path forward. Let those specific plans lead to general plans. Too often the Pentagon seeks to make a plan, but they live in the generic. This allows all sorts of “what ifs” and uncertainty to muddy the water. The bureaucracy wins the day as caveats and inaction sets in. Even at the local level, you must recognize when the uncertainty of the general seeps into your plans. Dive into the specific and let that set the course, for generic “rules” or plans later.
A single crop farmer must be wise and diligent at every moment. An overseer of an ecosystem uses the laws of nature to his advantage, through the diversity of the yield. Embrace the unknowable yield, rather than myopic single crop harvest. Or you will be exhausted and are one hazard away from failure.
Sometimes that simply prepares you for a later day when the seed arrives. On very few occasions can you till, plant, and water all at once. But if you have tilled the ground, you are well prepared for the future Aha! moment when the seed arrives.
Leadership must give a signal of an “aspirational vision”. That is what unlocks ingenuity, initiative, and opportunity at the local level. But leadership must make it clear they are allowing decentralized execution and planning, or everyone will sit on their hands. Leaders must have an open palm, not a clenched fist.
You cannot walk away if you want to see your vision become reality. Countless times, I’ve setup all parties, shown them the vision, addressed their equities, and wanted to walk away. Everytime, I could not. Instead, I needed to break down barriers and keep everyone headed in the right direction. Some great opportunities, and the bureaucracy didn’t even leverage it. It’s the same over and over. You must lead or design will simply remain design.
A friend once told me, that innovating in a bureaucracy is like swimming in underwater caves. When he calls me, it’s like finding an air pocket. You must be creative, be agile, and understand human nature to help others find a path forward. If you succeed, others will seek you out with opportunities.
Recognize those who have passion and those who have wisdom, latch onto the few with both. “When the beard (or hair is black, heed the reasoning, but ignore the conclusion. When the beard is gray, consider both reasoning and conclusion. When the beard is white, skip the reasoning, but mind the conclusion.” - Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game
Empower partners that share your vision and have common values. They will find opportunities that are beyond your purview or scope as if they were your business development folks. Help them to know you will back the opportunities they bring. While the details will be murky to you, you can trust that your shared vision and values will allow you to craft most opportunities into mutually beneficial ones.
There are folks in other organizations that you know you can inherently trust. When they ask for your support in a proposal they are submitting, you will be able to say yes with minimal understanding. If their proposal is selected, you know that you can work together to make it valuable to all involved.
Align yourself to the interests of others to achieve compounding benefits. Find out what they are most interested in and empower them by helping them make a difference. They want to be relevant. Help them be and you will see great benefits.
When people see that you surge to opportunities, they will bring you more because they know you are fertile ground.
Don’t accept charity, because you can’t trust that the other person will show up tomorrow. But if you know the collaboration aligns with the other parties' interests, then you're confident they will keep coming back. Therefore the key to worthwhile collaborations is to navigate the organizational and personal interests of others. Make a mental note of the organizational and personal interests of everyone you meet. Then create a vision that aligns with their interests. Now you know you’ve set the conditions for success.
The key to unlocking emerging technology is to create an aspirational vision then build collaborative stepping stones to the future.
A design-thinking vision for base security became a “Digital Fortress”. That vision becomes like Commander’s Intent, which empowers you to find a diverse set of opportunities and move in that direction.
We partnered with Customs and Border Patrol on a Counter-Intrusion pilot, with Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory on a Counter-UAS pilot, with Defense Information Systems Agency on continuous multi-factor authentication for logical and physical access.
Each of these opportunities allowed us to leverage the expertise of the primary agency while refining the use case for installations.
The prescriptive process is doomed to fail. Act like a designer. Ideation and refinement of the vision and the plan is critical. You must maintain your agility, rather than being dogmatic on a procedure. This allows you to maneuver around the bureaucracy to find a path forward.
Never fight the bureaucracy on its own terms. Too often, military servicemembers will decide something is right or just. They will then proceed to run through that wall (especially Marines). You must remember the bureaucracy is stronger than you. You must maintain agility so that you can maneuver around it.
Brandon and I share why we're maneuvering against the bureaucracy, why it's so important to our national security and our free society, how we got to be in this position, and the underlying philosophy that guides us.
In the second of three short intro podcasts, I tell a story about my very good friend Brad Rothenberg, founder and CEO of a very successful startup (nTopology), and how he uses the principles of maneuver warfare to stay a step ahead of the competition. We touch on why we think of the bureaucracy as our adversary, and why maneuver warfare is so effective against it.
Welcome to the Art of Maneuver., a show where we prove that defeating the bureaucracy is not only possible, it's imperative to our national security and our free society. Our bureaucracy is our own worst enemy, and the people at the pain point of this problem feel it the most.
This podcast series is for you - some learned principles on how to take on the bureaucracy and WIN.
We can't do it alone, and we want to inspire you to believe that you can absolutely make a difference by using your best and only truly necessary resource: your passion and your authentic self.