In the world of superheroes, Nick Fury occupies a truly unique space – a man whose superpower lies in pulling together organic and unexpected superpowers, teams that aren’t formed through calculated recruiting and often defy his superiors’ guidance but instead through the relationships and trust Fury builds with each of his teammates, getting them to the point where they’ll take a chance on his crazy ideas, and maybe on each other, too. Instead of the typical military model, where a selected team is led and guided by a commander expected to be the expert in fieldcraft, today’s most innovative and accomplished teams are those brought together with unlikely personalities, complementary abilities, and unique and creative thoughts.
From my keynote to the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum, November 2023
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for giving me the honor of closing out what has been an incredible Defense Entrepreneurs Forum! As you’ve all heard, we have some incredible people out there doing absolutely amazing work to disrupt the status quo, broaden support networks, and create amazing innovation capacity.
But the most important part of that sentence?
We have some incredible…people.
What we do here is all about people. All about teams. All about relationships. All about how we can use each other not as individual super-heroes, but as the building blocks of absolutely power-house get stuff done teams.
Before we get too deep into that, I just want to take a moment to say hi and talk a little about my innovation journey in the hopes that we can get to know each other a little better if we don’t already, and you can make a better decision about whether or not you want to listen to what I have to say to you this afternoon.
I’m COL Kris Saling – yes, I’m a colonel, yes, I’m active duty, and yes, I’ve tried to retire more times than Tom Brady and one of these times it’s going to stick. This might be it, but I spent the last two days in the Pentagon talking to senior leaders about what they could do to keep me. That’s the kind of thing you dream about as a lieutenant, you know? We love you, we love you, please stay! Ha. But speaking of lieutenants…
I started my innovation journey as a lieutenant, although I had no idea at the time. I was commissioned on June 2, 2001. Let that sink in for a moment. I was at BOLC, then called OBC, when 9/11 happened, and my cohort and I realized very quickly that the Army we had been trained and prepared for was absolutely not the Army we were going into. And we were very much, all of us, from junior to senior, on our own.
We had a few senior folks who had some experience in Grenada, Desert Storm, Somalia. Almost everyone who had led in Vietnam had retired. We had no combat experience. We were preparing for things we’d trained for, sure, but only really knew about from study. And the sprawling plains and mountains of Afghanistan and choking moon-dust of Iraq were nothing like the jungles of Vietnam or rain and mud of Germany and the former Soviet front. Innovation was a necessity.
We were experimenting at the time with new kinds of equipment – I was with the 14th Combat Engineer Battalion at Fort Lewis Washington at the time. I have the somewhat dubious honor of being one of the first women assigned to a combat engineer battalion as a platoon leader, shared with Laura Cherney Shiplet, but that’s another story. We’re talking about all the new equipment coming out – meerkats and huskies and buffalos and such, but we didn’t get that until later. The first thing we got was a mine clearing armored protective kit for our dozers that we spot welded into place.
The first thing my NCOs and I thought when we looked at this thing was there was no way we’d protect our Soldiers. They’d be deaf at least. So we decided to do what any good engineers would do, and blow it up.
We put together the concept. We designed a range. We got approval from range control, from leadership, and we insulated the hell out of the thing with a number of different prototype insulation materiels and got OSHA to bring out their decibel testing equipment so we’d see how much concussion anyone received inside. And over the next two days, we set off blasts right in front of the mine rake and next to the front tracks to simulate where a mine strike might likely do the most damage.
We found an insulation material that reduced the decibel levels to nothing, and then the 864th battalion commander did something amazing. He volunteered to be the first person to sit inside the dozer when we set off blasts, just so he would understand how it felt. His battalion was going to be the ones that did a majority of this type of clearing work and he wanted to ensure it was safe.
I’ve done a lot of work in the innovation space since then, building teams at INDOPACOM – the Deployable Joint Force Augmentation Cell, if you’ve heard of that – then the Human Capital Big Data now People Analytics program for the ASA(M&RA), an awesome data and AI team at Army Talent Management, the Innovation Cell at HRC, and now I’m consulting on the Innovation Cell for US Army Recruiting Command, but that first part of the journey really started my innovation experience – because of that range.
Because building a team of superheroes and innovators isn’t necessarily about the skills they have, but the relationships, the trust, the empowerment…and the leader that provides that.
I have a friend who likes to use “which superhero would you be” as an icebreaker question at events. Shout out a few. Who would you be? Who would you be? Who else? The answers are always fun. All my techies want to be Tony Stark (because who doesn’t?), and there’s a whole host of Superman, Batman, Captain America, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, and so forth.
I have a different one in mind.
Over the past eight years, my mission in the Army’s people enterprise (because yes, I have been here that long) has been not to tackle hard problems by myself, by doing incredible things, because believe it or not I am not so incredible, but by building great teams and empowering them to go out there and create change.
So I’ve started thinking about the power of teams with another example of a superhero, one people don’t always think of: Nick Fury.
Knowing that Earth needed to be protected from outside threats, Fury didn’t look for the radioactive spider or special serum or super suit for himself. He searched for people to join a team and founded the Avengers Initiative, a team he worked to bring together and anchor in a common cause so that they could combine forces whenever the world needed them.
The more I think about this, the more it becomes obvious to me that leading teams who innovate is not about being the hero. It’s about finding heroes and empowering them. It’s about not worrying what you personally bring to the table but about making sure the right people with the right skills have the right tools to do what they need to do. It’s about building the coalition of the powerful and the willing and getting the job done, not about who gets the job done.
As I’ve recruited for transformative teams throughout the Army human capital enterprise, which needs a lot of transformation, I’ve kept this example in mind. Because sometimes leading change is not about being the enactor of that change, or about having the vision, or about really anything you do by yourself at all, except to lay a great foundation for other incredible talent to build on, and letting THEM lead.
So how do you do that?
There are a lot of simple tenets of leadership and fieldcraft that we should all keep in mind as we look to build our teams or become part of innovative teams. You’ll recognize a lot of these, but maybe haven’t thought about them from this angle.
The first one is a given. Humans are more important than hardware. It’s the first SOF truth for a reason, and our friend Director Fury doesn’t rely on superpowers or high tech gadgets, which often prove to be no match for his adversaries. Instead, he relies on trust, relationships, and personal connections to build his teams.
In a world increasingly dominated by data and algorithms, the human element remains irreplaceable. Humans bring creativity, adaptability, and intuition to the table. I once had a boss that I greatly respect, both as a leader and an innovator, ask me what role intuition and experience played in this data driven world we’re creating. And the answer is that these things are still invaluable. Intuition and experience allow us to contextualize the world around us, and that includes the worlds painted for us by data and analytics.
Secondly, switching metaphors to our favorite fall season superheroes, if the team were all quarterbacks, we’d never move the ball. Innovation thrives when diverse minds unite, each contributing unique skills and perspectives.
We’re used to building squads of infantrymen, and that works for that particular skillset maybe, but if you build a team of all data scientists or all data engineers or all UI/UX developers, you’re not getting after the entirety of the problem. Most of your innovation teams out there on the DoD side are a few subject matter experts in the business space, a few folks with technical chops, someone who can not just spell FAR but has actually read it, and the folks with the business acumen to know how to build it, buy it, or field it.
Think about what would happen to Fury if his team consisted of multiple of any one Avenger – or the team at SHIELD, don’t forget he had all of them as well, who had to work in and around each other, facilitating each other. Even the disagreements – almost especially the disagreements. Disagreements demonstrate different perspectives, which any leader absolutely needs to have to see the big picture.
I have an exercise I do with my team. We pick an argument of the week. And we start fairly benign. Is pumpkin spice the root of all evil. When is it too early to start talking about Christmas? Then we start getting heavy. Biggest threat in mis/dis information. Deliberate Denial of Service. Biggest failure point in one of our given projects. What happens if we don’t succeed, and if we just literally sit down and do nothing at HRC and the Army keeps rolling along. I said in our panel yesterday that not building the engines for adaptive talent management is an existential dilemma.
But to get to that deep level of understanding, my team has to fight its way through the perspectives, through the argument, through the logic and disagreement. We can’t do our jobs in an echo chamber.
Third – well, actually I’m cheating by calling this one thing, because it’s actually three separate tenets of Mission Command – a culture of collaboration, communication, and trust. There is greater power in a cohesive and flexible team that clearly understands an intent and is trusted to execute it than there is in a team that can only follow a given play.
It’s through trust, collaboration, and communication that you get people willing to take a risk on your crazy-ass ideas. You get them to truly add their expertise to the team, expertise it’s likely that you and the rest of your team don’t have. Because you’re in a world where you don’t know more than your team, unlike our military doctrine, and to not allow people to add their expertise and trust them to do this to the best of their ability is to hobble them, and endanger your mission.
The kind of team I’ve framed out is one that we know how to build in doctrine. However, we reward innovation in combat, and we punish it in garrison. We’re at an inflection point, where fewer and fewer of our organizations are going into combat theater, where we have more and more garrison, and if we’re not careful, we’re going to see innovation suppressed and get mired in a world where we prize above all compliance and conformity.
This, ladies and gentlemen, are not how wars get won. And while we have a lot of talk out there about returning to discipline, about this we’ll defend, about lethality and supporting the warfighter, if a part of that is not a willingness for our leadership to support doing things differently, to support experimentation, to support innovation…no amount of tanks or hypersonics or autonomous vehicles will save us.
These are tools, and tools must be applied in war with ingenuity and violence of action, which we will not have in a mother-may-I world of compliance and conformity. We need our leader facilitators, our growers of innovation, our rebels and risk takers, more than ever.
You’ve heard about a few folks who are good at this during this convergence. Molly Solsbury. John Cogbill. Dan Kearney. I’m sure there are tons more and a lot of them are sitting right in this room. Find them, use them.
And where you’re in the position to be them, to allow people to take risk and try things and where you can create an environment that empowers everyone to be their best, be those leaders. Don’t sit at the head of the table. Build the round table and bring together the people with ideas.
I’ll leave you with one final thought this afternoon before we go share in some fellowship and beverages. How are you building your team? If you see a problem, if you have a mission, how are you building America’s Mightiest? Because I’m pretty sure there is a good start to your team sitting in here. Connect with them.
As Jesse said, we were talking about outcomes for this convergence, and we want all of you to be able to go out of here and instead of wondering where to start on an amazing operation, for you to sit there and go, “Hey, I got a guy” or “Hey, I got a gal.” “I got someone for that.” Then go to them and either say, if you like being over the top like I do, “I’m putting together a very special initiative.”
Thank you.
Defense Entrepreneurs Forum, November 2023