Complexity and Innovation

On 12 October 1999, the U.S. Army began a journey down a new path to innovation, when General Eric Shinseki presented his vision of Army Transformation at the 45th annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army. In this speech, General Shinseki described the Army as an organization consisting of heavy forces with excellent staying power but poor strategic responsiveness, light forces with excellent responsiveness but poor staying power, and a logistics system with an excessively large footprint. His proposed solution, a comprehensive change of the Army resulting in full-spectrum dominance and strategic responsiveness, would occur so quickly as to "be unnerving to some. "" While this prediction has turned out in many ways to be true, it is not necessarily the speed of change that is unnerving to many of the people studying Army Transformation. This study's research question is, "Does Army Transformation embody the concepts of complexity theory as applied to organizational design?" Because Army Transformation lacks a clearly articulated theoretical framework, seeking to develop a Future Force in the absence of a specific operational design and supporting doctrine, the process is subordinated to the whims of Army culture and parochial bias. Complexity science is one possible source of sound theoretical principles that could provide a guiding framework to the transformation process. Chapter one serves as an introduction to the problem. Chapter two describes the study's methodology. Chapter three introduces several concepts of culture as it applies to warfare and the military, demonstrating the need for a foundation in scientific theory to shift Army culture toward more beneficial patterns of change. Chapter four reviews complexity theory and describes the recent advances of Complex Responsive Processes (CRP) theory, demonstrating how complexity can provide a Common Body of Metaphor (CBM) to guide innovation processes. Measures of merit derived from establi