A great challenge of entrepreneurship is leadership. Early stage entrepreneurs must struggle with the twin demands of both defining and leading their new enterprise. Longer-term entrepreneurs must struggle with the changing nature of their own role as a leader when their business or operation grows and evolves. A third type of entrepreneur is one who finds himself or herself in a situation where they must lead an organization under conditions that are rapidly evolving. These leaders may not have created their organization, but somehow they must find a path to success while wrestling with both the unknown and the ever-changing.
I had the good fortune to be introduced to one such leader recently. We had a great chat—he just happened to be half a world away in Afghanistan.
The connection to Matt Fritz, the chief of staff at NATO Air Training Command in Kabul, Afghanistan, came from a friend of mine, Tori Drew, after she mentioned Matt was going to be a storyteller at their annual summit, BIF10. I am fascinated by the ways in which leaders can help transform their organizations, especially when it comes to fostering innovation, so I asked for an introduction.
My interest in military leaders had been piqued by some design-thinking work I had done with a group of leaders from Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa Bay, Florida. I was intrigued by the way they were willing to rethink their mission in light of changing circumstances and the way they were willing to truly think outside the box. It only increased my respect for men and women who choose to serve as I considered the complexity of what they were being tasked to do.
The situation Matt found himself in—helping the Afghan Air Force rebuild itself—was just such a complex undertaking, especially as his role is not active but advisory. The Afghan Air Force is one of the oldest in the world. Founded in 1924, it has been through several cycles of expansion and contraction. With the collapse of the pro-Soviet Najibullah government in 1992 and the continuation of a civil war throughout the 1990s, the air force had reduced aircraft to less than a dozen. Since 2007, the US-led NATO Air Training Command-Afghanistan (NATC-A) has worked to rebuild and modernize the Afghan Air Force.
Don’t Impose
One of the first shifts in mindset for the team of advisors on the ground was that the word “win” needed to be struck from the operating lexicon. There could be no winners or losers in this situation. To find a shared definition of success meant breaking communication and cultural barriers that might impede a shared accomplishment.
Everyone exists in a culture. In Afghanistan, it’s not just a national culture but a mix of national, military, social and ethnic cultures, and determining not to impose a culture is crucial. Matt talked about the fact that one of the first casualties of desire meeting reality in this situation was the need to let go of “the way we think it should be.” Imposing values would not lead to success. He noted that “the dynamics are changing so rapidly, this is the largest change management problem I have ever had a chance to be a part of.”
The work itself had to be rethought. “Everyone in the West lives by our watches,” said Matt, “and we have had to learn that the things we might count on elsewhere don’t fit here…our plans previously written in pen may now need to be written in pencil.” When the variables of performance shift so often and so fundamentally, imposing a plan is an almost certain path to failure. It’s all about
Taking on others’ perspectives in order to achieve an outcome.
Build to Sustain
If they could not build a concrete plan, they needed to build plans with enough flexibility and resilience to be sustainable over time. Matt said that given that his role is advisory, one way to test their thinking is to invite participants to join a “random sample club.” This group is given a glimpse of the plan, and their input and feedback is directly solicited, regardless of role or rank. Through this process, he noted that “not a single one of our ideas has survived first contact,” but the plans and resulting actions become more robust and more likely to succeed.
The way you define the difference between success and failure lies in the way you communicate the plan with the people who are going to execute the moves.
Another part of sustaining results over time is recognizing the “Must Do” categories for performance. Matt spoke about wanting to address all the challenges he found, but recognizing that when trying to improve a complex system, which in this case has 119 different specialties supporting seven different types of aircraft, you cannot do it all. So you focus on the biggest systems issues, like maintenance, for example. If you can address the complexity of maintenance in this kind of system, other higher-profile challenges, like flight training and performance, will follow closely. But if you don’t address maintenance, nothing else gets addressed.
Promote Ownership
The key to sustaining the results of the building effort lies in shared ownership of communication. “All team members are storytellers,” says Matt, “and it is necessary that they understand the plans we have at such a simple and deep level that when they share that story, they own it, and they are in alignment with each other.” Not only does everyone know the plan, they can tell it to someone else and it will match up very cleanly. Driving this is the need to develop a sense of ownership.
So often we are waiting for the one big one, the one big idea to be a success. So much of success is innovating where you are, right now. It’s not the $1 million idea; it’s a million well executed $1 ideas that become something spectacular in the end.
Matt will know whether or not his work and advice has been effective if the Afghanis on the ground take ownership of the mission. Do they, as Matt noted, clearly state, “I’ve got this”? A shift in taking responsibility is what the mission is designed to deliver. That sense of accomplishment needs to be fostered so that the whole organization system can better execute and meet long-term strategic goals. And that shared understanding means the difference between a good effort and mission accomplished. It means that all parties are living the motto Shohna ba Shohna—translated from the Dari dialect, “shoulder to shoulder.”
