WEST BETHESDA, Md. –
Dr. Steven Spear, author of the best-selling book “The High-Velocity Edge,” visited Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division in West Bethesda, Maryland, on Feb. 14 to talk to employees about his thoughts on how being a learning organization leads to becoming a successful organization. Spear’s visit was part of the Industrial Liaison Program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a partnership that allows the two organizations to share resources.
During a presentation, which he called “Discovering Your Way to Greatness: How the most successful organizations repeatedly get to the right answers fastest,” Spear referred to Adm. Hyman Rickover’s establishment of nuclear power on Navy ships several times.
Spear focused on how that happened, with a lot of attention on the culture and environment that Rickover created to succeed over the adversary of the time, the Soviet Union.
“The U.S. Navy committed to nuclear power around the same time as the Soviet Union committed to nuclear power, for exactly the same reason,” Spear said. “The lethality of the submarine gets multiplied, exponentially grown, enormously, by it being able to be underway for weeks and months rather than hours and days.”
In 1948, the U.S. Navy started working toward the goal of atomic power on ships, and only seven years later, USS Nautilus (SSN 571) became the first submarine to sail under nuclear power.
“But in 1948, no one had controlled atomic power on anything—earth, sea, whatever, no one had it,” Spear said, adding that it was Rickover’s understanding of how “getting it wrong” meant learning, and learning meant the U.S. Navy not only got to the solution faster than the Soviet Union navy, but also maintained a perfect record in naval reactors, to this day.
Spear said that Rickover managed an organization where the technology and scientific developments were the second order of effect, while the first was to have a learning culture.
This is how the chief of naval operations envisions the Navy delivering on its goals and objectives. In Adm. John Richardson’s “Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority – Version 2,” Richardson lists platforms and payloads he wants to see acquired under the line of effort of “Achieve High Velocity Outcomes.” In version one of the Design, the key was to achieve high-velocity learning.
Spear described the difference as basically cause and effect.
“One is the behavior for which you get the results,” Spear said, advocating for the change from “plan, brief, execute, debrief” to the more dynamic planning of “plan, practice, perform, progress and promulgate,” or P5.
“The priority has to be learning,” Spear said, describing the P5 process as learning throughout, not just at the end, something he said Rickover’s nuclear power program was known for.
He also used the example of General Motors and Toyota. Their common goal was to double fuel efficiency. Both ultimately came up with the same solution of a hybrid vehicle, but Toyota came to a solution much faster with the Prius, about 10 years faster than GM’s Chevy Volt, and they produced 10 times the amount of hybrid cars over the Chevy Volt, which was just recently canceled.
“When you ask the question, ‘Why does someone succeed?’ the answer is because they arrived in the moment of test. And when they arrived in that moment of test, they were prepared for the test they were facing,” Spear said. “And inversely, ‘Why does someone fail?’ Because in the same moment of test, they arrived ill-prepared in terms of knowledge, knowing what to do and how to do it, in terms of skills and know-how. And because they arrived ill-prepared, they weren’t able to succeed.”
Spear took his theory to a workshop while he was at Carderock for the day. In the “Building Systems” event, the idea was that the workers, split into two groups, needed to deliver 18 defect-free paper airplanes, all different, in sequence to the customer. They were given example airplanes and time to set up their “factory” or process before the clock started on delivery.
In the case of both groups, the workers all set to figuring out how to create the paper airplane and set up some type of assembly line. But Spear pointed out that, in most cases, no one ever asked the customer the pertinent questions upfront, which was “What do you mean by defect-free?” and “How did you make this plane?”
“We have this predilection for action, our hands are busy when our brains should be busy,” Spear said, pointing out that Carderock’s Dr. Nick Jones who was part of one of the groups actually did ask the question about the meaning of defect-free, one of only two times that’s happened since Spear has been conducting that exercise.
Spear also spent time with some of Carderock’s leaders. He said it’s really important for leaders to create the environment where learning from failures is the rule, not the exception.
“We have to make it OK today, not just OK, but necessary, to highlight what’s not working, so we can fix it through learning,” Spear said. “If you do that, you have a chance of really pivoting to the direction of high-velocity learning and high-velocity outcomes.”