In The Innovator's Solution1, Christensen and Raynor describe a problem that faces successful companies: they continue to do what brought success. They avoid old mistakes.
In times of slow change, this is a good strategy.
However, times change. The actions that brought success in the past may no longer so. Unfortunately for the companies, possible newer methods often go against what is clearly the most profitable and readily foreseeable pattern of action. In particular, to embrace different policies means also to spurn current, good customers. Moreover, regardless how well a new method looks, it must start small.
As I said in the draft of my book on Choice and Constraint,
A company's management, its ruling group, institutes methods for employees to follow. Middle managers, the equivalent of captains and colonels in an army and of middle level civil servants, learn enough of their company's culture to prevent anyone higher up from learning about many propositions. This filtering prevents those higher up from being overloaded. Consequently, many a successful company or government carries out only actions that fit what the organization has already been doing successfully.
As I write this in July 2004, the United States Central Intelligence Agency appears to have fallen into this trap: its culture rewarded employees who did not place truth ahead of notions that were comfortable to its clients, particularly its key clients, the Presidents of the United States.
This mode did not have disastrous consequences during the quarter century following 1975. The CIA underestimated the number of nuclear weapons possessed by the Soviet Union (the country had far more than even the most pessimistic assessor claimed). It failed to predict that the Soviet Union would collapse anyway. But the weapons were not used, and the collapse benefitted the US. Consequently, the organization felt success.
The CIA did fail to predict the attack of 2001 September 11. Strangely enough, the US government did nothing to address that failure. I find that inaction inexplicable. But then, we have seen previously successful companies, as well as previously successful countries, follow policies that lead to failure.
Just as the suggestions from Christensen and Raynor make sense for companies, they make sense for US government spying: set up a new organization that is separate from any existing intelligence organization. Imbue it with different cultural values and different rewards for success than existing agencies.
It might be possible for Congressmen and such who design organizations to look at that part of the US armed forces that thinks in terms of `lessons learned'. It appears that to some extent, at least, the US military has learned to change tactics and policies. (It is also evident that in many ways the military is slow to move: why else would US soldiers in Iraq purchase civilian goods to replace or supplement what the military provided?)
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