Guest editorial

National security is among a host of industries where any failure to learn can have tragic consequences. One lesson from studies of the terrorist attacks in the USA on September 11, 2001 was the realization that US security agencies had failed to share information with each other. This had led to gaps in knowledge about the likelihood of impending attacks and a failure to learn and take action to prevent them. One might contrast that dysfunctionality with the success that took place at Bletchley Park, England, during World War II. There, teams of researchers learned how to break the code of the German’s Enigma machine and adapt to its evolution over time thereby helping the Allies win the war.

Over the past 60 years, a great deal of research has been conducted on how and why learning occurs in and of organizations with a special emphasis during the last 25 years or so in building learning organizations (LO). Among the themes that have emerged from the literature is the notion that learning takes place in a variety of ways and that learning styles need to be aligned with environmental demands. For example, we would not expect nor want transformative, so-called double-loop learning to take place in the control room of a nuclear power plant. In that context, the consequences of learning from experiments and faulty assumptions would be catastrophic (think Chernobyl, 1986).

For most countries, national security is customarily the responsibility of a range of civilian and military organizations, both public and private. The organizations engaged in national security can be represented by the acronym DIME which reflects varied instruments of national power including diplomacy (D), information (I), military (M) and economic (E). Probably the most well-known organizations are military in nature – the Air Force, the Army and the Navy. In the USA, lesser-known civilian organizations that play key roles in national security include the National Geospatial Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

All organizations, whether large or small, civilian or military, public or private, profit or nonprofit can be characterized by some common elements including their structure, culture and capacity to change. At the same time, organizations vary by the work they do, the goals they aim to achieve and the context in which they operate. National security organizations share many of the same characteristics and challenges, such as bad publicity, faced by organizations operating in other sectors of contemporary society. They also share characteristics unique to themselves.

The set of five essays in this special issue reflect both universal and idiosyncratic elements of organizations that aim to be LOs and promote organizational learning (OL). They highlight specific themes and challenges in promoting learning within national security organizations. Such organizations are, for the most part, highly-visible because they function in the public sector, and are hierarchical, bureaucratic and complex where multiple change or learning initiatives are apt to overlap or compete with one another. Any of these characteristics can generate barriers in the flow and use of information essential to learning and achieving better outcomes.

Governmental organizations customarily face intense scrutiny from external constituencies and stakeholders, especially those operating in democratic systems. The call for accountability puts special pressure on public organizations to share information about errors, accidents and mistakes and to demonstrate a desire and capacity to learn from them. At the same time, surveillance of public organizations by special interest groups that aim to embarrass or undermine the implementation of public policies constrains the transparency necessary for knowledge to be shared as part of any OL process.

Consider, for example, the case of Pat Tillman, an American athlete who left professional football to serve his country in Afghanistan where he was killed by ‘friendly fire’. The admiration many Americans had for Pfc. Tillman led the US. Army to cover up the circumstances of his death to avoid acknowledging dysfunction. A well-known European case occurred following the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986. The Russian Government did not inform the world of the explosion and the release of radiation until changes in the atmosphere were detected in neighboring countries. In both these cases, sharing information would have reflected poorly on those responsible. So, although transparency about accidents is vital to learning, the embarrassment and dishonor caused by their publicity often limits the flow of information about them.

This special issue also contains a review of Amy Edmondson’s book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Contributed by Nhien Nguyen, the review examines Edmondson’s concept of ‘psychological safety’. It is present when organizational members feel safe to share information about their own mistakes so they can be learned from. By contrast, in organizations that suffer from a culture of silence, mistakes are covered up, never learned from and then repeated.

A common characteristic of organizations is their vertical hierarchy spanning from those with the most formal power to those with the least. Military organizations and most national security organizations are highly-structured with deep hierarchies and narrow spans of control. These traits promote an innate tendency for personnel with less power to avoid questioning authority, as suggested by the phrase: ‘It’s not for us to question why but our duty to do or die’, a variation of lines from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. Such organizations have been described as ‘machine-like’ (Visser, 2008).

Another consequence is that it often takes a fair amount of time for knowledge about what is happening at the lowest level of the organization to be communicated to the top levels. In organizations characterized by many layers or levels of social strata, the knowledge or information essential for learning is apt to be filtered or distorted as it moves up or down the hierarchy. In organizations guided by an unspoken cultural rule ‘kill the messenger’, information that reflects poorly on leadership is apt to be masked or covered up. This dynamic is reflected in an ethical dilemma faced by messengers who ‘bring truth to power’. In ‘Improving team learning in hierarchical teams: learning-oriented, transformational and transactional leadership, and psychological equality within military teams’, Christina Stothard and Maya Drobnjak discuss how the constraints of hierarchy, so distinct in the military, can be overcome by different forms of leadership and a new construct, ‘psychological equality’.

For a host of reasons, including the accelerating pace of technological change, the context or environment for promoting national security and waging military operations has become increasingly volatile. That characteristic is reflected in an oft-heard acronym in the military, VUCA, which stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic and Ambiguous. Militaries must have the capacity to learn from the changing environment and adapt to circumstances as they evolve in real time.

Learning requires acceptance of new and diverse behaviors and thought patterns that challenge the old to make way for the new. In large-scale enterprises, many decisions are guided by policies, procedures or norms established by the lessons of past experiences, both successes and failures. Another value that guides bureaucracies is an appreciation for consistency and stability of performance through standardization. Creativity and diversity of thought that do not conform to the status quo are not encouraged. In effect, OL gets embedded in policies, procedures and doctrine which then become stumbling blocks as organizations try to learn and adapt to changing environments (Jamali, 2006).

This contrast, or paradox, between the military’s bureaucratic structure and the demands of VUCA environments, promotes dynamic challenges in promoting OL. In ‘Building military learning organizations: Many birds, one stone’, Tyler Freeman and Michelle Calton demonstrate how, despite the presence of doctrine and bureaucracy, a military organization adapted to wartime conditions when facing an adversary that was continually improvising and adapting to conditions on the battlefield.

In some organizations, learning becomes embedded in the personal mastery of their employees. When individuals leave an organization, which is inevitable, they take that learning with them unless it has become part of the organization’s culture through formal policies or procedures or informal, often unspoken, norms. In military organizations, the personnel turnover caused by the ongoing rotation of staff, especially in the officer corps, is common. This characteristic can lead to recurring episodes of Sisyphus’s failure. Organizations improve performance as they go up the learning curve, and as personnel leave, performance declines as organizations go right back down that curve.

Although staff rotation constrains OL, it does promote ‘personal mastery’ considered by some to be a fundamental attribute of LOs. In the USA, by rotating through a variety of billets or assignments, military officers gain a broad knowledge of their service’s functions and how to manage their complexity through effective coordination. Also in many militaries, officers need to participate in several years of formal education to progress through the ranks to the most senior levels of leadership (e.g. admirals and generals).

While coping with the lost learning that occurs when employees leave, organizations are required to concurrently learn how to integrate or acculturate new employees. In today’s VUCA environment, militaries must go a step beyond that to effectively deploy personnel from multiple services to distant zones of combat (Dyson, 2020). Such so-called ‘joint’ operations necessitate rapid learning among specialized forces. Often originating from different allied partners, participants in such cross-functional teams are apt to have no personal knowledge of each other with limited capability in ‘foreign’ languages or professional lingo. In ‘Learning to organize and organizing to learn: The case of Dutch military expeditionary taskforces’, Eric-Hans Kramer, Matthijs Moorkamp and Max Visser discuss the challenges of organizing cross-functional military teams that are rapidly assembled. Their particular focus is how expeditionary taskforces ‘organize to learn and learn to organize’.

Most organizations aim through varied initiatives, some large and some small, to improve performance. Nearly all such efforts demand some form of learning on the individual, team or organizational level. Sometimes OL and LO initiatives masquerade under different names (DiBella, 2001). For example, during the 1960s and 1970s, well before the LO concept became popular, kaizen and total quality management programs were major initiatives implemented by companies that sought to do better. Today, we hear much less about those programs and more about ‘building learning cultures’ (Van Breda-Verduijn and Heijboer, 2016) or ‘managing high reliability organizations (HROs)’, those that avoid the replication of error and mistakes (Roberts and Bea, 2001).

In large, complex organizations multiple change or learning initiatives may be pursued concurrently even as the assumptions underlying varied approaches may be in conflict. In addition, the lexicon of learning initiatives can produce a host of acronyms, words or phrases whose meaning or implication can vary across cultural settings. National security is the domain of a cluster of organizations where learning and performance improvement initiatives can easily clash. At the same time, one might expect or hope to find positive synergies among concurrent efforts to promote organizational change and learning and the conditions for LO creation. In ‘The Army Medical Command, becoming a learning organization’, Bonnie Hartstein and Ed Yackel describe how initiatives to establish an HRO led to the maturation of a LO. Their case study is truly unique, as it focuses on a healthcare organization that is also a national security organization, the US Army.

Anyone familiar with the military knows about its many rituals and traditions, from promotion and retirement ceremonies to the awarding of medals and ribbons to the sharing of commemorative coins. And let us not forget musters and gatherings to acknowledge command changes. One danger in a large bureaucratic organizations such as the military is that rules and rituals may become disconnected from their original intent or purpose. The military engages in many learning activities to learn from experience and create and share knowledge, including briefs before engagements and debriefs after them, ‘hot washes’, ‘murder boards’ and after-action reviews. Unfortunately, such events often become routine or ritualized to the point where their value is more symbolic than substantive in actually contributing to OL and improving performance.

For that reason, some services are focusing less on discrete activities, such as ‘After Action Reviews (AAR)’, intended to promote learning and specifically on building systems of learning (Moro and Hanson, 2019). In ‘Cultivating a learning culture in the US Navy’, Liz Cavallaro and William Nault describe the experience of making a major national security organization (the US Navy) into a LO. They use a multilevel framework to discuss building a learning culture that can best address the challenges and opportunities facing the Navy.

In this introduction to the special issue, I have associated each of its essays with a single element or characteristic of organizations that affects learning. In truth, each essay touches on several elements and the dynamics of their interactions and reveal how making military and national security organizations into LOs are both different and similar to the challenges of doing so in other industries. Perhaps, the most critical dissimilarity is that the organizations discussed here are not focused on private gain but public benefit in the pursuit of a safer and better world.