By: James Boyd, Adyton CEO and Co-founder
Time is readiness.
I’ve seen firsthand how we tend to operate as if time is a free and limitless resource. It is neither. Whether it’s making soldiers stand around waiting to be released or requiring them to show up excessively early for formations, our military culture often reinforces the notion that time is not valuable.
Our tendency to disregard time creates organizational friction — the kind that slows down operations and drains energy from the mission. For the Department of Defense to evolve, there must be a mindset shift towards viewing time of its personnel as one of the Department’s most valuable resources.
In private organizations, time’s relationship to success is linear. Their primary mission is to make money — if they don’t make money, they go out of business — meaning the effectiveness with which they use their time has an existential impact.
In the military, that’s not the case. Units aren’t really connected to the direct dollar value representative of a soldier’s time. Warfighters are paid annual salaries and there’s no overtime. The units overseeing the individual soldier aren’t responsible for their wages.
We will see the value of time in the military when we reframe it in terms of the Department’s core mission. It’s a finite resource, and time lost to complicated approval processes, inefficiencies, or delays is time that cannot be spent on training, maintenance, and physical fitness.
Complexity introduces friction
Let’s use the most simple military unit as an example: ten soldiers and a cannon. There are two METL tasks in this unit: shoot the cannon, and maintain the cannon. Accepting there are only 24 hours in a day, the soldiers are going to spend some time sleeping, some time shooting the cannon, and some time maintaining the cannon.
The soldiers’ capacity to get these things done drives their readiness — their ability to deploy and effectively shoot a working cannon when called upon.
However, necessary subtasks and complex processes complicate the overall picture of readiness.
Maintaining the cannon requires the soldiers to be physically fit, so we need to add in some time for running. So now, each day they run, they shoot the cannon, they maintain the cannon, and they sleep. The soldiers need to request a range to be able to go shoot the cannon, too. Now, one of those soldiers needs to fill out a range request. Due to some screw ups in the past, the soldiers aren’t allowed to submit the request directly to range control, and instead it first has to go through internal unit review and approval from the Training NCO.
In turn, the Training NCO doesn’t live to approve range requests. They’re also responsible for planning the school schedule, so they don’t have time to review all of the range requests each day. And unfortunately, the Training NCO doesn’t have the best technology, so the range requests are approved on computers that take 10 minutes to start up and log into.
While one soldier fills out the range request and chases down approvals, the rest of the unit is waiting to go shoot the cannon.
It’s easy to see how shared resources, dated technology, and unwieldy processes all produce friction. Now, we’re in a world where the unit no longer has the same number of hours in the day to run, shoot the cannon, maintain the cannon, and go to sleep — the things they must do in order to be ready to execute their mission — because of friction.
Time is lost and the unit is less ready as a result.
Simplicity drives readiness
Our military is far more complex than one unit with ten soldiers and one cannon. There are many more readiness requirements and multiple levels of approval or coordination required in any given process, and there are nigh countless processes across our military. There are similarly countless shared resources, from trucks to a range to a classroom to a school slot.
The friction results in less time, so soldiers end up spending a lot of time coordinating activities, and a lot of time waiting for shared resources. Today, our warfighters are allocating fewer hours to activities that directly contribute to readiness, which in turn results in greater difficulty achieving our core mission.
We have clear examples of how we try to reduce friction when lives are on the line — the JTAC talks directly to the bird when soldiers need close air support and leaders use mission command and intent to delegate and empower autonomous action with subordinates.
When lives are on the line, there is inherent urgency to make every second count. We need that urgency to be imbued in every process across our military, every minute of every day. It has to become part of the culture.
Leaders must embrace the idea that time is a finite and invaluable resource — a resource that friction reduces. Every moment lost to inefficient processes, unnecessary approvals, or slow communication and coordination is a moment that could have been spent achieving readiness. Our military’s success hinges on its ability to maximize the productive use of time to generate combat power advantages. By reducing operational friction, we can ensure that time is spent where it truly matters — on preparing our armed forces to meet any adversary and emerge victorious.
Our near peer adversaries have the same amount of time we do — there’s only 24 hours in a day. If the men and women who serve our country are structurally put in a position to use their time more effectively than our adversaries by reforming poor processes, unnecessary approvals, and slow communication, we will be providing American warfighters with an undeniable advantage: They will be more ready for whatever comes next.
Time is readiness, and the clock is ticking.
James Boyd is co-founder and CEO of Adyton. Alongside co-founder JJ Wilson, James established Adyton to build resilient and adaptive mobile software products for the US armed forces and partners around the globe. A Stanford graduate, James previously served as a Special Forces Communications Sergeant in the U.S. Army before going on to lead Palantir’s business with Special Operations.
