Captain America or Maury the Nerd?

...So I was privileged to attend a luncheon at the San Diego Convention Center featuring the best and the brightest in military communication, command and control....with Vice Admiral Jack Dorsett, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations...and I heard the vision of the US Navy for the coming years....and the Admiral outlined something that they are calling "Information Dominance"...and let me tell you I was pretty impressed...

...it is real clear to me that the military is way ahead of the rest of us by decades...and ahead of Universities by probably a couple of centuries...but that is another story...and what they are going to do is merge the best and brightest skills, tools and techniques from the Geeks into the command and control mechanisms of the Navy...and it is going to rock the world...

...what are they up to and why should we care? ...because historically out of the military and space programs have we as regular 'Schmoes' later been the recipients of what they create...and for us in business let me just prophesy that what we are seeing is the end of the strategic plan as we know it...

...they are engaged in a new way of thinking and planning that the rest of us need to catch up to...and quick...and the demand for accurate and widely dispersed information is what is driving this...they see that the path ahead is dangerous and unknown and how they will navigate cannot be achieved by vast centralized top down strategic planning....

...what the Navy wants is that all platforms in the organization are "sensors" and each sensor has its own "roadmap" which are flexible and nimble and dynamic...these maps are then linked to all other stakeholders...and each sensor continually manages and maintains the information link throughout the organization...and that the sensors are allowed to be different from other sensors depending on context and opportunity and need...

...I have seen elements of this in the past in the business world known as "Strategy Maps" and "Balanced Scorecards" but this really is the best working model I have seen of a forward thinking planning structure that gets rids of much of what we have known as strategic planning for the past 25 years...

...I will be writing about this more in the future but let me just say that I was very impressed with the sense of purpose, clarity of thought and forward thinking that I see in the Navy...and we need to study and learn from them...

...this isn't your grandparent's Navy!