Too Much of a Good Thing? The Armed Forces’ “Can-Do” Culture

Cdre Steve Prest RN (Retd)

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Our ‘Can-Do’ culture needs to go. Defence is simultaneously trying to do too much and yet not achieving enough. Almost as paradoxically, the solution lies in trying to do less and achieving more.

This is the secret to success in Agile methodologies like Scrum, so beloved of senior leaders in Defence at the moment. In his book SCRUM (the Gospel according to St Jeff, Chapter 5), Jeff Sutherland exhorts teams not to multi-task. Focusing on the highest priority and then moving to the next one once it’s completed in successive sprints, with multi-disciplinary teams dedicated to rapidly developing the product. That’s the key. The book claims that applying this, and other elements of the methodology, will allow organisations to achieve ”twice as much in half the time”.

Defence is its own worst enemy

Perhaps so, but Defence has an extremely large and complicated portfolio and needs to do lots all at once. It’s hard to find someone in Defence who only has one job! Nonetheless, in trying to apply such lessons, Defence is its own worst enemy. We always try to do too much. We just can’t help ourselves, which is why we end up with an overheated equipment programme and burnt-out Armed Forces that have a dreadful material state, overworked people, and poorly provisioned stockpiles.