N. Peter Whitehead
In a community college building in Austin, Texas, the Army is doing something nothing short of amazing. Army Futures Command's Army Software Factory (ASF) is at once providing useful software products and taking the first steps toward addressing DoD's most pressing nongeopolitical issue, absorptive capacity.
Leveraging commercial software development practices such as minimal viable product, Army enlisted service members and officers work together in teams to produce products—but that just scratches the surface. Unlike the Air Force's Kessel Run, the work of ASF is all done by uniformed soldiers, assisted by contractors as mentors and instructors. When they rotate out, those soldiers take their knowledge, understanding, and wisdom with them, bringing indispensable absorptive capacity to the modern battlefield. These are not soldiers who will need contractors to tell them what can and cannot be done, they will lead from wisdom.
Those two concepts, absorptive capacity and wisdom carry a lot of weight in innovation. Unlike six sigma, agile software development, model-based systems engineering, and a laundry list of DoD management approaches over the decades, absorptive capacity has withstood the test of time on the commercial side and remains a benchmark in leadership development. Since first published in 1990, the need for subject matter wisdom in leadership has grown to universal recognition as a key factor in innovative development at the speed of need. While this has become the standard in commercial industry, DoD has taken the opposite tack of outsourcing to contractors more and more of the top end of Russel Ackoff's cognitive hierarchy.
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