Disclaimer: heavy bias towards Other Ranks follows.
This article is a gripe about Soldiers' Annual Reports.
Okay that's not strictly true, it's about reforming 'community engagement' to enhance Social Mobility – a subject close to my heart since I, like so many others, joined the Army with nothing and turned my life around. I've been lucky where others have been complacent (some are just chilling, and that's okay, others have been let down by anachronistic system barriers and expectations). Let's talk about how the Army can do so much more for its people.
With every year that passes by, our youngest generation of Service Personnel are increasingly capable and evermore critical about the world around them. The British Army has proven to be exceptional for encouraging social mobility based on the actions taken to ensure we are open and accessible to progressing talent from all backgrounds.
Additionally, the days of a Warrant Officer leaving at 22 years with little to no academic or cross-industry relevance to civvy street are, for the most part, behind us. While The Offer has sought to map civilian qualifications from military training to continue the social mobility trend, accreditation is suboptimal since soldiers are not afforded appropriate experience(s) to back them up.
Oxford Economics measured the monetary value of the British Army to society.
Doing more with less. Still.
The Army is getting smaller. Again. And with that, we’re seeing increased demands on all of our people. Serving readers might sit back and wonder how on Earth that’s going to be possible, it looks and feels like we’ve been at full-tilt for decades now. And they’d be right.
We need to come up with ways to work near capacity in a sustainable and healthy way, while maintaining outputs and our intellectual edge simultaneously. It all sounds so… impossible, right? I don’t believe so. We can do much more to equip our Other Ranks (ORs) as forward-leaning leaders and managers, we can drive up organisational intellectual capacity, and we can nurture a culture of continuous learning – from that we’ll have a smarter, happier workforce who are more committed to the organisation along the way.
What’s the idea?
I see an untapped area that sits in the realm of 'Community Engagement', which is being done at unit level across the Army already but to limited (and varied) effect. More on this to follow. In a nod to the Army’s antiquated past, ORs are not by default afforded cognitively demanding jobs and/or opportunities, and we continue to ignore this opportunity at our peril.
Complex or complicated thinking tasks are routinely at the preserve of Officers because, holistically, ORs are expected to carry out their core roles (which are predominantly ‘doing’ roles, not thinking roles). The truth is, nowadays, the gap between Officers' and Other Ranks' intellectual capacity has become increasingly blurry.
Soldiers would make significant gains from proving their capacity, potential, and performance through a cross-industry perspective. Organising sports/adventurous training/social events, from an OR perspective, has limited value chiefly because they lack uncertainty. Meaning they lack credibility in the real world or when used as evidence of ‘development’. Admittedly, these activities do help to show an ability to achieve outcomes, but they are more often than not simple copy-and-paste emulations of previous events. In a nutshell, they show less mental agility and resourcefulness than is optimal. Yet, this continues to be a method of choice to develop some of our people.
This is a seemingly pervasive tick-box exercise to get a line written in their Annual Reports, exacerbated by apathetic leaders who continue to craft said reports without questioning the validity of the activity. While this reads as combative, I acknowledge that the system appears to value these secondary duties. I've witnessed on many occasions well-seasoned Warrant Officers defend this type of activity and use it as ammunition in defence (or offence) of report subjects... much to my despair.
That aside, managing these tasks as a developmental activity is far from formalised or standardised, it is not used wholesale across the OR structure, nor is it used across the Army in a meaningful way.
A pertinent note, our apprenticeship schemes are significant and valuable for the Army and our personnel. Yet, these focus on trade specifics rather than developing a well-rounded business acumen and/or cross-industry knowledge. Apprenticeships are brilliant but they channel people down highly specific pipelines, and they produce silos of excellence in their own limited fields of interest.
To counter this the Army could formalise OR orientated project management and encourage personnel to look outwards into the corporate world, ultimately giving soldiers a foundation of concrete (transferable knowledge, skills, experience, and behaviours) rather than sand (accreditation).
How?
Step One: Find the right model. Foremost, people need to learn how to follow a structure from idea(s) through to completion. Plenty of models or frameworks are available, some are more suitable than others for dealing with varying levels of complexity, for free. Don’t forget the Army uses the PERIL Cycle (see below image, designed by the Army for the Army but isn't used enough) too, and it is also advantageous to look at the Combat Estimate with project management lenses on.
Step Two: Get out there and do it. Through the adoption of a Mission Command approach, personnel would be guided to project manage meaningful projects and/or tasks after completing Step One. Personnel familiarise themselves with the model of their choosing, plan and carry out the task through to completion, then report back to their Chain of Command with progress/findings/best practice/better ways of doing things/further development ideas and plans. This can then be fed into a central lessons hub where successes and areas of opportunity can be further investigated or exploited. The individual wins, the Unit wins, the Army wins.
In true risk-averse fashion, personnel could initially keep it ‘in-house’, for a year or two, within the Tri-Service environment (not solely within the Army). Bolster the project management language, skills, and experience of the whole force first, then unleash personnel into the corporate world to increase and enhance their skills exponentially.
We’ll start seeing individuals en-masse proving their abilities to be visionary and decisive, communicate and motivate, organise with cooperation and leadership, make decisions, integrate their thinking, and deal with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). Only then, I argue, is it justifiable to use ‘planned a [insert extra curricular activity]’ lines in a soldier’s Annual Report.
Community Engagement Reform
With tens of thousands of Non-Commissioned Officers in the Army, this could see thousands of soldiers doing self-directed projects of their own choosing. ORs will close the gap between military and civilian ways of working, and reform what we see today as ‘community engagement’. Some of these projects would be relatively major and use networked teams of ORs, some of them would be minor standalone projects as individuals – all a spectrum and entirely dependent on individual ability and capacity. This could be international, cross industry, or problem solving at unit/department level, and would get the best out of our people and their development.
The Army is already "operating in accordance with the government’s ambition to spread prosperity more evenly across the UK" (Oxford Economics Report, 2019). Should the Army embrace this recommendation, it would see tangible outcomes with Military Aid to Civil Authorities (MACA, see image below for an idea of an increase in demand) tasks in mind. In so doing, we would further enhance the activities that enhance the UK’s soft power by promoting British values, heritage and culture. Our NCOs will be more comfortable with cross-industry uncertainties that may befall them in the future.
In Closing
Soldiers are intellectually capable, they just need the freedom to focus on tasks that allow them to prove it. The impact could yield tangible increases to local businesses, both in money terms and also organisation development. Operational effectiveness will also be bolstered due to gains in soft power across the UK, through an increasing contribution to long-term productivity and prosperity.
Give them a chance, allow them to think, develop them meaningfully; then everybody wins.
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