Startup culture: Can the army be an inspiration and a model?

Jul 5, 2022
Posted in CULTURE
Jul 5, 2022 Marcin Nowak

Israel is a country of the military and startups. More than any other country, in Israel, these two seemingly completely different environments are so closely connected and influential on each other. It’s no wonder, since military service is obligatory there for everyone (including women) and startups are often founded by people with real combat experience behind them.

Recently, watching the report of the Strategy & Future think-tank team on a study visit to Israel and talks with military and civilian strategists, I started to reflect on the organizational culture of the Israeli army. Of course, a large part of the report concerns the military aspect in the context of Russian aggression against Ukraine, which, although extremely important, especially since the war is taking place just beyond the eastern border of Poland, I’ll put aside for now.

What I will focus on today concerns what I do on a daily basis, i.e. how relationships and openness of communication between managing and managed people are shaped, how we approach errors in actions and conclusions from them.

Can you disagree with a General?

When discussing their visit, the Strategy & Future team strongly emphasizes two elements:
  1. The openness with which Israeli officers in lower ranks presented views different from their superiors – including generals. They entered into discussions with them and formulated substantive counter-arguments to the views of their superiors, demanding justifications without automatic acceptance of the commander’s view.
  2. Accuracy and honesty with which the analysis of all activities is carried out – debriefing, no desire to conceal one’s own failure, focus on searching for causes and drawing conclusions. All this to gather knowledge on how to avoid mistakes and what actions bring a positive effect.

Those describing the visit focused on comparing these behaviors to the Polish military environment, whose misunderstood hierarchy often treats the willingness to discuss with superiors as a kind of insubordination, and the analysis of errors is aimed at finding and punishing the guilty. In my opinion, this is unfortunately a universal problem that concerns all structures, not only military. The mechanisms we are talking about occur equally often in company structures and each of us has certainly experienced them.

Resilience requires wisdom

Since the Israeli army has seemingly found a way to deal with this problem, I decided to find out more about the operating mechanism of the Israeli army and how it developed.

Israel is a state operating under conditions of constant threat, surrounded by states that can very mildly be described as “unfriendly”. This state, striving for a sense of security, naturally built an army stronger than the armed forces of its opponents. It is one of the most modern in the world, both in terms of technology and equipment, as well as its management methods.

It is the reality of the threat, its permanent existence, together with civic responsibility, that is undoubtedly the reason for the substantive nature of behaviors and practices. Mistakes and unattended risks create a real threat to the lives of both military and civilians, real also in the scale of the state’s collective security. Therefore, practices leading to the highest quality of activities and system resilience were developed.

Simple rules, high demands

How does the organizational culture used by the Israeli air force shape, for example, something like debriefing? Overall, the principles of debriefing are simple, but require a lot from those involved in the process.
  1. Just the facts – we only talk about what happened.
  2. We are only looking for the root cause of what happened.
  3. We define what should be done differently to make the result better.

It doesn’t seem very revealing, does it? Actually, we’ve seen this somewhere before. This in no way seems to make people feel like talking about their own failures, mistakes that threaten to destroy millions of dollars’ worth of hardware and endanger their lives. But thing is, they talk. This is because we have a few additional practices and habits that create the environment in which this analysis is conducted.

The key to good culture

First of all, the criticism of actions, the search for better methods or the discussion as to the adopted solutions are not something that is simply expected. They are a duty. Something that is required that affects a person’s judgment. Failure to enter into an open discussion or the ability to propose a different solution is a disadvantage that negatively affects the person’s career.

At the same time, when a decision is made, even if we have discussed it, we implement it. Resist and obey. Let’s look at how much this differs from the practices we often see – no open discussion, undermining a superior’s decisions through gossip and office chat, and then either blind obedience or masking one’s own actions that do not comply with the decisions made or the rules implemented. In the Israeli army, we criticize, but when the decision is made – we respect it.

As managers, do we really create a space to discuss our actions and the possibility of criticizing them? Do we treat it as something that develops the organization or as a threat to our own position? Can we resist the temptation to resolve a discussion authoritatively rather than consider the problem factually? How often does our ego win in our dealings with business?

What is & what might be a mistake

In the Israeli army, the principle of “We don’t judge the person, but the situation” is sacred. Moreover, mistakes do not block the path of promotion and development – on the contrary, the ability to openly admit a mistake is noted and rewarded in the future. Because there is an understanding that it makes us better overall. In the context of the Israeli startup nation, a lot has been said about the openness of talks about failures – this is where it comes from.

So let us consider how we treat people in our organizations who have made a mistake. Do we do it to encourage others to speak openly about their own? And how often do we ourselves – as managers, founders, leaders – speak openly about our mistakes?

Another important principle is the obligation to propose new solutions. No matter if the idea is not polished, the Israeli army is expected to come up with a proposal on how to solve the problem. We listen to everyone’s voice and teach them to take responsibility. The question arises again – do we require a proposal or rather expect an eager “yes sir!” with our own idea or we allow apathy and passivity?

The process as something that builds cultures

To this I will add two other customs that impressed me and are worth mentioning:
  1. Debriefing is always carried out. Not only when you make a mistake or fail. Not only after a spectacular success, but always. The first element of preparation for, for example, exercises is planning the debriefing after their completion. Thanks to this, we create a culture of constant search for better, constant analysis and learning, and not an interest in facts and conclusions only when we want to find the guilty person or someone to reward.
  2. Separate jobs are responsible for collecting and sharing the knowledge gained in this way to all who can benefit from it. They, in turn, are required to read it. Knowledge of the bug and problems is not buried, but available and distributed so that everyone can learn from lessons already learned.
Startups and fast-growing companies have similar needs – they must have a culture that fosters creativity and criticism rather than passive obedience. They need to learn quickly and learn lessons and share them with their teams. They will make a lot of mistakes, so they need to be able to talk about them. All of this is necessary for survival (just like an army!) and adaptation in such a competitive environment.

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

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