Abstract
1. Are military leaders around the world out of touch with what it will take to lead and win in the emerging future operating environment? Digitalisation, the return to peer-onpeer contest, the challenge of operating in the sub-threshold, the ongoing threat from violent extremist organisations all highlight the need for organisations that can operate, fight and adapt at breakneck speed and agility. From within, leaders face the need to understand and guide increasingly diverse and demanding personnel that may require more from leaders than ever before. 2. The ability for a leader to be able to adapt to these changing complex environments will be fundamental. This Future Leadership exploratory concept aims to describes the implications of this future operating environment on leadership to identify and guide future national level work to ascertain how best to prepare and support our military leaders. 3. What stories will our service people tell about our military organisations over the next fifteen years? Will they celebrate an innovative organisation that thrived by adapting its leadership skills and behaviours towards the demands of the information age? Or will they express sorrowful tales of military organisations that have fallen further behind the emerging future operating environment? 4. Our modern Western militaries are trapped in an industrial age mind-set. We shape and organise the battles in the world with lines in our minds. We thus think and speak of ‘front lines’, ‘behind the lines’ and ‘lines of communication’. We have ‘chains’ of command along which invariant sequences of linear transmission must occur. There is an ‘order’ of battle. We do not merely divide our military forces into logical units and subunits; we also rank them in ‘order’ of precedence. We march as we think and think as we march. Our notionally modern militaries are linear, rigidly hierarchal and (ostensibly at least), deterministic organisational constructs. Rank, authority and command are inseparably linked, as are rank and status. So deep is this culture that even the consuming of nourishment is subject to status-based segregation. 5. However, military leaders are human and as such hampered by self-deceptive inconsistencies and contradictions, cultural inertia and especially in a reluctance to rigorously rethink or challenge their past leadership practices. Some of the leadership principles of behaviour, culture, and organisational structures that once defined excellence may have become less relevant and less valuable. This is all exacerbated by military education and training systems that have yet to fully embrace the multiple embedded tensions that undermine our ability to support and prepare our leaders across the full spectrum of responsibility and across all levels of operations (Williams, 2019). 6. A proliferation of ‘unthinkable’ events over the last decade has revealed numerous challenges for military leaders, in particular in how to understand the ‘so what’ of an event and what to do about it. One of the factors that make these ‘unthinkable’ events ‘unpalatable’ is that they can be complex, ill-defined, improbable to predict with no definitive formulation with which to approach. These can be considered as wicked problems. For military leaders understanding how these events shape its way of thinking is a decisive factor in making that thinking effective. Therefore, how we think in response to such wicked problems becomes a challenge for military leadership. 7. As a result, there is an increasing likelihood that no single leader will have all the answers or even be able to make sense of the more significant challenges that are encountered. Thus, there is an intense need for conversations to examine leadership across all domains to ensure that future leaders are suitably prepared and supported.