“Standard operating procedure becomes dogma,” he observes.

He said there’s a tendency toward overly-linear thinking that prevents leaders from adapting to new challenges. Senior leaders often reject new ideas out of hand, because it’s not how they learned.

“Egos get attached to process instead of the outcome,” Satterlee explains.

But failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have severely bruised many of those egos. As a result, military leaders today are far more vocal about reform, and some are surprisingly candid about what hasn’t worked. Perhaps more than ever, many commanders are willing to entertain new ideas.

That includes Lt. Gen. Stephen Lanza, U.S. Army I Corps commander and JBLM’s most senior officer. Lanza has said the Army needs to explore new approaches in how the leadership should tackle wartime contingencies and instability—and to avoid the mistakes of the past.

“We must adapt faster than that instability,” the general recently told an audience of cadets and civilians at University of Washington in Seattle.

That’s easier said than done. Even when the military is ready for change, that doesn’t necessarily mean the larger defense establishment is.

But at 1st Group, Satterlee says their philosophy on change is simple. “If it doesn’t work, we fix it.”

This article by Kevin Knodell originally appeared at War is Boring in 2015.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense