Learning Before the Stakes Are Real
For the Joint Force, that problem carries real consequences. Leaders routinely make decisions with incomplete information, limited time and competing demands. Some decisions allow room to adjust. Others don't.
Learning to recognize the difference was at the center of a recent leadership discussion involving Dr. Mark Anarumo, an Air University leader, at Sandia National Laboratories.
The panel, “Failing Fast Without Failing the Mission,” brought Anarumo together with Col. Charlie “Thunder” Goetz and retired Col. Chris Neiman for a discussion facilitated by Carey Eichhorst. Their focus wasn't failure for its own sake. It was how leaders can create room to test assumptions, learn and adapt without putting the mission at unnecessary risk.
“The only thing worse than taking risks is doing nothing because you're afraid,” Anarumo said.
That distinction matters at Air University.
As America's Airpower University, AU brings together education, research, doctrine and leader development as an integrated enterprise focused on forging expert joint warfighters and solving operational problems for the Joint Force. Part of that work is giving leaders opportunities to make hard decisions before they're making them under operational conditions.
Air War College, one of the university's professional military education organizations, provides one of those environments. Senior leaders work through strategy, campaigning and security problems where the answer isn't always obvious and the available information isn't always complete.
The point isn't to teach leaders that failure is acceptable. It's to teach them to understand risk.
One of the panel's central ideas was that leaders need to define the boundaries before asking people to exercise initiative.
Some areas are non-negotiable. Standards hold and failure carries consequences that can't be accepted. Other areas provide decision space, where people can exercise judgment, adapt and solve problems. A third area creates a place to learn through simulations, scenarios, pilots, tabletop exercises and other controlled environments before the consequences become real.
For a military organization, knowing which environment you're operating in can be as important as the decision itself.
That idea carries into how Air University prepares leaders across the enterprise. Wargames, exercises, research and classroom scenarios can put leaders in situations where they have to make choices, defend those choices and see the results. They can challenge an assumption today that might otherwise follow them into a planning cell, headquarters or operational command tomorrow.
The panel also drew an important distinction between different kinds of mistakes.
Some mistakes come from complacency, recklessness or ignoring an established standard. Others emerge when several factors combine in ways that are difficult to anticipate. Still others occur while trying to answer a question that doesn't yet have a known answer.
Those aren't the same problem, and treating them as though they are can create another one.
Organizations still have to hold people accountable and enforce standards. But when people become reluctant to surface a mistake or challenge an assumption, leaders can lose the opportunity to act while a problem is still manageable.
That makes early learning a matter of mission effectiveness, not comfort.
A wargame that exposes a weak assumption has done something useful. So has a seminar that forces a leader to reconsider a course of action or an exercise that reveals where authorities and responsibilities aren't clear. The consequence is contained, but the lesson can carry forward.
There's another part of the problem that can be easy to miss.
Risk doesn't stop at one level of command.
The panel emphasized the need to understand risk tolerance across the leadership chain. A decision that makes sense at one level may create problems somewhere else if authorities, expectations or acceptable outcomes aren't understood.
Leaders need to know what they can decide, what requires coordination, what requires approval and what can't be allowed to happen.
That gets directly at the kind of problem Air University is built to help the Joint Force work through.
Solving an operational problem isn't simply finding an answer. Leaders have to understand the authorities, constraints, resources and consequences around it. They have to know when established processes should hold, when an assumption deserves another look and when the situation requires a decision before every question can be answered.
That judgment becomes more important as decision timelines compress.
Air University's role is to create opportunities to develop it before war demands it.
Across the university, its schools, centers and other organizations provide different pieces of that effort, but they contribute to the same outcome: warfighters who can think clearly, exercise disciplined judgment and act when conditions aren't ideal.
That doesn't remove failure from military operations, and it doesn't lower the standard.
It gives leaders a chance to find weak assumptions earlier, learn while there's still room to adjust and carry those lessons forward.
For the Joint Force, that's the better meaning of failing fast: learn before the stakes are real.
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