Achieving Organizational Flexibility through Ambidexterity

This article introduces the concept of organizational ambidexterity and explains its value to military planning and problem-solving from the tactical to strategic levels. I 2005, as the US military waged numerous armed conflicts around the world, Army Chief of Staff General Peter J. Schoomaker was confronted with a serious troop shortage. In an interview with Time, he explained not only how he would overcome the shortage but also why there was no need to institute a draft: “We are developing a modular Army force that gives us much more rapidly deployable, much more capable organizations. . . . What you will have is a team of pentathletes. I want a whole team of Michael Jordans who can play any position. We must . . . have this pentathlete team better organized, better led, better trained, better equipped, and more strategically agile.”1 It is not a stretch of imagination to anticipate future troop shortages, especially for an all-volunteer Army required to sustain numerous small wars across several regions of the world simultaneously. Thus, the concept of the pentathlete soldier—multifaceted and agile, proficient in a broad range of tasks, and capable of accomplishing a variety of missions—is key to sustaining Schoomaker’s vision of flexible, multifunctional Army units that effectively operate in complex environments. While US Army strategists were devising more efficient and effective ways to train and employ soldiers to meet this vision, Joseph Soeters, then-dean of management studies at the Netherlands Defense Academy, was exploring organizational ambidexterity.2 Arguably, he identified and extended the philosophy of pragmatism practiced by Morris Janowitz, a pioneer of military sociology, to examine the changing nature of Cold War and post-Cold War civil-military relations.3 The passage below introduces Soeter’s perspective: Peace operations are often mixed military and civilian and led by military forces, which bring a warrior ethos to the task. The warrior ethos includes rigid dichotomies such as friend/enemy, victory/defeat, strength/ weakness, good/evil, and life/death. The seeming contradiction of 1 Sally B. Donnelly and Douglas Waller, “Ten Questions with Peter Schoomaker,” Time, April 22, 2005. Later in the interview Schoomaker was asked if America needed a draft. His answer: “No . . . because it takes too long to train people as pentathletes.” 2 Soeters won the Morris Janowitz Career Achievement Award for excellence in the study of armed forces and society. For more information on this award, see “The Morris Janowitz Career Achievement Award,” Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, http://www.iusafs .org/JanowitzAward.asp (accessed April 21, 2017). 3 Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (New York: Free Press, 1971), 264–77, 303–20. Also see Donald S. Travis, “Saving Samuel Huntington and the Need for Pragmatic Civil-Military Relations,” Armed Forces and Society, August 30, 2016, doi:10.1177/0095327X16667287. 66 Parameters 47(2) Spring 2017 warriors administering peace poses challenges for the administration of a positive peace.4 Soeter’s pragmatic approach to ambidexterity, which implies something exceptional such as a soccer player’s skillful use of both feet, can impact warfighting and peacekeeping in many ways. This versatility can address seemingly contradictory goals imbedded in international peacekeeping operations that often employ military skill sets concurrently to carry out other operations. As a pragmatic approach, ambidexterity recognizes a problematic situation facing leaders of such missions and suggests a strategy to resolve the problem. The approach deals with the time-honored culture of the warrior and the need to adapt in the face of new or evolving missions. The concept also represents an adaptable and useful cross-disciplinary practice of excelling at seemingly contradictory skills that is applicable in medicine, business, and many organizations, including those involved in military affairs. This article addresses each of these applications and explains several implications of pragmatism and ambidexterity for the military environment.