Following the very helpful discussion during a NUSC presentation of his research on 12 July, Dr. John Tull (BOS) applied some key ideas from that discussion to an in-depth workshop in Germany and an invited seminar in Australia that presented key findings from his collaboration in a 3-year ESRC-funded research project (ESRC Grant ES/V004190/1: ‘A Revolution in Military Learning: Realising the Potential of Lessons-Learned Processes’, led by Royal Holloway, University of London; P.I. Prof. Tom Dyson, equal co-author Dr. John Tull) into NATO organisational learning.
As discussed with the NUSC community in July, the current study shows that individual national militaries within the NATO alliance have both idiosyncratic learning challenges and also shared, systemic issues in utilising the NATO orthodoxies and processes.
Similar to a multinational corporate, NATO strives to remove frictions from knowledge sharing and enhanced interoperability so that resources and skills can be applied more fluidly and effectively. NATO’s 30 Centres of Excellence (CoEs) form a crucial network of applied research, education, knowledge exchange and quality assurance activities to directly enhance the alliance’s strategic capabilities and operational performance.
The parallels with high-tempo, high-stakes management are strong – how do we learn so we can adapt faster and better?
Management studies’ theories of organisational learning have previously been applied by military researchers, but typically in only piece-meal fashion.
The NUSC discussion emphasised the need for more system wide analysis and better governance of the end-to-end process; the 3-day NATO CoE Directors Conference in Ingolstadt, Bavaria presented a great opportunity to play out these themes and garner workshop responses and follow on conversations.
The 2-hour workshop led by John and the ESRC project P.I. demonstrated to the 50+ NATO participants that a more integrated analysis of CoEs seems highly promising.
Figure: Dr. John Tull co-leading the NATO CoE workshop 11 Sep 2024
The current study findings suggest that CoEs should be analysed as a network of activities framed in ways that capture the agency of practitioners through a novel practice-oriented framework.
This promising scope would play to the strengths of GBS in e.g. social network analysis techniques, decision analytics and human resource development. Royal Holloway is a natural partner, being one of the leading (REF) International Relations schools in the UK. Other potential consortium partners may be sought – suggestions are very welcome!
The NATO CoE workshop resulted in several invitations to engage further with various CoEs, and a potential deeper workshop with the CoE Directors in 2025, opening potential research avenues for the near future.
Earlier NATO events had led to a separate invitation for John to present to the Australian Defence Force Academy while he was on vacation, a seminar held on 8 August with 30 ADFA academics in Canberra.