Military Mindset Meets Management Theory

Business scholar Wayne Johnson’s path to exploring management theories didn’t start in corporate boardrooms, but on Afghanistan’s remote roads that were as much linear minefields as they were transportation routes.

In 2010, Johnson served a tour with the U.S. Army leading a “route-clearance” platoon whose mission was to detect and disarm the IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, that accounted for about half the U.S. combat casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time.

The tactics he was taught for this job were designed for Iraq’s urban landscapes and paved roads, but eastern Afghanistan presented an entirely different challenge. The unpaved, mountainous, rural terrain resulted in a much different battle space, with metal-free, fertilizer-filled homemade bombs.

Instead of trying to detect bombs from the interior of armored vehicles, Johnson hypothesized that it would be more effective and safer to walk directly in the road, with eyes close to the ground. He looked for telltale signs of a concealed bomb: wires in the dirt, depressions in the road surface, dark spots that could indicate fresh digging—anything out of place.

“Some guys thought, ‘That’s really stupid.’ And they had a point,” Johnson says.

Under the new tactics, the platoon’s find-to-detonation ratio rose to 23 bombs defused for every one that exploded. Previously, a one-to-one ratio was considered good, with half the bombs going undetected, placing troops at far greater risk. Yet Johnson soon discovered how difficult it was to persuade others to adopt his method. It took five months to develop a new system, but five years to get that system widely taught and accepted.

That experience now animates Johnson’s civilian career as a postdoctoral researcher in the David Eccles School of Business’s Department of Management, where he is exploring another kind of minefield: Why do some innovations struggle to gain acceptance while others are quickly embraced? According to his research, the more novel an idea is, the more varied the response—and mixed reviews are seen as a bad sign. But, Johnson notes, “Mixed reviews are to be expected when an idea is new.”