Social Network Theory describes the sort of network structures that support innovation. The tech sector does this naturally but other sectors like the public sector do not. More than ever, we need the right social networks to support innovation in defence. Network Resilience describes a social network that has inbuilt redundancy and can survive a crisis or conflict.
Across defence and national security, people in the public sector, often by virtue of the work they do, have limited networks into the tech sector. Techcraft, Tradecraft, and Warcraft are at an intersection that means our military and national security communities need to become deeply networked into the tech sector. We need Network Resilience in this new era of tech enabled warfare.
Carefully and strategically building the right social network structures matters. Information travels over networks. The more networked a human system is, the more efficiently information can flow to where it is needed. Innovation requires both a lot of network ties, and a particular type of network tie. In 1973, Mark Granovetter famously wrote about ‘the strength of weak ties.’ In his pivotal experiment, he showed that people were more likely to get a job from acquaintances than from friends. This was because people less well known to someone are more likely to know information that person is not already exposed to. People close to you – colleagues, friends, family – have many contacts in common, and those common contacts, or strong ties, share information with each other so that it becomes widely known. This information becomes redundant.
If I am looking for a job, and you tell me about a job our mutual friend already mentioned to me, that information is both redundant and of very little value to me. Someone we both don’t know, a weak tie, is more likely to know about a job that neither of us have heard about. That information is non-redundant and is more valuable. That value is social capital, or the value that is embedded in network ties.
This basic concept, of weak and strong ties, and of social capital embedded within networks, is at the heart of why networks matter for innovation, and understanding the structure and dynamics of social networks is particularly important for building ecosystems that support innovation.
Back to defence. Our public sector structures tend to build large strong tie networks. People in the Army, for example, are highly networked with each other. There is very strong internal social capital – shared trust and norms that mean the group work together well. However, these networks have very few bridging ties – people who act as bridges between that network and other networks.
This is exacerbated by real concerns, like security classification, but is also encouraged by culture. When people leave defence or national security they have their clearance cancelled, door passes removed, and are pushed out of the network. There is a general sense of distrust of the private sector, and a distance – them and us. They have different incentives, values, and rules.
For defence and national security to be agile and innovative, we need the sorts of networks that support innovation. These are networks rich in weak ties, where novel information can flow into the network from many sources, and can move around easily to find where it is needed. Silos do not help this, nor does that distrust of other sectors. Very secure buildings, internal comms networks, door passes and clearances all get in the way of information flowing freely in a way that supports innovation.
The public sector builds well-funded innovation structures, then they launch them at the tech sector. They rarely achieve their potential, and often fail completely. This is because they are not underpinned by the right social networks; they lack a dense weak tie network around them to bridge out into the tech sector. They often become ‘front doors’ and rely on a handful of people to interface with the tech sector.
But networks don’t work like that. Networks that support innovation need lots of bridging ties. These bridging ties connect into other networks. Novel information flows over bridging ties and this combination of new information and different people is what fuels innovation.
``To benefit from the huge sums of private capital available to the tech sector, government agencies need to start building broad and extensive weak tie networks into the tech sector.``
Social Network Theory shows that not all weak ties are bridging ties, but all bridging ties are weak ties. This means you need a lot of weak ties, because not all of them will become bridging ties. Without bridging ties, novel information cannot bridge from other networks into your network. In this case, it makes it very hard for new ideas, information, approaches, and people to bridge into defence and national security. Without weak ties introducing disruptive ideas, you get group-think.
We are out of the age in which government builds the best defence and national security technology. Governments can no longer afford to be the innovators. To do that you need huge sums of money to hire the best people and build the best facilities. That money is no longer in the Treasury, but it is in venture capital and private equity. Startups can raise tens and hundreds of millions of pounds quickly to hire the very best people available in order to build highly innovative technologies at speed.
To benefit from the huge sums of private capital available to the tech sector, government agencies need to start building broad and extensive weak tie networks into the tech sector. Only in this way can they communicate out their requirements, and only in this way can the solutions find the customers. Single points of entry and complex government structures are too slow and too inefficient compared to organic, broad, weak-tie human networks.
This is the lesson from Ukraine. Conscription saw the country bring some 7,000 people from the tech sector into the military, immediately creating a vast network of tech people throughout the military and from the military back to the tech sector itself. In the early days of the war, startup founders were communicating directly with their friends on the front line and building the technology they were being told they needed. This developed into the rapid iteration we see of technologies like drones in six-week development cycles as information travels from the user in the field back to the engineers and startups in real time. The Ukrainian military have now developed systems to facilitate this, but that is because it was happening at a human level already.
In the rest of Europe, or at least in ‘Old Europe,’ our military and national security communities have very limited networks. The scant network ties into the tech sector are mainly limited to people whose job it is to engage with the sector, or a few people who find it genuinely interesting. These tend to be more senior because they have the freedom to leave the building and the time to follow their curiosity and start meeting people beyond their job description.
The tech sector struggles with this because the people who engage through their job suddenly disappear when they move to the next job, and the senior people disappear when they leave public service or get promoted. It is expensive for startups to have to constantly rebuild networks into the military as the people they talk to cycle through their postings. Having better networks, and more weak ties, would prevent this.
In a war or major crisis, the structures built in peacetime to engage with the tech sector will probably collapse. The small numbers of people interfacing with the sector will mobilise to other roles. Overall, the networks will fail and the flow of information will slow or stop, just when we need it to speed up.
To cope with modern warfare and to enable our militaries to move at the speed of the tech sector we need Network Resilience, and we need to build redundancy into our social networks. This means having the large and broad number of weak ties that supports multiple bridging ties. A weak tie network, in this case, means having lots of people in the public sector having direct personal networks into an equally broad range of people in the tech sector.
These networks should not be job-specific, they should be person-specific, that way they will become embedded in the institutions along with those people. They should travel with the individual as they move around their career and not be related to a role, rank, or job. Having a lot of network connectivity like this means that if individuals, or organisational structures, collapse in a crisis there are enough network ties overall to maintain the flow of information. That is Network Resilience.
To do this, we need a significant change in culture.
We need to encourage people in the military and national security community to leave the building and develop networks rather than treat networks with distrust and concern.
That means we have to stop thinking this is about them and us and realise we’re all in this together. Defence relies on tech, and tech relies on defence – both as a customer, and to maintain the type of society in which innovation and startups thrive. Innovation and capitalism require free markets, the rule of law, and democratic systems, so the tech sector is incentivised to help with national security in the face of adversaries who want the opposite to this.
We need to empower people to build networks. This means seeing it as part of the job, not a distraction from it. When I run defence tech conferences, most of the tech sector people attend for the full event; many of the public sector people come for a specific panel and then leave. The tech sector people realise that the networks are as valuable as the knowledge; the public sector people see the conference primarily as a learning opportunity.
We need more mutual trust. We get that by getting to know each other better. Networks that support innovation are rich in social capital – trust, shared norms, mutual understanding. More weak ties bring cultures closer together, share more, and build more social capital.
We should be helping our future leaders develop and nurture their networks throughout their careers, not just as a stepping stone as they leave public service.
Some people in the public sector think that if their employees are trying to build networks into the private sector it means they’re trying to leave and get a job. However, if we encourage them to build those networks, they will be able to do the job they have far better and more effectively. In fact, if we make it easier for people to leave the public sector into the tech sector and come back again, and for people in the tech sector to dip in and out of public sector careers, we will instantly create far greater network connectivity and far better Network Resilience. That is currently counter to most public sector culture.
My own interest lies in creating what I call low-friction interfaces, which are simply structures that make it very easy for tech sector people to engage with the public sector, or for public sector people to leave the building and meet the tech sector. The more of these interfaces we build, the more weak tie networks we develop and therefore encourage more bridging ties. I have now built a number of structures and activities to do this.
In a war or crisis, a well-developed, resilient social network will be able to sustain the rapid movement, displacement, and loss of people, and the collapse of peacetime structures. Network redundancy will mean that enough ties will always survive, and information can continue to flow in a way that supports innovation. Network Resilience will mean we can speed up innovation in a crisis, rather than slow down.
What we have seen in Ukraine, and we are now seeing in the Middle East, is that modern warfare is about technology; it is about speed, and it is about out-innovating your adversary. Our militaries and national security structures need to be deeply networked with the tech sector to be able to keep up with the speed of innovation in defence.
Tech and innovation are still seen as an adjunct to defence. Countries talk about setting aside 10% of budgets, or similar allocations, for startups / tech / innovation. The bulk of the military is still made up of old-fashioned, exquisite platforms that take years and cost fortunes to deploy, and are now drone fodder. America and the UK are firing hugely expensive missiles and scrambling expensive fighter jets to shoot down cheap Iranian Shaheds. This shows we are behind in defence innovation and the use of novel technology.
We need a paradigm shift away from tech and innovation being an adjunct to defence to it being the core of defence. That means a wholesale change in culture in defence and national security. The quickest way to achieve that is to get more public sector people out of their buildings to engage with the tech sector, and to find ways to bring more tech sector people into those buildings. Building effective and constantly refreshing weak tie networks will deliver that. For that to happen, we need to develop our understanding of the role social networks play in innovation, and to maintain that we need Network Resilience.
Dr Tobias Stone has a PhD in applied social network theory and innovation, and is co-founder of Resilience Media.
