It wasn’t, in any sense, a planning system, acting slowly on stale and summarized information. Instead, it acted fast on current, raw, and detailed information. The RAF’s force multiplier was an intelligence system.

But David still reminds folks at IDEO and elsewhere to treat organizations as imperfect and unfinished prototypes. When some policy or practice annoys or drives people crazy, friction fixers need the courage and sway to try something different. And if that doesn’t work, to change it, or toss it out, and try something else.

In Military Misfortunes, historians Eliot Cohen and John Hooch describe how the United States tried to stem U-boat attacks by imitating British solutions, including using sonar and destroyer escorts, which were operated by specialists.

After World War II, the United States commissioned David Lilienthal to head the new Atomic Energy Commission. Lilienthal brought together a group of people who were highly influential—celebrities in their own right—disciples, as it were, of their own frames of reference. This very diverse group of individuals had an extremely heavy agenda, and they were impatient to get at it. In addition, the press was pushing them.

Governments were also subject to the same cognitive pressures of a world that was becoming more complicated, so they also needed solutions to attenuate information.