What We Mean By Culture

By Lieutenant-General M.A.J. Carignan, CMM, MSM, CD - May 26, 2023

Reading Time: 5 min  

Everything we do in the Defence Team is in support of operational effectiveness, and culture is no exception. Another disquieting misconception is some people think we are putting sailors, soldiers, aviators, and special operators through “social justice conditioning” in a culture change that “look more like a Marxist cultural revolution.” Few things could be further from the truth.

To be clear, the Defence Team needs to reflect the society that we serve and protect. We need to reflect all of Canadian society because we all have a stake in our family’s safety, our homeland’s security, and in protecting our democratic, tolerant, and compassionate way of life. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is a clash of cultures: dictatorships trying to overcome democracies. There may be more of this to come.

Freedom is not free. Freedom is earned every day. Our defence is a whole-of-society effort. If anyone is left behind, we all suffer for it. How? We suffer from unforced errors in anticipating, learning, and adapting. These blind spots are cultural failures that undermine operational effectiveness.

Looking to our past, we know that the soldiers deployed to Gallipoli in February 1915 followed a long-established battle plan, but it failed. One senior officer who survived Gallipoli, and other campaigns, Julian Byng, applied what he learned during the First World War and listened to people of diverse backgrounds so that a little over two years later this command staff led Canada to a strategic and historic victory at Vimy Ridge.

Byng, 54, was demanding of – yet popular with – his troops, who called themselves Byng Boys. How did he do this? From the top down, he relied on the insights of arguably one of Canada’s greatest general – Major-General (in 1917) Arthur Currie, 41, a former teacher, insurance broker, and land developer – and the ingenuity of allies who masterminded the rolling barrage – to motivate the 100,000 members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

From the bottom up, he trusted the troops – a first for Canada’s military – by ensuring everyone down to the rank of Private was familiar with the battle plan, had copies of trench maps (hitherto exclusively in the hands of senior officers) so they could orient themselves if their commander was killed and unlike their predecessors they practiced the technical and tactical innovations they had devised over months of meticulous planning. The troops were included in planning the mission and understood their role in it.

Like in the First World War, the CAF is merging two generations into the Defence Team. Among ourselves, we call these the Industrial Age and the Information Age generations. We also call leadership that rallies all the troops around the mission an expression of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

This diversity of thought, experience, and background combined with treating people in a fair, respectful, and equitable way fosters the essential sense of belonging required to build strong teams. Any unit commander then, and now, will tell you this enhances operational effectiveness.

Today’s culture transformation rests on four pillars: teamwork, identity, leadership, and service.

Operationally effective teams now as then trust each other, we express mutual respect because we’re included in the process and we know to balance individual expression with the need to work together.