Adapt or Die – The Canadian Army needs an Adaptive Space!

by Colonel F.G. Auld Commandant - January 6th, 2026

Reading Time: 8 min

This article aims to stimulate reflection and discussion on the Canadian Army’s (CA’s) organizational agility; that is, the CA’s ability to continuously evolve to remain fit for the ever-changing operating environment.

As the Commander of the Canadian Army has noted, the army we have today is not the army we need. As a result, the CA has commenced a multi-year modernization effort. With a new Capstone Operating Concept providing the aimpoint, the CA is adapting its warfighting theories, doctrine, organizations, education, training, and equipment for the demands of today’s and tomorrow’s battlefields. However, “modernization” is a misleading word. Most interpret it as meaning there is an end state, that we will eventually reach some final modernization objective. In truth, modernization can never end; there can be no end state. The operating environment constantly changes, so armies too must adapt and evolve incrementally every day, forever.

To respond to a continuously changing operating environment, armies require agile, flexible structures, versatile capabilities, and, most importantly, a culture that embraces the need for constant evolution. Plainly put, to be ready for the next battlefield and not the last one, we need an army that actively thinks about the future fight, watches contemporary conflicts, learns, experiments, adjusts, and evolves every day. However, history demonstrates that armies are conservative and risk-averse, so change is hard. Too often for armies, meaningful adaptation occurs only after battlefield disaster.

This raises a critical question: How does a conservative, risk-averse institution like the CA develop the capacity for continuous adaptation? One compelling answer is the concept of an Adaptive Space.

Adaptive Space

“Agility is generated in the tension between pressures to adapt and pressures to produce. This is where Adaptive Space comes into play. Adaptive Space creates connections that serve to discover, develop, and diffuse new ideas across an organization.”¹ - Dr. M. Arena, Adaptive Space

Several years ago, I read Adaptive Space by Dr. Michael Arena. It offered an insightful exploration of how large, conservative organizations can become more agile, overcome barriers to change, and reduce the turbulence that typically accompanies adaptation. Arena argues that genuine organizational agility depends on the deliberate creation of what he calls an Adaptive Space.

An Adaptive Space is a purpose-built environment within an organization that bridges the gap between ideas and implementation. An Adaptive Space is where experimentation, risk-taking, trials, and learning occur. Where ideas are incubated and matured, tested, and refined before being scaled. Critically, an Adaptive Space provides the mechanism to transition the most promising innovations into the organization’s established operational systems (where most of the risk aversion lies). Arena observes that most organizations do not lack in creativity; rather, they struggle to experiment, trial, and scale good ideas because their legacy operational systems, optimized for efficiency and short-term performance, tend to suppress new approaches.² In legacy systems, innovation is often seen as risky, costly, or irrelevant to near-term outputs. As a result, some leaders, policies, and culture in legacy operational systems are inclined to become impediments to adaptation and innovation.³ Sound familiar?

To overcome this inertia, Arena proposes a cycle of positive disruption, a process supported by an Adaptive Space, through which organizations can evolve continuously and organically.⁴  This cycle has four key dynamics:

1. Discovery – generating ideas and identifying emerging opportunities, often within informal or Entrepreneurial Pockets.⁵
2. Development – nurturing ideas through experimentation, prototypes, feedback, and iteration within a semi-structured Adaptive Space.⁶
3. Diffusion – transmitting promising ideas into the broader system through recognized channels.⁷
4. Formalization – embedding new approaches into the organization’s core processes, creating lasting change.⁸

An Adaptive Space is the engine of this cycle of positive disruption; it drives continuous adaptation and acts as an antidote to organizational stagnation.

Figure 1 below from the Plexus Institute offers a graphical depiction of the Entrepreneurial Pockets (where ideas are generated) on one side and the risk-averse legacy Operational System on the other, with the purpose-built Adaptive Space bridging the two.

An Adaptive Space for the British Army

By the late 2010s, faced with accelerating technological change and resurgent peer threats, the British Army (BA) recognized the need for greater organizational agility. In 2022, it established the Experimentation and Trials Group (ETG) in Warminster to drive adaptation.

Co-located with the Land Warfare Centre, the ETG coheres experimentation and trials across the BA, tests new concepts, evaluates novel technologies and organizations, and feeds evidence into modernization and lesson-learning systems. It is, in practice, an Adaptive Space.

The ETG includes:¹⁰

• 2nd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment – serving as the Army’s Experimentation Battalion, capable of operating as a Robotic and Autonomous Systems-enabled Battle Group and pioneering new combined arms approaches.
• Uncrewed Aerial Systems Trials and Development Group – experimenting with small UAS, including FPV systems and loitering munitions, and developing novel tactics.
• Combat Service Support Trials and Development Group – testing mobility, handling, maintainability, and recoverability of vehicles.
• Mounted Close Combat Trials and Development Group – evaluating tracked and heavy wheeled armoured platforms and mounted weapon systems.
• Dismounted Close Combat Trials and Development Group – trialling soldier systems (boots to NVGs) and dismounted lethality (rifles to AT weapons).
• Joint Effects Trials and Development Group – testing emerging artillery, AD, and counter-UAS capabilities.
• Military Engineering Trials and Development Group – trialling bridging, explosives, engineering vehicles, and specialist equipment.

Viewed through Arena’s framework, the ETG serves unmistakably as the BA’s Adaptive Space: an organization deliberately structured to discover, develop, and diffuse new ideas into the Field Army.

Conclusion – The Canadian Army Needs an Adaptive Space

Modernization must be continuous; it can never end. However, relying on the CA’s field army formations and units to drive this required continuous adaptation by supporting experiments and trials, developing doctrine and tactics, and other necessary but demanding requirements is unsatisfactory and unrealistic. The CA’s formations and units are already fully occupied in training to deliver on their force generation requirements.

So, to facilitate and energize continuous adaptation within the CA without distracting and adding additional tasking burden to field army formations and units, the CA must seriously consider creating a purposeful Adaptive Space.

Establishing an Adaptive Space is not about creating yet another headquarters or staff process; it is about purposefully creating an environment where experimentation, failure, iteration, and diffusion are both possible and encouraged. For the CA, the creation of such a space could unlock latent creativity, enable faster decision cycles, and ensure that modernization efforts are grounded in evidence and experience rather than aspiration and opinion.

Is the BA’s ETG model right for the CA? Perhaps. In fact, the foundations already exist in the Canadian Army Trials and Evaluation Unit (CATEU) in Gagetown. With an expanded mandate and formation structure, CATEU could become the CA’s engine of experimentation, supporting the development of new concepts, doctrine, technologies, organizations, and methods of warfare. A dedicated Class A and B reserve company could provide the force required to test equipment, trial organizational models, and participate in combined arms experiments. CATEU’s evidence-based findings could then feed modernization efforts directly, reducing reliance on intuition and creating a disciplined, repeatable pathway from idea to implementation.

Ultimately, if the CA intends to become the agile, learning organization demanded by the modern operating environment, it must move beyond episodic modernization initiatives. The Adaptive Space concept, exemplified by the BA’s ETG, offers a practical framework for institutionalizing continuous adaptation.

To remain relevant in a rapidly evolving world, the CA must make adaptation a defining organizational habit, and not simply a reaction to an unfolding crisis.

In my view, establishing a CA Adaptive Space is not optional; it is essential if the CA wants to be ready for the next fight rather than the last fight.

End Notes

1. Michael J. Arena, Adaptive Space: How GM and Other Companies Are Positively Disrupting Themselves and Transforming into Agile Organizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2018), 11.
2. Arena, Adaptive Space, 11-12, 20.
3. Ibid., 22.
4. Ibid., 12.
5. Ibid., 19.
6. Ibid., 20.
7. Ibid., 21.
8. Ibid., 22.
9. https://plexusinstitute.org/2018/06/11/the-adaptive-space-imperative/, accessed 22 October 2025.
10. https://www.army.mod.uk/learn-and-explore/army-of-the-future/modernisation/experimentation/experimentation-and-trials-group/, accessed 22 October 2025.