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What if the next war is decided not by drone swarms, hypersonic missiles, or AI — but by good, old-fashioned human creativity? We have undervalued the mindset dimension that is critical to innovation yet it is the cornerstone of defense organizations’ adaptability and very difficult to scale. We cannot buy (military) innovators.
One of the most important shifts happening inside NATO today is not a drone platform, a software suite, or a breakthrough in AI — it is the growing recognition that innovation is a transferable skill between people. The alliance needs to speed up the rate of transfer so that it can catch up and keep pace with technological change and retain competitive advantage over adversaries. Our experiences prove that nearly anyone can become an innovator by using a repeatable process, grounded in rapid learning, small experiments, and cross-team collaboration.
In June 2025, the alliance adopted a new rule that sounds almost impossible at first glance: field new military technology in 24 months or less. Not debate it. Not admire it. Deploy it. The Rapid Adoption Action Plan is now official policy, and it effectively warns 32 countries, if you cannot learn and adapt faster, you will fall behind those who can.
For the past five years, one of us led the development of Project Mercury, an innovation consulting and community of practice that helps military and government organizations improve learning, adaptation, and decision quality. While Project Mercury created a commercial interest in how innovation programs are designed and funded, it also reflects the credible hands-on experience of more than a hundred teams of graduates skilled in overcoming the cultural and structural barriers that delay change.
In that time, we learned that the true limiting factor for innovation and adoption was not the speed of software development or shipbuilding, it was whether operators could experiment, question assumptions, and adjust in real time under pressure. Across NATO the pattern was unmistakable: When units succeed in adapting quickly, it was because their people — from the most junior soldier to a senior leader — knew how to navigate uncertainty and seize the initiative to implement the required change. When innovation efforts stalled, it was rarely because equipment failed. More often, it was due to the human operating system: waiting for permission, misreading ambiguity, or reverting to familiar habits when the environment demanded improvisation.
This brings us back to NATO’s 24-month clock. Streamlining procurement processes matters but it is not enough. Policy changes alone cannot create agility. Speed on paper does not produce speed in combat. But speed in adoption does. People drive adoption, and there are not enough individuals with these skills and mindset in most NATO members’ militaries after decades of downsizing.
That is why the alliance has begun investing in something easily overlooked: programs that coach innovation as a practical craft. In 2019, Project Mercury began working with the U.S. Air Force to develop concrete behaviors in a learn-by-doing approach to rapid testing, constructive conflict, and disconfirming evidence-gathering. In 2023, NATO adopted this model, partnering with Allied Command Transformation to launch a new generation of operator-centric innovation programs built on a simple premise: You cannot adopt new technology at a faster speed unless your people can learn (and do stuff) at a faster speed. If NATO intends to meet the Rapid Adoption Action Plan timeline, then it should work on upgrading the human side of the force. It should make creativity a capability.
We’re ready to share initial results from our proof of concept and highlight the success of this way of thinking for a small team of operators. We offer a vision of existing NATO pathways for scaling these approaches to bridge the “creativity gap” and have a sustained impact on acceleration, while being clear eyed about what stands in the way of designing collective creativity as our most effective deterrent.
At the crux of the “doing stuff faster” challenge is an operator who learns to be more self-authorizing. They apply creative logic rather than rigid processes to get things done. Self-authorization also requires leadership who trust this operator to execute in good faith. Air Force Col. Dr. Dave Blair has remarked, “to the bureaucracy, innovation is isomorphic to corruption.” A cohort model like Project Mercury effectively provides top cover and a mandate to each individual to contribute and pursue the mantra “get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
For the past two years, NATO operators using Project Mercury innovation methods created solutions to readiness and workflow problems that leadership barely knew existed. None of these fixes depended on new platforms or sophisticated software. What unlocked progress was a crucial shift in human behavior: individuals questioning assumptions, experimenting rapidly, and collaborating across silos without waiting for permission from higher ups. The fact that some of the most effective solutions came from the youngest members of the force underscores another thesis — creativity and adaptability, not rank or technical authority, often determine who generates meaningful change.
These programs work because they deliberately create the conditions traditional military education avoids. We placed people in controlled environments where failure is expected or even intended, disconfirming evidence is valuable, and assumptions are examined rather than protected. This is the intellectual analogue of flight training: Operators get repetitions in ambiguity and adversity before they face it in the wild.
This matters because militaries rarely struggle with generating ideas. Rather, they struggle with executing new behaviors under pressure. Learning about innovation is insufficient. In order to innovate, people need to experience the discomfort of having incomplete information, the tension of competing interpretations, and the discipline of running multiple experiments at once. These experiences form the habits that allow operators to adapt quickly in future crises.
Here lies the core of the innovation problem and the essence of the human edge NATO should scale. No technology can compensate for a force that has not practiced learning at speed. By preparing innovators today in a (semi-) controlled environment, coaching them, and giving them basic innovation skills, we are equipping them with the mindset to deal with uncertainty and attack complex problems. Three Project Mercury graduates faced exactly such a test when tasked with leading Task Force X Baltic.
Task Force X Baltic is an Allied Command Transformation project created to rapidly evaluate the capabilities of uncrewed systems and to accelerate their adoption. It offered NATO something rare: a real-world test of how fast multinational teams can learn, adapt, and coordinate under deliberately chaotic conditions. The problem itself — defending against rapidly evolving uncrewed maritime threats — was technical. But the decisive challenges were human: reframing requirements under pressure, integrating partners at speed, absorbing failure without losing momentum, and pivoting repeatedly as operational priorities shifted.
In Dec. 2024, NATO confronted a new threat in the Baltic Sea. Commercial ships used anchors to disrupt pipelines and undersea cables and we had to pivot to a radical expansion of scope in early 2025. Success no longer hinged on contracting innovation — it hinged on cognitive agility. With demonstrations taking place in June, our team had to absorb a mission pivot, get uncrewed assets on contract, and deploy them at sea for four events. We also had to redesign data architectures on the fly, integrate 13 data sources in six weeks, and rebuild essential systems mid-exercise after early prototypes failed. The final goal: live stream telemetry and video from the uncrewed assets in the Baltic Sea to the NATO Summit in The Hague. These were not engineering miracles — they were demonstrations of improvisation, judgment, and learning velocity.
What Task Force X ultimately proved is not just that NATO can adapt quickly when required, it proved why it can. Progress occurred when operators had the freedom and expectation to learn faster than events were unfolding. The effort also revealed a strategic vulnerability: A small cadre of unusually adaptable personnel delivered this performance. Scaling Task Force X will require far more operators capable of thinking, experimenting, and adjusting at this tempo.
If the 20th century rewarded militaries that massed firepower, this century will reward those that can mass ingenuity. Task Force X shows that NATO’s ability to field technology quickly is, in fact, tethered to its ability to cultivate a human operating system built for rapid learning and skilled to apply creativity where needed.
Nobody becomes adaptable simply by saying so. Military creativity under pressure is not an innate trait but an acquired behavior, and NATO is only beginning to develop the institutional muscle memory required to cultivate it and absorb it at scale. Project Mercury showed how emerging innovation programs are giving operators controlled environments to practice the mental habits demanded by the real world requirements of a Task Force X event. In these settings, personnel learn to challenge assumptions, design small experiments that quickly reveal what works, navigate the ambiguity inherent in war, and respond to disconfirming evidence instead of defending initial ideas. They learn to pivot when an idea fails — an ability that separates resilient teams from fragile ones. The success of Task Force X translates to a change in behaviors in the NATO commands. NATO is now executing several Task Force X projects at similar pace and scope as the Baltic scenario. What seemed impossible a couple of years ago is becoming the new normal.
Increasing demand for Task Force X and innovation is a positive sign for the organizational culture of NATO, but identifying who has these skills remains a challenge. In many places, adherence to process remains more important than achieving tangible results. Meeting the alliance’s 24-month adoption rule requires developing creativity and innovation capacities at scale, pushing them from specialized pilot programs into the mainstream of force development and therefore closing the current “creativity gap.”
This gap is not new, yet it remains a critical vulnerability within NATO. Allied Command Transformation’s Human Capital Innovation Concept recognized this years ago, outlining a framework to unlock human potential. It was never implemented and the concept became just another study. Today, the stakes are higher. NATO cannot afford to repeat past failures. It could reboot the Human Capital Innovation Concept as a high-impact operational objective with four key results aimed at human networks.
Metric Tracking for the Creative Workforce
Project Mercury demonstrated that targeted interventions — such as workshops and longer cohorts — can help change organizational culture. These programs don’t just teach skills — they rewire mindsets. The challenge is scaling them. NATO should track and incentivize participation across commands, like how the U.S. Air Force created its 88IO Innovation Officer “special experience identifier” for creative thinking. A measurable goal would be to train 700 participants per year — 3.5 percent of NATO’s approximately 20,000 civilian and military workforce — a 20-fold increase in participation over 2025. We suggest pulling a mix of volunteers across NATO to ensure vitality and continue the practice of rank-agnostic team formation. Young and mid-career leaders should be leveraged as future project champions.
Reengineering the NATO Executive Development Program
The NATO Executive Development Program is a prestigious leadership development program that provides strategic-level management education and networking for approximately 25 high-performing mid-career NATO international staff civilians from across the alliance each year. Members could be given a Rapid Adoption Action Plan task and assist in the fielding of a single project before the end of the year. An outcome-based approach would assist leaders in practicing important leadership lessons. By developing and executing a project, the program becomes a creativity adoption accelerator. Graduates return with operational playbooks for rapid prototyping, cross-domain collaboration, and calculated risk-taking. Leadership should demand creativity in decision-making, not tolerate it as a secondary, optional trait. The goal: a leadership development experience where rapid innovation adoption is the default and a routine practice, not the exception.
Leveraging the NATO Young Professionals Program as a Generational Catalyst
The Young Professionals Program is NATO’s most underutilized asset for organizational cultural transformation. It’s a competitive three-year rotational program that places 13 early-career professionals from NATO member countries across NATO organizations to support the alliance’s mission. Young professionals bring digital fluency, diverse perspectives, and zero tolerance for legacy constraints, forcing commands to adapt. Their limited tenure eliminates bureaucratic inertia as they can test bold ideas, fail fast, and learn faster without institutional resistance. When paired with structured, open-minded mentorship, this program doesn’t just refresh talent, it helps to reinvent how NATO operates. We suggest an expanded Young Professionals Program to include project-based learning and leadership creativity and adaptability. Such a “capstone” project could help embed these principles into permanent structures.
Buy the Way We Fight
Creativity alone will not modernize acquisition if systems remain nationally siloed. Acquisition expert Dan Ward argues that while warfighting is coalition based, procurement is still happening largely along national lines. The Rapid Adoption Action Plan provides an interesting approach that might accelerate procurement in the alliance, while respecting political and economic sensitivities. By sharing the results of testing and experimentation campaigns in the alliance and recognizing the proven potential of new innovative solutions with an “innovation badge,” member states could build on the joint efforts in the alliance and shorten the long evaluation and prospective period that is part of government procurement.
A common “NATO front door for industry” will also help in this process: Industry will be able to share new products in a structured way, without having to wait for requests for information or procurements. National acquisition pathways are also ultimately staffed by people, and so, one last change should be that active participation in innovation efforts becomes a career-building prospect for acquisition professionals, not an act of sacrifice.
We find that inside large bureaucracies like NATO, getting things done often requires bending rules in service of outcomes and that this practice that depends on trust. Yet, trust is difficult to measure, and compliance is easy to enforce. The result is predictable: Habits that were built for stability and budget scarcity end up suffocating adaptability. These barriers are real, but they are not immutable. We can overcome these barriers if NATO expands investment deliberately in the people who will carry its rapid-adoption mandate into practice.
This returns us to where we started: meeting rapid adoption isn’t about scaling a pathway. The order to field new technology in 24 months may read like a procurement directive, but the deeper challenge is human performance. Research pointing to declines in measured creativity and to the attrition of highly creative personnel in military systems suggests that institutions cannot assume they are naturally cultivating the cognitive diversity, improvisation, and agility that modern conflict requires. NATO’s bureaucracy does not drift toward adaptability but towards efficiency, adapting only in the face of “critical junctures.” We can forge a creative practitioner who embodies “creative destruction” by using the practices above. To meet rapid adoption mandates requires leaders who rewire the system to produce not one or the other, but both.
Elevating and embedding rapid adoption mandates to existing leadership programs could quickly drive adoption but likely faces headwinds. What existing portions of the leadership curriculum must be skipped or skimmed to make room? A chicken and egg problem emerges. How will decision makers skillfully and quickly adapt the existing programs when these same leadership programs don’t teach how to skillfully or quickly adapt? We need volunteers committed to learning and adapting who don’t wear rose colored glasses.
A fast learning and adaptive alliance, that can rapidly absorb, test, validate new technology and processes into their concept of operations will be a more formidable force. An alliance that clings to certainty, inherits processes without questioning them, or suppresses experimentation will invite strategic surprise. NATO’s rapid-adoption mandate is therefore not simply about speed. It is about survival.
The efforts within Allied Command Transformation through Project Mercury demonstrate what learning at the speed of relevance looks like: hands-on, evidence-seeking, iterative, and deeply human. Cultivating that capacity cannot remain the responsibility of a small cadre of NATO innovators. We’ve suggested how these tools could be adopted into a broader community of innovators across the NATO commands and the 32 allies, committed to exercising adaptability and creativity as a capability rather than admiring it from the sidelines. For those across the alliance ready to move there is urgent work to be done. NATO has set the deadline; technology will not slow down. The only question now is who else within NATO will invest in the people who must keep pace — and keep the peace.
Ethan Eagle, Ph.D., is an innovation coach, educator, and former aerospace engineer. From 2019 to 2025 he led training programs for the Innovatrium via the Project Mercury initiative and has coached thousands of military and civilian personnel across the United States and NATO. His Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering is from the University of Michigan.
Jeroen Franssen is a former Belgian senior Army officer and Innovation Officer in the Belgian Ministry of Defence. He currently works as an Innovation Manager at NATO’s Allied Command Transformation and is a graduate of Project Mercury. He works on alliance-wide initiatives to strengthen adaptability and accelerate technology adoption. He was the 2025 co-lead for Task Force X Baltic.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their employers.
Image: Україна via Wikimedia Commons
