Kathryn Bigelow’s 2025 gripping political thriller “House of Dynamite” portrays the chaos unleashed when an unidentified nuclear missile strikes the United States, forcing leaders to confront the terrifying uncertainty of retaliation and responsibility. The movie challenges audiences to reflect on the fragility of deterrence and the dangers of misinformation. Although fictional, its unsettling premise resonates with real-world incidents that highlight the fragility of nuclear security and global stability. History has seen chilling near-misses, such as the 1983 Soviet false alarm where malfunctioning satellites mistakenly signaled incoming U.S. missiles, or the 1995 “Norwegian rocket incident” when Russia briefly prepared for nuclear retaliation against what turned out to be a scientific launch. More recently, concerns about cyberattacks on defense systems and escalating geopolitical tensions have underscored the potential for catastrophic consequences from miscommunication or technical errors.
The rise of artificial intelligence adds another layer of complexity: algorithms now influence military strategy, intelligence analysis, and even crisis communication, yet the inner workings of these systems remain opaque to most decision-makers. Embedded technologies, from autonomous defense platforms to predictive analytics, operate with layers of code and machine learning models that few truly understand, raising the risk of misinterpretation or unintended escalation. By hinting at these hidden complexities, the film underscores how fragile global stability can be when human judgment collides with systems that are both indispensable and inscrutable.
These concerns are not limited to nuclear warfare. In August 2025, I wrote “3 Ways Cognitive Warfare Exposes Character And What To Do About It,” highlighting the vulnerability to character erosion that weakens judgment, whether through disruptive social media or targeted cognitive warfare by foreign actors. I concluded that “we need to see the development of character as the foundation and starting point for not only combating cognitive warfare, but also for addressing the broader threats to judgment that will undermine human flourishing, sustained excellence, and democracy.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Phil Desmarais and his team at the Canadian NORAD Space Detachment exemplify how character development can be elevated to a mission-critical priority. Having collaborated with organizations across the world on the development and application of character, I have seen many approaches—but what Desmarais’ team has undertaken is uniquely ambitious and distinctly pioneering. In contrast to more conventional efforts, their work signals that genuine character development and transformation require embracing three paradigm shifts.
1. Seeing Beyond Competence to Character
Despite significant research pointing to the necessity for character-based judgment to underpin competence, organizations have been slow to make the paradigm shift, revealing how challenging it is. For organizations starting anew, a foundational resource is the MIT Sloan Management Review article I wrote in 2023 with Bill Furlong and Rob Austin, “Make Leader Character Your Competitive Edge.”
Military organizations have had an early advantage in recognizing that character-based judgment must support competence. However, like many organizations that believe they have character covered because they value it, there are some critical blind spots. In a 2025 study with Christian Breede, which examined the Leadership Doctrine of the “Five Eyes” – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States – we found that although character was a cornerstone, there were imbalances in the emphasis on some dimensions of character over others. It is not just that character matters, but also understanding its architecture and how potential virtues can become vices, something I have written about in several prior Forbes articles and most recently in September 2025, “Is Character A Competitive Edge Or Strategic Liability: 5 Differentiators.”
Desmarais and his team were fortunate to build on the pioneering efforts of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), which have invested heavily in adopting an evidence-based approach to character and its development. Character is embedded in the CAF Ethos, and significant resources have been dedicated to developing subject-matter experts who understand the fundamentals of character, how to develop it, and how to integrate it into the organization, including Human Resources practices and culture.
The shift from recognizing that character is important to actively doing something about it is a crucial step. It requires a leader to champion the effort, often someone like Desmarais, who may only have a sense that character matters. In his November 2025 Virtuosity Character podcast with Corey Crossan, Desmarais explained his motivation to implement a character development program in his unit. After his initial exposure to character within the CAF, he realized how essential character development was to the ability to lead through character-driven judgment. He took the mission personally.
“People who rely on me deserve a better version of me. And an ever-evolving version of me… So this has become really meaningful to me to make sure that I’m always doing something to be better than I was before…But essentially, this idea of evolution is just so important to keep up to date with, certainly, the security and defence environment that we deal with in the world today, and certainly, I can apply that to so many different parts of my life…Being in service of Canada, people are owed the highest level of leadership that they can get. So anything less than world-class leadership is unacceptable.”
Desmarais and his team took a leap of faith because no one had attempted what they were trying to do. Arguably, it required a lot of character-based judgment to take that leap, especially the ability to see the possibility, the courage to step into the unknown, and the humility to do so. Although he demonstrated strong integrity and accountability in his efforts, he also showed strength in collaboration, which enabled this co-created initiative. A cornerstone was that the team wanted to take on the second paradigm shift.
2. Moving Beyond Training To Habit Development
Embracing character development as a habit-forming practice is the biggest challenge. I have worked with many organizations that focus solely on awareness and assessment, believing that understanding what character is and how it shows up in deficiencies and excesses will enable them to develop their character. While there are clear benefits to this approach, it misses the broader potential. An analogy to exercise would be knowing what it means to be fit, but not actually working out to improve fitness. For character, this means daily practice that creates habits—what we call “going to the character gym.”
Just as there is a science of character, there is also a science of character as habit development, which relies heavily on research in exercise science. Several essential aspects of character development include progressing through five levels of exercises: observing and identifying character, activating character, strengthening character, connecting character dimensions, and ensuring that character holds up in different contexts. It is this last point that has led sociologists, such as Zimbardo, to essentially conclude that context undermines character. In his 2007 book “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,” he provides convincing evidence that placing “good apples in bad barrels produces bad apples.” However, the potential to strengthen character to withstand different contexts has been underexplored by sociologists. Although character has always been under siege, today’s context has magnified the risks. Whether it be intentional efforts to compromise judgment or the sheer complexity of technology, AI, and decision-making revealed in the film, the mission-critical aspect of character is that it must be strengthened to withstand contexts that undermine it.
Developing character as a habit also requires understanding the factors that influence the intention to build character (such as attitude, ability, lifestyle, peer influence, and norms), along with the reflective cycle of practices. This structure of character development that Corey Crossan and I designed is embedded in the Virtuosity mobile app, which Desmarais and his team used. Desmarais described his experience in character as habit development with an example from the second stage of activating character: “The most activation happens when you get to choose music, quotes, stories, places, and everything else that truly activates character. And for me, that’s just about things you already have in your life or that are quite likely. You’re just now collecting all these things within the character development universe, even though you’ve already listened to music, read books, and gone to places that are meaningful to you. So, you’re now seeing it all through that context.”
A critical insight from character development as habit development is that the more a person works on character development, the more they truly understand it. The more you understand character, the greater the likelihood you see it in daily practice, which sets up for the third paradigm shift. The challenge is that developing any habit is difficult, and character development is no different. As James Clear wrote in his book “Atomic Habits”, “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Having something like a “character gym” is a system that can guide lasting habit change. A key facet of the system is that character development becomes an organizational norm, and that the person engaging it can see the benefits, which leads to the last paradigm shift.
3. Making Character Development Mission Critical
The third paradigm shift is to combine character development with competence to make it mission-critical. It means character development is not limited to leadership development in a workshop; it is woven into the fabric of the organization. As Desmarais explained: “There’s global instability, there’s conflicts around the world, and there’s no shortage of bad news. So that was a huge gap in where I thought we needed to have a competitive or, in our case, operational advantage over adversaries…We can’t just rely on our three oceans to protect us anymore… We have to be able to be dynamic, make quick decisions, and operate under the highest levels of stress that are expected of anybody, really. That’s what the military is there for. That’s why we have it. And that’s what we’re expected to do. So if you walk that back, you end up at judgment to make better decisions. And then you keep walking it back, and then we’re into the remaining 10 dimensions.”
Whereas Desmarais and four members of his senior leadership team enrolled in the Virtuosity Program in 2025, using the mobile app for their personal development, they were tasked with bringing that learning back to their teams and integrating it into daily activities. They aimed to expand the application of character beyond traditional areas such as leader effectiveness, better communication, and fostering psychological safety. For example, they realized that understanding their own character development and observing it in others could be used for behavioral forecasting, something I wrote about in my June 2024 Forbes article “Behavioral Forecasting: A Foundational Practice to Navigate the World.” Desmarais’ team utilized their own character strengths and weaknesses to identify blind spots when working on a training scenario involving a distributed coalition with the US Space Force and US Space Command. The team was also tasked with preparing a briefing for a Brigadier General. As Desmarais explained: “We were asking ourselves to do something we’ve never done before. We definitely pushed all of us outside our comfort zones, but I was just so impressed and proud of the team for what they came up with. Ultimately, it did end up being a very rich and useful conversation with our senior leader. He found it super helpful and would have loved to have more of this throughout his career, as a way to prepare for the barrage of engagements they get peppered with as a senior leader. And I’m sure that’s not unique to the military.”
The key insight is that those who are actively working to develop character will find ways to make it mission-critical in their personal and professional lives. Co-creating the program with Desmarais and his team has demanded innovation to support their efforts. For example, Corey Crossan developed a series of videos on each character dimension to relieve the burden on their subject-matter expertise to cover the foundations, enabling them to focus on application. As they prepared for a workshop on the dimension of humanity, we engaged in conversations to help them see the connections between the development of humanity and trust, for example. If a person lacks the empathy and compassion associated with humanity, they are unlikely to foster trust in others, as is evident in the “House of Dynamite” film.
“House of Dynamite” portrays not only the weight of judgment across the military and civilian spheres, but also the deeper truth that competence alone is never enough. In an era where artificial intelligence accelerates technical capability and the complexity of decision-making grows ever more daunting, the need for character as the anchor of judgment has never been greater. The work of Lieutenant-Colonel Phil Desmarais and his team demonstrates that embracing the paradigm shifts—elevating character alongside competence, cultivating character through habit development, and making character mission-critical—is not only possible, but essential for navigating the challenges of our time