From a cultural perspective, the bloated program offices reporting to large bureaucracies of functional and headquarters offices stifling creativity and innovation while attempting to deliver the 100% solution the first time have to change. What is needed is for small hand-picked teams in flat organizations to take intelligent risks led by an empowered program manager to deliver the minimum viable product. This cultural change—albeit difficult to implement—is essential.
Colonel Kristi Lowenthal captured the cultural challenge faced by acquisition professionals—particularly program mangers: “… Former Army Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Heidi Shyu once likened program managers to the driver of a very long bus in which every stakeholder on the bus has a steering wheel and a brake, but not a gas pedal.”
That was from Chad Millette’s NPS symposium paper, “The Cultural Change Required for Rapid Defense Acquisitions.” He surveyed 19 students from an Air War College course on rapid acquisition (including several Army officers and one person from SpaceX) asking them to identify the most important factors for success. He reports that organizational and cultural issues top the list:
The characteristic most common to organizations/efforts the students investigated was the ability to handpick their team or employ a unique hiring process. Ten of the 17 organizations/efforts have this ability. For instance, Big Safari and the RCO hire using the Green Door assignment process (for specially cleared personnel), which allows them to hire an assignment cycle ahead of “standard” program offices and to interview candidates. Due to the mission need and urgency, the DDS hires people directly at GS-15 pay grade. And, as previously mentioned, as a private company, SpaceX certainly handpicks their acquisition/development teams.
The next most highlighted characteristics are related to organizational structure and culture. These employ a flat organizational structure that reduces the bureaucracy and hierarchy with respect to decision-making and execution authority. Further speeding up decision-making are the organizations/efforts that empower their lower echelons within the organization. Interestingly, as related as these two characteristics are, they were not universally highlighted in the same organizations/efforts. Finally, teams taking intelligent risks was another characteristic highlighted in nine of the reports. This is a characteristic of innovative organizations that tend to perform rapidly [emphasis added].
I think those top four elements were found in Rickover’s nuclear reactors division. Rickover interviewed over ten thousand sailors and had over 100 managers report directly to him. It may be debatable how much he delegated decisions to the lower levels, but no doubt he took intelligent risks.
It’s perhaps appropriate that hand-picking a team tops the list. After all, it’s hard to have a flat organization tolerant of risk taking and delegated decisions if there is not a certain amount of trust. Defense leaders often talk about the importance of culture, but few organizations have much control over their own culture. Indeed, organizational cultures are often dictated by the program planning processes they coalesce around.
The Space Force was often touted as required if only due to the need to foster a unique culture. However, the Space Force reported that:
The Air Force currently handles recruitment for space missions and units that were previously part of AFSPC. The Space Force will work closely with Air Force Headquarters and the Air Force Recruiting Service (AFRS) to identify specific recruiting quotas and monitor, assess, and adjust goals and quotas so that recruiting needs are met.
However there is this:
In the coming months, planners will create processes to enable personnel joining the Space Force to be placed directly into specific, space-related tracked both before and after commissioning.
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