Sabra Horne joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discussed her new book: Creating Innovation Navigators: Achieving Mission Through Innovation. She is an executive in residence at BMNT, and before that she held a number of important roles including Innovation Hub Chief at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Deputy for Information Sharing and Collaboration at the National Security Agency, and an advisor to the Chief of Staff for the Director of National Intelligence.
Download the full-text transcripts
- 1:20 – characterizing the 300 federal innovation efforts
- 3:40 – streamlining clearance and suitability processes
- 6:30 – how to select metrics and evaluate performance
- 10:00 – when mission calls, people deliver
- 13:30 – using commercial solutions openings
- 17:00 – leadership and the DHS procurement innovation lab
- 22:00 – partnering with general counsel to adopt authorities
- 23:50 – BMNT’s innovation navigator’s course
- 27:00 – how to get to ‘yes’ with the frozen middle and stakeholders
- 31:10 – we need 20 Hondo Geurts and 20 Mike Browns
- 32:30 – it took 30 years for government to organize around cyber
- 37:00 – the innovation pipeline
- 39:30 – requirements and budgeting misaligned with human-centered design
- 45:00 – engaging with industry
- 50:00 – investment readiness levels, adoption readiness levels
Measuring Success
One of the challenges organizations is choosing metrics that drive performance evaluations. Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Many metrics are useful, overoptimizing on them can lead to dysfunction. In acquisition, we care about meeting cost and schedule for a fixed technical/performance baseline. These metrics, however, can be especially challenging when confronted by novel situations, as Sabra discusses:
I think when you are engaged in emergency events — which is a lot of the time that I’ve spent in my government career addressing huge challenges like the release of classified information by Edward Snowden or the discovery of Russian interference into the 2016 presidential elections — when you are in the heat of an emergency, metrics simply are very difficult to think about… you don’t know what the measures of success look like.
Sabra mentions that if you aren’t accepting failure, you aren’t pushing hard enough. But in government, it’s often a “no fail” situation using taxpayer dollars. So those things are at odds with each other. Learning to move forward is the key and not repeating failures. But as we build our baselines in acquisition, Sabra reminds us that “Only when you’re halfway down the path can you start to see what success might look like and therefore how you can measure it.”
In my mind, baselines work fine for the next incremental advance on an aircraft or ship platform. But moving to a new paradigm, such as one with AI/ML at the core, measures need to be updated with learning.
Using New Authorities
Sabra brings up the commercial solutions opening (CSO) pilot program to contract faster and ultimately get a better requirement. She discusses an example where an office at CISA had been working on communication device for 9 years and failed to field the capability. However, AFWERX had funded a commercial technology that had been used to help coordinate in Afghanistan. Using the CSO, they were able to purchase the technology in 18 days to rank and prioritize emergency communications in the US.
Some of the reasons the the tech adoption worked at CISA included: (1) a flexible partner who, rather than protecting the budget and legacy solution being worked on, pivoted to the new solution; (2) leadership at the top from folks like Soraya Correa to empower use of alternative authorities and provide top-cover; and (3) the efforts of the DHS Procurement Innovation Lab to help alleviate the fear in the contracting community.
Another important aspect was bringing in a representative from the Office of General Counsel, as Sabra recalls:
They provided us on the Innovation Hub a representative from their office who attended almost all of our meetings. When we were meeting with contracting officer representatives who were nervous about utilizing alternative authorities or OTAs, he [the representative] was able to allay their fears. We would start each meeting or training by saying, “You will not go to jail by utilizing these authorities. This is the person who would help put you in jail. We can commit to you. This is a legal action, so let’s try to learn this together.”
Stakeholder Mapping
In large organizations like the government, it is important to identify stakeholders and bring them along with you. As you might learn in negotiations training, don’t talk about what you want but what the other side will get. Sabra discusses the stakeholder mapping exercises they do at BMNT’s innovation navigators course and how participants find it incredibly helpful. Here’s one slice from the podcast:
We also have people who can be saboteurs to our efforts and our goals. People who perhaps don’t want a certain program to succeed because it threatens their own efforts. Perhaps people who do not want us to be funded for something because it takes their own funding away from what it is that they’re doing.
There are myriad of reasons why you might have someone who’s a potential saboteur, but number one, being able to identify those people, and number two, understanding their motivations so that three, you can help figure out how to get to a different place so they’re not so damaging to your program. Understanding that mapping it out and creating a plan is fundamental in being able to bring everyone along in your innovation effort.
Listen to the whole thing!
Thanks Sabra Horne
I’d like to thank Sabra Horne for joining me on the Acquisition Talk podcast. You can find her book, Creating Innovation Navigators, at booksellers everywhere. I recommend listening to Federal News Network’s interview with Sabra here. You can find some articles on Sabra joining BMNT here and here. Be sure to check out BMNT’s Innovation Navigators course here.
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