WHAT KIND OF INNOVATION DO YOU WANT?
environments, you don’t have something that creates a cost for being too cautious. And so, the system falls into, frankly, a bureaucratic stupor. I hate to use a con- troversial phrase.
Army AL&T: Tat’s a controversial phrase, bureaucratic stupor?
Chao: Yeah, where people check boxes and, because there’s no other way to distinguish between who is performing really well versus not, you pick away at every little failure as a way to differentiate between people.
It’s such a fundamental point. If you want innovation, you need to accept failure because you are asking the orga- nization to push its boundaries. Which
raises another point: You don’t neces- sarily want your entire organization to be focused on innovation—and to be clear, I’m talking about the extreme ver- sion of innovation centered on looking for major disruptive technology. Right? You only need a certain portion of your organization living on the edge, seeking extreme disruptive innovation. Tere are some parts of the organization that you frankly don’t want innovation in. I don’t want somebody experimenting around well-proven processes for man- aging the safety of a nuclear weapons stockpile, for example. It works, stick to the plan. Don’t go goofy. It goes back to the [earlier] topic: Recognize that there are different kinds of innovation and tailor different parts of the organization to focus on them.
Army AL&T: When you look at some- thing like Better Buying Power, some of which seems to be more back-to-basics than revolutionary, do you think that it’s striking the right balance between tech- nological and process innovation?
Chao: Acquisition reform is one of these perpetual activities. After having stud- ied acquisition reform for a long time and participating in a lot of the acquisi- tion reform studies and efforts over the last 20 years, I think what you end up observing is that—the knee-jerk reaction to date has often been, “Let’s rearrange the boxes or create czars or change the rules,” when, in the end, getting back to the basics is where you should want to be. What I find encouraging about the latest round of acquisition reform discussions, and what Better Buying Power 1, 2 and 3 are beginning to embed, is the topic of incentives.
It doesn’t matter what rules you set, it doesn’t matter how many boxes you change. If you set the incentives the wrong way, then you’re not going to get behavior change. Tis is why the topic that we just covered, willingness to take risk, is one of those elements that is disin- centivized in the system.
IT STARTS WITH A SPARK
Michael Cataldi, a mechanical engineer and modeling and simulation analyst with the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, uses modeling to evaluate small-cali- ber munitions. We live in an era defined by Moore’s Law, Chao argues. As microprocessors get faster and faster, and storage gets cheaper and cheaper, it enables promising capabilities such as M&S, which in turn enables engineers to zero in on the strongest designs without churning through multiple prototypes. (Photo by Todd Mozes, U.S. Army Garrison Picatinny Arsenal, NJ)
If I’m a program manager in a company, and I take risks and I fail for legitimate reasons, not incompetence, and I’m punished for it—I lose my job, I lose my program, I lose funding, what kind of behavior change do you think that’s going to trigger throughout the entire organization? Or if a company spends its own money inventing a product and the government grabs its intellectual property or insists on having [that] intel- lectual property so it can subsequently do open bidding on the manufacturing to crush the margins down, what do you the reaction is going to be the next time
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Army AL&T Magazine October-December 2015
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