The defense sector is undergoing its biggest transformation since the Cold War. To stay ahead of rapidly evolving threats and technology, the Department of Defense is adopting distributed fighting concepts and hybrid force structures to field a more lethal balance of legacy exquisite capabilities and complimentary affordable mass systems.
Defense innovation challenges are not primarily the result of technology issues, but center on people and process. Delivering world class capability to operators at the speed of relevance requires leaders to recognize and act on the different culture, process and success factors driving sustaining innovation outcomes versus those that drive revolutionary disruptive outcomes.
Embracing the proven Get Real Get Better collaboration process has been a powerful driver of step change improvement in readiness outcomes. The imperative to bring this approach and mindset fully alive across the industrial base to deliver world-class force generation and force design outcomes has never been clearer.
Increasingly, we will see the skills necessary to translate ambiguity and uncertainty into focused and meaningful action — the art of thoughtful risk-taking — as vital to our future, as essential as the skills we use to translate knowledge into action. Our ability to broadly develop leaders with these essential skills, producing the change agents who drive the required experimentation, adaptation and operational improvement, will both be the hardest competitive advantage for us to achieve and the hardest for others to duplicate.
Listen to former Vice Chiefs in the U.S. Department of Defense discuss key insights on innovation, readiness, and risk.
