"Advice for a new SECDEF?"

(Initially published article on 16 Nov 2008)

Dan Ward, a well known author in the DoD's AT&L magazine, asked in an online discussion group what advice you would give the upcoming SECDEF on the issues of our poor performance in acquisition activities. (in reference to this article from IEEE Spectrum http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/weapons)

My response was:
One concept that a few of us have been discussing is the mismatch between the the types of systems we want to acquire (disruptive/asymmetric) and the corps of individuals we have leading the acquisitions (title 10 trained officers, APDP/known metrics based acquisition managers).

I hypothesize that we cannot truly acquire asymmetric or disruptive technologies with people who are trained to use management techniques or leadership principles that are best suited for containing known problems. Leaders and acquisition directors who are used to directing their subordinates inherently build a program that works for that leader's and how that leader structures the organization to acquire the system (Conway's Law: "Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." - Brooks). Inherently, title 10 military officers are trained to be this kind of top-down leader for very good reasons. Unfortunately, that leadership style tends to not work so well with disruptive projects.

One suggestion would be to be very deliberative about recruiting, training, and developing leaders that can acquire and field disruptive technologies. Some research that we've done indicates that transformational leadership preferences** work better for novel and disruptive technology programs. If the new SECDEF can figure out a way to establish action level leaders (program managers/directors) that can promote an effective acquisition environment for specific disruptive programs, we may be able to adequately control our acquisitions - not by using the techniques that have worked in the past, but by the PM working with talented/skilled/not-yet-blinded-to-new-t

hings staff to collaboratively "raise themselves to a higher level of understanding". Not every PM needs to be this new kind of leader, as many programs will remain in the "acquire more of the same" category. However, our current system for finding, training, and selecting acquisition leaders focuses on those who have done very well at "acquiring more of the same using the same tried-and-true methods". **Transformational Leadership, as proposed by Bass and Burns, pardon the buzzword sounding name, is an actual preference of leadership action dating back to the 1970's which focuses on "leaders and followers raising one another to higher levels of motivation". Contrast with the more typical transactional leadership preference (common to title 10 military training), in which the leader tells the subordinate what to do or what to be responsible for (also covers contingent reward, where we reward people for doing what we told them) *** I'm intentionally avoiding trite suggestions such as "long term, stable funding from Congress for acquisition programs" and similar, as such suggestions are too far away from the US Constitutional prohibitions on separation of powers and changes there may lead to other very undesirable consequences.