 It's my privilege to introduce Major General J.P. McGee, the Director of the Army Talent Management Task Force, and welcome you to this professional development opportunity to discuss the Army's ongoing initiatives to reform officer personnel management. There's going to be a questions and answers session at the end of the formal period of this briefing, just a reminder to you that it's being recorded, so if you're not speaking into a microphone, you're not going to be heard on the recording or by the folks that are listening on the outstations, so if you'd be patient, wait for one of the two gentlemen with the microphones here in the back of the room to come to you, and we'll get you into the recording. Without further ado, General McGee, thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Sir, it's great to have you here. Thanks for coming, Brian. Great to see you. Okay, so I'm J.P. McGee, I'm the Director of the Army's Talent Management Task Force. What I'd like to do is I've got about an hour with you today as I have given this more times than I can count, and what I'd like to do is take about 40 minutes to explain this to you, and then I'd like to take the last 20 minutes just to answer questions, and I will stay here even longer if you want to ask more questions, but to try to be respectful of your time. I'll stay here as long as you want to answer all your questions, but hopefully it goes a little bit more smoothly, I think, if we run through without any questions until we get to the end, and then I'll take questions for as long as you've got nothing else going on today other than answering your questions. Next slide. Okay, so we're going to show you a video, and then I'll talk you through these slides, and let's go right to the video, okay? People are the Army's greatest strength and our most important weapon system. The Army delivers the most lethal and decisive land force in the world as part of the Joint Force. To be certain, the Army's modernization efforts are not just about new equipment. They must include the multi-domain operations concept at every echelon. The six modernization priorities, and a 21st century talent management approach based on decades of research and analysis in personnel management practices. The current personnel system is based on a 1947 model of a mass-produced, interchangeable, one-size-fits-all officer corps. In 1980, the Army moved to a rigid structure of year groups based on time and grade and established the up-or-out system, forcing removal or retirement of officers who are not selected for promotion. The industrial age model of the 1940s and 50s focused on developing a large number of interchangeable officers with an emphasis on standardized career models and rigid timelines. In fact, an officer from the 1950s would be very familiar with our current system for managing officers. An information age approach focuses on learning about the individual and taking their uniqueness into consideration for their development and employment with the intent of maximizing the contribution of every member of the Army. Simply put, better information about our people leads to better decisions about how we manage them in a way that recognizes everyone for their unique talents. Young men and women today want to be part of something bigger than themselves. They want to make sure they matter. They don't see themselves as interchangeable parts in an industrial age system. The foundation of the Army's ability to dominate in land combat depends on our skill to attract and manage the best talent, giving us a decisive advantage over future adversaries. Talent management encompasses acquiring, developing, employing, and retaining the Army's greatest asset, its people, to enhance readiness by maximizing human potential. The Army is moving out rapidly in four areas. First, the Army talent alignment process matches officers to assignments. This process empowers commanders and individuals to play a more active role in the assignment process. The foundation of a talent management system is a thorough understanding of the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and preferences of every officer in the Army. The Army talent alignment process, enabled by the software Aim2, moves us forward dramatically to gather this information. Second, we are building a culture of assessments. The Army does not have a comprehensive assessment framework for officers. Talent assessments provide a common lens through which to identify an officer's knowledge, skills, and behaviors. The Army is developing prototypes and pilots to determine how to use assessments to gather data about officers' talents. Assessments provide the Army with better information for development, assignment, promotion, and selection decisions. Third, we are developing options that enable officers to have flexible career paths. Last, we are significantly modernizing the way we promote and select officers. In all of these endeavors and with the nine new authorities granted by the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, the Army has been given the flexibility to determine the characteristics of a future talent-based system. Talent management enables the Army to stay competitive, attract and retain our nation's best talent. Great organizations have the ability to make predictions about the future and enact the necessary changes before they're needed. Applying a soldier's talents where they're needed most gives the Army the agility to meet the challenges of 21st century warfare. The Army talent management approach will maximize the potential of the Army's greatest strength. It's people. What are the big ideas that are framing what we're trying to do within the Army's talent management task force? The first thing is this idea that you hear the Chief talk about. It's a transition from an industrial age to an information age and what that means in the realm of personnel. Specifically, how this nests in with all the other modernization efforts that the Army is doing. We're developing a new fighting concept called multi-demand operations. We're looking at acquiring technology and seeing the fight in a different way that's the mission of Army Futures Command. The center of all this is our people because people are the most important asset that we have within the Army. Let's talk about the approach that we all grew up with coming up in the Army and what we're trying to move to. We grew up with a very industrial-aged approach. It's really formed on two pieces of legislation, the 1947 Officer Personnel Act and the 1980 Defense Officer Personnel Act. Defense Office Personal Management Act. Those two pieces of legislation are really embodiments of industrial-aged practices. What does that mean when you're a large organization? It means as an institution what you need to do is you need to bring in a significant number of people and then as an institution you need to get them to a minimum competency level of acceptance. At that point you can jam them into any position across the entire institution. An infantry captain can go almost anywhere and do these jobs interchangeably. Because you're not enabled by technology you have to manage this large cohort of people and you do this without any IT systems effectively. You have to do this in this very rigid timeline approach. When these laws were written there were actually very forward approaches for how to do it. But now things have changed a lot. One of the big things that's changed is we've got information technology that can help us to manage our people much, much better. We've got a place where we can put this information and again look at officers in a more discreet fashion. So if you take an information-aged approach what you say is an institution brings in a significant number of people, understands their uniqueness, uses that for their development to get them to be really, really excellent and then uses them to employ them most effectively across an entire career that has a lot more flexibility within it. And that's all got to be enabled by 21st century IT systems that can help you do this. Now we're not there yet but that's the vision of how we're going and that's that transformation. And so if our goal is talent management where we are still sort of stuck right now is the idea of performance management and quantity distribution as opposed to true talent management. So that's one of the key dynamics as we're working through as we're trying to go to move this forward. So we talk about having the right officer and the right assignment at the right time over time as being critical to this and also that the idea with talent management is that you've asked yourself the question who's the best officer in this room? The only possible answer is well what job are you looking for? And it's this recognition that different officers might be highly skilled in different fields and it's the responsibility of the institution to start figuring that out, developing them and putting them into a place where they can contribute maximally to the mission of the United States Army. One of the things that we don't have right now that is an impediment because people will come up to me and they'll say JP we already do talent management, we sort of you know have done this mine you know I've been talent management as I've come up. I would say we do this with small subsets of the officer corps. So if you're one of the 302 active duty general officers I think you're sort of talent management. Like they've got a plan for you, they understand who you are. If you're an ORSA or a FAO generally the smaller groups but it doesn't happen for the vast majority of the officer. If you're sort of a middle of the road armor or infantry officer at the rank of say major you're not really talent managed, you're sort of put into a position and you're just sort of moving along. And so what I say the first thing we need to have is a granular level of knowledge about the knowledge skills, behaviors and preferences of every officer within our inventory and then we can start you know using that information to better manage that entire cohort. And I say that what that will impact is not really the top 5% but really will have a significant impact in the management of that 6 to 60%. That's how we choose to define that. And I'll talk about some of the ways we need to do that. The guidance from the Chief and the Secretary have been very clear to our team. It is not to take the current system and make it better on the margins. It's to create a new and better system. And so what we talk about is not a 10% change but a 10x change. So what's an example of that? If you took all four engineers and you took them to an offsite and you said the average miles per gallon for a Ford automobile is about 50 miles per gallon. We want a 10% change. They would go to an offsite. They would try to figure out how to tweak some hoses and some valves and do some things with the engines and they would get you to 55 miles per gallon. If you took that same group of Ford engineers and say Ford's goal is that the average mile per gallon fuel efficiency in every one of our vehicles is 500 miles per gallon. That 10x change, they would have to do something very different. They would have to look at what's the relationship between an engine and the wheels. They would have to look at what the chassis is made of. They would have to look at driver behavior just as a side note. On a car, only 55% of their fuel efficiency comes from actually the engine. So they would have to look at it fundamentally differently and that's the task that we've been given in the Army's Talent Management Task Force. We're not changing things on the margin. We're trying to move and make decisive change across the way that we manage our officer corps. And then the other piece of this is we talk about changing cultural norms because some of the things we're going to talk about are things that are new to us in terms of those of us who've been in the officer corps for about 30 years or so or less. But if you go back in our history, some of these things are things that we've done in our past and have done very successfully. So we'll talk a little bit about direct commissioning coming forward, going ahead. In 1942, the Army was able to successfully direct commission in 102,000 officers in one year in order to meet the needs to fight World War II. And that's not something that any of us have lived with, but we recognize that we needed to infuse civilian talent and technical skills into our military and use it to win a war, and it turned out pretty well. So again, not something that we're used to, but something our Army has done. So that's why we talk about changing just a cultural norm as opposed to changing the culture of your Army. Why is this really important? Well, it's really important because people define our Army and we have probably lost our positions being the premier human development organization in the world and that's what the chief aspires to when he talks about what we want to be as an Army. It also gives us a decisive advantage against our near peer adversaries. So when you start looking at what combat is in the future, and we're talking about large-scale ground combat operations and the national security strategy which drives us that way, we start looking at adversaries who have populations that are larger than ours. We look at adversaries who have an economy who is equal to ours who have closed, at least narrowed if not completely closed the technological gap. We need to, as an Army, take advantage of every advantage that we have and one of our critical advantages is people. And we don't win future wars by sort of squandering the great people that we have in with antiquated management practices and not maximizing the full potential of the people who come in and join our Army. The other piece of this is you are experiencing today the slowest rate of technological change that you will experience in your lifetime. So as fast as everything has happened over the last 20 years, think about a time not that long ago when you didn't even know when iPhone was, it is only going to accelerate and how the Army starts to be able to develop the agility to fold some of these war fighting, some of these skills from the civilian world that are happening in the field of technology and bring them into our ability to fight ground combat operations is going to be absolutely critical because they're going to start playing a key role in what combat looks like in the future. You don't do the other system that effectively says, you know, we're going to run this in a very conveyor-based approach that, you know, if you haven't been in the Army for 30 years, you can't be a general. I mean, all of these things that make us not be able to take the strength of our nation and make it a strength of our Army, these are things that probably need to change over time so we can remain competitive. Then the final piece of this is that, you know, we are certainly seeing a change in generational norms. Okay? So what does that mean? That means that today across the United States having a dual income family is the norm. Okay? And that is a critical step to being able to squarely be in the middle to upper middle class. You know, competition to get in good schools is significantly harder than it was 20 or 30 years ago. And if the Army's lifestyle is increasingly divergent from that and your spouse can't work and, you know, your kids aren't, you know, well educated so they're not competitive, we start putting ourselves at a significant disadvantage for the people that we retain within our Army in terms of our retainer and our most talented. Because the simple fact of the matter is the most talented people in our Army have the most options. And so we need to remain attractive to these people who, you know, our most talented officers who have, you know, all sorts of options that are out there. And we do that by starting to take things like preference into account, more robustly, and to start giving some more flexibility and ownership of their careers as a first step. Okay, next slide. So I'd like to use this as an example of how we manage the officer court today, what it begins to mean when we talk about transition from industrial to information age, and some areas of potential sort of immediate or very soon impact we can start making across the Army. Okay, so this is the career forecast of the way we run our attrition-based model within the officer court today. So I'll focus largely on the active component. But on the left-hand side of that screen, what you'll see is every year we have to bring in 5,000 active duty officers a year. Okay, that's 1,000 from West Point, 1,000 from OCS, and about 3,000 from ROTC. Just so you know, ROTC needs to produce another 2,500 guard and reserve lieutenants to be able to fill out the force. Okay, so just the raw numbers of them having to meet their mission means that they can't be nearly as selective as they would like to be, and they also can't be as directive in terms of what fields of study that we do, because really there's this huge impetus for them just to be able to bring in the right numbers to be able to get to our goals for retention down the road. So you all of a sudden start having these sort of mismatches of things. So here's my first of a couple pieces of personal trivia for you. What is the number one degree that ROTC produces across their graduates? Criminal justice. 10.8% of the ROTC graduates that we commission every year come with a criminal justice degree. And I have nothing against criminal justice degrees, but I would argue in a world that is largely becoming defined by technologies that we may want to have STEM degrees a whole lot higher on that. And you don't actually don't hit a STEM degree until you're at the 7th degree at 3.8% in its general engineering for the officer corps. So that's one of the reasons, but one of the reasons we do that is because the tremendous number of people that we need to bring in. And we need to bring in that many people because at year 11, and you can look there at major, what we need to be able to do is the first selective cut and make 2,150 majors. So the interesting thing is that we need to get rid of by year 11 56% of the officer corps that we bring in. So we need to get rid of 50% of them already, but think about what we do to manage that 50% that we retain what that sort of looks like. So has the Army spent any time to say, here are the talents that we want to retain for the long term within our Army? Here are the skill sets that we need to propel us forward over the next 10, 15 years, unless backtrack and try to find out who those junior officers are, who at least have the potential of having that? We don't do that. Do we survey the officer corps in their first couple of years to find out what their propensity is to continue to serve and why they may stay in or get out of the Army? We don't do that either. We don't do any sort of incentive program to identify that among those 5,000 officers that we commission, there may be some that we want to retain more than others and we would do something as an institution in order to retain the most talent within our ranks. We don't do that as well. What we effectively do is we bring a whole bunch of people in and we say we sort of hope enough get to year 11 so we can do some form of selective cut to major and as long as we've got raw numbers, we're sort of good. As long as we can do an arbitrary sort of 80% cut from captain to major, we're fine because we're all focused on quantity, not the talents. And that's one of the areas where I think increasingly we need to change to start shaping that so we're actually going out and retaining those officers who are going to provide the most benefit for the Army over the long term and then developing some sort of incentives to be able to do that. And again, incentives aren't always cash, right? They may be assignment of choice. They may be different sort of flexibilities you can provide. It's not just about throwing money at people, but at least we could start doing some force shaping things in order to make sure that we're retaining the most talented or at least our best bets on those officers who have the opportunity to contribute to our long term mission. There's a gentleman named Tim Cain. He wrote a book. It's called Bleeding Talent. And it effectively says that the Army does a horrible job of retaining this most talented and they all get out. I would say it's even worse than that. I would say that we don't even spend the time to identify what those qualities are we want to retain. And so we don't know whether we're actually retaining talents or not within our Army because we have not done those things. Again, that's what it means to run an organization in a data poor environment instead of a data rich environment. And just so you know, if you're a large company or organization, if you're a large company in particular that manages your people that way, do you know what you're called? Bankrupt. Because if you go out to the civilian world today, what they will say, and they use this term every single time, they say we are in a war for talent. We don't say that. We don't even think we're in a competition for talent. We don't even think we're in a fair game for talent. But they describe themselves as being a war for talent in order to make sure that their companies remain competitive and don't go out of business. And they don't have the luxury of sort of bringing in so many people that they can do these things. And so I think it's very interesting. So we are now starting to talk about going into, you know, engaging in the war for talent in order to be able to be successful. So I talked about the first, you know, a couple of years of an officer's career, but let's go now to the right side of that equation or that sort of cascading slope there. And let's talk about the way we look at colonels. I would argue in the future the most important role, the important rank that we need to optimize in terms of creation is the rank of colonel. First off, we promote a fair number of colonels. And we also now have the flexibility to have colonels stay in and extend, you know, past 30 years to be able to work on specific missions. And colonels provide the military long-term sort of expertise on the Army staff, on a combatant command staff up at OSD. They have an ability to be able to really contribute after, you know, after years and years of service. I don't think it's about making general officers because the dirty little secret is that every year the Army only produces about 40 general officers and three years after those 40 general officers are created, half of them need to be out of the Army anyway. If they don't get picked up for two, they're out after three years and they're sort of done. So I think colonel is where we need to really focus on making sure on the other end of that wing we've got the most highly talented and diverse skill set within our colonels. Frankly, if you have that, then picking generals is going to be pretty easy. But then you've also got these great leaders that you can then keep in the Army longer. But again, at the end of this wing we do the exact same thing we did in the beginning of it. So what do we do to identify those colonels who have the best talents and the most relevant talents to the accomplishment of the Army's mission? What do we do to try to incentivize them to try to stay in? Not all of them, but the ones who have those sort of unique talents. We just sort of say, hey, look, you're going to be made a colonel and you get to stay three years until you're fully vested and you can get your full retirement and at that point you can stay or you can leave and we really don't do anything to identify those people within our ranks who are the most talented who we want to have stay in and continue to contribute because at the end of the day, hey, look, if we're like 101% on colonels, we're good, right? Because it's pure numbers. It is pure numbers and it's not anything beneath that. That's what you start to see if you start becoming an information age organization. Next slide, please. Next slide when you get a chance. Okay, so you are all Army leaders. Can you go back one? You're all Army leaders. You should understand that when you start talking about talent management, we are adopting a new operational approach to our management of people. It has its own definitions. Just think multi-demand operations or airline battle. You didn't get to define your own terms. You don't get to do the same with this one within the Army. So there's the definition of what talent management is. It encompasses the pillars of acquire, develop, employ, and retain of our people. And we say as an Army that talent is the unique combination of knowledge, skills, behaviors, and preferences. And we sort of footstomp the preference piece because that is really, really critical and it's a big change. You will hear some people say knowledge, skills, attributes. The Army has made a deliberate decision to go with behaviors. And frankly, the behavioral versus attributes is a big psychology sort of discussion in different sides of the field of psychology. We'll never agree on this. But the bottom line is we said that we are more interested in whether you are an officer who behaves ethically than if you're an officer who has the attributes of an ethical officer. So we have decided that the definition is knowledge, skills, behaviors, and preferences. And that's what the Army senior leaders have agreed upon. So you should use that terminology when you're talking about this with your subordinates. Next slide. So how do we start moving this gigantic system, this gigantic organization of the Army from where we are today to where we want to be tomorrow? So first off, you've got to identify where we are. We've got this industrial age system based on a conveyor-based approach in terms of your timelines for your officer's career. Again, I was commissioned in 1990 from West Point and I think any career map that I saw back then, I think I was off no more than six months over the last 30 years in terms of what my different milestones would be. It implicitly says that an infantry officer needs to develop at the same rate as like a cyber officer or develop at the same rate as a transportation officer even though we know those fields are all pretty unique and different and increasingly so. But the system has a lot of great qualities about it. And we try to list out what those strengths are, fair, scalable, predictable, developmental, resilient, and then some of the increasing gaps that we have seen. I like to say that what we're executing right now is the best possible industrial-aged process you can have in terms of the management of people. Like, I know no one else who does a better job in the United States Army than managing an enterprise at this scale as well as we do. And there's a tremendous amount of work done by AG professionals to make this system work every day. But it is a bit like showing up on a bicycle for a motorcycle race because things have just progressed and there are other new technologies that can help us do a much, much better job and there are mindsets that can change as well. So let's talk about where we want to be on the right-hand side. So that's an information-aged approach at the center of that is that the core of it is some idea of flexible career paths, okay? And then underpinning this whole concept of how we manage our people are three things. Is it a management process? I think we're increasingly moving there with the whole Army Town alignment process, which I'll highlight to you. And the next piece is we need to have greater organizational alignment. Okay, so I'm gonna ask you a question. I'd love to hear your answer. What organization and, so let me ask you another question. I'll be back up here. So for logistics and material, what individual and what organization is in charge of the Army for our logistics and material considerations and management? AMC, General Perna, okay? Who's in charge within our Army of all training and doctrine? Trey Dot Commander. Okay, who is in charge of managing the Army's people? Absolutely not. Okay, so it's, I mean, so as I've looked at this, I didn't realize it's telling us this job. Let me tell you all the different organizations that have an outsized role in the management of our people. And I'm gonna give you, I think seven, but I'm probably gonna miss a couple. So G3 Training, which does the funding for a lot of our officers sort of initiatives. G3 FM, which does all the force management, which is under the G3, so they get guidance from there. You've got the HRC Commander. You've got the G1 of the Army. You've got the ASA MNRA. You've got the CAC Commander, who has all the proponency guidance in 600-3 in terms of career pass. And then all the branches work for him, infantry, armor, aviation, all that sort of stuff. And then you've got all the functional areas, all of whom work for somebody else. So we've disaggregated the strategic management of our officer corps and our people to all these different organizations. So it's very, very hard for us to achieve a unity of effort in anything with our officer corps. So this is one of the reasons, amongst many, why things like mits, pits, and spits, you remember that? Remember they were supposed to be treated like battalion commanders? That never happened. You remember we said training battalion commanders or the exact same as a tactical battalion commander? That didn't happen. We talked about the AFPAC hands being something that's a key priority and we're gonna do that. That never happened because we don't have anyone or any organization that has any kind of alignment between all of them as we're looking at meeting the chief's strategic guidance and direction and the secretary's strategic guidance and direction. And it's been further exacerbated by something that we've just recently fixed which was there was no routine touch point back to the chief or the secretary in terms of how we were doing and meeting their guidance in terms of the management of our officer corps. And I should have set up front. I talked a lot about the officer corps because we've been given the task to change it for the non-commissioned officer corps and then eventually the civilian workforce but I think we're small enough that we can work that piece. But again, there has been no mechanism by which we went back and informed the chief and the secretary how we were doing with this critical function. So that's just recently changed. General McConville has established a new routine update to him called All Things People. We're getting ready to do one for him next week where we say, okay, here's the guidance he gave us. We're on glide path or we're not consistent with his vision and make sure he understands where we're in doing that. So I think those are three underpinnings for a new system and I'll highlight a couple of the descriptors there that I think are really important as well. So you can see we brought over the key sort of strengths of this but we need to be able to adapt to disruptive changes. We need much greater flexibility. We need to manage officers based on talent. Here's the other thing. We need to start leveraging technology. So if you take a look at the technology systems, the IT systems that we use to manage our people specifically our officer corps, most of them were written in code in the late 80s to early 90s and have been updated since then and it is not a stretch to say that we have almost zero predictive capability in terms of any decisions that we make about the officer corps with the long term effect it's going to be. So what does that mean? That means I feel like you did about six months ago says I want to change the policy and I want to make all company commands not be 12 months mandatory minimum but 18 months mandatory minimum. We have no modeling or system that says well sir, you know if you do this it's going to increase the queue lines for you to go on a command on these sort of installations. It's going to mean CGSC is going to be backed up and we're going to have people who aren't able to go to CGSC. We can't say seven years down the line this was going to happen for your battalion commanders and how we pick battalion commanders. And that is a huge gap in our IT systems in terms of how we manage the offscore. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the officer corps today has managed off excel spreadsheets and not much else. Because we've got this tremendous ability to see where we are today we've got a pretty decent ability to see where we've been in the last 20, 30 years even that's sort of hard for us but really no ability to see for it and again that is not a good IT system to help us do that and that's what makes it possible because it helps us start making decisions in a data rich environment instead of a data poor environment. So I'm going to talk you through some of the initiatives we've been doing because we've been told by the chief and secretary grab subsets of the officer population run a pilot prototype with them see how it goes and then scale it rapidly to the rest of the army if it's a success and I'm going to talk you through how we've done some of these. So the first one is the Army Town Alignment Process I'm actually going to dedicate a fair amount of time here in a couple minutes about what that looks like and the system by which active duty officers are being assigned. Next I'll talk to you very briefly about assessments. So everyone in this room is familiar with an assessment. It's called the APFT. Every six months you do an APFT and as a consequence of that if you took the average 40 year old soldier and baselineed against any 40 year old American citizen you would find there were three things that we are extraordinary on. That's our ability to push ups in two minutes and our ability to run two miles. That's because we run an assessment every six months and our physical ability to do those three events and you know whether you do it in Kuwait or you do it in Korea you really got the same you've got the same objective assessment on what that means and you all understand the difference between a 297 out of 300 on an APFT or a 210 and it means something to you. But most of the way we manage our Oscar today is based on evaluations. It's based on what your boss's boss thinks of you and then that subjective piece is in it. And I think that's always going to be central to the way we manage our officer corps. But what we're saying is we need to start folding in other information that's more objective so we can get a better view of the officer and then figure out how they need to be developed and then how they need to be deployed how they need to develop and then how they can be employed. So if you show up at like your basic commissioning courses you know OBC or the captain's career course and you're a really good writer and you can demonstrate through an assessment you're a really good writer. Why do you need to go through all that crappy writing courses if you're already good at that? Why couldn't you do something else to better use your time? These are the sort of things that assessments can help us with. They can also help us see us where officers need to you know develop themselves. So what we see is integrating into professional military education at the captain's career course CGFC and the war college these opportunities that do assessments worth in the first 10 years it's largely being used for the development of the officer. That allows the public speaker. You don't have a whole lot of these sort of skills start working on these things over time and as you become a field grade officer and become more senior we start folding that information in terms of how you're actually going to be employed what jobs you may be able to go into and how you can best best be used. The other value that allows us to do is beyond the development of the individual is diagnostically as an institution we can use that to further our PME. So we can look at transportation corps officers at the captain's career course and say wow they really have a problem with like writing or mental flexibility and you can start seeing how then your curriculum could change to address identified weaknesses within a cohort of the officers as we're going forward. One of the first steps forward with this is at the captain's career course every captain is now required to take a GRE. We're making them take a GRE so we can start figuring out who are the right officers for us to send to advance civil schooling which is a significant investment by the United States Army in the future of an officer. So Simon you're a great candidate to go to advance civil schooling or you might be a very good bet for us to send for someone like that. We're also integrating in there a cognition test into the captain's career course so we can start seeing how officers you know how they operate on a cognitive and non-cognitive ability to better assist their development. Okay so the next piece of this is the flexible career pass in August of 2018 the 2019 NDAA was signed it gave us nine new authorities that were mentioned there. One of those is the ability for an officer to be able to opt out of a promotion board for up to two years. If you're doing something of significant value to the Army you can self nominate yourself it's just open up for the first time for this Lieutenant Colonel's Board and you can say I would like to not be considered for promotion for one or two years in order to give me some give myself some some more time. So who does that apply to? That is just think captain to major that might apply to someone who goes down to Fort Rocker and wants to spend a couple more years as an instructor pilot to develop his or her skills as an aviator before they go back to the forces like an S3 or an XO and someday a battalion commander. Instructors up at West Point who have to go to get advanced civil schooling and then a utilization they could roll back their consideration for your major Lieutenant Colonel if they had chosen that sort of path in order to give themselves more time when they leave West Point a chance to get Katie qualified as a major. Imagine a ranger company commander who also wants to get a top tier advanced civil schooling master's degree from a from a premier organization. Something like that but it has to be if you're doing something of significant value. It's our first step to figuring out how we can establish a system that opens up the windows for a timeline for an officer and then allows officers to sort of decide when they want to hop in for promotion boards or not. So the inverse of the opt out is the opt in and we're exploring options to develop that right now. And then the final one is promotions and selections. I will talk about that a lot more with the assessment program. We're going to initiate in January and some of the great work some of the interesting work that we've done on that so far. But certainly there's a whole lot of work on how we can improve our promotion process and our selection process beyond what we have right now. Just to understand legally that the promotion system has a lot of legal requirements to it and there's some flexibility selections for the chief though is a much wider sort of piece. He has a lot of authorities in order to make a uniquely army selection process for selection for key bills like battalion command brigade command. Not quite as much flexibility when you're talking about promotions because there's a lot of law that governs that. So next slide. So I'll hit these NDA authorities very very rapidly. But the first was repel the age limit. Law used to say you couldn't bring someone in who effectively they had to be younger than 42 because they had to be under 62 by the time they hit retirement age after 20 years of service. Another piece of trivia for personnel is during what war did the army adapt 62 as their mandatory retirement age? Anyone? Just guess a conflict. Was that Korea's good guess? No. Civil War. That's exact right. The army was carried forward 62 as a mandatory retirement age since the Civil War. I know it's a, I know I'm a heretic for saying this but maybe we've learned a little since about 1863 or 1864 about the management of people. This is directly tied to the idea of direct commissioning. So we now have the authority to direct commission in officers up to the grade of 06 that was presented to the chief and secretary last year. They said that is open to all branches, all functional areas. I pushed back and said certainly you don't want to direct commission infantry officers. And General Millig Times said hey look, foreign armies make fantastic infantry officers. You find one who wants to come join our army. We will consider bringing them in and making sure that they're in the right position. We have a position that is going to be one of the areas we focus on this year. We now have the ability to do Brevet promotions. Brevet promotions look like this. You have a position. If it's a colonels position, let's say, lieutenant colonels can compete for a position that's been identified as a Brevet colonel position. And if the hiring authority picks that lieutenant colonel to be, for that position, that lieutenant colonel will rank until he or she departs that position. In the cycle that's opening right now within the Army-Town alignment process, we have 225 positions identified for Brevet promotions. We will scale up to 770 use the full authorization. It's something the Navy has been doing for years in their SEALs and their Nuke forces and we've just been giving the authority to do it. We've got a merit-based promotion list. It's just half of the most recent major promotion list. So Congress said, hey look, you don't need to go off date of rank anymore for your execution of your promotion list because what had happened in the past is a board would meet, they would establish an order of merit list, one to 1,000, and then as soon as it came time for us to actually promote people, we reverted back to date of rank as if date of rank had any relevance to how well they had done in the previous 10 years or so. And they said, you don't have to do that anymore. So we went through this consideration. We said, well, should we do that? We don't want to do that. We want to do that for two reasons. One, we thought it would break down the spirit of competitive cooperation that we enjoy within the officer corps. So we all know that we're not really in competition with each other, but there's a sort of friendly competition. And two, we thought officers who were promoted later on in the whole process, we get stigmatized. So they show up in a unit and you could just see commanders saying, I don't want any officers showing up to my unit who got promoted off the 1st of July in the second half of this list. Let's do a hybrid. Let's identify some who are going to be promoted off the order of merit list and some who will be promoted off of the date of rank. And so we sat down and we started working through with the people who were going to execute this. And we said, well, what percentage do you think we should do? And the answer came back. They said, let's promote the top 15%. Let's promote the top 15% of every list and make those guys be the ones who are promoted based on merit. And I came back and I said, I don't want to promote the top 15% because it's my all-time favorite number. And they said, okay, let's do 17.12. I mean, that makes sense to me. And I said, oh, I'm sorry, I just changed my mind. I would love to do 12.13 now. 12.13 is now my favorite number. I love it. And they said, okay, we'll do 12.13, like stop talking, just like let's find a number and go with it. And I said, look, you're missing the point. 12.13, 15%, 17.12, these are all arbitrary numbers. And you can find those scores that are actually identified top clusters of that group. And so that's what we're going to do. Every board that meets now is going to have a mathematical, it's called K-means clustering, analysis done of their scores. Those who are clearly identified as the top cluster will be promoted off the order of merit list and then it will revert back to data rank. And the first time we did this with a full board, the majors list, the range was some categories were at 9%, 19%, but it's where the numbers take you as opposed to something arbitrary like 15% or 17.12%. I talked a little about the opt out of promotion board. I want to reemphasize that that is because you're doing something that's of significant value for the army. That's not just because you're a sub performer in your field and you don't want to get looked at for a promotion board. And that's why the approval for that has to go all the way to the assistant sector of the army for that activity service from up to 40 years if they've got unique skills and they run through that process. The sector army has now been granted alternate promotion authority where he can identify subgroups of the officer core and he can say they need to go through a different promotion board. Think of those officers maybe who we bring in direct commissioning and they're brought in as majors and we want to look at them for like lieutenant colonel but they only have a couple years worth of OERs for example of that. The last two are about the management of the IRR and the management of the guard in terms of some discrepancies between when states recognize and when the active duty recognize them. But again biggest authority has given the army and the services since 1980 and frankly there's sort of a piece of this that says look we're giving you all these authorities we're very interested to see how you're going to expand and use these as some significant first steps towards changing your management because I want to talk to you rapidly through the army town alignment process which I think is what many of you are interested in and I think we'll get a lot of questions here. Okay chief and secretary approved of these principles a couple things to emphasize. Everyone is being moved into the ATAP process okay no longer is it an HRC rep an assignment officer calls you and says hey Captain Smith you've got three jobs that are coming open for this next cycle which one do you want to do. You have increased transparency so you see every person within your time. The specific guidance from the secretary of the army was get the assignment officer out of the middle of the process this is now a conversation between an officer who's moving and a unit that is hiring and we have pushed the hiring authority down to brigade commanders and above okay and so this is now a very different way of doing it again talking about 10x change in terms of how we hire officer corps. We have tried to loosen up the professional development requirements so also if you go out of the campus career course and go to an ROTC assignment you don't need to go right to a unit so we've tried very hard to loosen up many of those things that have made our sort of assignment process artificially constrained and again we've got increased transparency and HRC effectively only kicks in if there is a failure of the market to find the proper match. This is a first step towards incentivizing officers and unit participation and sort of incentivizing officers to find the proper match. So what we've done is we've linked these brevet promotions with hard to fill locations so all of a sudden if you have to go to a place like JRTC or NTC or Korea some places that are hard for the army to fill you can be available and eligible to be brevet promoted if you go to an assignment in there. Next slide. I will talk through this very quickly but the really sort of three phases setting the conditions, executing the market and clearing the market in a way that we've always done this and it is all based on readiness. So this isn't every job in the army is open. We still go through the standard process of saying that the army has only so many movers and so many jobs and we prioritize what jobs to be filled. I only say this because people come and say hey look everyone's going to want to be a speechwriter in Hawaii instead of being an infantry battalion S3. That's not the case. In terms of readiness we will make being a battalion S3 a critical role. The market place and the regulated marketplace opens up as it is right now what it allows is sees individual movers to see every job that's available across the army and it allows the unit to see every officer that's available to move and it is and then it allows a conversation to happen and then allows individual officers to be able to preference where they want to go and units to be able to preference their candidates. If you're talking about individual officer preference deep because the whole thing is set up for you to be able to get your preference as an individual moving officer and that's the side of the equation that has the individual officer preference weights is more heavily way than anything else in this whole process. So make sure you go deep but also you've got to get used to the fact that like you may be getting your 27th out of 200 preferences which isn't half bad but it's different than when you were given like you were given a good choice. So when the market closes we're going to clear the market, we're going to run an algorithm that matches that again individual preference is weighed. We're going to stop, we're going to run the numbers, we're going to check and make sure that there are any significant issues with performance, distribution or anything else we're going to see that we make sure we don't disadvantage any units and then we're going to go final with the decisions that come out. This transparency, his or her individual preference gains more weight and an improved ability to manage your own career. In terms of units, units get transparency, they get to build their own teams and then we think it's going to give you a boost in readiness. Here's the big thing, what the Army now all of a sudden has though is a central repository for information about our individual officers who have to self control and manage their own career. We're going to be working on the knowledge skills behaviors from different positions and from that we can start doing all sorts of really interesting analytics that will help individuals over time and will help the institution out as well and so it is for the first time us moving all this stuff, all this information into one environment for which we can better manage the outscore. It's going to be a great opportunity for us. I think you've already heard the chief talk about it. He has decided that we are going to launch a new way of picking battalion commanders. I will talk you through this fairly quickly. What it came to us was take a look at how we select for battalion command. It plays a critical role for the accomplishment of the mission as well as the effect that a battalion commander is doing. We analyzed the current way and we said when you're a battalion commander and you go for that board 25 board members review about 1,450 files and so when you do the math on that it means they review every file in about 57 seconds. Which is why we've got those tweets there because what that means is when they're looking at your OER they effectively look at your senior rate, your block in terms of your promotion or selection there's more information contained in most tweets than is relevant information within your OERs. We said is there a better way that we can do this? Is there a better way that we can bring additional information in that would be relevant for such a critical position? The other piece of the reason why battalion command is so important it's one of the true significant cuts that we make and from battalion commanders and through battalion commander was if we brought in more relevant information would we make better decisions as an army? Let me give you a graphical representation of this. Colonel Stollworth would you please stand up? Thanks. I need to make a decision on Colonel Stollworth. I am her senior raider. I see only so much of here under the current system that is the only piece of information that is going to be my stand up. Colonel Calvert is one of her peers or subordinates. He probably has some pretty important information about Colonel Stollworth that we want to know about Colonel Stollworth before we make a critical decision about it. So how do we fold that information? So now we've got two points of information coming together. Colonel Jacobson you mind standing up? You represent the information that we get through the screening done by psychiatrists. So all of a sudden we've got your senior raider insight. You've got your peer and subordinates insights and you've got an impartial set of assessments done that give us a much better idea of whether Colonel Stollworth is the best candidate to be put in that position of responsibility. At the core of it that's what the battalion commander assessment program is trying to do. It's the idea of triangulating and bringing all this other relevant and really important decision. Next slide. So what do we do? We grab the alternate list of infantry and armor officers and we made them report down to 26 of them and we asked them to report down to Fort Benning so we could run a pilot program on what this would look like. So the first thing that happened is we sent the invitation to 26 and three came back and said I'm not interested in doing it. I don't want to be a battalion commander. So that's fine. It was good to know. We set up a grading scale that said we were going to score three events, cognitive and non-cognitive assessments. We're going to make them do a graduate skills diagnostic test which is online sort of grammar test and then make them write an essay, an argument of essay and an essay that we chose and we're going to make them take an APFT. So those are the three scored events to reestablish the order of merit list. But then we added a bunch of other events to gather information to help us make this decision. So we had them sit down and do a psychological test with this general sort of psychological assessment. They then had to sit down with a psychologist for about an hour to talk through the results of that. We sent out this thing called the Army Commander Evaluation Tool which was a sort of streamlined 360 degree assessment which you could fill out about 10 minutes and effectively says, so we found those peers and subordinates that we sent this to. We went through and found out who had been one of your peers or subordinates. We sent them the questionnaire and then they very rapidly had to sort of fill this individual's leadership style and then really most importantly would you recommend this person to be a battalion commander and we gave them a free form to be able to fill that out in terms of making any sort of comments. I will just tell you that overwhelmingly overwhelmingly like the 95 percent the comments were positive to neutral in very few cases where they're actually negative. And then we did an interview process and it was a blind board interview process so the candidates came in after getting some information from the psychologist information that had been anonymized. So it was candidate one, two, three and four. They reported behind a screen and then there was a structured interview that happened with six general officers asking them questions. And this was all just sort of a pass-fail. At the end of that the panel members were asked to do a pass-fail vote on whether they thought those officers should go into battalion command. So I'll talk you through the results. Next slide. So with the new OML what we found out is the average OML shifted about eight positions. So about 30 percent shift because we had about 23 and they shifted eight. All BCAP candidates said that the BCAP was a better process for picking battalion commanders. Many of them recommend we do it on top of the standard CSL. So the CSL worked out. All seven general officers who sat on the panel said that this is a better way to pick battalion commanders within our army. But really there are some other things that came out that were a little disturbing too. Five of them failed. So two failed for height weight. Three failed for being deemed by the panel board as being not fit for command and they just thought they would be the wrong people to put. And we also took primaries who were very high on the primary list and we threw them in the second iteration of this and see how they would score against the alternate list. And one might think they would take one, two, three and four. They took two, three, seven and thirteen out of 27 on that one. And so again, when you bring in different and relevant information, you come up with different choices on this. What the chief has decided is that in January I noticed about to go out to about 815 officers because the Lieutenant Colonel Central Selection Board has met. We have gone a straight OML. 815 officers will receive invitations to come to Fort Knox between the 15th of January and the 12th of February and they will show up for a five day period where they will be run through this assessment process which is modified a little bit based on the lessons that we've learned here. An order of merit list will be re-established and that's how we're going to pick our primary and alternate. You should know that a number of factors will be weighed but the heaviest weighted criteria has been your manner of past performance as determined on how you did on the order of merit list coming out of the Central Selection Board. But a lot of other factors are going to be used in this weighting as well and there will be a board process similar to how I described it to you. Next slide. I think I went over. I apologize. I can stay here as long and answer as many questions as you would like. But down and dirty that is where we are right now. So what questions do we have? Yes. So we have people who are listening on the outs. I had a question about matches bumping up against manning guidance. Under what circumstances will matches in the marketplace be broken? This is a great question. So the way you ask that question is a little bit off though. So during the initial setting the conditions for the market we have already established the positions that the Army has decided to fill. So let's just say you're CAC and the active component manning guidance says CAC is going to be manned at 80% and they have 100 open billets. That list HRC validates those are the right 80 positions to fill. Those are the ones that are going to be moved into the regulated marketplace in AIM 2 to get an assignment for. So that's the first piece of it. It's not every job that's available comes out when just the ones that have gone through that process. And then the things that can break a match because I probably didn't emphasize this enough if at all is that a one to one match from an individual in a unit will not be broken unless it's an exceptional circumstance like it's EFMP or if it's like a married armies couple program or something like that. We're trying to do all that work early in the system but the general the philosophy is the market matches are maintained and you know one to one is obviously the most important but you can have two to two or two to four and those market matches are not going to be tweaked with unless there are some of these things like you're not qualified because of security qualifications you've got an EFMP issue or something like that. So at your point you have to maintain those matches otherwise the system doesn't have a whole lot of validity. Now here is one piece that we've been mindful of is you know we're making these sort of calls about jobs about nine months before people fill people show up because we're doing this in the summer cycle. So we have given the local commanders at the post the ability to tweak with up to ten percent but we're going to track those numbers and so the guidance is if you're slated to go if you're picked and chosen to do a brigade that the goal is 90 percent of the officers who are picked to go to that brigade are going to go to that brigade and they're going to stay at that brigade for at least nine months and after that the senior mission commander can do it. Now you know over nine to ten months things can change like new operational readiness requirements become people get sick or ill things can happen that would cause some change but we don't want to be much more than ten percent if it happens it's going to trigger a flag okay great question I probably should have covered that earlier. Were there questions? Yes. Sort of Lieutenant Carl Livingstone question about army filling joint billets. So right now most a lot of the joint billets are like former battalion commander or former brigade commander billets I'm from a smaller functional area we don't have those kinds of and so sometimes we run into complications filling joint billets that are designated because that's sort of a standard measuring stick across the services is there any thought now into how this might play out you know if we look at matching the right officer and the right billet at the right time will it be limited in some way or expanded in the joint world. So it is expanded joint world and the man who has been working this is Colonel Michael Cousar so I will let him hit that in some detail. So I think we're going to start by going with this is you're going the first step is you're going to see all of the joint assignments and I think that's a change from your assignment officer giving certain people certain elements of the population usually based on your MOP the ability to get a nominative a joint or an OSD assignment. So step one is you're going to see all of those jobs listed and you're going to be able to contact the incumbents and you're going to be able to sell yourself based on your resume. So that's how we see the competition happening for those jobs. Does that answer your question? From what I understand some of the joint hiring decision makers are going to be looking for a minimum level and I don't know if that will change in the future or not. Okay so I think the big change here is that previously we had one dimension that we were looking at and it was performance and so what you're saying is hey they only wanted to consider top performers and that's kind of what I was saying that your assignment officer was only showing those jobs to a certain subset of people. So what we want to change with talent management instead of managing people based on past performance only we want to give you the hiring agency the ability to hire what seems to be that average officer who has a unique knowledge skill and behavior that qualifies them for that job and so that's where we're going. Michael let me sort of reinforce that. So I think all of us are familiar with what happened when the Army tried to fill the SFAP mission. Remember the Security Force System brigades. Okay and this is something you're great embodiment of what happens when you try to go from data port to data rich. So the Chief Staff of the Army at the time said SFAPs are important we want to man this with high quality officers and let's just talk about captains and we said as an Army only top 10 percent captains can go in there. Well if you're running this by only one dimension which we generally tend to do that means they took a review of all your last OERs and we said only those who are in the top 10 percent based on this MOP score you get whether you know it or not you've all got a MOP score and it's a quantitative of how likely you are to be promoted at your next board. The flaw in that was and I can say this because I commanded a Security Force Assistance Brigade is that when you're looking at captains you're really looking at company command positions within you know how they did as company commanders within the Army as captains and so what we found is we found the top 10 percent or top 15 percent of company commanders and we said this is the crew from which we're going to pick advisors. So again I commanded a Security Force Assistance Brigade and I can tell you the skill sets that you need to be a great company commander are really different than the skill sets you need to be a great advisor and I had some great company commanders who would be lousy advisors and I had some great advisors who would be lousy company commanders but when you run this enterprise in a data poor way you only have one you know measurement by which you can look at them and you're always going to be in a constrained environment but let's talk about what this could be like in the future. What it could be I want to find officers who would be good advisors okay let's say just for their performance just as an initial screen I want top 50 percent officers okay just just as a rough sort of look at their OERs but I want to have someone who has a high degree of cognition and a high degree of cognitive flexibility maybe someone who's tested and measured well for cross-cultural fluency and then someone who in his own self-described behaviors says that he or she likes to travel internationally and go to foreign countries because what better information of what really you enjoy than how you spend your own time and money and now because of vein 2 we've got a place where we can see all those things and so all of a sudden when you're doing the search parameters for the people that you want to bring in to be advisors you get a very different set than just saying give me the top 10 percent of all your company commanders and so you get better advisors on one side of that but the other thing is those people who wouldn't so you get a mission you get a lift in the operational effectiveness of your advisory mission commanders you know they don't get jammed into a position where they're always going to be frustrated not doing very well and they can work on some other skill sets maybe send them to advanced civil school and maybe send them to NTC or JRTC and they infuse their skills into the force but that's what it means I think when you start doing that and so your point from the joint now you can see not just who you know who the sort of arbitrary screen is there may be in the lower or the middle echelon some people who be really really good joint officers who can contribute to your fight in terms of their own knowledge skills behaviors and so that's what I think you're getting out an opportunity to see. What are their questions? Mr. Good afternoon Colonel Rob Parker thanks for your time with us today I want to look at the roles in ATAP slide specifically under roles unit talks about being aware of nepotism I was wondering if you could take a minute to describe what kind of safety or safety mechanisms are in place to preclude us from going down that road is an army. Yeah so there are really sort of three things that we're concerned about and I think we share the concern about having this hiring authority go this way so one is nepotism two is performance distribution and three is diversity so let's just talk all three because that is one of them so all I answer is yours directly so nepotism so my first question to you would be how do you know nepotism isn't happening under the current system and what mechanisms do we have to check against it and then that we routinely and systematically check now we have an ability to actually check this in these conversations as we're trying to figure out how to do these we are always in this conflict between is this something we want to regulate so we can set a bunch of rules about nepotism and what that looks like or is this something we just want to be able to illuminate so we can see how commanders are doing in terms of exercising this authority that they've been given on the idea of nepotism we decided that for this first iteration we're going to try to illuminate nepotism it gets a little bit tricky like how many times can I go work for Rob Parker before it's nepotism and if you're a brigade commander should you be able to hire maybe three people out of 40 that you worked with before or is that five people out of four and so we just sort of thought let's see how this goes and we can take a look and do a run now that we've got the data commanders specifically advised to make sure that they are open up to hiring all sorts of talents also in terms of doing this with smaller subsets when we did this in the green pages for what we found was that engineer officers who were given a hiring authority entered into this process thinking they were going to hire their own people but when they saw the totality of the talents that were out there they made dramatically different decisions because you know Colonel Hansen I could have served together a number of times and I thought for sure I was going to bring him on to my team but when I see everyone who's out there I'm like well he's really good but the person I need is someone I hadn't even met before and I just interviewed this person and I came up with a very different plan make sure you're not hiring people who just sort of look like you or don't look like you or whatever it is to be able to do that and then the performance distribution and again that went out in the X order as well and commanders will be evaluated and how well they do that and we've got ability to look at that and the other is performance distribution as I sort of mentioned we're going to after we do the initial slating we're going to stop and make sure that we don't you know really hurt in locations that are tough to fill because there remains a geographic area of the Army and so we're not going to zero out you know the brigade that's down at Fort Polk and we're going to take a look at what that actually looks like okay but those are three concerns that we have and we're going to take a hard look at that as we're executing this okay what are the questions yeah please Sir Colonel Brian Chapman I'm an Army FAO being a small functional area how many of the new authorities have been implemented or can be used to manage if you have shortage in populations 05, 06 and things like brevet promotions or extending MRDs would help to fill gaps that are in the force so the brevet promotions we're about to do we're given 770 positions this first marketplace, regulated marketplace has identified 225 positions the extensions past 30 years is something we're still working to try to figure out we bump into this issue of we're trying to extend people but we're already over strength in terms of colonels for the Army so we're working that right now to try to figure out what that looks like but I think a place like FAO where you've got a unique skill set and there are not a lot of people coming behind you with those I think it's right for opportunities for stuff like that okay Sir David Thomas a quick question about I'm trying to understand I understand the preferences between officer and units and how those marry up one to one, two to two etc how does the algorithm come in is that I'm not a super strong math guy are you saying that's how we calculate the whole pool or is there some way of looking at the individual relationship between officer and unit so I will start this off and then I'll turn it over to Colonel Kazzara who has been working this so it is based on the medical matching model so the way that people get chosen for medical schools but it is strongly based on preferences and it's a measure of weight preferences between the units and the individuals but the individual preferences have a stronger weight than the unit preferences in terms of how we do this matching as we're going forward you want to follow up Michael Sir I would just dovetail first off because we're short on time there are two great videos out there this is based on the national medical resident matching program which won a Nobel prize for being a very fair preference matching system we've changed it to the army town alignment algorithm which also has its own video on youtube if you google that but basically we picked this it's called an officer proposing delayed algorithm and what that means is there's really no gaming the system which is why we chose this so it doesn't advantage or disadvantage first movers the market is open for 60 days of your preferences in on day one or day 60 no advantage or disadvantage it also allows no one to game the system hey I'd really like that job but I don't think I have a shot at it so I'm going to make this other job my number one preference this allows people to reveal their true preferences and without any gamesmanship they would alter alter what they're revealing as their preferences there's a couple reasons we picked the algorithm right there but I think the videos are really illustrative and you get it immediately one other thing I forgot because they were being passed out we did pass you out a handout I'll take question but we did pass you out a handout I would strongly ask you to take a couple minutes to fill that out what's really important is you put your DOD ID number in there we're not going to come track you down unless you want us to I'm not going to have any objections to anything you say but it allows us to say hey lieutenant colonels think this so I would ask you to put all that information on there and then as you leave hand that to our team in the back one of the questions we have yeah Mr. Colonel Jason Davis from DAG3 DMOAV so we've heard the complaints from the force on the old system or the current system in two years or after a few cycles what do you guys predict will be the complaints about the new system and then what can we do to help the town management task force with messaging from the DA staff yeah I think the first thing you're going to find is some people are going to be like hey I thought my preference mattered and like it didn't matter okay well that might be because you're not a particularly attractive candidate and frankly I think we're going to start gathering some of that information right like I mean if you have to be if you have to be forced into a job you know two or three assignment cycles that's a pretty clear indication about the overall value of the skills that you bring to the Army I think the immediate mess you know is a couple of times because we've never run it on these numbers before it's important for an individual to preference deeply and then for units to preference deeply as well as long as that happens there's going to be some form of a match I do think one of the things that we've seen which is really positive is that officers are reaching out to mentors and now that they have all these sort of options and choices and they're saying like how do you see me where do you think I should go and so anecdotally we're getting a lot of feedback about how this is driving conversations that hadn't previously happened when it was much more sort of centrally controlled by HRC and you got a couple of options and you went forward but that is one but I think just the messaging is for people to understand how this whole system works how their preference is weighted and and I'm sure there are going to be a whole bunch of unanticipated I mean you know we're going to the data analytics and the AAR process we've built that into this entire process and this process we're going to be able to see what we find out but Michael can you think of anything we're anticipating seeing in the next year to two years in terms of major or significant issues no sir I think you hit it I mean you just have to there's one market that has 757 officers in it so somebody is going to get their 700th choice so I mean you just need to be more accustomed to hey this is great I got my 57th choice I mean there's just a change in culture the other thing is the other sir I knew you're going to I knew you're going to have a question it's going to be a hard one too the the other thing is interesting so I had these conversations with some people who've been you know in the personal management world for you know for a long long time and they'll say stuff like hey JP you know and in my experience all you all officers want to do is go to a post and what I point out is in your entire experience it's the only choice you've given to an officer right like because you don't get assigned to a unit you get assigned to a post and the senior mission commander there is the one who assigned you down so I think some of that stuff is going to be really interesting to see about when officers are given the ability to go actually to a particular unit as opposed to a particular post how that starts shaping preferences and start bringing this information JP just for the record I wanted everybody to know I had to ask a question because this row just won the spring but award that's an important award to have hey I got into to aim to today and I was going down through all of our open requisitions and I was taking a look at the section where we're able to put in specific qualifications for the job ksbs and I found myself particularly for the crew that we have really placing a premium on certain masters degrees right this issue associated with information age army the chief's push over the last two palm review cycles advanced civil schooling funding has taken it in the shorts just put it lightly gang I there's no better way for me to say that that said if you could establish the data driven foundation for what folks are asking for inside aim to there may be more ammunition inside the ttpeg deliberation in particular I was just wondering for your thoughts on that sir I think that is I think that's a great point and I think it is one of a number I mean it is it is already interesting so Sir I agree with you I agree everything you said and I think we're going to start getting really good insights about the mismatch between the skills we wish we had and the available inventory of officers I think I'd start driving things like funding of certain degrees and incentivizing officers to do that and again that's a data rich already we're seeing things that I think are really interesting that we hadn't even considered sort of the ramifications of it so for example you know we have now been able after a couple runs of this to talk mathematically about which posts are most preferred and which are least preferred they're sort of a cutoff point where you know they're more preferred than least preferred and one of the ones that's on the other end of the least preferred side is for bliss so I was having this conversation with the with the commanding general out at out at for bliss general you know Patrick Matlock and he said he said look I can't wait to see this data because I'm going to take this information and I'm going to go to the leaders at for bliss and in El Paso and say look you're not an attractive you know you're not a destination of choice you're not a post of choice so we need to do something together to make El Paso in the surrounding community and for bliss a more attractive place to be and so you know that's the institutional level in the individual but sir I think I think what you just mentioned is going to be important but I think it's going to be one of a hundred other things that we see as we as we finally have like a coherent data structure from which we can learn this because what everyone's always told me and again I can I can say these things I don't fully understand but when you start actually getting a cohesive framework to gather your data you start off you know get trying to think you've got some you want to get answers to certain questions and then you find out you're not even asking the right questions because there's these linkages amongst the data and I think that's just one of them so that and Carl your come over and OCL L and from a younger generation perspective is there any protections to put in place for say units with niche skills like going to the 82nd and hey we only want majors that are jump masters is that going to kind of close the window or there are areas in there that that will leave that option open for for people to get into those type of units that they want to hunt down so you know so again you know you want to go to the 82nd and you're a high quality to do is to have a dialogue with that brigade commander who has that hiring authority and you get a chance to say here's why I'm a great fit to come to the the 82nd I didn't you know I didn't go to a jump unit before but here are the reasons why but what we are doing increasingly is we're eliminating all these restrictions that would say you couldn't go there and so now you've got an opportunity to actually see what those positions are compete for them and you can have that dialogue with a hiring authority the brigade commander to make sure that there will be a number of officers that won't get their choices and that will end up being at the bottom of the pool or whatever so I was just kind of wondering what's that feedback loop for those officers that aren't doing so well since we have now all these metrics and all this information how will they get the information to them so they can actually you know improve their chances or yeah it's that's a great question so let me give you so you see these questionnaires we just passed out I will I will give you one of the pieces one that we've brought together shouldn't be a surprise to you but 75% of the officer corps that we've asked this question to and I think now the data sets about 1600 officers so it's fairly stable at this point like numbers aren't going to change but about 75% of the officer corps that we survey think of there in the top 25% of the officer corps okay so we clearly have an issue with visibility in terms of where we are I think when we start bringing assessments into this and certainly in the first 10 years we are unable to see these things and you start getting this feedback and it's objective it's not just my opinion of you it's actually a you know a fair measurement of your of your skills I think people start getting a better feel for for where they are and I think that starts driving maybe different either career choices or feels that they go into and I think there's a whole lot of value in that because I don't think right now officers really see themselves accurately in terms of their own skills or skills in their career field what else Sir do you see at one point other branches competing for billets that are in a different branches billet for example you know being the G6 out of Fort Carson it was hard to get people to come out and become Brigade S6's and serve in that billet but there could be an infantry or armor officer even a low justician they could fill that Brigade S6's billet and compete for it. Yeah we haven't seen that before I mean I would still see Brigade S first off I don't think there are any billets that are hard to fill Fort Carson as far as I can tell but I well interestingly Fort Carson is super popular much more popular like Hawaii which again you wouldn't know I mean I would have always thought Hawaii was more but I think Fort Carson because it's still located in the continental United States certainly as you become higher ranking I think people start having kids and they want to really look at that yet I think you know right now as we're seeing this you'd still want to have a signal officer doing that doing that role now I think you're going to go in a different direction you know we sort of code different jobs post like Brigade S6 and so right now if they're these billets that are open they're only a chunk that go to Infantry Officer I think you could see we could see expanding that in terms of how they manage that at a at a lower level but not as you're sort of describing at least not okay any other questions okay well I really appreciate your time apologize for going 20 minutes over it's very hard for me to do this in an hour and you guys had great questions I will stick around here if there are if there are any questions and I will just end with with just a couple thoughts that I think is really important for us all to understand you know we have a Chief of Staff of the Army General McConville who spent three years as the G1 and two years as the Vice okay at least in my time in the Army I don't think we've ever had a Chief who has understood the people side of the Army better than General McConville there is a reason why he says this is his number one priority because he understands the system and he understands how we need to make it significantly better to retain the right talent to win future wars at the end of the day that's what this is all about and then the final piece of this is you know I have seen this in lots of different fields as well but everybody loves change until that change impacts them it's just true we all hate change and if you tell me you don't hate change I'm not sure I'm going to believe it but as we're doing this make sure I mean understand that we're doing this for the reasons of making the Army more competitive more ready for future for future fights and then make sure you spend the time to understand the reasons why and mentor your subordinates on how this is going forward and then as we go forward we are always open to your inputs and how to make this better okay like I don't think we have every answer I think we are we are clear on a direction that we're moving out but we rely upon your feedback to make this whole system better okay thank you very much