 Okay. And now for our main keynote this morning. I think when we left off yesterday afternoon for those of us who were in the design thinking portion trying to solve that wicked problem, we left off with the image of turtles upon turtles and how deep, how many layers of turtles we should get through. And we had a lovely array of sticky notes on an iceberg. And we were trying then to maneuver ourselves from how we got some things on three levels of an iceberg. And now today and this afternoon we're really going to dive down into what do we do about all those stickies and how do we start solving our main problem. And so I think it's really hard to capture the essence of an organization and particularly the culture of an organization to say nothing of how we might change that. But there are a handful of people who really have made that their life's work. And so one of those people, Peter Shine, is our keynote speaker this morning. And along with his father, the co-founder, he is the chief operating officer of the Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute in Menlo Park, California. And Peter was a strategy consultant and corporate development executive at large and small technology companies in Silicon Valley, including Apple and other startup ventures. We are delighted to have him share his organizational focus, his ideas and ways to conquer our wicked problem this afternoon. So Peter, the floor is yours. Thank you for joining us this morning. All right. Well, thanks all for coming. It's an honor to be here. This is great. And what a super topic. And I also want to say that there is that elephant in the room that after two years, this is great. It's new after two years. We were doing this all on Zoom last year. Actually, I don't know. I was. So it is a great pleasure to be in person in the same space. That's obviously a very important principle for all of us to remember that as much as we can do this all virtually, it's really important to do this in the same space. So let's see, do I have a clicker? No. Yeah. Yeah. So the next slide, just quickly a little bit about me. I studied cultural anthropology and undergrad. In fact, yep, I am going to do this because it's going to be easier. So and I want to walk around. This will make it harder for the Zoom camera. So studied cultural anthropology, but went into business, did an MBA, 25 years in Silicon Valley, but always sort of drawn to those, particularly in M&A, drawn to those issues of are these people going to fit with our people? Are our people going to be good to these new people? So that, you know, you can think about M&A in financial terms, but the success and failure of M&A is never measured in my mind in financial terms. It's have you brought teams together that are going to be not only efficient together, but effective together. So that's part of what drew my dad and I together. He's been doing this since the early 80s. I was studying anthro in college while he was writing the first organizational culture book. And so we just said we have things to say. We have things we want to share with the world. And honestly, a few kind of rants about things that were frustrating us in the work that we were doing, but also what we were seeing for me in Silicon Valley. And then for him after 40 years at MIT, but he then moved to Palo Alto in 2018, so we got to work together. And that's why we started our little institute and wrote four books together and we're working on a fifth. And so that's a little bit about me. So you can go to the next. So for today, it sounds like you were doing some pretty kind of tough heads down design thinking work yesterday. So this is sort of intended to be a little bit of a sit back and let a little of our crazy theory stuff wash over you because there'll be plenty of hard work for the rest of the day. And this is about always that tough problem and problem solving is can you be specific enough because as you get more specific, generally problem solving is easier. It's that culture tends to be this vague thing, how can we possibly fix something we can't even see or smell or touch or hear. And so today is about a little bit more vocabulary. I know you kind of worked on a model yesterday and a vocabulary to start dealing with some of this. Today's a deeper dive on that and hopefully this will help not confuse. However, there is a little a little bit of a tease and that is that we have actually been out in public talking about how we don't like to use the iceberg anymore. So it's it's it's not a bad framework, but we had kind of came up with a new framework that isn't in this slide deck. That wasn't intentional. I didn't I didn't I didn't know the plan to sort of give you the alternative to the iceberg, but you will recognize the sort of the three layers of structure. And I'll just tell you that the reason we tend not to use the iceberg anymore is because culture is not frozen. And it's it's very important metaphor in that so much is below the surface. That's that's was the sort of the initial idea of the iceberg as a metaphor. But we started to feel like, yeah, but, you know, culture is pretty dynamic. And so we'll get into that more. The alternative metaphor is a lily pond where a lot happens below the surface. And then the rest of it is described in some of our books. And if we have time at the end today, I will I will describe that metaphor as well. We have lots of other metaphors to get to. So let's let's start going through this next slide. So first of all, why do we care? And in my mind, we care because complex organizations are human systems. Human systems. And the lot of this talk will be about human versus system. The some of the founding fathers and OD like Eric Trist referred to organizations as socio technical systems. And but so much of kind of modern management theory has been more about the system and less about the human. More about the resource and less about the human. It is interesting how it's not human resources anymore. It's people in places or it's people operations. That's good because human resources tend to tend to think more about the resource and less about the human. So today is about make sure that we're balancing what's the system, what's the human. So with that, I want to kind of set up the next slide with that idea that I don't think it's always been the case that we've thought of organizations as human systems. In fact, Taylorism and Frederick Taylor was out there around the time of the developing assembly lines, sort of defining that mid century view of the organization as a machine. And so this idea that in the past man was first, but in the future, the system is going to be first. Yeah, I mean, because you're trying to create efficiencies and you're trying to eliminate defects and you're trying to move us quickly toward that model A or model T, that made some sense. But we're humans. So were we comfortable with that? Well, next slide. Mary Parker Follett is sort of less known as one of the early great organizational thinkers. But she was always a little bit more of a humanist. And so her comment is, and I love this, the problem is not how to get control of people, but how people can control the situation. Because I think that's really a much more better statement of where we are in the 21st century, that all of the systems that we've designed to control humans, but that's not the problem. The problem is that there are complex situations that humans have to get together to solve. So then the last sort of setup comment here, next slide, is from Douglas McGregor, who was my dad's teacher at MIT when he first got there. He recruited my dad. And he made this very clear distinction between a view of people in an organization, Theory X, as resources, as they're working because they want to get paid, but they're not working because they want to work. Versus Theory Y, which is that humans do want to engage. With the goals and objectives of the organization. And they do want to work. It has to be fair. It has to be good. It has to be something they enjoy doing at some level. But it was a human first kind of like, let's make the assumption that people are good and they actually want to be working. Because again, in the 21st century, the sort of machine model of the organization, that wasn't a requisite assumption. That you could assume that people don't really want to be working, but they do want to be paid. So let's just treat them as resources. And so here we are in the 21st century. We're in the second quarter of not quite. But we're moving along in the 21st century. And I don't think we have that machine model of organizations anymore. That depends where you look. But generally, I think we've evolved. We've moved forward to a more kind of modern view of the organization. So let's go forward. And start then into the theory dive with a quick definition about culture. There's many definitions, all of them generally work. But this is sort of a simple one to give you another perspective for today. And then we'll talk about structure and practice. So next slide. Accumulated shared learning. We could fill a page with a very complicated definition of culture. But for now, does it help us just to say that as an organization and as individuals, our culture can be summarized as the accumulated shared learning that's helped us deal with external threats. And as an organization helped us deal with internal integration challenges. Integration challenges, that's you've got silos and fiefdoms and people behaving badly and ages and sexism, racism. All of those things are forces against an integrative culture. But at the end of the day, we figure those things out, sorting out our external challenges and internal threats. And what is successful becomes what we think of as that sort of shared learning. And then it gets sedimented into what becomes our culture. And we'll come back to that term sedimented. So next slide. So now we're really going into the theory dive. This was a book that I had to read as a sophomore. And I didn't get it at the time. But interestingly, sort of 40 years on, I'm starting to figure out what he was talking about. And I really like some of the dichotomies or some of the distinctions that he's making. First of all is the idea that the notion of external events and culture. We don't manage external events because we have a culture. Culture is reordered as we manage external events. So that's one idea. And then the other idea is, and I'm going to read this just so that we can go through it quickly, powered by disconformities, meaning challenges between conventional values and intentional values. So we'll come back to convention and intention. The historical process unfolds as a continuous and reciprocal movement between the practice of the structure and the structure of the practice. And imagine you're a sophomore in college and you read that and you just go, what? But actually, if we think about it, it actually starts to make some sense. And the last point being, we want to say, well, let's fix our culture going forward. No, culture and history can't be separated. And so, particularly with organizations like the Navy, that a culture goes back a thousand years, arguably. It's derived of the British Navy. I hope that's not in any way wrong or insulting. But the US naval culture has a long history. And to try to separate and say we're only going to worry about culture going forward is just not sensible. And you know that because you were looking at the iceberg yesterday. So let's go on to the next. So again, I just want to sort of double down on this idea of conventions and intentions. You can think of intentions as the here's something new and better that we can be doing. But you're generally the change model suggests that you're going to get some pushback from how you used to do it. You're going to get some pushback in doing something new by, yeah, but we used to be we're very successful doing it that way. Why should we be doing it different? I mean, the basic change problem. So let's think about conventions and intentions and that relationship between them. Our conventions are always there and we're always going to have new intentions to do something new and different and better. And then the other thing is the notion of structure and practice. Think about new initiatives as sort of here and now practices. And we'll keep going on this idea of practice. New practices that are always going to happen within the context of our existing conventions. There's always going to be that tension. That's not how we used to do it. Why are we doing it this way now? Why are we changing our practices when our conventions and our conventions have been successful? We learned how to be successful on the basis of those conventions. Why are we changing our practices? So those are sort of some of the vocabulary that we're going to go through. And then we'll go through in some greater detail right now. We go to the next. So this is the three layer model I believe you were working on yesterday. So, and this was kind of first written about by my father in the early 80s when he was studying Siba Geige and old Swiss chemical company in Basel and Digital Equipment Corporation in Maynard Mass. And he was very close to the founder of digital but also knew a lot of the senior management at Siba Geige. And he just had to try to come up with, how can I explain the differences between these two organizations? They're so radically different. What's a model that I can come to that will help me understand those differences? So that's what developed this, how do you observe culture? How do you experience culture either as an outsider looking in or as a newcomer to an organization? You're experiencing these physical, visible things, we call those artifacts. And then you are hearing what people are saying about the organization, like we believe in this or we are pursuing that. And those are espoused values in the sense that they may be deeply held values. But they're also something that people are willing to be out front and talk about. So a lot of that under the surface in the iceberg are things that are believed. But they're not necessarily things that are going to be espoused publicly. So that's the distinction between those sort of deep underlying assumptions and the things that people will say about who they are and what they're doing. So, and just to make that equation to the Solans quote that's so abstruse, that this is what I'm referring to as conventional values. So now let's go to the next slide, the practice slide. In our later culture books, we've tried to make this model now have a parallel in practice. So there's the structure layers and there's the practice layers. And the practice layers in our mind are technical culture, which is kind of what's our strategy, what's our mission, what are our objectives. Social culture, how do we get along? How do we relate to each other? Are we nice? Are we mean? Are we a, in Silicon Valley there was early distinction between a bear culture and a penguin culture. And you're kind of thinking, well, I think I'd rather be a bear than a penguin. Or I'd rather be a penguin than a bear. Well, it turns out the distinction was the bears, if somebody is weak and hurt, the bears take care of the den, they're nurturing. They want to nurture that cub back to health. The penguins, the weak one, the sickly one just gets pecked to death. And you, you, you, you know, and when I was at Apple, I could point to some companies that were, Apple was more of a bear culture. But there were a lot of companies in Silicon Valley at the time that were absolutely penguin cultures. Some still exist today. So anyway, this idea of technical social macro, we have, and I'm sorry, I should get to macro. That's, you know, the world we live in. That's the air we breathe. It's, it's technology trends. It's, it's social trends. It's, you know, for instance, how much has our, have our work lives been transformed by digitalization, right? Everything's different. We went from, you know, in-person conversations to storing forward sort of voicemail communication, then we had email, and then we had instant messaging, and now we have Slack. And, you know, the, the, how we relate to each other obviously has been transformed a lot. But it's also, it's not just our work lives. It's also our personal lives are transformed in that macro culture. Our attitudes about politics, about, about DE and I. We'll talk a lot about DE and I. Those, those are informed in the organization by what's going on in the macro culture. So let's go to the next. I, I share this picture because I want you to think of the nestedness of technical, social, and macro. And, so, and, and think about how any change that happens, happens across all of those dimensions. We'll talk later about a change model, but here the idea that it's easy to change the technical culture. We're pivoting. We're going to go to a new strategy. We're going to acquire a company. And we're going to, or we're going to build a new division and it's going to change. It's going to alter our technical culture. But for that truly to sort of have lasting, lasting impact on the organizational culture, that those changes traverse the, the, you know, the nested circles here. And they're not successful if they're out of alignment. If we're doing something that's radically different that really doesn't fit with where people are in the macro culture, then change won't succeed. So we just have to think of all of these, these dimensions of our practice at work as needing to be in some degree of alignment, unfolding together as we, as we go through a change process. So let's go on to the next one. So I love the picture because it's the old, it depends on your perspective. So this, this is the culture of vocabulary where we are now. We've, we've, you've talked about the, the structure that we discussed yesterday with the iceberg, the three layer model. And again, that's kind of culture observed. And then the practice, which is what, what you experience every day at work. There is one distinction I want to add here too, and that there are big, thick textbooks written about the difference between culture and climate. Has anybody seen, you know, those, those discussions of what's climate and what's culture and, you know, there's lots of good scholarship about that. Our idea of practice and, and the relationship between technical culture and social culture is sort of our way of saying, let's not try to decide whether it's culture or climate. Let's say there are different expressions of culture depending on, you know, where you are and when it is. So, but we've, we've, we've, have some colleagues who say, wait a second, you're talking about climate. It's like, yeah, yeah, but we're, we're trying to use a different vocabulary because in some respects we think it's more helpful. It helps us be more specific. So next slide. Lots of ink spilled about how to assess culture. And so I just kind of wanted to walk through part of this metaphor is to think about, does it make sense to do a big survey because we want to understand our culture? And yes, it might make sense to do that. But recognize that when you're doing that you're in an observation vessel in a harbor looking at the shore, looking at the town and you're effectively creating a very fine detailed snapshot of what's going on. That's generally what surveys will give you. And so that's good. It's two-dimensional, but it may be very, very detailed, very fine-grained photograph. But to really experience what's going on you need to step onto the shore, walk around, experience what's going on. And this is where you're sort of, you're not really just studying the structure anymore, you're starting to understand the practice. And then the last step is you've, you've started to experience in three dimensions what's going on in, you know, shared space. But you don't really know what the culture is about until you sit down around a campfire or at the bar and really start talking with people and understanding how they got there. It's not just sort of who they are and what they do. It's how did they get there? And so that's why in culture assessment we would sort of always argue survey is not enough. You need to have some degree of interpretive discussion to really figure out what's important and why. The other thing I just wanted to say is there's another metaphor here that may be helpful for some people is to think about it as financial statements that surveys will give you maybe the equivalent of a balance sheet, sort of big animal pictures. You know, the, you know, this more than that. And, but until you sort of start to see the dynamics which you get from an income statement or even more so, you know, the real nitty gritty of a cash flow statement, you're not really understanding the financials of that organization. So they have to go together. All right, next slide. So this is all by way of setting up that one of the pitches for you folks today is that we think that anticipating where culture is going may be as important as trying to sort of understand what we're feeling and experiencing in the present. So let's go on to the next section here with that proposition that culture scenario planning or predicting the future of culture is every bit as predictable as technology. And you can take that as you want. In other words, technology is not at all predictable. So I don't believe that culture is any more predictable than technology. Yeah, I don't know. And maybe it is. But the point is it's probably worth considering carving out some time to do culture scenario planning. And arguably, as futurists, when they do there, like the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, when they do a scenario, it includes culture. It's not just technology or just economics. It includes culture. But the next couple slides are going to be about a way of thinking about the future of culture and trying to have an active process for cataloging and defining the things that you think are going to matter. So can we go to the next? So this is all keying off the great William Gibson quote that the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. I completely believe that. That we just need to be good at sort of seeing what's out there in the future that we need to be aware of that's going to impact our organization five years out, 10 years out, 15 years out. So we've been using this term, metaculture, for a couple of years. It's not copyrighted or anything. It's just sort of a way of describing and a way of creating a metaphor for what's coming. We know what's coming. Can we be strategic about cataloging, identifying, and being ready for what's coming? So and I guess for me, one of the keys is this idea of what's accepted reality in groups or generations of people who it's not accepted reality in our organization, but it may be in future employees or future enlists or future officers. What's their accepted reality and what do we need to know about it? So let's go to the next slide. So two of our favorite voices. Greta Thunberg has a different accepted reality and how dare us for not recognizing that she was, I think, 16 or 17 when she said this, dreams of eternal economic growth, how dare us? I mean, it had an impact. I think this was at a talk at the UN a few years ago. And then Jacinda Ardern, one of the world's favor prime ministers. There's very little not to love about Jacinda Ardern. But she's expressing an accepted reality that economic success that does not yield social progress or social success is not success. It's failure. Now, I don't think everybody believes that. But that is accepted reality for her. And she's making a point of it. And it's getting us to listen. So let's go to the next. So again, if we can think about systematically cataloging some of these things that are out there that we think are going to be important to us and important to our organization, or maybe very threatening to our organization. So the ones that I've listed here, you talk to a 15 to 20-year-old, they care about climate justice. And they don't just care about global warming. They care about climate justice. And when you start talking about justice, it's going to impact your organization, similarly with social justice. And then I guess I'd make the point that when I talk to my 22-year-old daughter, I know that Dee and I mean something different to her than it does to me. She grew up in a different place. This is just a personal note. I was in a freshman dorm of 180 kids. And this is going back a few years. There was not a single South Asian in that freshman dorm of 180 kids. And that's at Stanford University where the population is now probably 25% South Asian. So the existence that they're living in is so dramatically different whether or not it's sort of intentionally, whether or not their politics are different or whatever. It's just that their context is completely different. So how do we anticipate how that different experience is going to impact how we should be thinking about things like Dee and I? And I know you're spending quite a bit of time on that over these days to know. I mean, those are big, hard problems. And they impact us directly. I've often made the argument that I think equity is the bigger issue than diversity and inclusion, partly because of that experience that a 20-year-old has a much different view about diversity and inclusion because they live in a more diverse, inclusive society, I think, maybe in my little stupid bubble in Silicon Valley. But the equity problem certainly isn't solved in Silicon Valley. So anyway, the image here, too, is just a reflection of how connected the world is. That's not news to any of us. So this is a picture that was posted a couple days after the George Floyd murder. And there's this big crowd, multi-age, multi-ethnic, multi-gender. And this statement, silence is violence, which I don't think everybody had necessarily said that was the point of the George Floyd protest. But that's a very important message that came out of that protest. But the thing that I love about this picture is that if you know your geography, you know that's not Cleveland. It's not Detroit. It's not Minneapolis. That's the Cologne-Germany Cathedral in the background. And this was literally a day or two after the George Floyd murder. And there's this huge protest. And it's in Cologne, Germany. So that future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. Well, it was strongly distributed in Cologne at the time. And so except that some of these new concepts are almost, we have to assume, are global concepts. This isn't some little idea that's happening in Silicon Valley. These ideas are happening everywhere. And part of that process of cataloging the future that's going to matter is recognizing that this is a global cataloging challenge. So next slide. So this is another example for me of metaculture that allows us to measure a time period. This is a little marketing piece that I just happened on in San Diego in 2015. And it's a company that has a bunch of bars and restaurants. And they don't call them bars and restaurants. They call them projects. It's just very design thinking-y. And this was sort of their statement of espoused values. This is we're going to make this public about who we are. And so and it's jargon-y and it's fun and it's full of sort of like hip profanity. And a lot of it's very kind of 20-something in 2015. But it's also a very powerful statement of kind of what we think we're up to as an organization. And so here's my question. Supposing you walked into work one day and your leaders said, I want to hear some recycled ideas. Or I want to hear some small ideas. I'm tired of those big, hairy, audacious goals. I want to hear some small ideas. Or I'm not interested in your striving for perfection anymore. I want pretty good. I want good enough. Or I don't want to hear from, let's start at the beginning and do this in an orderly way. Start anywhere. It's OK. Just start where you want. I want you to slow down today. Come into work, slow down. That's very different than move fast and break things. And that's slow down is that how well does slow down fit into the design thinking framework? It does. And it kind of depends on what you're designing. But it's not the first thing you hear when you think of design thinking. We're going to start by slowing down. And then getting personal and staying personal will come back to that. But I guess my point is that these things were sort of like this cool hip marketing piece. But I think a lot of this stuff over the last six or seven years has actually become sort of relevant. A lot of these ideas, there is a pushback on perfection. Nobody's out there saying six second was too much. We're going to go for two sigma. We're not saying that. But we are saying that sometimes perfection is the enemy of good. And we need to recognize that. Or sometimes we do need to stop and take 10 minutes and look up or be present and figure out what's going on. You're in an argument. What's the best way to deal with that conflict? Stop and slow down. So I feel like this is metaculture that starts to sediment into our modern thinking about how to deal with problems. So let's go on to the next. So this takes us, I said, we were going to get to that idea of getting personal and staying personal. And it also takes us back to that distinction between the system or the machine and the person or the human. So a little bit about sharing and not transacting. Let's go to the next. So a basic proposition for us in our work is that it's not about roles and technologies and organizations. It's about relationships. Everything happens through relationships. So next. And I love this picture. The roots of leadership are relationships, training, experience. But I think generally we can recognize that at the end of the day, leaders have to have the right kinds of relationships to get stuff done. And then the role of the leader in culture formation can't be separated. Leaders and culture are the same. They are part of that reciprocal and continuous process. And how leaders create the right relationships that allow better decisions to happen and better decisions to be implemented is such an important consideration for us. So with that, we have a tendency to talk about is good relationship or bad relationship. Part of the theme of being specific today is that that's not enough. We need to be clear about what kind of relationship it is. And so let's go through the next slide. Let's go through our relationship model really quickly. This is not anything that's entirely new, but we're trying to present it in a way that's simple. Sociologists have always described different kinds of relationships that we have in different social contexts. So it's a four-layer model. It's not 1 through 4. It's minus 1, 1, 2, 3. And the reason is that we wanted to characterize that first relationship on the list, the minus 1 relationship, as it's a negative relationship. The relationship between the prisoner and the guard, they know how to anticipate the other one. A relationship is sort of based on, can we anticipate how that other human is going to respond? Well, the prisoner and the guard have that relationship. But it's one that's based on domination and exploitation. Or the shop floor and the worker in a sweatshop. That's a negative relationship. That's a minus 1 relationship. Now, is it a swab, is that the Navy term? For the first level of an enlist, who's in basic training and semen recruit. I probably just said something that has to be edited out of. I used the term that I'm going to forever damn for using, sorry. But it's that idea that in basic training, you have a leader, a drill sergeant, whatever, who's going to dominate you. That's part of the game. And the good news there is that those relationships typically will evolve to something that's much better. I was giving a similar talk at the Air Force Academy a few years ago. And I had an Army general come up to me and say, after I had described these levels, he said, yeah, I mean, our guys go from level minus 1 to level 4. And I'm looking at my list and saying, oh, I wonder what he means by level 4, because we don't have a level 4 in our model. But anyway, the good news is that a lot of times the exploitative or dominating relationship changes over time and becomes a healthier relationship. The main point about today, though, is this idea of an older model that said transactional relationships, professional distance, maintain your role, stay in your lane. That was a good way to run an organization like a well-oiled machine. But we just don't think that problems today are solved when everybody's maintaining that kind of transactional relationship. So the idea of personalized is that you're accepting the people that you work with as whole human beings. And you are developing levels of openness and trust with those whole human beings that are going to allow you to share information rather than transacting information. And then the last point about these levels is that there is this level of emotional intimacy that generally we don't think is OK at work. But we all know if we've been in intense teams or even sports teams, you hear pro athletes talking about loving each other all the time, well, what is that? That's about spending so much time together that you're finishing each other's sentences. You're connected at a level that's beyond just a level to openness and trust. It's a deeper level of intimacy. And by the way, that personalized, that's not a typo. That happened a few years ago when we were writing something out, and it started as a typo. And we decided to wait. Actually, it's different than personalized, which is sort of like your personalized shopper or your customized this or your bespoke that. We really wanted to make sure people recognize the difference between that relationship that's characterized by openness and trust and something that's very different than a transactional relationship. So let's go to the next. I think I've already covered that. Well, inertia. It's easy to sort of stay in that transactional mode. We have to recognize, OK, wait. We're acting too role-based. We're acting too professionally distant. We need to break through a log jam by creating a tighter personal bond. All right, quickly onto the change model, and then we're going to wrap up. The point here is that we have all of these great stepwise, linear change models. The Cotter model is very famous. It's a good model. But it's also important to recognize that change is not necessarily linear. And because we establish these metrics of success and we don't hit them all, does not mean the change has not been successful. It's just it's been iterative. So I'll go quickly through this model of a nonlinear iterative change metaphor. So let's go to the next. So to think about the relationship between culture and leadership and change, this is our sort of beach metaphor, where leadership happens in waves. You're standing in the sand. The leadership wave washes over you. You feel your world changing. You feel the sand moving. The terra firma is changing underneath you. But as we know, the wave washes. But it doesn't, how that sand has changed doesn't stay that way. It back washes. And the back wash is go to the next. You can, so that first one, that's the change. We're doing something new, doing something better. We feel it changing under our feet. And we'll go to the next one. And then we're pushing back. We're saying this isn't how we've always done it. This doesn't feel right. And the pushback we can think metaphorically is headwind blowing off the shore saying, nope, we're not ready for that. Or just the natural process of how humans can't change things from zero to 100 in one step. It takes multiple steps. It takes multiple waves. So we experienced that back wash. Like, yeah, that worked. We're going to keep that. But that other thing didn't work. It's going to get washed back. And the metaphor is that for culture to change, it takes a lot of waves. It takes a lot of change initiatives. We've established how hard is it to get something to change at the bottom of the iceberg? It takes a long time. But efforts make a difference. The small waves do change the contour of the sand. And over time, go to the next slide, those changes resettle the sand. And that resettling accumulates. And so this is the way we like to think about metaphorically. If you're thinking about change programs, think of them as waves. Think about how there's going to be a resettling that doesn't accept all of those changes. But over time, they accumulate. And we get to a point where we look at the contour of the beach. And wow, yeah, we really have changed. OK, let's go to the next. So going back to that question, why do we care about culture? Usually the reason is because we think we need to change it. So often it starts with we have a culture problem. Well, we don't really like to think about it that way. A culture problem is too hard of a problem to solve. So today has been about a vocabulary to be more specific. So you're not saying what's a culture problem. You can go to the next slide. Don't hide behind that. I think we have a culture problem. We need to change it. Let's, first of all, recognize that to get at the real issues that we need to solve takes that some degree of personization, because you need to be in places where it's safe to say what's really going on. By the way, level to openness and trust. Broadly speaking, that's analogous to psychological safety. If any of you have read Amy Edmondson, a student of my father's, that psychological safety is a very important idea. All we're saying with the idea of openness and trust is that you're establishing that level of personal connection that you will feel safe to say what's really going on. It's the old, don't bring me a problem. Bring me a solution. That's last century. This century, we need to trust each other enough that you're going to tell me what the problem is. The second point is the reason we talk about leadership, culture, and change in the same sense is because culture change can't happen without leadership being involved. The classic thing of let's have HR or OD go do a culture study and then tell the CEO what needs to change. That's not enough. That's not going to create culture change. That might give the CEO some insight, but if the CEO is not in it, it ain't going to happen. That's back to our original model that founders create culture. Leaders nurture and change culture. It doesn't happen from the bottom. It has to happen across the organization. And if it doesn't happen across the organization, a leader can make sure that it does happen across the organization, but it really needs that involvement at the top. And then I guess the point is about today again is I've given you a sort of a rich vocabulary to start putting post-it notes on. It's not we have a culture problem. It's there are changes that we could make in our technical culture. And then what are the implications of those changes in our technical culture that will impact our social culture? Or what's happening out in the outside world that we know is going to impact our social culture? And how are we going to adapt our technical culture according to those threats that are coming? And then the last point is let's try to be clear and specific. A lot of today, again, is about being specific. So next, that's what we've covered, structure and practice, the idea of anticipating medical culture, levels of relationship, and a nonlinear metaphor for change. So any follow-up, any questions, any anybody want to push back on anything? Any violent disagreement? Those are always good, yeah. All right, thanks. OK, thank you very much, Mr. Shine. I think even though we're going back to work on our iceberg this afternoon, I think we'll be well-armed with some new terminology and ways to develop those things that we have to implement in order to change culture. And we all probably still need to, despite our good notes, buy some books and understand it more thoroughly. But thank you so much. We'll continue right now into getting our panel three, the 930 panel on WPS and security cooperation, strengthening partnerships and improving capabilities. The moderator is our own Dr. Saira Yameen, our chair for Women in Peace and Security here at the Naval War College. So Dr. Yameen, if you can get your panel to come up and introduce them. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention? Please. Please be seated. We are going to start with panel number three. We have a really outstanding panel for you here this morning to talk about how WPS applies to security cooperation, how it strengthens our partnerships in the region, and why it matters so much. How security cooperation through WPS advances peace, security, and stability in the region, and why it's so important for US national security as well. Our panelists here today, we have four wonderful people, Colonel William Naughty from Ghana Armed Forces, Command and Staff College. Thank you so much for coming all the way. Master Sergeant Nicholas Fitzpatrick, USA 95th Civil Affairs Brigade Special Operations. Thank you so much for being here. Ms. Gina Costante, Defense Security Cooperation Agency, and Ms. Jasmine Wilkins-Smith from NAVARF Navier. You can read their bios in the program. I won't read them here for you in order to save some time for you, and now without further ado, I'd like to give the floor to Colonel William Naughty. Over to you, thank you. Good morning everyone, and I am indeed privileged and honored to be here. Please pardon my Ghana descent, but I'll make sure that I'm quite clear for all of you. So I'm going to talk about Women, Peace, and Security Cooperation, the case of the Ghana Armed Forces. So by way of introduction, I'll say that Ghana is a small West African country about the size of Oregon, with a population of about 30 million. And in a region of upheavals, political upheavals, and instability, Ghana presents a beacon of hope with strong democratic governments and a penchant for peace. It has a small armed forces of about 20,000, and the core job is serving in United Nations peacekeeping around the world. Ghana has consistently been in the top 10 troop-contributing countries of the UN peacekeeping missions in the last 10 to 15 years, and we deploy as much as 25% of its forces to do this. Currently, there is about 17% of women in the armed forces, and that's quite significant. So it enables the force to deploy significant women in peacekeeping. The country is also a staunch ally of the United States with deep security cooperation, arrangements, and programs across all three services, Army, Navy, and Air Force. Next slide. This brings me to my aim, which is to highlight activities that impact on WPS agenda and ultimately contribute to organizational culture in the Ghana armed forces. Next slide. This is the agenda I'll cover, and I'll make sure that I do that in the time allocated. Next slide. Women, peace, and security in action, and this is a personal experience. On 8 February in 2017, I was given a command of a tax force of an 850-person battalion to deploy for peace support operations in Lebanon. Significantly, this included 132 women, forming 15% of the battalion. It was the first of its kind. In the cultural, organizational setting of the Ghana armed forces, everybody was apprehensive. In fact, some of the old leaders just said, go back to the leadership and tell them that there are just too many women in this battalion. More importantly, even though these women were qualified to deploy, most of them had just administrative and logistic skills, and they didn't fit very well in the all-bath. So we had to shape the women's employability, and we started doing new things. For example, training a midwife and an S to become the S9, getting an education officer to train to become the S7, training other women to be drivers, guards, gunners, and APC drivers, as well as truck drivers. And then as this was going on, there was a cultural problem in the battalion. Some of the men felt that these spaces are not for women. Why are you bringing too many women to take our roles? So we had to manage this. And we did this through diverse education. And we eventually found that some of the men were even willing to undertake some otherwise administrative and logistic roles. So it brought about what I called cross-training. And that's all we did. While I was in the unit and deploying into Lebanon, the mission leadership was very excited. 15% women, they just decided to work straight to the battalion. How do we make sure that we put in women's meaningful participating, not just 15%, but what exactly can they achieve on the ground? And so we designed many programs, which are assume, market walks, female engagement teams, mixed patrols, and all female patrols. Various ways these were utilized to achieve key missions and key tasks and outcomes that the mission leadership wanted. And as an anecdote, which reinforces women's efficient and effective participation in peaceful operations, one of the female patrol teams was in an area which is considered unfriendly. And usually, they would just block the road and attack UN patrols. So on this occasion, they did the same to the patrol, not knowing who were the occupants. Then the all female patrol disembarked and it was horrifying to the men. This was a cultural problem in Lebanon. They just stood there for about 10 minutes, not knowing what to do. And then some of them just decided to drop their stones, sticks, and then walked away. And that was the impact that this patrol came. So this is an anecdote that I always share, that if you want to know about women's meaningful participation, there are clear examples on the ground. Next slide. So what are the key or current engagements that the Ghana Armed Forces is engaging in as far as women, peace, and security is concerned? We're doing a lot of education and symposia for officers and general officers. And we hope that this will broaden the outlook of the force because it's a key fact that a lot of the brass do not understand what women, peace, and security hopes to achieve. For, in this regard, we've also got a lot of appointments for gender officers across all echelons. And guess what? 90% of these gender addresses are men. We don't know what that will impact, but we're looking forward to two or three years seeing that this will create a new cultural change and dimension in the force. Because we think that when men really understand WPS, there's a lot that can be achieved in a shorter time. Then we are doing a lot of training of females and female engagement teams for peace support operations. We're also doing training of senior female officers for leadership roles. So this happened when we promoted the first Brigadier General in 2019 and the UN immediately poached her to become a deputy force commander. She performed very well and since then, as we speak, we have two deputy force commanders who are in the force on the Golan Heights and one in Western Sahara. So we are mainstreaming a mode of training for poaching female to become leaders in the UN in a short time. Then we have activities with the LC Initiative. And this is a Canadian sponsored agenda to increase the meaningful participation of women in peace support operations. Ghana was one of the three true contributing countries selected by the LC Initiative for dedicated technical training assistance. And currently, I dare say that this initiative is what is drawing the WPS agenda in Ghana. Subsequent to that, we develop what we call the MOIP report. MOIP is measuring opportunities for women in peace operations. So this was a full research that was undertaken by DCAF. DCAF is the Geneva Organization for Security and Defense in conjunction with Cornell University here in the US and partners in Ghana. The MOIP report is pretty much like what we're doing yesterday. Trying to find out what the organizational culture is and what is preventing women's meaningful participation. This report is online and if you Google MOIP reports for Ghana, you can find it. So going on then, let me look at gender strong units which is trying to push the agenda to 20% of women's deployment in missions. And currently, we are working on two battalions in for South Sudan and in Lebanon. Next slide. Areas of cooperation. These are the areas of cooperation that Ghana has engaged in with Canada. And I've mentioned the LC Initiative. There is also a module for technical assistance and a lot of advocacy. Next slide. Now let's look at the areas of cooperation with the US. The US has put up a dedicated fund for women's peace and security in Ghana. And this helps in finding a lot of activities. There is an opportunity for gender programs that people can attend from Ghana and a lot has been done. There's also ring fence courses for females in leadership. In this regard, we have recently trained two people in for burning for future leadership in the armed forces. Then we have advocacy at all levels that the US OSC is doing in Ghana. Then we have assistance to Ghana armed forces to provide gender advices also at all the H1s. To conclude, I must say that the Ghana armed forces continue to drive the WPS agenda and the meaningful participation of women in peace support operation. This is helping to erase stereotypes and bad organizational culture towards men and women and changing outdated cultural beliefs. I hope that these strides being made will contribute to the positive impact that WPS agenda is making on conflict, peace and security in the world. Next slide. Next slide. These are three recommendations that I've put forward with our partners. The third one was just a discussion that we had yesterday. Finally, next slide. This is my favorite quote and I hope that if we take nothing at all, this is what we should take. Thank you very much. General Naughty, that was really fascinating. Thank you for a very powerful presentation. Clarifying the role of women, their impactful participation in complex conflict zones and peacekeeping operations, which tend to be very, very difficult and challenging, but also importantly, the role of men, the importance of educating men and bringing them along in accelerating cultural change. So that was really wonderful. And now I would like to invite Master Sergeant Fitzpatrick over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Will, also for attending. Will and I work together in Ghana and that's kind of a cautionary tale for security cooperation as it pertains to WPS. And I'm gonna talk about that a little bit, but first I'm gonna tell you what it is I do so that you have some understanding of why I would be here in the first place. This isn't close enough, is it? I'm too tall. So I work for the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade. Cool pictures up there, lots of army stuff. The 95th Civil Affairs Brigade, you can go to the next slide. So what we do is we provide the nation's premier civil reconnaissance and civil engagement force to understand influence, human component of land domain, and to advance the nation's global priorities, right? You can go to the next slide. I don't know, is that not working? Okay. I could talk ad nauseam about all these things, but the main element of what we do is civil reconnaissance, civil engagement, and then human network analysis. You can skip to the next slide. An organizational chart, if you're not familiar with it, we have a battalion that's aligned with every one of the global combatant commands. And then we have a battalion, a non-soft battalion that does them along with the 95th, but is also active duty civil affairs that is aligned with US Army Forces Command, US Army Force Comm for contingency and crisis operations. So just, that's First Special Forces Command's organizational chart. We're one brigade within First Special Forces Command and we have multiple battalions in the different AORs. So we'll skip to the next slide. These are all the areas where we have teams right now. Why is it relevant? It's relevant within this enterprise because there's often a sort of a delta with major commands when there's WPS activities, who's going to go ahead and execute them, who's going to carry them out. And frequently it ends up being civil affairs forces simply because people know within the military that civil affairs forces are going to go execute civil engagement. And most women, peace, and security activities that are operationalized out in the theater of operations are carried out by people who are doing civil engagement. Next slide, please. We have an advanced skills detachment. The reason I have this in here is because I'm the Brigade S-37 Training, NCOIC. So what that means is I developed the medal for the unit, the Mission Essential Task List, and I contribute to having the Commander's Training Guidance built that he signs off on saying, this is what we're going to train on this year to get after our mission. So it puts me in a unique position to kind of shoehorn WPS initiatives into the Commander's Training Guidance if he lets me get away with it. I'm not trying to get a laugh, but that is kind of, that's very telling that I said it. So next slide. Different stuff that we do. It's not really that important. It's all Army Special Operations stuff, but it is important to note that we are the first and the most fully integrated unit in the United States military and within US SOCOM in terms of female presence within our unit. I have served on teams where my captain, my team leader has been a female, my medic has been a female, my team sergeant has been a female. The operational commanders have been females. The battalion staff has been, including battalion commanders have been females. It is very much an integrated unit and I think it's a model for Army Special Operations and probably Joint Special Operations in terms of what we could look like versus what we do look like. Next slide. So we go out and we engage with the population. What was I doing in Ghana? I was there to advise the Ghanaian military because of the security problems they were having and then also to advance the US interest in Ghana. One of the things that I went into that deployment trying to do, and I kind of teed it up beforehand using my wife as a very good WPS resource and then connections like Ms. Fleaser or Lindsay Brothers at AFRICOM, connections from within this network to try to tee up a women peace and security initiative to carry out while I was in Ghana. I wanted to run it like a pilot program where I could prove, instead of just knowing in my head that we would make more gains on the battlefield with female engagement teams and with women doing the engagement than just going after fighting age males the way that we traditionally carry out operations. I wanted to prove that and I wanted to do the operations using that program to prove that I was right about this. Now ultimately, it didn't happen. So go ahead and go to the next slide as well. And the reason it didn't happen isn't because the Ghana armed forces didn't want to do it. It wasn't because we didn't have the desire to do it. I took my female commander out there to Ghana with me. I worked as the Special Operations Forces liaison element, the SOFLE. If you guys have worked in embassies there's usually one SOF person or two SOF people that that's their job within the embassy. And then I took a female captain with me as well and we structured ourselves that way when we deployed to Ghana on purpose to try to carry out some of these activities because we knew that we would have more buy in with the commanding officer, the team being a female or the commanding officer for the ground force to be a female if we were trying to do female's initiatives. And ultimately, again, it didn't work out. It didn't come to fruition the way that we wanted to. We did many things with the Ghana armed forces but my hope was we'll kick off this female engagement team concept that I have in my brain so that we can do research and see how this ends up affecting our integration and our work on the battlefield. Ghana's not a battlefield. Let me go ahead and cue that up as well. I say battlefield because I've been in the Army 20 years. We were there to do peacekeeping stuff in Ghana so we weren't there fighting the enemy but Ghana has lots of neighbors with enemy all around them, right? So common acronyms, this doesn't really matter and I'll send this out to the mailing list. The main point that I'm putting this presentation up here for is that you have a partner within the operational force, within joint special operations and within the reserve component of the Army in civil affairs that has the ability and his task org and man to be able to carry out initiatives for women, peace and security with partnered nations. So as it pertains to security cooperation, there is somebody out there that you can do this with. So if you get an idea in your head when you're working at this maycom or you're studying here at the War College and you wanna write a paper or you wanna carry out research, they exist. It's already happening. Not necessarily all the time with women's initiatives but any kind of educational research you might wanna conduct. We do that in the 95th. We constantly have people interviewing us from the King's College in the UK or people that we send to NDU or to Naval Postgrad to carry out research in a lot of different areas but one of those areas that it's possible is WPS. I haven't seen yet anybody come and say like, hey, we wanna go see how you have your female operators and how they go and they act on the battlefield. No one's come to do that yet. So I guess this is sort of like an unofficial invitation from someone that's not in charge. Somebody needs to go ahead and do that because it can be done. Next slide. Yeah, this is all the rest of the stuff for the unit that I'll send out. Next slide. Unique Rsoft capabilities again. Civil engagement. Next slide. I'll pass these out. These are meant to be hidden slides and I'm running short on time but I've got vignettes from Columbia. Next slide. And I've got vignettes from Bosnia-Herzegovina. These are not women specific. And then next slide. Here's a women specific vignette from Burkina Faso and this happened in the last 12 months. And then I could talk to you ad nauseam about initiatives that we did while I was working at South Africa for women peace and security attached to exercise flintlock. So if anybody wants to know how to operationalize women peace and security for the battlefield, it's already been done. It's not new. It's already been successful in some places and unsuccessful in others. And although ultimately we will get to female engagement teams where the US is assisting and training the Genands but it doesn't always work out. I guess that's also a portion where I hear some of the questions that come up about expectations like how fast can we do these things? And I had my own expectations and thinking as a man that I could sell something and I get the same eye rolls that you guys get when it comes to when you mention women peace and security. So you're fighting a culture war that I think is difficult and it's gonna take time even if you wanna smash the system right away. And that's all I've got. Thank you so much. This is very, very insightful for all of us how the US is operationalizing WPS in the region and the acknowledgement that it's very much a work in progress and there is pushback and there is resistance and again the reminder that men can be such great allies and we need to work along with them and get as many male advocates to advance the women peace and security agenda. So thank you very much once again. Now I would like to give the floor to Ms. Gina Costante who's going to talk about Botswana. We're all ears, thank you. I'm fortunate up here that you can't see the slides and I didn't get to see the slides from my colleague. So I kind of need to see it for myself. Good morning, everyone. My name is Gina Costante. I am from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency and I will tell you outright the reason I agreed to Brenda's proposal that I come and speak is because I actually believe as a career civil servant that the US military should be leaning forward and ahead of social change as should all the militaries in the world. They are representational of their citizenry and they are there to protect them. So next please. For those who do not know DSCA and unlike what Tiffany Phillips said in her presentation there are two DSCA's. Hers was Defense Support to Civil Authorities. Mine is actually an agency, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. So important to know this isn't a DSCA presentation but we execute Title 10 and Title 22 authorities. Next. So how did I get involved in WBS? Completely accidentally, completely accidentally. Next please. So from 2019 to 2021 I served as a DOD Ministry of Defense Advisor in Botswana. The MOTA program exists around the world, generally in NATO countries but not exclusively. So I just wanted to give, I've had several people ask me about MOTA, super great program and feel free to come up and talk to me afterwards if you'd like more information. MOTA happens to be executed out of DSCA. That is not why I participated. That's just a random thing. Next please. So what does a MOTA do? I sat as the only foreigner. I sat within the Ministry of Defense Justice and Security in the capital of Botswana which is Haborone. This is me in my office and my door in case you didn't believe me that I was there. That's what that is. Generally I advised all levels of the ministry on national security. That was the reason I was there and strategic planning. Where does WPS fit in? And I wasn't thinking going into this that WPS was going to be anything that I did. Frankly, had it been, I probably would have been shot down a lot. So I realized over the two years that WPS sort of has to be a backbeat to this sort of field work. And it did gradually just because I am the woman I am but it wasn't a conscious effort. Next please. And then came COVID. Gender-based violence is a problem in Botswana. It became a terrifically large problem during COVID. I think it's important to see that nearly 70% of women in Botswana have experienced some sort of gender-based violence. And I am one of those women. I was attacked on the street in Habanone. And that was sort of to use Warren's word, career inflection point. That's what sort of got me into WPS. Oddly. Next please. Lots of things happened during COVID. Increased alcohol consumption. We were in lockdown for quite a long period of time. And the culture is, how do I describe this? It is still evolving when it comes to the way women are represented. I put this particular front page of a tabloid because it's, from my point of view, quite outrageous. And I could show you many of these tabloid covers with these inflammatory things about women. But it is important to note that gender-based violence became a parallel pandemic. And it was something we were working on all during the lockdown. In fact, the president of Botswana asked his senior staff to convene a task force on gender-based violence. It was getting so bad. Week after week in the newspapers, you'd see uncles, husbands, brothers, killing girlfriends, wives, sisters. Really very difficult. Next please. So after being attacked on the street, I felt that because I have a voice as an American woman, that I couldn't let this go. The man who attacked me did not attack me because I was white. He didn't attack me because I was American. He attacked me because I was a woman. And he thought he could. So that's sort of how I've gotten on this bandwagon. It was just, to use Warren's phrase, a career inflection point. And I thought that's a particularly good graphic. This is from South Africa, but it says I'm here to represent all women who don't have the voice or freedom to fight. Next. So, this is my favorite general. And when you work as a moda, it's good to find people who are in your corner. And his name is Brigadier General Linky Joseph. He called me his sister from another mother. And I shared with him my experience of having been attacked. And the first thing he said was, well, you know, when I was at the Army War College, he went to Carlisle. They taught us a class about sharp. I am a career civil servant. I didn't know anything about sharp. So I did a little research, sharp. Next. And I spoke with my very dear friend, Lindsay Brothers, who I hope is online. She's WPS advisor. And she sent me to sharp program managers in Italy and Germany. And I spoke with them thinking, wow, my favorite general actually remembered about a lecture he received five years earlier at the Army War College. This is an entree. So they gave me some great ideas. And then I'm asking, would a sharp like program make sense with the Botswana Defense Force? Next please. So this is one of two slides where I have a lot of writing. But I had great interaction with, interactions with the sharp program managers. Things I did not think about or know. And they were actually, and I urge anyone who's working in the field to use these types of folks as a resource. The first one they said is, begin with a command climate survey. Find out actually what the problem is. Now generally the Botswana Defense Force does not make it a habit of surveying their members. And I remind everyone about Survey Monkey because when I brought up this as a possibility, anonymity was of primary importance. So there's always that tool. How do you identify leaders that you're willing to work with? This is a patriarchal society as are many in Africa. There is nothing particularly unique in Botswana I think to anywhere else in Southern Africa. And this little bit was really amazing to me because I do that automatically. But my favorite general, his wife and I were also friends. And in fact, one of the pieces of guidance the sharp program manager said, historically if you work with the spouses of military leadership it helps to further the WPS cause and the sharp initiative. So I could do that easily. And the buy-in has to be from day one. And in my mind, the fact that the president had called a national task force on gender-based violence already proved that the energy was there for this. So the longer term goals were figuring out accountability and responsibility. There has to be an understanding if you have no action, if you take no action in resolving these complaints, there will be a knock-on effect. And for a place like, or a country in Southern Africa they suggested to me sort of a multi-step program with gradually increasing levels of training and matching discipline to correct negative behavior. Should the, you know, in America we use the three strikes analogy would that sort of thing make sense? You have three opportunities to change your behavior before there's a career impact? I don't know, these are all questions. And the peer-to-peer training was also a key element. Next. So I outlined what I thought, and I will tell you up front this is a work in progress. I didn't see the success in my two years there that I would have liked. But I go back to Botswana to speak to NCOs next month and I will be following up with this, I can guarantee you. So I have this idea of an advocacy office and I welcome other words if someone has them, but a place where complaints can be received and there can be peer intervention. That was one of the keys that the SHARP program manager said. It should be peer-to-peer and talking about behavior change. The office can't be seen as a career killer but a career builder, training with scenarios, regular training. Next please. I really like this quote, to good will can make any organization work. Conversely, the best organization chart in the world is on sound if the men and women who make it work don't believe in it. Stumbling block next. I have spoken a lot about how I think ODC chiefs in particular, because I do security cooperation, can engage and have some wins and WPS on the ground. And here's a list of them, I know I'm running short. But I think one of the interesting ones here in Botswana was engaging with JAG officers who in fact are the ones who are dealing with lawsuits, having to do with harassment. If we develop policies on the ground floor, this reduces the legal caseload in the amount of money the Botswana Defense Force has to pay out for lawsuits. That was just the most practical ground level and that made people's ears perk up. Next. I think we're short of time, so I will. Anyway, Botswana has done its first peacekeeping. There are five women who are on that group, but they will get better, I know. Next. I have to mention one of the biggest wins that I felt I had was a tabletop exercise. First time ever that there were people from the Ministry of Defense, Justice and Security. And it just happened to be all women. I didn't actually plan for it to be, but I have to tell you, it was amazing because the members of the military and the police who were part of this TTX were so amazed they could work with women and they actually knew what they were talking about. It was terrific, it was a really, really wonderful event. She is my most favorite, so, so, so shy. So shy does human resources, but she just blossomed. It was really wonderful. Next, please. Can a woman do this better in the man, WPS? Had this conversation with the ODC office often. And I will say it's not better or worse, it's just different. There are things I can bring to the table as a woman that are different than a man, like dealing with the spouse of the Brigadier General. But it doesn't mean we can't work together on it. Next. The future is bright. This is a young lady. She is the highest ranking female officer in the Botswana Defense Force. She is a captain, that as high as it goes. Women were allowed in since 2007. And she is a wonderful mentor towards NCO officers. And this, this is a private sector thing. The private sector is ahead of the BDF on this. They're advertising funeral insurance, which is big in Southern Africa. But it's the woman who's in the military. That I think is truly amazing. Next. So, this is me at a wedding. This is what you wear at a wedding in Botswana. And glad to take any comments. Questions, thank you. Gina, this was fascinating. Thank you for the really good work you're doing in Botswana. Gender-based sexual violence is a crime. It's under-reported. It's stigmatized. And when women get engaged, women who are victimized feel more comfortable and come forward and report it and talk about it. So it really helps. And we also know it's not just a women's issue. It's a national security issue. We saw it increase around the world during the pandemic. It emerged as a shadow pandemic. We know it's related. It's not an issue in and of itself. It's always a symptom of a much more complex problem. During the pandemic, we know they were underlying economic stresses, psychological stresses, societal stresses. We also see it rise during war zones, battle zones, crisis zones, disaster zones. So it's very important. Thank you so much. And now finally, last but certainly not least, Ms. Wilkins-Smith, over to you. Would you like to come here or would you? Okay, great. Good morning, everyone. I am so grateful to be here today and tell you a little bit about our work with implementing WPS at Navath Navier. And it was ran by the lead, Lieutenant Commander Shinise Kindle. Unfortunately, she couldn't be with us today, but I was her deputy lead along the way. Next slide, please. So our WPS program began in March of last year. Prior to that, our command had no WPS implemented within it. And a big part of that was, how do you implement WPS within the maritime domain? And the way we kind of went about that was by making sure WPS was incorporated in talking points with senior leadership seminars. We trained afloat ships. A big thing for us as well is making sure that it was incorporated in the exercises. And because the program is so new at our command, unfortunately, we weren't able to get it within our express series exercises because our command did lead quite a few exercises. But we were able to get it into the talking points of our last exercise, Obengami, stating that for all these future iterations, there will be WPS implemented within the academics week, working with the script writers and making sure that it is within the scenarios that are taught as well as the SLS portion of it. And another big thing we did was do shipboard exchanges with our partner countries. And then in addition to that, making sure that we support host nations WPS engagements, meaning that we would advertise that we were willing to help and assist in any kind of way, but we also not only wanted to promote what the US was doing, but to sit and listen and learn what other countries were doing to implement WPS as well. Next slide, please. So this shows quite a few engagements that we have completed. And so many people have asked us, how have you done so many WPS engagements with so little money, well, no money at all, essentially. And as I said before, we trained afloat ships. And so we went aboard the HWW, and fortunately we were able to have the AFRICOM Genad come with us, Lindsey brother, she's amazing. And she assisted us with training the captain, the exo and all of the officers aboard the ship about WPS what it is and how can they assist and incorporate WPS aboard the ship. And we were able to utilize the ship as a platform for all of these engagements. So basically it was free. And they went out and did several of these engagements on behalf of NAVF Navier. So we met them prior to their first deployment around Africa, and luckily the captain and exo were happy to implement. The exo commander Enrique Cessler quickly became our champion. And she was perfect simply because not only was she a woman but she was an African-American female. And that was so impactful for our partners when we received the AARs to see someone who looked like them commanding a ship, especially as a part of the engagement, we would do a series of exercises and for them to see her commanding people while they're doing these exercises was incredibly impactful. So I will talk about a couple of our engagements. As you can see, we had one in Liberia and Pugana and Gola Equatorial Guinea, South Africa and Djibouti. And one thing I would like to know is we worked with other service components to coordinate these events. With Djibouti, I have to give a shout out to CTFJ Hoa, their WPS program is amazing. And they partnered with us to do that Djibouti engagement aboard the HWW down in Djibouti. Next slide, please. So this slide shows our command gender network. I thought it was important to show this because not only were we doing external engagements and things outside of the command, but also inside of the command, we had to structure it and get it built up so that it was implemented across the board. And a big part of that had to do with each end code. They needed to know exactly how can they implement WPS within each one. And luckily, as our political advisor would say, we had so much catastrophic success that the command saw the need for a gender advisor. And we are the only co-com who is paying out of our own funding to sponsor a gender advisor. So they are looking for a gender advisor in Naples, Italy. Just to put that out there. Next slide, please. And so this is our support infrastructure. This is how we connected to the dots to do so many of our engagements. We felt like it was important to really think outside of the box as far as how to implement WPS. So we reached out to the War College and we worked with Spelman University and other organizations to help us implement WPS. Next slide, please. So I know we're running short on time, so I'm getting through this as quick as I can. But this comes from the slide that we normally utilize to train the float ships. And I will highlight one key thing, which goes to the had our missions. And that is how we really say that the ships can truly implement WPS as far as making sure, not only do they have the supplies on board to support the women, but making sure they're putting a gender perspective in what they do on board the ship. And it is really been helpful. We have two ships trained so far, but the idea is to have all the ships trained within our African AOR and our European AOR because we do service both AORs. And thank you for your time. It's into how to integrate the gender perspective in the maritime domain. How to operationalize WPS. And I think what I took away from your talk, especially was the importance of women in leadership roles. How impactful they are as role models and how much credibility they add to institutions, to defense institutions, and of course, many other institutions. So it's an important reminder that both men and women play very important and sometimes different roles. They bring different strengths and add so much. So thank you all. So now we have about, maybe about a little over 15 minutes for Q and A. So let's begin. Over to you, our audience. Okay, Brenda. Thank you so much for this. This is a fabulous panel. Such good work. But of course, for Colonel Norte and Sergeant Fitzpatrick, the burning question, why didn't it happen? And both of your takes. I'd like to hear both of your views on why it didn't move forward. And it doesn't mean that it's not going to happen, but it didn't during your time there. So the delay for WPS while I was there was on the USN, not on the Ghanaian end. So Ghana had already established gender advisors, I think at Army Command and then above at their joint command. So at the very highest level of their joint staff, they had a gender advisor already and they have them in each one of their services as well. As to what activities they're all doing, I don't know. I was focused mostly on Army. And then the program, it was an OSC program actually that was already teed up and approved for use in Ghana. It was female engagement team money. But frankly, the OSC there is overburdened. It's a large, it's a large embassy. It's a large mission. There is too much going on and there should probably be anywhere from two to three Army attachés and two to three Navy attachés in that country in order to really to cover all the ground they're gonna have to cover. Particularly with Ghana's partnership with the US becoming more and more prominent with the spillover of JNM and violent extremism out of the cell. So we were unable with all of the, the bureaucratic red tape and then with it being a nascent mission set for the 95th. It was only the second team to go into Ghana and it was the first full team. So it was the first team of actually all four service members there. In order to get the normal wickets in place for minimum force requirement to travel certain distances out of the capital with force protection and everything else. We had a lot of red tape that we had to cut through that was just not gonna, it just wasn't gonna happen quick enough. And as we all know, like a lot of the money is tied to a fiscal year. So my desperation, because it was desperation to get it done was expected. Cause I know at the end of this year, like if I don't get this done and the next team doesn't get this done that money may not spill over into the next year depending on which pot of money it is. I think I'll let Will speak to whether or not it will happen. So following on on that, that was my third recommendation. We need a dedicated WPS focal point in the OSC so that we can move forward with more activities and that will solve the problem. But going forward, also with the FET arrangements because the outlook for FETs from the US is usually battle centric, battle focus. We are more focused on peacekeeping at the time. Yes, there are threats that are coming so we will require their experience and expertise in the other areas. But as we speak now, that program is rolling already because the UN mainstreamed that into peacekeeping and they came up with a curriculum and a policy and guidelines. So we have no choice but to integrate that. We do a lot of cooperation on other fields, not just WPS, so that is also in the US space in what we call the APRP. So it's also on another level. What this means is that the cooperation levels are many but if you have few people to distill all of them, some of them get blocked along the way. So essentially the FETs is going on but it's going on in the peacekeeping space. We eventually get onto it and then look at how we incorporate that in fighting extremists and other activities. Thank you. Great. Okay, we have a question there, Lisa. Hi. Thank you all for being here. I found it very informative. This question is for Colonel Norte as well. You talked a lot about cultural change within the battalion and education of senior officers and generals. I was wondering if you can expand upon what topics of education you implemented for cultural change within the battalion. So one of the key areas was a program we did with DECAF, there's a lady called Heather Huntonen and she came up with two strands of a topic and it said, men working with women and women working with men to break down little nuances of cultural dimensions between how this becomes a problem in a peacekeeping setting and in other areas. And I think that was one topic that went down very well because I hear them thinking that, well, she needs to come back, whether they will engage her virtually. But there were other topics. The key thing was that we realized that people talk about women, peace and security, gender, peace and security and there is, it's just surface. People don't really understand it. They don't understand the impact it makes on the ground and why we are asking for more women participation in peacekeeping and the meaningful impact that it has. So it's just about breaking it down, trying to address these issues and say, look, this is essential. We actually have experience and we also have lessons to prove and bring this to the leadership because the leader is like, well, the armed forces is doing great. Why are you pushing so much women? I mean, we're fine. But you need to tell them that we could be better and those are the lessons that we seek to bring. I hope that answers your question. Thank you. And thank you for highlighting the importance of the role of leadership in understanding the problem and we were talking, we heard about it from the keynote speaker earlier that unless there is political will and understanding, it's going to be very difficult to engender cultural change. So yes, thank you for that. Other questions? Let's go to the online audience. Okay, we have Andre. Yes, over to you. Well, that's happening. Andre, maybe you can come here. Okay, thank you. Hello? Yes. Great. This question is for Jasmine. Kudos to your office for one year in the office and you're doing so much work. So I think that's impressive to be noted. My question is, have you had or thought about doing kind of networking events, kind of female officers or female enlisted specific? And then if you're concerned about cost shares, I was thinking you could do a partner nation 50-50 where they could host an event and then the ships can also host events. The CEOs have some discretion on their representational funds. So the supply officers and dispersing officers can pay for their food and then they can do an event at the ward room. So just curious about if you had done those type of events. Yes, we have done quite a few of those events. As far as the funding for food, with COVID being a big part of it, we couldn't have food because of the COVID restrictions on board the ship because that was pretty much the only platform we could use. We tried to do it with the cost share. It didn't really work out because the other country did not want to pay for our WPS events at all. Simply because some of them were a little hesitant to do WPS and incorporate it. So it was more when we worked with the embassy team, we have to take care of it. So, but we did quite a few of those and a lot of our engagements were panels like this. So we really got to hear the experiences of the women in military because the country team stated that a big part of what they want to push is recruiting and retention within those militaries. We wanted to find out what are the problems and then push that up to leadership so they can make policy changes. Thank you. Great. Okay. Do we have questions from our online participants? This one is for Master Sergeant Fitzpatrick. Our participant from chat says, I'm so happy to hear and see that special operations units like yours are holistically incorporating women into your units. How has this change, how was this change initially received and how have perspectives changed since? Is this on? So I actually came into the 95th as a very young soldier. I was a medic. I was not a civil affairs specialist in 2008. Prior to that time, around 2005, 2006, the 96th was the only battalion that did special operations civil affairs. In the whole of the DOD, there was a lot of the civil affairs was on the reserve side of the armed forces in the army, but within the special operations unit, that unit was primarily all green berets. So there were no women in the unit prior to 2005, 2006 because at that time there were no graduates of the special forces qualification course who were females. So there were nothing but green berets in the unit. At the time that the global war on terror really took off and I'm gonna say blossomed, although that's a bad term. Like it just grew into this larger than life thing and all these green berets were being pulled out of the unit and sent back to their groups to go do special forces activities and we still needed civil affairs. So they started backfilling the civil affairs units with branch detailed officers because civil affairs was not a branch within active duty at that time. And when they did that, we had everything from former infantry commanders to nurses, some of the first females I saw in the unit were like, they were army nurses that came in and they were just branch detailed to civil affairs. When active duty split from use of K-POP when the reserves and active duty split apart and the branch was hard established within active duty, we already had females within the unit and we invited everybody to come and try out. So there really was never a, there was never a bar to women's serving within civil affairs and because of that reason, many women applied and once we had a selection, an actual try out like a selection process, women came to selection and their success rates were actually pretty good and I mean, it just happened. There wasn't like a brand champion for women to be there. They were already integrated into the unit because we needed people and we just continued doing it. So I guess it was kind of like, nobody really forced it, it just happened. It's actually, if I could just add one point to that, there are many, many women working in special operations across the board who I would call, much to the chagrin of some of my SF peers, I would call them operators. Many that you're never gonna read them out in the paper, you're never gonna see their name, you're never gonna hear about it. I'm not talking about women that graduate from Ranger school because there was a lot of fanfare with that but there are women special operators in the higher level special operations units that have been operated in those units integrated, fully integrated in doing excellent work for many, many years before 2006. They've always been there. I don't, it's kind of just a parable or a talking point that women haven't been integrated into combat roles. They have been. People just, some of the combat roles are not freely discussed or openly discussed because of security reasons. So I'll leave it at that. Great, wonderful. Do we have, okay, one more question? We have one more question. This is from the perspective of national guard partnership programs. Are there initiatives to tie in the national guard partnership programs, partners, excuse me, to WPS military efforts in the field with partner countries? So national guard partnership partners to WPS military efforts in the field with partner countries? So this, I know that, for example, Ghana is aligned to one of the national guard units. South Dakota. And we usually have a periodic meetings and as far as they are prepared to work in the space when they face the objectives, we'll be more than happy to let it work. So far, I'm not too sure if that is happening. We've engaged them in other activities, but this is an area that we are quite excited to move forward with about. So national guard units are more than welcome. And I can speak to that, Adrienne. So I supported Nevada National Guard in Tonga in the development of a national action plan and Nevada National Guard is very, very active in Fiji in planning, they're also planning to expand their footprints in Samoa. And I find them to be very, very effective because they are on the ground and they have built the relationships and they understand. So I think national guards could really make the change. I know that, I think it's Oregon National Guard, they're working in Bangladesh. And I'm also aware of a few other national guards and right now they're slipping off. I don't remember them, but I think these national guards are groups that I have worked with and I think they can really be very, very impactful. And if I was the president, I would give them as many resources as they wanted. So that's a great question. I have one question of the panel. I have one more thing to add. So as a security cooperation practitioner, I am a huge fan of National Guard. In Botswana, we had North Carolina as the SBP partner. They are ramping up their WPS work. One of the challenges for an OSC chief, and by the way, for people who are not in on the know in security cooperation, every embassy has the equivalent of an office of defense cooperation or security cooperation or at Indopaycom, they're called Just Mags. It just depends. So I sort of use those words interchangeably. Funding the National Guard is always a challenge because most pots of money cannot pay for their, can only pay for their per diem and it's up to the state to actually pay for their salary to come and do engagement. So it's always a challenge and whoever is going to rely on the SBP, you need to know you have to work that out in advance. But I think it's a great opportunity for National Guards to advance the WPS agenda. So I have a question for the panel. I have, I think we have just one more minute. So for the past day and a half, we've been thinking about organizational change and precipitating cultural change. What are your takeaways? Would anyone like to share, when you go back, is there anything you have thought about after coming here that you will take back and implement within your organization? Who would like to take this? Well, I'm already planning on trying to shoehorn all WPS things into my commander's training guidance. What I will say to add to that, my biggest takeaway, I think over the past two days and having my own catharsis in my 20 year career about what we've been doing in Afghanistan and Iraq and all these places where, to the common observer, we have failed, is that we focused, for 20 years, we focused on fighting age males in these conflicts. That's who we focused on, that was the primary focus. And what that means is, even though we did many WPS things over that 20 year period, we didn't do nearly enough. And fighting age males are nurtured and indoctrinated into their culture usually by a woman. So, leaving out that piece and not engaging in a meaningful way with women on the battlefield left us with an enormous information delta. We developed units to try to do that, but they were done too fast and they were not given enough money and they were not given enough training and resources. I'm speaking about cultural support teams and female engagement teams right now. They should have been a bigger unit. They should have been established permanent. They should have received more money for training and they should have a permanent home somewhere within Forces Command in the US Army or SOCOM or in one of the other services. And because you can't go do women's engagement in an emergency, you can't create those people in an emergency and they just don't exist within outside of what Corey and those guys had to do to go to OAW and take care of those problems. Like, that's an emergency and like they just, contractors ended up doing it because we don't have a force that's dedicated to this and there needs to be one. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your thoughtful response. Colonel Norty, maybe 30 seconds. Thank you. As I mentioned earlier, we have already appointed gender advisors at all levels. They are mostly men and we have put women as their deputies, women who are competent in the field. What I look forward to do is probably having a session where we can use the design thinking that we've done in the afternoon to really tease out some of these things out of the men because I think that is where we need to focus. Working to change the mindset of the men who are likely to make more impact. That's where I go. Excellent. Fabulous. Ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking this wonderful panel. And I think it's coffee time, right? All right then. I would like to turn it over to my colleague, Dr. Gina Palmer, for moderating this panel. Thank you so much. Hello, I'm Gina Palmer an assistant professor in NWC's College of Leadership and Ethics. And it is my pleasure to moderate panel four today on WPS, Org Culture and Global Security. Our three panelists are Colonel Brad Tippett, Marine Corps University, Peg Klein, U.S. Naval War College, and CMC Joe Farney, also from U.S. Naval War College. So to kick it off, could each of you talk to us about your take on WPS and global security? And are there one or two key priorities defense leaders should be focused on right now, and why? So over to you, Brad. Thank you. So I'll start off my comments is kind of just a, I think an appreciation to the group, to the team here at the War College for extending the invitation. Last fall, my colleague, Laura McKenzie, their command staff college in Quantico, said, hey, would you be interested in being a part of this? And I said, sure, and I'm not gonna lie to you that as I prepared for this over the previous weeks, the phrase, it seemed like a good idea at the time, has cup rolling back to me. But some uprupt truth in advertising, I am in no way shape or form a WPS expert. That's not why I think I was asked to come. Full truth, transparency, expectation management on your part. I learned about WPS being a thing last summer when I checked into command staff colleges director, and Lauren and some of our colleagues said, hey, there's this thing that used to exist, it wasn't law and didn't have things now is, and we need to understand how that fits in curriculum. So, but as a novice to WPS, I think a discussion with my value proposition, I'm gonna go with what I know, and unapologetically, I know leadership and team building. I've been doing that in practice, studying that for about a part of 30 years in Marine Corps, and I have more recently started into really a deep dive into two topics that I think converge with that, but are more focused on myself, and that's really how to become more self-aware to include demonstration of vulnerability in a lot of different settings to promote growth. So I'm gonna look at kind of a nexus of those as we go forward. So when I looked at the question that Gina talked about, you know, WPS Global Security, I really had to go back to the theme about last and change, and I think there is this aspect of urgency that exists with the issues, but I think maybe some of the fundamental aspects that I wanna talk about are maybe some of those deeper areas, the iceberg that I guess we're not supposed to talk about, but we'll talk about, but things that are below the surface of the pond or the ocean or wherever we're gonna look, and I don't think those necessarily have quick fixes or easy fixes, but the central idea I wanna present to you is a paradox and I think it's one we need to wrestle with, and that's this. I think that the success that we desire for WPS is dependent on men, and at the same time, inhibited by a male-dominated culture such power structure within the department of defense, and I don't think we're wrestling with that enough. So why do I think that depends on men, that change? It's a factual reality. Qualitatively, men represent more leaders within the department. That trickles down from the department down to every subordinate formation, whether it's a ship's crew or whether it's a maintenance section or an infantry squad, and that's not a statement of being right. It's a factual reality. So if we operate within that reality, the conversations surrounding WPS that need to be occurring between men and women at all levels, I don't believe are occurring at the right frequency and the one the manner that will create lasting change. So the question, but the next why, right? I paid attention yesterday. What's the next why? Why are men sitting on the sidelines of the conversation? I'm reminded of a quote that I heard in a podcast recently and how satisfied you are with the status quo will inform your need for the change. I think that starts to unpack and unravel a little bit of that paradox. Hear me out, I'm not advertising. I don't have data. I'm not a research analyst that shows that there are some number of men who are fully satisfied with the level of meaningful participation that women are having in defense of my joint force. I'm not saying that, but if you'll just draw the argument out a little bit more, maybe, if there's a small percentage of male leaders who are on one end of a spectrum that don't believe that WPS and whatever represents our good ideas or a good investment of time. And then on the other end, there's another smaller group of men that are zealots that are all about it. We got to do this somewhere in the vast majority as the rest of the male population within defense and then the leaders perhaps. But I just, what I want to call out is that all three of those groups sit within the status quo where power distribution benefits men. So whether you're a zealot, whether you're a non-believer, whether you're somewhere in the middle, you're benefiting from the status quo. So what's the incentive for men to disrupt the status quo that's advantageous to them is the question I think we got to start wrestling with. I think it's useful to acknowledge that altruistic motivations are great. We should do this because it's the right thing to do. Let's be pragmatic though. That only extends so far. Defense professionals, men and women alike, they want to realize greater career opportunities that includes promotion and leadership positions, command. So I think this is like, if you start to unfold this paradox, it starts to become a little bit more clear, at least it did to me. Here's what I would contend. Someone told me, one of my commanders told me, subordinate commanders, last time I was in command, he gave me this great illustration when someone said, hey, you stole my thunder. Pete Shine stole my thunder, but he didn't steal my thunder. I'm sharing his thunder with us, right? So I want to share some of his thunder and hip some of mine. I don't think there's anything that tells a man in Department of Defense that engaging in those conversations is a safe thing to do. That's not what we're signaling. To step out of the status quo, to promote a concept or program that disrupts that power structure, I don't believe it's not pragmatic on the part of a man. So those that choose to involve themselves do for various reasons, and I think those are important to understand. I don't have good answers for any of them, but I think the area that he spoke to about psychological safety, the work that Amy Edmondson did that many are familiar with, that things like Project Aristotle that Google did confirm that good teams are based off of a vital element of psychological safety that promotes growth at the individual level and organizational level. We've got to start unpacking that. I think that one area that we can work towards would be, I'm stealing a lot of terms, right? We talked about a lot of micro things yesterday. It's microaggressions and micro support and micro motion. I think micro and macro environments, we look to how we create those where it's okay for men and women to wrestle with the why of WPS, not just the what, right? I think there's an elemental level of why that we're just, and this is not an indictment, this is not a majority statement, but there's, we're implementing and we're doing, but in some cases there are groups of men that are legitimately looking for an opportunity to ask why are we doing this, what's this really all about? I think there are a bunch of folks, men that are like that, and they want that opportunity to have those conversations, but I don't think that there's a belief on their part that asking those questions in public forums is really something that's gonna damage them because this is just what we're supposed to do, and then we start getting this aspect of whether or not we're achieving change or whether we're achieving compliance associated with WPS. I think we need a space for folks to be able to really challenge their own biases, to be able to examine their perspectives, to hear different perspectives, things like we've been doing this week, this past couple of days, and then to be able to have a forum that allows them to synthesize those things into something new. The things that Pete and I talked about of culture being learned behaviors, I think that we need to continue to learn, we need to continue to grow, not just say what is, but we need to allow individuals and those relationship level engagements to be able to grow as individuals and move past some of the things that they believe now, but to do it at a pace which we may not, in some cases, be fully satisfied with, but I think it's gotta be at the individual level in many cases that this is done. So I'm all in with my comments. I'm almost to what I told you I was gonna do, Gina. Told her eight minutes, I'm not gonna get it, but I'll be under 10. It's hard stuff, but it can be done. I use myself as an illustrative example. I'm a long-term infantry officer in the Marine Corps. I commanded from the platoon level to the battalion level. In every one of those cases, there was not an integrated force in the Marine Corps. They're all men in those units. So I'm kind of a stalwart, if you will, of non-gender integration. I don't know what WPS is, not because I'm a bad person, but because my experiences didn't deliver that to me. But when my experiences were able to deliver to me different opportunities, specifically the last time I commanded, I have two women that I count as mentors, they're friends, they were subordinates, but they allowed me to be able to see the value of meaningful contact participation with them. They demonstrated that grace to me that was necessary at the micro level, not without accountability, not without boundaries. And then in turn, I believe they trusted me to be able to have conversations, to ask questions, whether they were gender-related or otherwise, of like, why are we doing this? It would be hard to do those things at scale, to be able to blow that out to a service, to an organizational level, but I'm confident because I've seen it and I've seen the power of it done at the micro level, at the individual level. And it requires trust and grace and accountability, all mixed together in some uncomfortable conversations, but I believe that's where the growth will occur that's necessary to be able to kind of submit this going forward on the part of a critical factor and that's the men in defense. So, thanks a lot for your comments. Thank you, Brad. And you mentioned this tension between safety and pragmatism for leaders versus true progress. Even, you said last night when we were talking that even if leaders are given mission critical aspects of security and defense, that WPS is important for true sense of belonging, for unit cohesion, for resilience, for readiness, that this tension or elephant in the room that you bring up is really important for you to discuss and he'd really like to discuss that with the audience and we'll open that up after we get to the other two. Given that the discussion would be different at a table of three like last night versus in a room where you have Zoom versus something that's recorded in broadcast. So, granted that that conversation may not be what you want, let's definitely get into the conversation that we can have in that regard. You may get more than you wanted for, but I'm glad to have it. So over to you, Peg. You're familiar with all of this and you're also focusing on org culture in the Navy and meaningfulness, meaningful change in WPS. What's your perspective on this? So, first of all, thanks for the invitation to serve on the panel. I'm the Dean of Leadership and Ethics for the Naval War College and that position was created as an outgrowth of the Navy's emphasis, not just on technical competence, but on competence and character. And so, when we say competence in just about any chosen profession, the bubble over everyone's head could be clearly identified among people in the conversation. When you say the word character, it is a very different story, right? So in the Navy of Confidence, I have, let's imagine that I have a pair of naval flight officer wings on my uniform and I tell you what aircraft I used to fly. You immediately have a very graphic and realistic picture of what I do in the Navy or in my case, what I did in the Navy. I have a bunch of ribbons that could indicate the level of performance. If we're pure meritocracy and we give ribbons and medals out based on merit. Which we largely do. Where I think it is extraordinarily important to start this part of the conversation is, and just so that you can imagine the bubble over my head, I'm thinking of a tree with deep roots fertilized by conversations in women peace, in and around women peace and security. And this tree, I love maple trees, but oaks last much longer. But think of it as having three major branches, okay? So if I'm talking to you, let's just put me as the trunk and I'm gonna kinda go in three different directions. First of all, had women peace and security been part of the law? I would imagine that my experience as a young officer, which was a long time ago, I would imagine that my experience as a young officer would have been quite different. Instead, I was left to navigate a system that is all the things Brad said except the infantry part. I was an aviation, which is different than infantry, but the same male statistics in 1981 when I was commissioned. I fortunately grabbed on to people who could help and I recognized that the organization, the uniform of my country was a team sport. So we're gonna move over to the next branch. The next branch is the small unit organization that I again started out in as a junior officer. Again, WPS didn't fertilize that tree and so those first two branches did not benefit from the benefits that we now see and that we see potential for going forward. So my experience in the organization was when I had good leaders who recognized that everybody needed to be treated with dignity and respect, then I was treated with dignity and respect and they led the organization that way, which caused them to hear from everyone in the organization. Okay, now we're gonna go shift quickly to the third branch. The third branch is the larger enterprise and I'm gonna talk about the Navy because that's where my expertise is and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet people from DSEA, one of the defense DOD agencies and DHS and so, but I'm gonna talk from my experience. So my experience around the Navy is that we are challenged, so I'll talk about the challenges and then what WPS does to help us going forward if we take advantage of it. So the challenge is that we try to scale amazing ideas and Brad, you said something similar, right? Very difficult to scale good leadership. I've been trying for much of my time to incentivize the types of leaders that we want and the types of leaders that I wanna see across the Navy, again, as the Dean of Leadership and Ethics, so there's no problem too small for me to embrace, which whatever, that might be, there's a few biases and heuristics built into my brain there. It is critical that we understand what good leadership looks like and I'll go back to the first branch and the second branch, which is treating people with dignity and respect. Now, as we continue to look at this large organization and look forward at how it could benefit from all that WPS has to offer and I'm gonna talk more about women and security than I am about peace, but peace has a role there, I'm just not accustomed to the peacemaking part of the business, what I'm accustomed to is deterrence, what I'm accustomed to is war fighting and what it takes to contribute in those organizations. So what does it take to contribute in an organization, my tree, that is now fed by the program, by the law, by the models embraced by women, peace and security? Well, what does it take? It takes, I'm gonna focus on one for a couple minutes, perspective taking. In my very early experiences, your perspective didn't matter for anything until you had your professional credentials and then if you were part of a group, a socially recognized group that who was credible, then your voice mattered. If you were smart enough to know what it took to get into that socially recognized in group, your perspective mattered. In today's, in the 21st century security environment, we can't wait for that. We can wait for the professional credentials because me talking about the lethality of my aircraft before I had flown five hours in it, not so credible and I would say is not part of the problem. Many people have well-established processes for how we build, most professions have well-established processes for how we build technical credentials. You, as an infantryman, you understood what it took, you spent a lot of time in classroom, a lot of time in the field, a lot of time doing structured and unstructured exercises. What we cannot afford today and what we need from the strength that WPS gives us is we can't afford to wait. When somebody has their technical credentials, we need to pull from them their very diverse perspectives because the reality is that the white male organization that I walked into in 1983 had a lot of diverse perspectives but we didn't listen to them. I would argue that 40 years later, that we cannot be patient enough to wait for diverse perspectives. We must, thing one, we must incentivize the people who bring together diverse perspectives. We need to stop promoting the people and promoting, right, I'll use the term loosely, I don't mean statutory promotions. We need to stop promoting the people who are closed-minded and think that the people that they currently know have every good idea that's ever gonna be created. This environment and the problems that we see, the complexity that we see, we can't be patient any longer to wait for those leaders to emerge. We have to figure out, I would say less about coercion, more about incentives, right, because we know carrots and honey work much better than sticks and vinegar. We know that, there's a tremendous amount of research of what it takes to incentivize. So, let me leave you with a question. How do you incentivize the behavior that you want? And what have you learned yesterday and already today? Peter gave you some amazing models. What did you learn today and what will you do differently to incentivize the things that we need in the 21st century global security environment? Thanks. Thank you, Peg. And thanks for bringing in that element of asking this group what they'll design and opening up that conversation and talking about your experience and structure and practice. And with that, let's pass it over to Joe. Joe, I know you've also talked about the importance of learning culture, the importance of scaling inclusion. Tell us about your perspective. Thank you, I really appreciate that. I would love for everybody to have my perspective. My perspective is that I've got Dr. Klein here with her entire note system right there. Meanwhile, Brad and I have laptops and 11,000 words of text on here that I'm trying to pack into four minutes. I appreciate you so much. I think it is important to highlight a couple of things without real coordination between what any of us were going to talk about today. You're gonna hear some consistent themes. One that Brad hit right off the nail here and that we've heard a couple of times over the last day and a half is this idea of graciousness. I think in any kind of conversation where you are discovering or in the process of trying to discover one another and what makes us better as an organization that there has to be a level of graciousness in that conversation. And with that idea in mind and to couple Dr. Klein's remarks in that space about how important it is to get after diversity very quickly instead of waiting on it to come to you. I'd like to recognize a couple of folks. And some of these folks are in the room and online and I don't, at the risk of being patronizing. I just wanted to share with you what my mentor network looks like and the folks that have really shaped what I think about and why I think about it. You met Admiral Chatfield yesterday, an extraordinary boss, an extraordinary visionary person and someone who has given me a heck of a lot of latitude to think differently about what this space might look like from a women's peace and security perspective. Dr. Klein as well is just a tremendous role model for me and quite frankly, every person that I know who aspires to be a little bit more like Peg Klein. Dr. Katrina Norvell who was my academic advisor at Roger Williams University that said, hey, you've got some life experiences that really tie nicely into this conversation about women, peace and security and where that might make a difference in a culture. And then to have somebody like Dr. Jenna Joule who was at my previous command who helped me really every single day understand that from a gracious perspective that I could ask questions of her that were complicated and difficult and that she was willing so patiently and graciously to explain things to me. Captain then Emily Bassett, some of you may know, Captain Shreve Calphi, Captain Derek Granger and Commander Mary Ann Stamphley, all of whom who in their own way over the last 16 years as my time as a Command Master Chief have been so gracious in this conversation to be persons that would help me understand as the Command Master Chief to a senior leader in an organization whatever that organization might look like that I have a deep obligation to set the battle space for individuals to be able to come to work every single day and belong and that they do not have to come to a place and subjugate parts of themselves to be able to fit into an organization that that belonging is deep and is important and that they can do that. I had an experience just a couple of days ago where I had a female black American who was sitting in the audience. She's a doctor and MD and she was talking about her experiences with her 19 year old son who is in his first year of college and one of the things that she said to me that was just really striking is this idea of, I can't escape this thought, right? Whether I am in the surgical suite, whether I am in pre-op, whether I am on my couch, whether I am in my car, I cannot escape the thought that the next phone call might be the phone call that tells me that my 19 year old son has been shot and killed or has had some horribly bad thing happen to him, right? And from a women peace and security perspective, what I see in that space is I cannot expect that women come to work every single day ready to shoot a five inch gun and provide naval surface gunfire support and do it in a way that is effective and lethal in every context possible while they are thinking about the hours and hours of non-compensated work that we demand of our women and our households and our homes and how that space will look, right? We have got to be better in this space in terms of how we might do that. I had two very powerful women in my life. I mentioned them yesterday when I shared my one line important thing about me. Dr. Klein wasn't here, so I'll share it again. But both my aunt and my mother owned beauty salons. They were both beauticians, both equally talented, both remarkable women, both leaders of great character in spaces where I first was exposed to diversity in beauty salons that had black and brown individuals that had members of our GLBT community that operated in the space in the 80s where that was a really, really complicated to be a place to be. And I watched how the patriarchy around those two women shaped the way that they really thrived or did not thrive. My mother, who unfortunately died very tragically by her own hand in a place where she was not willing and not able to receive the kinds of support that she could have and was always struggling to fit in wherever she was. And my aunt, who was absent at patriarchy, absent that kind of idea and who thrived at every possible endeavor. I have a 15 year old daughter that I think about, what does the future look like for her and which of those two examples I just gave you, will she be? It is our obligation to make it the latter. It is our obligation that our women come to work every single day and support in this place and be lethal in whatever thing they take up. And I think that's my obligation. All of those, unfortunately, are my opening remarks, which is, we are doomed. In 2019, I was asked to go speak at the National Convention for Public Administrators and I thought Dr. Novell and I were gonna go in and we were gonna wax eloquently with this wide audience of wonderful people of all different backgrounds. The title of the session was Dislodging Epistemic Injustice. Epistemology is essentially the study of knowledge. Dislodging Epistemic Injustice, social equity imperatives, right? And we walk into the room and it's an absolutely packed room, standing room only. And I start doing the counting and there's 77 women, three males and one individual who did not look like them. And I got to thinking like, here I am talking about social equity imperatives to a group of women who have been marginalized for the bulk of their lives. Social inequity in the workplace is something that I don't need to explain to these women. So I need all 77 women to go out in the hall, grab the first white male that you can find and bring them back into the conversation, right? Because I think that that is important. So I got crafty this year when I was asked to go present. And if you can understand this title, please let me know, because I still don't and I wrote it. Towards an epistemology of culture, a study and synthesis of relevant modalities and character connections and key enablers in high functioning teams and organizations. It was almost 50-50 male-female in that context, right? Because apparently I confused enough men that that's a place that they needed to be because they heard high functioning teams and organizations, right? I don't know a commander that's not willing to manipulate his or her battle space. And what I mean by that is before you launch somebody out of the back of an aircraft into a landing zone, we all understand what the prevailing weather conditions are, what the prevailing winds look like, what the nearest opportunity for contact with the enemy is, what kind of landing zone we're gonna be jumping into. All of those things are things that commanders will take careful consideration of, but we do not manipulate our battle space when it comes to race, gender, and other marginalized communities. And I think we must manipulate our battle space because we cannot wait for the battle space to change in our favor. There will not be a time in my lifetime where 51% of the leadership in the military will be women and we will have one, right? Because when you look at the leadership in the military and the leadership in our country, I think that that leadership, that one or 2% at the very, very top control so much of what goes on and I don't know that we're gonna be there in my lifetime. So we've got to manipulate this battle space differently. So I wanted to make a quick point of clarification from the panel yesterday, it came up again today. It wasn't just contractors that supported Operation LA's welcome. Speaking of diversity, I wanna make sure the whole team got credit. We had civilians, we had active duty. We even had state department and DIA civilians on the team as well. So thanks for giving me the moment to do that. And then the other part I wanted to ask the panel is, I'm really interested in the global competition piece that was noted in the theme of the panel today. And what do you see as the opportunity with regard to women, peace and security with regards to global competition? Can I maybe say something thought-provoking and then they can jump in with the deep thoughts, right? When I hear stories of, and I know great power competition is something we say and then we don't talk about, but we're talking about 21st century global competition. And so I think about those stories of foreign navies who are not necessarily our friends visiting our ships and the one aircraft carrier, CEO, and this is at least 20 years ago, who whenever they did a tour of the aircraft carrier, they had a chief petty officer show off the spaces. And this leader from another Navy who might be involved on the other side of the competition equation just was astonished at the power of our enlisted. That's one example of it's, we take officers who've graduated from college, we take enlisted right out of high school, that doesn't scratch the surface of the very diverse perspectives that exist in both populations and make us so competitive. And that's where the impatience part comes in my mind is that that's where we need to be impatient, where we need to look for leaders to scale. We need to look for leaders who understand that they are not the only hero in the room. So with that, I'll just kind of leave that thought provoking thing on the table for some more deep introspection. Well, as it was to the panel, I wanna give you Joe and Brad the opportunity to answer that about the global competition given the urgency. But I did wanna also underscore one of the conversations we've been having on AI ethics panels for five I countries is this idea of can you program ethics? Can we program in our ROEs and our values? And this discussion on what the deepest level, the undercurrents of the values that we have in common, those that we agree upon with our allies and across party lines, it doesn't matter, that we have to harness those. And those are going to be programmed in now for human machine teams, for informing commanders. So it's not a light topic to ask what are our values and how do we put those forward, not only with our people on the ground level, but in policy as well and process. So over to you, Brad and Joe, is there anything you wanna say on global competition and that kind of advantage? All of our three thoughts. I think one is WPS in the spirit of continuing competition whether it's great power or just competition is a concept that is continuum. I think that WPS is a mechanism, it's a tool, it's a thing, it's a concept that gives us the ability to purposefully pull in a different perspective into mainstream that will enable learning and improvement and betterment over time. It allows a continual cycle of learning. It's not the only different perspective, but it serves as kind of an established model to be able to do that. We want this different perspective. We can look at the same problem from the same perspective and not learn. If we look at the same problem and pull in different perspectives and synthesize those together, I think that's where growth and learning starts to occur and I think to maintain advantage in competition, that's required. You can't just sit and say, we're competing. You gotta continue to learn and grow and seek advantage in that capacity. I think it also goes to what was mentioned yesterday and I don't remember which speaker it was, but the idea of, we have some existing vulnerabilities within our own society that are presented by some of the differences in diversity and WPS, I think, offers a mechanism to start to shore up some of those vulnerabilities and we can start the integration and it starts to become normalized in some of the perspectives that we maintain so that they cannot be advantaged by our competitors. You can think about political aspects, but I think you could look at gender and race as vulnerabilities within our society in different opinions. When we swarm up, we reduce some of those vulnerabilities and I think the other thing we've talked a lot about and I think it's there, it needs to be explored more, experimented with. The last panel really kind of illustrated that. It's the access and the tactical advantages that you can gain. Those are beneficial not only in what they do, but I think there are also advantages and kind of a reciprocal action for implementation of WPS because it shows value into what those perspectives and those differences can bring. So three ideas. Yeah, just a couple of thoughts. When I think about great power competition, I really think about kind of three things. Competency, character, and connections. I quite frankly think that competency is easy to buy, it's easy to manufacture. If you throw money at it, you can get competent people, you can get competent systems and relatively easy to measure. What I think is much, much more difficult is this idea of character and connections and the value that they bring to this fight because they are difficult to scale and they're very, very difficult to measure. So when you are looking or at least I am looking at, how do I follow the money in an organization to figure out is WPS really an important piece of this organization's fabric? It is difficult to follow that money because it is difficult to measure some of the effect of that piece. I think that that is where we are going to out stick the competition. I don't know that we're out sticking the competition and competency every day. But I think that we are going to out stick the competition and character and connections when we work with our academic partners to help us have academic rigor and a solid foundation so that we can start to work character and connections throughout the organizations on the largest scale possible and understand what a practitioner's perspective is as they go to their ship's submarines, aircraft and medical treatment facilities every single day and do the jobs that they do. I think that that partnership is going to be increasingly more important and I think that's where we're going to out stick people in the next fight. Any questions from online? We do have a question from the chat audience. This question builds on John's earlier question. WPS implementation may often be dependent on men and their attitudes, who status quo was already stacked in their favor and who see WPS and women's rights as a win-lose for them personally, vice a win-win situation and reluctant to power share. How do you really change that in your entire organization as leaders? Because I talked about it, I'll give it a shot. I think you've got to model the behavior as a leader. You've got to talk about it. You've got to be willing to step out and that's not unique to just WPS and power sharing, right? I think to Admiral Klein's points, there are leadership characteristics and aspects of character which are applicable to WPS which are applicable to a lot of things. But I think the modeling of the behavior on the part of leaders is something that's important. In a case like WPS, in a case like power sharing, I think leaders have to recognize that at some level they've got to step into the breach and demonstrate some vulnerability. The aspect of what keeps men out of those conversations of it not being a safe space because I'm not sure whether or not I'm going to be rewarded or if I burn the bridge by entering this conversation. Maybe I didn't burn the bridge, but I certainly didn't do any maintenance on it. You're that guy. Those types of sentiments roll through men's heads, but I think the commanders who are those leaders, those men that are in those positions have got to be willing to balance that idea of that there might be risk to this, but there's also risk to my team, to my force, to all the members of my team by not stepping into the breach and showing some vulnerability in having those conversations. It sounds self-serving, career-minded to say that, hey, I wouldn't do those things because, hey, Brad, you're a poor leader because you're saying you won't have tough conversations. I'm not saying that I'm just operating the realm of reality, but that is a consideration for every professional. What conversations do you choose to go into openly and which do you choose to have in private? And I think you got to start having some of those conversations with your teams more openly and more frequently. And it could be done in manners that don't have to look like, like DE&I and A-training or WPS conversations, but just challenging folks with ideas that get them to recognize things. Illustrative example, I kind of give quips to my team just things that I'm learning, things I'm listening to, and sometimes it's just weird information, factual in nature. I did some preparation, not for this, but for that session I talked to you about, about why I mentioned mentor women and was drawing on the aspect of how something like law in place doesn't necessarily produce the change that we're looking for. Yes, that happens in this aspect of residual effects. So the illustrative example of it's not a discussion, it's not a sermon, et cetera, but like, hey, did you know that it wasn't, that your mother could be denied a credit card by a bank up until 1974 unless her husband signed? I'm like, what are you talking about, sir? Yeah, the credit act passed in 1974. Did you know that she was class two or three at the academy? I would expect class two or three of women, the first women they got allowed. 1975, first quotes, 1976 under the academies. Having those conversations that illustrate that this is not about the esoteric conversation, this is like in our lifetimes, these are things that continue to be requiring change and putting it to people in terms that they can grab hold of. I think there are some of the ways to do that. I ramble, I apologize. My team knows I do that. Just to follow up on that. So I've been over the last 16 years now in 40 different organizations where I've been sent to those organizations to deliberately study culture. And in some cases it is to take organizations from good to great. In other cases, it is taking, receiving the 911 call that we have an organization that is extremist and that we need to get them to just above marginal. What I find in those organizations, and I am talking specifically to the good to great organizations, and these are my observations of those organizations, the most significant effort in the commander's list of objectives in terms of setting the conditions for healthy, developmental, growing cultures and climate is the ability to establish a learning culture. This is not our first rodeo in civil rights. It is not our first rodeo in social equity. It is not our first rodeo in recognizing that women are a powerful piece of this conversation, not because it is only the right thing to do, but that there are lots of objectives that we meet in doing so. Learning cultures are disruptive. They are publicly principled. There's a sense of urgency in a learning culture. There's unambiguous language and feedback when things are kind of coming off the rails. Commanders are not afraid to jump in and to say, hey, that's not okay. To the conversation that we had yesterday, we don't do that here is not set enough in some of those organizations that are struggling with this kind of idea. Learning organizations have the study of people at its core and are willing to take personal risk. Going back to that conversation about gratitude and then to Brad's point that is so eloquent, learning cultures are deliberate cultures. There's no accidental learning. It's not like we have to muster the troops and do a set aside an hour to learn about women in peace and security, but in the course and the fabric of that organization that there are conversations about why that matters. And I just think that those things are just super, super important. Where I see the failure of leaders to have learning cultures are leaders that will not do the hard work. And I think the principles in an organization have got to do the hard work. They've got to have suitable trusted agents. They've got to be intolerant of individuals that lack discipleship, the willingness to go out and spread the message or to spread the gospel. They can't be my optic in like, hey, there's my bottom line, that's what I'm after. They really need to be thinking broadly about being accountable for what is going on in and around their folks in that organization. And if leaders are willing to say, please go find me a black female so that I can have a diversity, equity, inclusion officer at my command, but I don't provide that person with a budget. I don't provide that person with any resources whatsoever to carry that water than we have failed in that space even though we might have checked those box. So just some thoughts to that question. So I have a question in reference to, so women, peace and security, the necessary ingredient is women, but the DOD has a huge women's retention issue. Women leave the military service at 46% higher rate than men in the Marine Corps. It's even more, so it's 64% more than men. So how do we start to have those discussions about real issues with retention and those issues with retention that are specific to gender? And the reason I say that is because oftentimes we want to avoid the appearance of being just female focused, but in this case we actually have to be female focused. So any thoughts? Yeah, I kind of feel like I might know more than a couple, at least one of the people here, although Joe probably has studied it again as he's looked at 40 organizations in the last few years. I feel like women's retention is a symptom of deeper problems and there's some really good data on the business world side that nobody tells the truth on their exit interviews, that what people say anybody says, what they say why they're leaving is rarely a reflection of what really pushed them to not stay in the organization. And so I have a very strong DNA towards being stubborn and not letting anybody tell me whether I belong or not. So that was my survival tactic. And it took me until I was sitting in a hearing in 1997, Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee with Olympia Snow. I worked for Olympia Snow for a year and she's an amazing leader and incredibly thoughtful and a huge advocate for women. And she was asking questions at this personnel subcommittee of women who had been sexually harassed and sexually assaulted. And it wasn't until I was working for her that I realized how incredibly privileged I had been to work where I did and to have the defense mechanisms I did. So I think that upstream downstream, whatever model you're using is, I think that we need to have a better grip within the Department of Defense. This is very different for women in uniform. I think it's different for women in uniform than it is for civilian women. And so is that, were you asking uniform or uniform and civilian? Mostly uniform. Yeah, I mean, I don't, I've been studied the civilian retention numbers, male versus female. So again, leadership, right? This is my problem with trying to write policy that says, thou shalt keep all your women, right? Because people will say that, well, I really tried, but I can't help it, that she wanted to go have a family, right? It is rarely that that is the actual reason they left. So it comes down to a leadership issue. And if we did many of the things both Brad and Joe talked about, the organization would be more welcoming and people would join and join with the intention of what can I contribute to this organization? Not the dread of I wonder if my work will be valued. I think that's what has to shift. And I don't know this, but just the fact that we had to legislate women, peace and security should be about all you need to understand. And Brenda Opperman will throw something at me if I totally get this wrong because she's my smee on this topic. But you know, we've had, the services have a history of having to have things legislated because they wouldn't take them, they wouldn't take the problems on their own. So the really complex problem is people because people are the most complex weapon system that any of the services deal with. And how to understand what good leadership looks like I think is the domino that we could tip to start tipping others. And that's a really unsatisfying answer, but I think it's at the root of how we start to make things better. Let me just say one more thing. One of the things, and this is related, this is the blame game, right? This is, well, women just don't like it here. It is not my fault that women don't like it here. I was really proud of C&O Gilday after George Floyd's murder. He said, we have a race problem in the Navy. He didn't say people of color don't fit in as well here. He said, we have a problem with racism in the Navy. He's right. We have a lot of isms in the Navy. And again, that's my personal experience that from my time at OSD, I would say the Navy is not much different than the other services. So it starts by taking it on, internalizing it as we realize, oh, we're culpable in some of those, as you ask, the retention numbers. Two quick things, Sharon, to add, because I'm not just me in that, but it's some synthesis of some of the things that the Admiral was saying, and then some of my own perspectives. The conversation needs to go to diversity, and diversity is not about a gender. It's not about a race. It's about all of them, right? So viewing diversity is not just what the person brings, but who the person is, what they live, and what makes them thrive, right? We should be looking at all those factors and retention for all the people that we have in our force to include women. So I think expanding the aperture to include, how do I get people to thrive in the organization? What do those people live in the organization? Because if it's diverse, it's not the same. Every person, every group, every dynamic will be different. And then the second piece is, I think we need to do better about figuring out ways to be able to gather information from different groups as to what's the right turtle? What turtle actually made them leave? Let me think about the turtles all the way down, because I think to the Admiral's point, sometimes we get answers, and then, well, yep, policy change, and all we did was throw a bandaid on the sucking chest one, right? That really wasn't the answer. It wasn't really the right why to that, so. Thank you, Brad. I'm conscientious that we are at time, and Dean Klein does have to go. Thank you so much, Dean Klein. Did we have time for one more question? I did wanna ask the panelists a closing, give them a minute to make a one minute statement. Thank you, Peg. We give a hand to Dean Klein. So thank you for your challenges to, as you're stating it, Brad, to step into the breach to leaders, and Joe, your challenge to set the battle space for a learning culture. If you had the attention of global security leaders just in the last minute, could you state what critical piece of advice that you would give that could help institutionalize positive change? Over to you, Joe. Yeah, thank you very much. Two pieces of advice I would give. First, I think, and this maybe even speaks to the question that we just asked, hierarchical organizational leadership is no longer effective or desirable, particularly when individuals enter the service and cannot see themselves represented in that hierarchy. So we've gotta think very, very carefully about what parts of hierarchy are important in terms of communicating from commanders to their battle space. But in other places, we've gotta think about how does the lieutenant and the Brigadier General sit in the space and talk about culture in a way that is meaningful and important. And then the second thing that I would offer is that, again, just my observation, at some level, organizational leadership is not keeping pace with the quality of the individuals that are entering the service. I think, you know, to have a conversation about diversity is really impactful and important, but having conversations about inclusion is where we will retain the young men and women of all races and genders and colors and flavors. That's really where it will make a difference. I fear for our senior NCO community, from 20 to 34 years, the number of females that serve in that space are diminishing rapidly, and I don't know that are getting any better. And I would say that there's probably a similar case to be made for the 0304 in all of our services who is female and is being driven out of the organizations because there is a say-do gap between what we espouse to believe and what barriers might be in place. Thank you, Gina. If, well, accumulated shared learning is culture, that's what Peter Schein told us. So if that's true and the culture that exists is not what we desire, then we have to continue to learn. If it's shared learning that's accumulated over time, that means to change it means that we've got to continue to grow and learn. And I think the idea of what do we do that should be oriented on that and a lot of different ways to do that. But I do believe and subscribe to the idea that was laid out that that learning and that growth occurs at a relationship level, right? The personalized those things, those levels of intimacy associated with that. And in an organization which is hierarchical nature, we're not going away from that. People are going to wear a rank and they're going to be able to exert authority over. We need to develop within focus of mindset that developing relationships that are based off of respect is important. We're not primed to do that. So the simple advice I would give to, and I do give to myself and others is you can do it, but never miss the opportunity not to be a jerk, right? You can always be a jerk because your rank can allow it. Never miss the opportunity not to be that person. Allow those conditions to thrive within your organization. So thanks for sharing with us today. This was really great. Thank you. Thank you so much, gentlemen. Okay. We'll be shifting our location again upstairs. Hopefully we'll try to regain a little bit of the schedule. I understand everybody will do some admin time, but if we can regroup upstairs ballroom as quickly as possible for the next design thinking part to be much appreciated. And again, your note taking forms deposited by the door as you exit. Thanks very much.