 Hopefully, everybody's found the right place. I noticed that as soon as the sec death was done with his talk, about 600 people bailed out. I was frankly a little surprised we have this many people here for the afternoon session. I do note that the front seats, it's kind of like the front pews in church. They must have kryptonite or something underneath the seats, it's always tough. My name is Robert Thomas. I'm not going to spend a lot of time teeing this up because I really want to get to the panel members and when you look, I think everybody's got a program and the lineup card we'll use is Jim Lukman, then Frank Morneau, Lauren Selby, Jim Newman, Eric Thompson and then Steve Spear. We can keep going. Next slide, that's an ugly looking character up there. How many people out there have read a design for maintaining maritime superiority? That quick survey is surprising to me that that many people, A, have read the document. We rolled it out in January of this year and it is really nested with a cooperative strategy for 21st century seapower. As you look at the design, since most of you have read it, there are four lines of effort called out and three of those look very traditional to all of us. It doesn't matter whether you're in industry, you're an international partner or you're in the Navy Marine Corps team, very traditional. One is kind of platforms, one's people, in fact people I think is going on next door with Bill Moran and then partnerships and Chris Aquilino has been heading up that effort. Then there's this fourth line of effort that says achieving high velocity learning at every level and for most of us it's a bit of a head scratcher. Robert Thomas is in charge of implementing that line of effort across the Navy and I'll tell you that for the last eight months it has been a bit of a struggle to make sure that I'm on side with where we want to go with this. But I think the CNO has characterized it probably the best way possible in that as the design states for the first time in almost 30 years the United States Navy and the Marine Corps are facing potential peer competitors in the maritime. For the last 30 years we've been operating just essentially in a benign environment sitting off people's coasts, running sorties inland without much interference. That has obviously changed. CNO's proposition is that our combat advantage is eroding when you look at those potential peer competitors and in the future we won't necessarily have more stuff, we will qualitatively have better stuff but that combat advantage is thinning and that it's an existential competition potentially and so what is it that's going to give us or allow us to restore that combat advantage that we've frankly grown used to and the proposition is that learning faster, learning more effectively, making decisions inside the potential adversaries decision cycle that is probably where our advantage is in the future that we can truly exploit to get this kind of exponential performance growth and he is adamant that we need that exponential growth. He sees it in commercial applications, you see it in places like Silicon Valley all the time, you know if we could just map over kind of venture capital mechanics to the United States Navy instantly it would probably our performance curve would be that much better but we are going through this cultural change, in fact Jim Newman, one of our panelists will point that out and others I'm sure will touch on it. So there's the proposition is we've got to learn more effectively, learn faster, make decisions inside the opponents decision cycle to increase our performance in a non-linear fashion. If we don't make this cultural change and we just keep doing business as usual and I think Lauren Selby said it best, he said we'll just keep using 20th century processes to try to get after 21st century problems and that's not going to hack it. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Jim Luchman and then we'll kind of go rapid fire down the line, they'll present remarks and our goal is to provide enough time at the end for some tough questions from you because frankly this group, industry, our international partners, the rest of the people in our own organization you're going to help us navigate through this notion of high velocity learning in the future, thanks. Thank you sir, so you can hear me okay with the microphone right now? Good, okay yeah I'm Jim Luchman and I do training and education for the Marine Corps so my portfolio is from, everything from recruit training through all the MOS skill progression training in the Marine Corps and professional military education and just general training so it's training and education we've put all under a command called the training and education command which is where I work. So thanks sir, so I'm going to dive kind of down into some practical things here in a minute that the Marine Corps is doing I think that fit this kind of high velocity learning construct but first I'll talk a little bit about the Commandant's guidance to us and how that lines up with some of the same things CNO is saying. You know we don't use the term high velocity learning at least we have not in the Marine Corps lexicon but when you look at what CNO is saying about what high velocity learning is and what the Commandant is giving us and guidance to do, very similar okay both talk about innovation and creativity and trying to develop leaders and organizations that are innovative and adaptive and willing to change. The Commandant specifically talked about having leaders who are innovative and willing to implement change in his planning guidance. They also both talk about some of the changes that we're seeing in technology and kind of the exponential growth of that kind of thing the whole singularity is near business and the changes we've seen in computing power and artificial intelligence and nanotechnology and a lot of things like that and being able to look forward and harness some of that to implement in our training and education continuum. So that's our challenge from the Commandant is to have a 21st century training and education continuum that produces Marines that are in this organization of the future same thing as what the CNO is describing I think with different words. So before I get into that let me talk a little bit one anecdote from a we had an innovation conference down at Quantico a couple months ago and the we brought in folks from across the Marine Corps but also brought in folks from outside the Marine Corps and had a couple days just to think about how to improve innovation in the Marine Corps was put on by our Marine Corps Warfighting Lab which are kind of our forward thinkers. So one of the projects they did was they broke into groups and they came out and they briefed back on the groups and I was listening to one of the one of the group brief backs and the tactic they took was to say well what would an organization look like if it was resistant to change if it was resistant to innovation what would that how would you design an organization like that and they said well you'd probably want to make sure that they were very you know hierarchical and it was pretty clear you know what the rank structure was and who was senior to who in there and they said then you'd probably go out and and recruit people bring them in you'd send your best people out to go get other people and bring them into the organization and you'd probably start them off you know indoctrinating them into the history of the organization and the ethos and values of that organization so they were fully immersed in that except if you really wanted to get extreme you could make them all wear the same clothes and cut the hair the same way and so so as the commandant and CNO talk about unleashing change and creativity we've got an organizational construct in the military which a lot of people would describe as exactly that you know opposed to that type of an organization so it's a challenge so diving down like I said into a couple of concrete examples of how we've tried to go about this I'm gonna talk about one and it's called the squad leader development program so a squad leader in the Marine Corps the the Marine Air Ground Task Force is kind of centered around an infantry unit the infantry unit is centered around the squad 13 man organization with a sergeant is the squad leader and that's who's in charge of that organization so the the challenge for us was to create decision-makers in those squad leaders with the skills and experience and education to do what they have to do in an environment today where the actions they take are going to be discussed worldwide within a couple hours so how do you create that individual so again it's a sergeant sergeant usually has between four and ten years in the Marine Corps the way our manpower process had worked with reenlistments a lot of times when the person is making sergeants about the time they're leaving their first assignment with the infantry and going off to do something else like be a recruiter or a drill instructor or something else so we had to figure out a way one to to fix our manpower process and then create this create this individual so it started with identifying the talent so we asked our division commanders to go find those young promising two and three year Marine corpals and lance corpals that have the potential to be squad leaders identify those guys we'd pull them out meritoriously promote the corpals to sergeant send them to school both their professional military education the sergeants course for PME and then the tactical part of the education our squad leaders course and then we'd send them back in for another they'd agreed to reenlist and go back in as a squad leader again with that additional education and we further took that squad leader piece the tactical education for them and broke it apart because we wanted to take the tactics techniques and procedures part and teach that at one level that was things like how to replace a machine gun and how to call for fire we wanted to build those skills separately and then we created a course called the infantry small unit leaders course which was a purely a decision-making course and so you put all sergeants in there so that they're all the same grade and then that course six weeks was really a series of decision-making exercises for those guys so this was our bid to create pull out the right talent give them the education and training and then put them back into our squads as an experienced leader so we're in year two of that right now and and in keeping with this learning organization do loop of you know execute look at how SS you know come back and plan it again we're making some adjustments in second year for additional incentives because you might imagine some folks aren't all that thrilled about going back into the infantry for another few years afterwards so so we're working the incentive piece to make sure we get the right people into the program so that's called a squad leader development program kind of a tactical way we're getting that changing our our talent at the Marine Rifle Squad I talked a little bit about this technology business and pretty exciting pretty exciting times with that and so I'll talk about one example of another of another thing that kind of is a technology focused initiative that we've got in the Marine Corps right now O and R has been working for a while on something I recently transitioned it over to our program manager for training systems and it's an augmented immersive team trainer is what it is so those of you familiar with mixed reality virtual reality augmented reality that's what this device is so it's a training device that'll enable us to train better faster cheaper and really just better so the idea it's an augmented reality thing similar to a Microsoft HoloLens or Magic Leap for those of you they're on the cutting edge that how many people have an an Oculus Rift right now or have it on order okay a couple that's good see I don't either but we got two guys in the office that do and so that's the virtual reality thing but but the AITT is an augmented reality so in this one it mixes real world with with simulation so it is a device you wear on your head but if I was wearing it I could see you all and then I can also drop constructive things into the into that virtual things into that environment so I could put enemy in the room or I could drop rounds on the room or I could bring a Cobra in here and do a strike so this trainer what it allows our Marines to do is to do combined arms and maneuver in a way that is very realistic with live forces which you now can bring in combined arms without the risk without the the cost of actually conducting the live the live air or the live artillery so this is an example of how tools if we get the right type of technology that Marines can use can enhance the training we get so how does this fit into the whole you know high-velocity learning idea of an organization that is innovative and willing to change and I think it's that example is one of embracing technology and what the future will bring us it's it's really exciting to see what just five years from now or ten years from now we will have in the way of changes to our learning and educate our training and education systems our training and education technology so keeping our our our Marine Corps University and our training group again a lot of Marines and civil servants who been there a long time doing things the same way for a long time and getting them to be receptive to and accepting of the new technologies and new ways to do business in a way that'll make us better and faster that's one of the challenges we're working through so happy to talk more about education training or anything related to either of those when we do Q&A but that's what I wanted to say up front thank you good afternoon how's everybody doing too loud for anybody in the back can I get a sound check thanks hey my name is Frank Morneau currently assigned as a commander of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command and I want to build a little bit I want General Lueckman said as well too in my pitch but you know I'm pretty fortunate I have a great job and my job is not to necessarily come up with the good ideas concerning high-velocity learning but I'll put it to you this way my job is to put a beating heart into it so there's 19,000 sailors out there numbers of units of action and when they go forward how do as we talked about the sergeants course how the Marine Corps is learning at that level how do we ensure that we're stratifying the high-velocity learning at all levels across the commands that are inside of my TICOM now we've all heard if you're in this room probably right now you've heard the CNO say we have to learn faster and I know Dr. Spears probably heard him say a number of times as he's driven us we have to learn faster now I go back to that beating heart and where it applies to us is the fact that we have to just as we talked about in DNS said in his opening remarks we have to learn faster than the enemies of our country okay whether that's a peer threat or in some of the cases of some of my forces a terrorist organization that's on the ground we still have to be fast enough from technology from acquisition to being able to plan implement assess share the ideas of what we've gotten from that high-velocity learning and then get our lessons learned and plug them back into the system to ensure that we are defeating the enemies of our country in combat so we took an approach to implementing the design to our forces and that was breaking it up into combat effectiveness combat effectiveness the way we are defining it comes back to really one thing we will continually learn every day faster than those of our of our perceived enemies of our mission of what we have to do that said we broke it that we broke combat effectiveness down into two parts as well combat power which is stuff you know there's a lot of stuff I think in the rooms below us right now that we're going to go look at that all applies the technology etc and I was worried about that sir I didn't know if I had to get penicillin the interocular device that you were talking about for a second but the stuff is important but we're really putting our money right now is into fighting power and fighting power the way we define that is building the culture the culture that we have manifested in our design for maintaining maritime superiority with every one of our sailors from the young e1 that just comes out of bootcamp to the old e08 that's necessarily getting close to retirement all across our force and our spectrum we have to make sure that everybody is learning and implementing at a high degree now how do you do that how do you do that with a culture you make everybody understand that part of what you do every day is your desire and your commitment to be the best doesn't matter what your job is doesn't matter on your level of responsibility but it involves making sure that the fighting power the commitment to excellence the commitment to being the best you can is institutionalized throughout our force we've got to give people as you probably heard we're going to talk about it you've got to give them the opportunity to fail last week we did an airfield damage repair operation first time in the history of the seabees which came around since 1942 and our mine and bomb disposal forces which are EOD since 1941 where they actually did it together what they learned was they didn't have the C2 right this was in from day one to day two they needed to know how to necessarily assess all the craters how they were going to plow all the craters how they're going to render safe all the bombs that were in all the craters so it goes back to getting young sailors out there letting young sailors necessarily get after things and determine how they can in fact learn on the fly and learn in what a decentralized operations environment we go back to one of the greatest warriors of our generation general Mattis what did he come up with you got to be able to operate an uncertainty and thrive in chaos chaos so fighting power is driving exactly that just like general lukeman talked about we're working on the mark one motto brain and we're making sure that that decision process and how fast that we can get after the decision process is built inside of our sailors and how they process information and they can use the new technologies and go forward so I got two slides let me show you some other can you pull those up real quick slide number one so what this is is you know we we are nearing the end of our surface mine countermeasures ships our airborne mine countermeasures ships but what we did we took current off-the-shelf technologies unmanned vehicles we teamed them up with an EOD platoon we teamed them up with some of the experts down in stennis mississippi who know how to read sonar and we built a unit of action called expeditionary mine countermeasures it combines all of those forces together it utilizes all of these this equipment and it takes it out to the field and it's a singular unit of action that can do what can do the entire fine-fixed finish exploit analyze disseminate and attribute to who did the operation at the same time when we come down in a mine countermeasures now where I think the beauty of it comes to with high velocity learning is we're not tied to one mark 18 underwater vehicle system the next piece of technology that comes out can be plugged into this the next the next thought that comes out of the young sailor who if you look in the one that's in I guess it's the three o'clock position in the Hollywood squares it shows a little rubber boat there that's where there they came up with a way to tow a 900 pound underwater vehicle 12 miles out to see and chin hey harbor now it usually takes two EOD technicians to swim that thing out to see that's a joke one could do it thanks Admiral Selby but my point is all of this is being generated from your fleet it goes back to building that culture of how we have to stay ahead of our enemy and how we have to operate and thrive in a decentralized environment next chart bunch of IEDs all real pictures all pictures from the battlefield well and I'll give Joe to Guardo credit because he's in the audience today one of our captains because when he was a young officer in Iraq he came up with the sexy now you don't want to you guys coming up with acronyms as well too but that sounds for stands for combined explosives exploitation cell what was happening to us we're trading bomb for bomb on the battlefield with our enemy not a peer enemy but an enemy that's taken a $20 bomb and creating a weapon of strategic influence a roadside bomb when we buy $20 billion in MRAPS I think it's become a weapon of strategic influence for us to conduct combat operations on the ground my point is by creating that cell we were able to take the forensics off of all of those weapons and get it back into the system provide the intelligence provide the exploitation determine where we needed to pick the targets and attack the bomb makers in their labs by sway till we were attacking the bombs while they were out there on the road and the interesting pictures in the middle but I don't think you can get it it's a cell phone actual ID and if you can see it says missed call so my point is as we went through utilizing technology use a lot utilizing again a culture of rapid learning to defeat our enemies I think we were able to get ahead of this threat and save lives on the battle so I look forward to questions as well too I think is as general lukman talked about real practical application here where we're having to go but I think the important port to this remains the culture you know Bill Walsh I think everybody in the room probably knows one of our most famous football coaches said what if you can create the environment to develop learning the score takes care of yourself so thanks very much everybody and I'll pass it over. All right like three. Hey got me. Lauren. Yeah check it again. Yep looks like it's all right got it. OK afternoon. All right who here is from industry. Raise your hand. OK how about any academics in here any you are OK got a couple academics and I see a lot of government I see a lot of obviously military so so kind of like the CNO yesterday that's kind of the team we need to solve the problems we're talking about here. We've got some very challenging problems you've heard everybody from the CNO all the way the sector talking about the fact that our technological advantage is being challenged and in some cases we may have been surpassed in certain areas. OK and that that should concern all of you. I know it concerns all of us at this panel. So what does that mean. That means we've got to do something different. When I saw I'm a Richardson about a year ago before he became CNO we had a stimulating conversation about what the future of warfare look like. And he said well what are we going to what we have to do. I said we have to think different. I said like Steve Jobs think different. He said what does that mean. I said well that's the hard part. So we've got to do things faster. So a lot of this stuff is really about getting better at what we do faster than anybody else. And that could be a unit that could be an individual that can be an entire organization. It really doesn't matter. But we've got to change Frank said culture. A lot of this is cultural stuff. Before I go on I'm going to show you a really quick video because I want you to see kind of some of the threats that I'm talking about. And also some of the opportunities. Can you queue up the video please. It's a quick two minute video. Thanks. OK. So got your attention. OK. A lot of threats out there. But also a lot of opportunity. You see that exponential curve of technology increasing. I mean I talked a lot of folks have heard me say there's a great book called second machine age and it talks about this exponential rise in technology that kind of started back in the late 17 hundreds when James White perfected the steam engine. And it kind of goes from there to where we are today. And it's actually phenomenal. I mean the pace is not slowing down folks. In fact if you just look at the Internet by the year 2020 there'll be 37 billion devices connected to the Internet. Thirty seven billion by 2025 between three and six trillion dollars will be added to the economy because of the Internet of three things three to six trillion dollars. That is not small change folks that is a significant percentage of our GDP. That is huge. That's where we're going. And we've had some great discussions the last day and a half here about connecting systems and sensors and shooters. Well it's kind of already happening in your pocket. We just have to figure out how to translate that into the DOD. And that is the challenge. And so part of what I want to talk about today is what are some of those things that prevent us from going faster. Prevent us from doing these things like just taking those technologies and bring those into the Navy or the DOD and using them. And clearly there are a lot of rules sets out there that tend to slow us down. Folks in folks in industry here you know it always comes up you know acquisition is too slow DOD 5000. Look think about it this way. So things like technology increase at an exponential rate. Things like economics legal systems contractual systems acquisition systems social systems those tend to increase at an incremental rate. And that's why I like to say that we're playing a 21st century game with a 20th century rule book. The fact is a rule book is just not caught up. And it probably can unless we change the rule book. And that's kind of where I think we need to go. But that said we have to operate under the systems and the rules and laws that we have in front of us today. And there are ways we can become we can there are authorities that are available that we just tend to not use because we're not used to using them. Things like other transaction authorities. Things like a partnership intermediary agreements. Things like establishing consortiums to look at different research areas. I mean there's things that can be done. We just have to be more creative. We have to push our contracts folks and the legal folks a little bit out of their comfort zone. It's not it's not illegal but it's just not what they're used to doing. We have to try to push those folks in that direction. So as I look at these systems and these things that we need to try to change. I mean if at an organizational level Frank talked about some of this but there are a lot of things that they get in the way. They're stovepipes. Sometimes there's class classification issues sometimes for a good reason but sometimes it's just kind of just because these different systems and sets of rules and criteria that have just been allowed to kind of build and build over time. As a SECDEF sentiment back at lunch they're kind of cumulative and so over time you go from a bill that was you know 500 pages to a National Offense Authorization Act today which is I don't know how many pages. It's a huge book. It's probably I don't know several thousand pages a lot. But the bottom line is these things tend to accumulate. You tend to you bring these things on but you tend to not shed these things over time. And that's that's where we have to stop and really look at these things and try to figure out how we evaluate that. So if I want to go faster next slide please. If I want to go faster I'd want to put in place systems that would allow me to think differently will allow me to kind of open the white space. And so a lot of what we're trying to do as we talk about high velocity learning it's challenging ourselves challenging our organizations and trying to allow folks to challenge the assumptions. And I would say with data because if you can provide me data I can go in and I can challenge someone with with some rules and say hey look I've got data that shows that if I do something differently I can still satisfy whatever criteria I'm trying to satisfy but I can go faster. So that's a lot of what what I'm trying to do what we're all trying to do here on this panel with high velocity learning trying to challenge the assumptions put in place different rule sets that allow us to go faster. If you look at the slide I mean there's a lot of things up there but white space on the right there that's a huge part of what I think we need to try to establish for ourselves. If you look at human machine teaming we're getting to a point today where technology is going so fast and we're inundated with so much data it's just data I mean we don't even know how to handle it so much information you have got to use machines to help you parse that and help you decide on what to act on and what not to act on and what that buys you it buys you decision space it buys you the ability to actually make a decision as a human being because at the end of the day the technologies that we gain our adversaries are going to get them to if they don't get them first they're going to get them within a few years of us getting them. So the years of having you know a 50 year advantage over the adversary like we had in the last century are over at best will be a decade or so in advantage of the new technology. So the real deciding factor between nations that have the same technology really comes down to the human mind comes down to the mind so if we can find ways to free ourselves just enough decision space to make a better decision than the adversary then that better decision will win the day and that's kind of where we're trying to go and so high velocity learning is everything from an organizational level you're trying to break down barriers have people think differently about problem-solving trying to get teams to attack problems in different fashions to try to get their organization to be faster to actually doing things faster like fielding systems faster prototyping systems so instead of going off and spending millions of dollars on an acquisition program let's go test it first let's give it to the warfighter let's let him or her tell us what they think about it before I go lock in the requirements and then go spend millions to try to build these things these are the kind of things we're trying to do so there's a lot lot to this but again as you look at the barriers a lot of folks is it look in the mirror it's us it's us and again we need to challenge ourselves challenge the assumptions and if you can build data and come in with a reasonable explanation of why you think something will work better with a different rule set they show us and we'll try to go challenge those rule sets so I look forward to your questions and most importantly I look forward to helping you help me help you and all of us solve these problems because it's going to take a team sport and really is going to take folks that are maybe not immersed in the problem every single day to come up with some new ideas but I'd love to hear thanks this one's still working in the back so okay I find that I also have to approach this topic in a nonlinear fashion as difficult yet simple because there exist pockets of HVL in every organization but not uniformly not comprehensively not top-down I call it micro HVL I've done it myself I've seen it done by others others here I've given examples of micro HVL but it is definitely not widespread enough in most organizations to be the whole shebang true organization level HVL and why not well we all got to where we are and we all consider ourselves successful so whatever we did how we do things must be okay many of us come from organizations that do parts of high velocity learning HVL well for example I grew up at NASA for my space flights we trained micro HVL we designed improved shared knowledge and developed problem solving capabilities the motto of NASA's flight control was in God we trust all others bring data well when it came down to it we allowed both Challenger in Columbia to occur because we were not a true HVL organization we normalized performance deviation from technology that wasn't working as expected Columbia was my generation's opportunity to try an Apollo 13 style rescue of a fatally crippled space shuttle but we weren't even given the chance we didn't go get the data but the need for such heroics is the mark of a non HVL organization because foam strikes had already happened too often turns out a piece of foam had come off on my previous flight three and a half years earlier than in my last flight and we are starting to build the International Space Station but that piece of foam didn't hit the wing high-value high-risk operations such as NASA or the Department of Navy are really in need of the HVL culture but existing cultures are hard to change culture requires a common language and common assumptions and agreements about reality the challenge is to add in an HVL culture to the naval services existing cultures for HVL to be successful in the Navy and Marines we all need to speak the same language specified design to capture existing knowledge and building tests to reveal problems swarming and solving problems to build new knowledge sharing new knowledge throughout the organization and leading by developing these capabilities in our people phrases from high-velocity edge credit Steve Spears another one and these phrases all need to come trippingly off our tongues no team can design a perfect system in advance Wow what does that say about procurement requirements and RFPs and contracting and development and our systems are only getting more complex but now me may be the right time to embrace HVL as part of the C&O's design for maintaining maritime superiority the naval services and DoD are involved in a lot of culture change right now and we actually need an HVL attitude to help us manage the change that is here and that is coming we need to leverage this change for good for example women in the military and the opportunities that should present us we know that having diverse groups at the table results in better outcomes how do we take advantage of that conventional warfare is changing can nation states with nukes really engage in serious conventional warfare with each other so what are the threats we need a long-term perspective we know that the civilization of young men is an age-old problem what are the new perspectives here at home there are now more young women in college in this country than young men but the education of women and treatment of women in many countries these room for improvement to say the least the treatment of our military women by our military men is a real problem recall Susan Brown knows 1975 study entitled against our will men women and rape is not the whole story but rape is perhaps a statement of power more than anything else even the language we use in the military should be considered of course we all support the warfighter but are there other words that are appropriate as well peacekeeper or ally builder or some such that acknowledges the full scope of we want our military to do for us the concept of leadership followership and expedition behavior could also be integrated as part of the hvl culture excessive emphasis on any one of the three too often leadership can be counterproductive h to hvl we need not just leadership but we need hvl leadership so how can we hvl our way design improve share knowledge and develop problem-solving capabilities to evolve our military culture to keep up with the changing world we live in the military culture will evolve but talking about it with hvl language should help we also need to acknowledge that high velocity does not mean overnight it may take years but we have to keep plugging away at nps we had a serious i g problem four years ago we have been digging ourselves out ever since and just completed a successful i g and he's here in the room it turns out that we hope we'll restore trust by the navy in nps's culture and our value to the naval services and the joint force and d o n d o d and interagency civilians and our international partners we have embraced a culture of compliance but working hard to maintain a culture of innovation as part of our corrective actions the amount of training required has gone way up the financial process required for audibility have grown substantially contracting a slow down to reduce risk of mistakes and even our burgeoning legal staff are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of documents to review for legal sufficiency we thought we're getting special treatment but have learned from our students and colleagues that this is happening throughout the navy the dean of our graduate school of information sciences termed this is living in a low velocity bureaucracy or lvb so we need to learn and implement hvl throughout nps the department of navy and all of government really to overcome the lvb hvl in an lvb because otherwise at some point soon we fear we'll be completely compliant and auditable but we'll find it very difficult to get anything done and is another part of the cno's initiative we hope that whoever is working on line of effort three this is two yellow number four balance administrative requirements hurry please what does hvl mean in an educational environment i've been told that the navy has problems with acknowledging the value of advanced education for its officers but for many officers apparently the risk is worth it and nps is one of the options for those officers interested in any of a number of choices for masters or phd program nps grads end up with a higher promotion retention rate than those without a graduate degree many at nps would argue that they are doing hvl already especially in their research exhibiting where competition is immediate and tough but though exhibiting some of the hallmarks of hvl most of what is happening is most likely micro hvl teaching methods in particular could i believe be improved by a systematic application of hvl clearly there are costs associated with hvl the products are so value in the competition for students so keen it is our best interest to apply the hvl concept to improve teaching and research and by explaining the concepts and reinforcing the language to our mid-career joint officers we could spread the word not only to our naval officers but to the joint forces well so how do we begin next slide please start small solve a problem that really matters don't think too much but do a lot start with a small footprint but a long leg that means from the top down stay safe don't wait until you have enough free time because of course none of us do thank you well good afternoon it's it's my pleasure to be here today it's it's tough to follow some of these highly experienced leaders and some of these great minds i looked up at the stage here and saw what we call in football and unbalanced line first thought that was uniform versus non-uniform then i realized the line would be more balanced if i just drop back into past protection and let these guys take care of it but in spite of that i'm gonna i'm gonna talk to you about high velocity learning and i'm gonna be known sometimes as somewhat heretical and perhaps that's why i was invited to this panel i would argue to really create a high velocity learning organization we need to stop thinking about it is high velocity and we need to stop thinking about it is learning okay let me talk to you about why i think that's the case first of all we think about velocity and we think about one of two things doing stuff faster or doing more things in the same amount of time and i would argue that high velocity learning is not actually about that it's about generating an outcome where you increase your performance in a shorter period of time so it's about performance outputs it's not about speed of action or speed of inputs the other thing is is high velocity learning isn't just about learning we have a tendency within the military lifelines to think about learning is something that happens in educational institutions we think about learning and education is happening in training environments and that's part of the problem there are challenges in our training and education and learning environments and they could benefit from high velocity thinking but if we relegate our concept of how we change the military to what happens in our training pipelines we are never going to bend that performance curve and we are going to delude ourselves in thinking that we are actually learning so when i think about what it's going to take to become a high velocity learning organization what i first look at is the default setting of the of the navy our marine corps brother in the department of defense writ large and what i see is a modus operandi that values unity of effort hierarchical hierarchical chain of command standardization the gentleman down at the end here releases probably more navy instructions that everybody is supposed to follow than anyone else and it's a it's about process and process control and often how something gets done is equally even more important than what the product of that is and so when we're talking about high velocity learning we're talking about a cultural change which is a challenge for any organization especially an organization with deep-seated with a deep-seated culture that that grows its people through training pipelines that that uses doctrine even if it uses in a half ass fashion like the navy sometimes does that sort of environment strong traditions which is a powerful force for keeping unity within the organization but not a powerful force for change we have service ethos and command environments and we have a secretary of defense who just a few years ago when he was undersecretary was famously quoted as saying i always say don't do cultural change it's too hard so um so what are the key components of the high-velocity learning culture that i think it's important for us to to keep in our frame of reference and then think about what do we do about instilling it first of all it's a questioning ethos it's about empowerment at every level to experiment learn and change it's about swarming to problems discovering root causes and adjusting processes rapidly it's about challenging boundaries of what is considered possible cno is all over this if you've heard him speak at all anytime in the last six months it's about discipline and thinking about what is known and what is not known what can be tested and how knowledge can be developed and disseminated and it's about a commitment to share knowledge outside your unit or your organization and to seek lessons and knowledge and a knowledge based from others before you try to solve your problem in a vacuum it's about template it's um it's tempting to say that the navy already does some of this and the gentleman to my left have actually given some good examples but when we look large at the navy we say ah you know navy reactors almost you know almost zero problems a rigorous investigation problem if anyone has been involved in aviation in naval aviation you know the debrief after a flight is frank brutal and and implemented in every stage and and but that's that's okay but they're I think at the cultural level there are broad inhibitors to the navy becoming a high-velocity learning organization first of all one component of this is the no fault zero defect posture towards people in terms of their career progression and the performance evaluation of organizations we tend to take a lanes in the road approach for dividing responsibilities by organization they're the training people they're the requirements people they do concept they do concepts test and evaluation that occurs over there we also have the desire to standardize practices and have process-centric approaches particularly in staff activities we see some pressure on that in the operational environment the MHQ mock the maritime headquarters maritime operations center initiative about eight years ago was an effort to in the operational environment get out of the strictures of the Napoleonic codes and push staff elements together that that actually are synergistic I haven't seen that reflected in headquarters and I haven't seen that reflected in staffs across the navy or our marine core brethren programs acquisitions strategies initiatives including the design high-velocity learning is a concept span well beyond the tenure of any officer any enlisted person in their particular area of responsibility so this culture of well I'm not going to fix it effectively in my period I don't control all these things why don't I check out why don't I just do my job and worry about it as I've worked I walked around the fleet and talked to senior leaders and junior leaders across organizations operational commands headquarters shore establishment I've come to to recognize what I see is sort of three bins of reactions to to the idea of high-velocity learning and that is people who really try to get into and embrace this concept and figure out what it means for their organization and how they can begin to change their culture that's that's the most interesting been for me the second is those folks who do everything they've been doing so far and adopt the language of high-velocity language of high-velocity learning or the design for maintaining the maritime superiority it is so tempting in the culture of the military to say okay what is my organization what do I do all right let me map back to CNO's words you know pick your words whether it's Admiral Greenert now pick your words out of Richardson and as long as I can put on my slide a couple of those pieces of language then I must reflect the ideals and the ethos that the leader is looking for that's part of our culture that's part of what we do so how and then I guess the last piece of the problem I think is is this set of barriers and it's cultural it's organizational to sharing information across organizations I heard some of these guys tell some really good stories and I think it's really strong building blocks for a foundation of what am I doing within my organization how do I look at the problem set of mind countermeasures and improving what do I need to have in there my technology my people my training my ranges that's all great but what is that doing for the aviation community what is that doing for staff functioning at OpNAP where is that getting into the concepts development people who are that we don't do that yet we don't do that well because your your chain of answerability how you're evaluated your competition between your peers so you can get ahead and be recognized all mitigate against that so it's a pretty tough environment to create this cultural change towards high velocity learning so what can we do I'll give you some of my thoughts and I was as I was sort of putting together this big bag of observations ideas and things that I've learned along the way I was trying to figure out how do I organize an idea about how you might start to get after this problem and so I went into some of the Harvard Business Review literature because I learned from reading his book that are a bunch of smart people that I'd never exposed myself to before I came into contact with high velocity learning so I'm trying to do a little learning with a small L and not much velocity but there was a great article that came out that said cultural change it was entitled cultural change that sticks and the authors offered five things that you need to do to create real stickiness to cultural change and in an organization the first is to match culture and strategy that is you must match the audio and video of what you're doing you have to explain why we need to change our culture not just describe the culture you want to see so for the Navy I think that's leaders talking about not only the what but the why it's about strategic documents aligning behind the core concepts of how the Navy should operate and conduct its business it's about signaling the intent to change culture by changing organization where necessary changing players where necessary and changing the palm that you know overarching document that everybody knows we're serious if it ends up in the palm the second is focus on a few critical shifts in behavior and to me I think two easy ones one is applying what the CNO calls the learning engine if you've heard him talk in the last couple of weeks or months about this this is a frame of reference where you say okay when I have a problem I'm going to look at the problem I'm going to define it I'm going to define the environment in which it operates I'm going to make a hypothesis as to how I can change that environment I'm going to build a plan I'm going to execute it and I'm going to evaluate I'm going to I'm going to excuse me build a plan say exactly what change I expect to induce in the environment I'm going to execute it and I'm going to evaluate the degree to which that happened and continue that process over and over again another piece is a command environment whether it's in a staff or fleet headquarters or a single unit for knowledge sharing outside the organization as long as you focus on keeping what you learn no matter how high the velocity is inside your organization you are not creating cultural change the third is to hone our strengths excuse me honor the strengths within your existing culture and to me there are a couple of pieces in the Navy culture one is the devolution of authority under C2 under combat conditions we try to push down decision making to the smallest unit level possible we don't do that in staffs and we don't do that in our shore based institutions we do a lot of deck plate learning that's great happens at unit level at the ship level but it does not change the way the Navy works integrating the fourth is integrating formal and informal interventions this is what I call a coalition of change agents somebody here needs to be building a coalition of change agents to carry the message in formal and informal environments so that people come to understand and they can map mentally what high velocity learning will mean in their organization and finally we need to measure and monitor cultural evolution this is painful this is unnatural it's like you know it's like the body rejecting a mismatched organ after an implant for the Navy it's squishy but we must do the hard work of evaluating what we are trying to do whether we are getting the change that we want how we can judge whether that is sufficient and when we decide how to change implement or be satisfied with what we've done I think those are some of the pillars to to bring capital H capital B capital L into the Navy Marine Corps team thanks okay so when I hang out with Eric you can tell he equates high velocity talking with high velocity learning that's why I get lost okay Steve to wrap it up all right thank you so unbalanced line I'm the guy on the end I've spent probably the better part of the last 20 years trying to answer one question and another 20 I may get to a good answer but the the question goes something like this which is at least in the commercial sector you have many many contestants in each of the same games and those games might be consumer electronics or whatever else it happens to be and for a variety of reasons I'll detail you would expect a pretty level playing field to lead to pretty much parity and outcome and that's simply not the case it just isn't there's a huge skew between those who are best and everyone else and it may not be surprising that I'm the bow tie wearing guy from MIT to say that the secret sauce here is learning but it's learning and I want to be really specific about this it's not just learning I'll detail what I mean by that but it's converting everyone in an organization and not just the folks wearing white lab coats but the folks wearing coveralls and the folks wearing hard hats converting all of those people to bona fide knowledge workers where even the most heavy industry has behaviors which you would associate much more with Silicon Valley than the Rust Belt so anyway let me offer some color commentary in detail just in terms of the complexity and some of where you can and can't get competitive advantage so um Toyota and I'll pick Autos because I've got long history in that industry Toyota's facility in Kentucky it's about five billion dollars invested there it's got seven thousand people around the clock operations huge complexity of equipment and machinery so you've got engineers and technicians constantly doing repair maintenance upgrade replacement that kind of thing and it all exists there to launch as it were a new product at the rate of half a half a million units per year so that's more than one a minute in and around the clock operations and when I I told my Toyota friends that's coming to speak to the Navy said remind them that the stuff we launch we have to build first so anyway and and and the plant itself is not a standalone right because it's got the supply network and I won't even say supply chains this huge degree degree of interconnectedness which spans all of North America goes to Asian bridges over to Europe and so you have to keep all those pieces moving on some kind of harmony so you get this launch rate of about one every 45 every 50 seconds here's the other caveat on this is that and and and with with respect to the vendors in the room you can't buy anything that actually matters and what I mean by this is if you go downstairs is a whole bunch of gear which you can buy if you work for the United States Department of Defense and if you and and the folks downstairs if they want to sell it anywhere else they have to get permission not so in the auto industry that anything you buy steel, aluminum and gets plastic pellets the equipment on which you give shape to that stuff your vendor will sell it to everybody else so you buy a sub assembly off the Toyota line let's say there's the Chrysler the General Motors Ford line so there's nothing you can buy that you may need to get in this game and stay in the game but you can't differentiate you differentiate yourself with that stuff anyway that's the that's the setting for this now here's the thing given the complexity of the environment the fact that when you launch a Camry an Avalon a Lexus into the competitive space is running against the offerings from Ford and Honda and Key and all that you would expect parity and that's not the case at all so in the auto sector when Ford sells a car they make about 900 bucks 950 per unit General Motors Chrysler they're way behind on that and and Toyota is at 3x they make about 2700 bucks per unit and to to get this down it's a little more micro level the Camry which has huge amount of competition has been sales leader in its segment for the last 10 years digging down a little bit further same problem much different result so the world auto industry recognize the problem of increasing fuel efficiency reducing emissions and everyone had to use the same technology to get to that answer you know reduce the weight of the automobile go with a hybridized system so on and so forth Chevy came to market with the Vault in 2010 they've sold I don't know about 70,000 copies Toyota beat them to market by 10 years I mean 10 full years and whereas the Chevy Vaulted is about 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 copies Toyota's hybrid systems it's now in the 6th generation and on some 20 different platforms they're up to 7 million copies so there's a difference of 100 to 1 in terms of success into the same hostile marketplace so when you take that situation parody and complexity parody and suppliers parody and challenges and you know huge discontinuity in terms of outcomes it gets down to this this the learning story which is you know if your team and my team are playing the same game and you repeatedly kick the stuffing out of me you think about our starting point is equal right we're both ignorant in terms of what the market needs and we're both fairly ignorant in terms of what will satisfy those needs and we certainly have no idea at all what the configuration of the systems are that will meet those needs you keep kicking the stuffing out of me it means that you go from the same starting point of ignorance to a much deeper knowledge than I have which means that you're constantly challenging what's been accepted in terms of what we do how we do and how we train on train up on it and you're constantly challenging that and looking for new problems and new answers and let me just conclude the word culture has come up a lot across this table but this learning thing it's so outrageously counter cultural that if you can figure it out it's a huge advantage because if you think about what happens in organizations is that we get to an answer right and then we start training on the answer and we have so we have an accepted answer skills an accepted purpose for those skills an accepted method of training on those skills and we reward and promote and acknowledge on how well people do what's already accepted and what we're saying is that if we really want to learn what we have to do is ask people to challenge what's accepted always asking the question well you know is that the right skill with the right purpose transmitted in the right way so it's wildly counter cultural I think anyway that's a departure but let me just offer this is that if you're asking people to behave in a way which is wildly counter cultural for all the words we can put about empowerment and engagement and this and that you can't reasonably expect that this will bottom up bubble up from the bottom unless there's air cover from the top down and if this question that's curious I can give you some sort of tangible examples of that but you know when I read the CNO's strategic design he talks about you know near peers and regional competitors and the the asymmetric disruptors that that rang true from the commercial sector and that you have you can't buy stuff that'll give you advantage that rang true and then it's really about people and everyone regardless of their garb becoming knowledge workers that also rang true and it just struck me it's really really hard to do but the one thing that had me encouraged is that I was reading a document from a flag officer in the United States and not somewhere else because we're kind of committed to this whole motion of everyone created equal and that you actually have a right to stand up when you want to challenge I mean you can put your soapbox in the town square and stand up and call it out and people actually agree with your disagreement they can gather around and no one can do anything to disrupt that and fundamentally I think that's our competitive advantage because not so many other folks have made that commitment to those truths about equality and the right to disagree anyway that's my story Hey Steve thank you very very much I think you put a nice kind of capstone on what was a great series of presentations from my perspective as I said I'm trying to implement this for the CNO and each one of our panel members I was I was taking notes and saying okay I can plagiarize that I can plagiarize that in an effort to get into bin one as as Eric talked about okay I'm going to turn it over we've got about 15 minutes for questions and just go ahead and use the microphones go ahead this is a question primarily targeted Dr. Speer so the first thing I learned when I left the cushy home of academia and was thrust in the cold reality of industry and later government service is that there's actually a really really good way to change culture which is that everyone does exactly what you incentivize them to do and we have the ability we can give people more money and we can give people promotions to incentivize them now if we want to incentivize people if I want to incentivize my team for example to become better high velocity learners the best way to do that is to have good metrics for are we learning quickly or doing you know performing high velocity learning so I guess my question which is primarily directed to Dr. Speer is what are the metrics that we can use to say are we getting it or are we missing the mark oh yeah thank you the question about metrics is a difficult one for me to answer because I'm the guy at MIT who's not quantitative so but but let me offer this is that when we look at organizations at least in the commercial sector which have made profound change in behavior right and fundamentally I think culture is a reflection of consistent behavior given common stimuli that it's not obvious that incentives monetary and other kinds of recognition of or do the trick actually the place is unfamiliar with Alcoa, Toyota, Intel and some others it's paranoia that's been and leadership cultivated paranoia that unless we change we're sunk so we can't be complacent and it's almost like an inoculation against complacency and I'll just give you some small examples of that so in the case of Alcoa they had these crazy results in terms of making Alcoa arguably the safest employer in the country despite the hazards of their industrial processes they just started building up the paranoia around well do you really want to show up at work and leave with one less hand? No I don't so why don't we see problems about that at Toyota they build paranoia about well we're a small auto company and you know outside of Tokyo and a small insignificant economy do you want to lose your job and Intel also Andy Grove wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survived so I think it's the cultivation of paranoia and the fact that there is actually a burning platform gets people to change as much more than so the fact that there's an established system of accepted rewards for accepted behavior now in terms of the other metrics this is the counter-cultural part right so the the accepted things we do is questions how well are you doing at learning skills which are accepted in an accepted fashion for an accepted purpose and the counter-cultural thing is what have you discovered that doesn't work and what have you discovered about why those things don't work what have you discovered that might work better and so I don't know actually how you measure that but you certainly can see it in the language the behavior the posture of leadership and the resulting change in language posture and posture and language and behavior of those being led yeah I think some of the other panel members want to jump in Frank why don't you take a swing and then Lauren so one other thought on that so what I found is when you're trying to change culture in a large organization usually if you have a leader who's got who's passionate who's got strong you can put out a vision is very articulate about that vision usually you'll get the senior leadership will buy in because they're with that person daily and they kind of will get that the very junior people will also buy in because they still want to change the world they're kind of trying to come in they really want to make a big difference the problem you get is there's a clay layer it's kind of in the middle and you guys probably a lot of you folks have seen this and that's the hardest ones to change and you've got to really reach those folks and it takes really persistent leadership to do that and you've got to really reach down and communicate quite frankly you've got to reach through the levels you've got to try to reach each level but you've also got to just use the top and the bottom and try to drive it and try to bring those those two together and and then convince those folks in the middle that hey this is really right and Stephen's right if you've got a compelling you know emergency national need that you're going to this company is going to go on unless we all change kind of mindset okay fine that will also help you but short of that you really have to get the top you got to get the bottom you got to keep working those folks and be persistent and over time you can you can change it but it takes a great yeah on the navy staff we talk about that middle group as the permafrost so go ahead yeah I want to pile a little bit too I think you know it's we're talking about the design we're talking about the lines of effort we're measuring it I go back to you know how do you measure fighting power it's this big nebulous thing out there well that's what he thinks well that's baloney there's four words in that design that come out to how we should be measuring our culture and commitment integrity accountability initiative and toughness and I think the way that design our design right not cno's design the way our design in the navy articulates those words and how we're getting after those core attributes really articulate are we changing the culture are we moving the needle in the positive direction so we as professional warfighters can do our bidding for the country and that's what it's got to be we can't put I can't put a monetary cost on it I mean my sons the United States Marine second lieutenant I can't put a cost on what he costs to me but I can put a cost on those values is where I would go yes sir yeah yeah I'm with a SAP software the army training doctrine command down at port uses is planning an ACAT-1 program called ATIS army training information systems they're going to take the schoolhouse legacy applications and move it to the cloud is the navy planning on something like that of moving to the cloud and they haven't made a decision yet where they're going to do this at Dyssel or you know at an army you know data center but is the navy marine core planning something like that for some of their schoolhouse training I'll start with the marine core side I'm not sure the navy well you can probably jump in the MPS not specifically moving to the cloud I mean what we've done is leveraged some of the the technology that is out there now and future technology so things like Blackboard and the ability to network to access marine net is our network for distance learning for instance so outside the classroom the ability to access marine net from anywhere and not and make it easier for marines to to then to connect with it and the folks down at the university are moving forward with some of the same things you see in universities across the country in terms of getting away from written material and being able to provide learning environments that are more interactive and more responsive to student requirements as they learn putting things on videotape and reversing the the sequence of instruction to where you learn first and then come to the classroom to to discuss and exchange ideas with others rather than coming to the classroom to hear a lecture and then going home to do homework so so I think trying to leverage some of the current stuff but I wouldn't say specifically moving I don't know honestly if we put things in the cloud or how we're doing that because I know it's all kind of linked via Blackboard right now for us yeah so on the navy side and I'm going to turn it over to Frank I'll give you an example we haven't moved it into the cloud the cno would like to be there today we're just not agile enough but to that point of injecting technology and then trying to run and catch up with it in a learning environment in a schoolhouse environment we ran an experiment with recruits at a recruit training command up in Great Lakes this was really our Master Chief Petty Officer the Navy who said hey let's give this a try why are we having people learning basic skills you know we handed them iPads you know they can watch YouTube videos on their own rinse and repeat as much as they need to to get those basic skills so that we can spend the classroom time getting after that deeper learning and they noticed about a 20% speed increase as far as attaining those basic skills with these 500 recruits that you know we put them on iPads and made it more interactive Frank's team down in I think it's Panama City your EOD school so here's a bunch of people you know in the bomb squad that same technology inject using some what you know our children would consider basic you know digital skills and tools has increased their learning rate significantly so they can get here after either more material in the training pipeline or shorten it up and we get more as we call it a sub o out of Frank's team downrange because we're shortening up that training pipeline so baby steps compared to what you're talking about which is a more holistic training effort for the soldier but we are scratching at that one of the things that Steve points out where this kind of gets exemplified is you look at the difference between Toyota's onboarding process and their initial training for manufacturing you know in their workforce versus a GM and already you can see that that cultural change that learning change starts right in the onboarding process so that's why we're going after it at the recruit level yes sir okay now i'm in trouble one of my mentors has just shown up at the microphone Mike Vitale former Navy now KPMG consulting you all have talked about very eloquently what high-velocity learning should look like and how we might get there but in the end as you all know we have to change behavior and change your behavior requires changing rule sets which is what Admiral Selby mentioned so i'd like each of you to tell me one rule you could change if you could be king for the day in the way that we are doing behavior today and then Admiral Thomas if you would tell me how we are planning on implementing those potential changes if you're thinking and i know you already are thinking about doing that thank you thanks Admiral for putting us all on the spot so what we'll do is we'll just go down the line and kind of look at a rule and then i'll try to put a bow around it because that will be the last question i guarantee it that's a great questions all right you know and i kick myself for not having thought about the answer to that beforehand so i'm trying to figure it out on the fly i think a rule that would allow us to access the best of what's going on in commercial industry right now more quickly to apply to military applications i know we talk about acquisition rules a lot but in some of the things that we want to apply to the learning environment training and education for the Marine Corps there's an awful lot that's going on right now on the commercial side that we can we can really take advantage of so changing a rule that allows us to more quickly iterate with industry on the things that have the most promise to us and so that's not a simple rule but it's a desire that'll help us get where we need to go more quickly so i got fortunate to be the first one to answer the question thanks jim for taking one for the team prank thanks sir i think the challenge rule in the nfl is probably the one that i'm not at all i'm gonna pile a little bit on general lukeman here i worked at gyro for about nine months and i think we need more fiscal flicks flexibility with some of the way that we can apply money to do exactly what we're saying to either speed some of the technologies and i go i say again to remain ahead of our peer or near peer competitors but we had three year uncolored monies where i was able to apply seed money into something that guess what it could fail and if it failed you know that that was the price of trying to again to try and to to beat the enemy at his own game so i i think we need that type of flexibility i i know i've said a number of times our acquisition process was designed by al qaeda but i think that we have to we have to have that agility as warfighters to be able to necessarily stay ahead of technology lauren okay so this is a one rule by the way we don't need a traditional answer so this that's just me thinking different so here's here's what i would change it's not really a rule but here's what drives me crazy okay so i i look at my peers and we are schedule driven beyond belief and we are driven from meeting to meeting to meeting and every meeting there is a powerpoint that drives the meeting and it makes me makes my head explode so here's what i would challenge i would challenge the mentality in the in the building and probably in some of the staffs in the fleet that says you have got to have a powerpoint read ahead for every meeting if i am coming to you and i am going to request a decision from you i owe you a a read ahead i owe you the time just to have your staff prep it and tell you you know what the pros and cons are but if i'm coming to just talk about what i think the future of whatever is let's have a conversation and let's not have it driven by our staffs i think we unfortunately because we are so schedule driven we tend to abdicate a lot of these preparations these of quite frankly some of our thinking to our staffs and i think that's a problem i think that we as flag officers and senior executives in the building and senior leaders and your organizations we ought to be having conversations with one another just because we can and because i think that would open the white space in our brains and allow us to think about things differently when you go into a meeting and you're handed a powerpoint it totally drives the way you think and the way you act and it's not productive and quite frankly i think it's it's a deviance you know it's driving our our behavior downwards in a bad way when you go into a meeting and you're challenged and you're able to actually think and ask questions and have a real dialogue you come up with some real insightful answers that you probably would have thought of would not have thought of without that powerpoint stuck in front of you so that's what i would change it's not a rule per se but it might as well be because that's kind of the way we always do it okay so i wrote down loren selby pentagon no powerpoint heretic jim hey well the rule that comes to mind for me is one that is enshrined in many organizations and certainly in nasa we're still on tape so i won't give you the original version but it goes something like if one guy or gal makes a mess then everybody has to wear diapers what we do is we don't allow for i guess human nature we don't allow that people are going to make mistakes some of them intentionally some of them unintentionally and we try to legislate process out the possibility of people making mistakes because one person did once and so i think that is an area where if we could tolerate a bit of that because there's always going to be people who speed on the highway so we put policemen out there to collect money for their municipality we need to do the same thing i think in government and that is to not try to legislate because we all know no fraud ways to abuse right however it turns out in order to avoid any any fraud or abuse you waste an incredible amount thank you easy for me to say because i'm not actually in the navy but the rule i would change is is that the difference in the way we approach problems said and information communication between an operational staff at war and a headquarter staff and i've watched time and time again whether it's general madis come and say look anyone who's got a good idea come here you as leaders protect your mavericks listen to their voices when i get inside the pentagon i hear okay so we're gonna staff this and anyone senior to the most junior guy who checks the tasker can change the delivery can change the message can stop it from going forward can can take away the insights and package it for consumption and that rule set that we use is is i think preventing us from maintaining any velocity that is anything but the the curve you just described okay so there's another example you remember i'm the director of the navy staff okay i'm starting to feel a little bit of hostility up here of the panel okay steve yeah so speaking from the academic perspective i'd get rid of the the forced curve and here's what i mean by that let's say we're giving people an educational experience that could be in a classroom traditional or through the cloud or practical problem solving whatever it is we're giving a group of people that experience because we believe that there's some skills and some knowledge they should end with that are important for them going forward and then what do we do we um make a fixed investment a homogeneous investment in a group of people who are not homogeneous and then we're shocked shocked at the end that there are some people who who um get a's b's and c's well well whose fault is that right because what we did is we didn't tailor our delivery for the um idiosyncrasies of the individual to get everyone to an A and so what we've done is we've put the blame and the burden on the student who doesn't quite fit into that pathway to accept the C and and the guy who gets the A you could say it's talent but i'd say a big part of it is just dumb luck you know pun and deliberate that that person just happened to fit into that means of learning and so excelled in the and the b's and the c's didn't fit as well so if we dump the force curve we we we put the burden and the responsibility back on the instructor to actually figure out the student and the pathway that student should take to get to an A level of acquisition of the skills and the knowledge so force curve you're dead to me okay um admiral vitally asked a great question and the way he framed it was a perfect way to wrap this up you know you look at the the rule set and the cno has been very very emphatic about this when we rolled out the design last january and as you've read it and all of you it just appears about all of you have read it which is fantastic and as i look at that design this this high velocity learning line of effort he calls for fractal behavior you know that hey everything should kind of repeat image throughout the organization from engine room lower level you know from the top down to engine room lower level on that amphibious ship he's also been very very resistant to you know robert thomas and his view of implementation which is that typical operator view which is okay there's the objective i will go through a deliberate planning process i will do mission analysis here's my plan or next is my x-word and then we move out he would he refuses to allow us to generate what he calls a high velocity learning kit you know this notion that we're going to mail out a box it's probably be green because of the green l o e and it's going to just show up on every unit's doorstep and here's your hvl kit but back to admiral vitali's point as far as implementation it's clear in all the conversations and all the debates we've had so far and the efforts that are going on out in many organizations in the navy that the center of gravity and it's not going to shock anybody here are those unit commanding officers and the unit commanding officer may be small unit tactics that squad leader it may be you know admiral hallardies the commander of naval sea systems command or g8 over at nav air it's those unit commanding officers and we have to get them to embrace the culture change and this is not easy stuff if this was an easy problem it already would have been solved Brenda opperman is out there rob marshal is there in the audience they're involved with me in trying to make this change implement this change in the navy as are a lot of the panel members here we're going to debate it again on thursday we're gathering all the navy flag officer and senior executives department of the navy and we're going to hash this one out again um the cno has been extremely patient and actually has been embracing and inclusive and uh I'll you know I'll be honest with you a very uh healthy debate about implementation of high velocity learning but again the center of gravity is the commanding officers if I have my way we will have a essentially a tribe of change agents go out and convince commanding officer by commanding officer of this cultural change and many of them frankly already get it and we're going to go out and I'll bet you we learn from them as we go out and see what they're doing okay thanks again everybody really thank you panel members for a great discussion it's feeling good yeah