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"Building the Base" - an in-depth series of conversations with top entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders from tech, financial, industrial, and public sectors.
Our special guests provide their unique perspectives on a broad selection of topics such as: shaping our future national security industrial base, the impact of disruptive technologies, how new startups can increasingly contribute to national security, and practical tips on leadership and personal development whether in government or the private sector.
Building the Base is hosted by Lauren Bedula, is Managing Director and National Security Technology Practice Lead at Beacon Global Strategies, and the Honorable Jim "Hondo" Geurts who retired from performing the duties of the Under Secretary of the Navy and was the former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development & Acquisition and Acquisition Executive at United States Special Operations Command.
Lauren Bedula 00:10
Welcome back to Building the Base, Lauren Bedula and Hondo Geurts. Here with today's guest, Mr. Justin finale, we're really excited to have Justin on. He's currently acting Chief Technology Officer in the Department of the Navy. And as if that's not enough, he's also technical director for the Navy's Program Executive Office for digital and Enterprise Services, or PEO digital, which you'll hear us refer to it as. And Justin also teaches at Georgetown, so invested in students and academia and has a background focused on mission. So, Justin, excited to get into that today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Justin Fanelli 00:46
Thrilled to be here with you, patriots. Thanks for having me.
Hondo Geurts 00:49
So, Justin, really good to see again, enjoyed serving with you and watching you do amazing things. And we love to highlight people on this show, not only talking about problems, but more importantly, solving problems. And I think you've got some great examples. We look forward to getting to those with you. But to give our guests a little bit of background, how did you come to become the Navy CTO? Where did you start? And talk a little bit about how you've made your way through the Defense Department?
Justin Fanelli 01:20
Yeah, well, so I think we all start with our family. Grandfather was in the 100. And first jumped on D Day, uncle was a Marine, another uncle was Navy. And then my dad was Air Force. So we were, we had, we had all the colors covered. And I grew up just playing sports and knowing that I wanted to be a part of something bigger. And so, I was Air Force for about three minutes and then jumped right into Navy as a civilian when I was 22. And I wouldn't say I haven't looked back, because we've been working with private sector and doing side projects. But we're kind of intersection learners. And I'm an electrical engineering nerd who loves mission people. And so, it's this is one place, you can't get enough of it.
Hondo Geurts 02:05
And what was your takeaway, I know you were just in for a short minute in the service. But you know, for those who don't understand what going into the service Young is like and what it can do for you, oh, what would be your two or three takeaways from how that set you up for the future that's unfolded in front of you?
Justin Fanelli 02:25
Oh, man, it's awesome. So, we can either learn things early, and whether it's the hard way or the easy way or way later. And so, I think my, my time where in blue, opened my eyes to things that my peers, probably just didn't see or experience until their late 20s, or maybe even mid 30s That involved thrills, like there's no way out, we have to figure this one and like, no one's coming to help you right. And I think there's some of those other places, but they make it very real. And so that the stick togetherness that we get was, it was very much a team, it felt like an extension of playing sports, but at a whole new level of stakes, the discipline that instill the kind of like self-reliance, but also interdependence that it instill, and then just exposure to this big world, every year of my 25 years working in or with or around these folks, I realize how big it is, it has never ceased to be big or maybe even bigger. And one thing I've observed this year for the first time, and maybe it just takes 25 years, maybe I'm a slow learner is that it can get smaller, if you know the right Dewar's. And you have the information. So, I hope others learning curves are not quite as steep. But like the traction that we've gotten in the last two years has been really exciting. And what it looks like is reaching across different parts of the military or even different parts of government or the public private partnership that I had not seen, and probably wouldn't have seen without my time, kind of getting my roots in both civilian and military worlds.
Lauren Bedula 04:15
I want to get into that I think we'll definitely hear more about adjusting because you seem to be doing a great job of that connecting between the communities you mentioned. But before we discuss that, can you tell us a little bit more about your current roles, both of them, how you balance them, and what exactly you're focused on?
Justin Fanelli 04:32
So, two different roles right now, for context. Like in the government, a lot of people have two roles. I think I've had two roles, except for my time at DARPA every minute for the last 15 years. So, these ones are, in my opinion, particularly well aligned, in terms of outcomes. So, program executive offices, this is big acquisition. And so, we have PEO digital that is Actually with an ASN RDA named hundo Geurts. We converted that PEO into a portfolio minded PEO. And so, this is interesting and pretty novel. But a lot of program executive offices exist within DOD. This is one where, instead of just programs and program offices, we have portfolios to allow for more prioritization and kind of data driven thinking. And so, I'm the tech director over there have an awesome group that includes cyber portfolio infrastructure, and user services and devices, platforms cloud, anything that you can think of, from a comms to a connectivity to those end users. That's the PEO job and then the CTO job. Miss Jane Rathbun was the first department nav CTO, she fleeted up to Don CIO, and I back filled her. And so essentially, we have the policy and strategy side, and then the execution stride aside within the PEO, and they're working hand in glove. And so, this is two different organizations that sometimes would have to, you know, have a meeting scheduled to talk, the relationships have gotten stronger and stronger and, and that's through the leadership of this rep. And in the execution on the technical items, were able to kind of connect dots, like you said, Throw passes faster, and then do a little bit more with the other PEOs. And the CIO and CTO shop, I think because of that proximity.
Hondo Geurts 06:45
So, Justin, a lot of folks listening may not be government folks. And the role of CTO is actually a fairly new construct in many of the government offices. And I heard a great podcast you did with Skyler Moore, who's been a previous guest here, who is the CTO at CENTCOM. And can you describe for the audience here, kind of that CTO role, what it is and what it isn't? And, and how it might differ from what a CTO on a commercial firm would be? It's, you know, I think same with it. Folks hear it, they think helpdesk, they don't understand maybe the way connect show. So, you're at this incredible nexus of, of all of these different activities, give us leaders kind of as a sense of how you pull all that together.
Justin Fanelli 07:39
Totally, there's no shortage of opportunities that all of us have seen in government. It's massive. And it's not surprising. When one organization is doing something really similar to another. We've all witnessed it time and time again. And so as from a macro perspective, the whole world has recognized what 14 years ago, the comment came out that Software is eating everyone's lunch, right? We've recognized that all organizations except for maybe lemonade stands on a 95-degree, DC day are digital organizations, and they still eventually have to go through the bank anyway. The push within government to be more digital minded, and more forward leaning in these capabilities is something we've seen in policy. It's something we've seen in positions. It's something we've seen in any number of thrusts. And Jen Phalke writes about that in recoating. America. And so, this is something that I talked to with peers in government. So, like Sky is incredible. And a couple other CTOs that were just getting placed that organizations, some have that job, some don't. And I think it makes a lot of sense. To your point. It can be different in industry versus government. And there's a couple reasons for that. One is because of kind of the massiveness of government because of there are so many different shops doing related things. Framing is a superpower in the government. I had a friend who came from a law firm in New York City, went over to be an executive at Treasury and said, Wow, there's so much happening in government that if you can't frame and context switch, you're left out of the conversation. And so, one of the key purposes that we have right now is talk to a lot of people. Make sure that if we see like items that we're connecting them, if we see common practices that we are standardizing those or smoothing those, and so it's at its best, we are operating as funnels for all the amazing innovation that's happening at the edge and dot connectors. And then if we're getting really frisky with it, facilitating some divestments so that we can get new entrants in and we can get new innovation in. Ultimately, I came from a technical debt meeting this morning. Ultimately, we have problems that most newer companies don't have in that. We have a lot of old techs that has accrued over time. The deputy CIO at DOD sometimes says, we, we built our house first. And so now we have a pretty old house. And for this reason, our focus isn't as narrow as a company that is purely focused on a product or a particular roadmap. And so, where we can help facilitate divestments to bring in new companies or change the way that we think about some of the problems, hey, we've always done it this way. Do we want that 10% faster horse? Or do we can we have some cars or some hoverboards? Or some spaceships and so solving problems differently, and the framing around Beth is, is a big one, too. So, I'd say translation is number one, and then removing friction is number two.
Lauren Bedula 11:13
And, Justin, when you talk about divestment, I imagine it's much easier said than done. You are a direct customer to the defense industrial base, what's your take on how it's changing? You're seeing new entrants who do a great job of I think, getting a lay of the land and engaging with industry, but could you give us your take on the state of the defense industrial base and how it might get stronger to fit the department's needs? Love it?
Justin Fanelli 11:39
Yep. So, years ago, we meet with the same companies over and over again, and kind of see the same pitches. And then with for the last maybe five years, before that it was up ticking. But it's been noticeable in the last five years, and then the VC push, and probably even less than that, and then the private equity pushes since then. So, a lot more pitches. And so, we went in, probably a little bit wet behind the IRS and said, Hey, let's meet with as many companies as we can for four months. And so, we met with 100 companies in four months. And, and we're context switching with the best of them. And my team is incredible. And so, they're getting excited about all of these things. But the question is, how do you place it. And so, when we think about cyber tools, just one more cyber tool doesn't necessarily make you more secure. In case. In fact, what often happens is like adding another cyber tool to the stack without turning anything off, just adds more weight. And so, these heavy, in some cases, well, that old house or a heavy anchor of technical debt can really build up and it ends up looking like maybe barnacles. And so, the idea is, we needed a better way to think about how we let these new ideas come in and build that base. But where is the new money coming from? We don't want to just ask for more money every year. And so, we're doing something specific for the last 15 months, I'll tell you about it. But what we're doing is we're asking some of the vendors to get smarter on the way that we operate, not experts, but smarter so that they can quantify the impact to our mission outcomes, so that we can place them if someone comes in the door and they say, a I think we can make you better, but they don't understand exactly what we do. It's a lot of meetings. What we've done is we've said, here are our baselines, how can you improve us? And is there anything that we can change or turn off so that we can get this moving faster, because we want this game changer now. And so, with that resulted in our world class alignment metrics, and this is one of the quantitative ways that we're meeting with companies given them a read ahead and said, We understand the tech we read the brief, let's make this time about how you can make all of the activities within the Navy more effective and shrink friction, like how do you change our game? So, we're looking at from a military Moneyball perspective to buy wins, not products. And this has made our team and external teams more conversant in a language of impact and mission outcomes as opposed to this is where my router goes.
Hondo Geurts 14:33
So just use the term which I love intersection learning. How did you teach your team how to be comfortable thinking that way? When probably traditionally they all came from we all came from a much more transactional kind of serial process. What was the learning like, so that you could be an intersection learner and what skills and traits in your team really allowed you to make that transition?
Justin Fanelli 15:07
I love that question. Well, I'd love to tell you that I took them through a checklist and like it was, it was this long, hollow process, I learned more from my team than they could ever learn from me. And so, I am just a Pittsburgh originally, we pride ourselves in being blue collar, and gritty. And these folks work so hard that they make me love the grind in a different way. And so, I'd say like, the closest two teams that I work with every day, they were intersection learners. And I think they just had that life or that proclivity, and then being around each other, one of the more interesting things I've ever seen is winning teams. compound in terms of the amount of overmatch. And so, I'll tell a story about that. But the way that we do that, I'd say the way that we are, like maintaining and growing, is, there's an ego check on a regular basis, they hit me with it, and we hit each other with it. And so, it is always about the idea and the team. And if rank or something like that gets in the way of serving our warfighters, it is handled promptly by almost anyone on the team. But in general, we are now measuring ourselves to the impact that we're making. And we're meeting with warfighters on a more regular basis. And that flywheel is so is so real. One of the examples was just to kind of test things out, we took that team and we said, hey, you probably won't be able to do this in this short period. And so, we did kind of a structured challenge with the team. And then we took another team that we have an unleashed list of folks who we think, want to take that next step. And so, we put that Unleashed team against them just gave them two related tasks and kind of measured that out. And unsurprisingly, the team full of kind of like, multi dexterous folks who are player coaches who are not too proud to do any role, they figured it out about five times faster. But then we did a, like a retrospective and huddled. And then we let the second team do the next one, and then they got better, as well. So, we're trying to do a not to train the trainer, but like, at least make this something that spreads. So
Hondo Geurts 17:40
you know, one of the things I learned it's so calm was you can our Special Operations Command, you can get good at doing things you've never seen before. You can plan for the unplanned, you're, you're saying, Are you sensing that from these teams of you can create the process and the mentality and the talents that allow you to accelerate through problem solving, almost as a processes, structuring and unstructured process? Are you sensing that from your teams? 100% 100%.
Justin Fanelli 18:14
And so, like, we'll talk about the people part, and then we'll talk about kind of like what that looks like within working with vendors. And so, number one, yes. In government, it's very easy to be overwhelmed because of the amount of data and the number of directions that were getting pulled. And the word priorities didn't even exist. 100 years ago, it was just priority, there was one. And now we Plural eyes the word to accommodate our schedules. But we don't always actually do that prioritization. And so, we've been clear on hey, here are our priorities. And here's how you measure them. And so, we've had weeks where we work really hard, and it didn't move the needle on priorities. And we're like, are we thinking about this the right way. And so, we've kind of diagnosed that we have some thinking time, one of the big takeaways was, there is a lot of work that we can either standardize or automate. And for the valley of death, specifically, we looked at, hey, here are the different valleys, where are people getting stuck? And we broke it down. I expected maybe five common issues, there were 15 common issues. And so, we said, hey, part of a valley is a glen. We said here are the 15, Glen's of death. And let's do a play for each of those. And so, we created for other teams, so this could spread on innovation adoption kits, the Atlantic Council that I think everyone here knows, well came out and said, America doesn't have an innovation problem. We are awesome at innovation. We at times have an innovation adoption problem. We don't send warfighters into theater without a kit. So why would we send innovators working with the governments in without one and so this is the innovation adoption kit for the Common sticking points and how we can get over them. And then on the personal side, it just takes more shots on goal and more work than people think. So, we're trying to motivate them, but they also they just need like that thick neck and a thick chin. Right? Like they need to be able to take those shots because not every meeting is going to be a good meeting. And so, as a result of that we have put, there's no guarantee to win, right? So, we have put more effort on the toughest problems, and we've put more support on people that we have who are going through the thick of pushing something. We had a guy the other day who was doing something awesome. It was across PEO lines, and they said, Hey, is there organizational pushback because of this? We said Does the operator want it? Yes. There are other stakeholders how are they taking this? Well, you know, there's some pushback, let's educate them. First, let's connect dots. And let's figure out this isn't the PEOs, the program executive offices and the buyers for they, they all exist to serve the warfighter. And so, if we are helping that through line, if we need to collaborate more, let's do that. We pulled the vendors in; we pulled up private sector partners in we have connected across organizations, and we just operate arillus. But that that wouldn't have started if there was like a, a lack of kind of like a morale. Right. And so that motivation piece was one that we use to show here's where we are in the story. And here's how we can get it back to mission impact.
Lauren Bedula 21:45
What an incredible team, just something we often ask our guests about is their take on barriers to progress. Are there policies or authorities needed? Or is it really just a cultural problem? Can you talk a little bit about what you run into? As far as those barriers to success?
Justin Fanelli 22:07
What do you think three years ago, in government, everyone I sat around, said, hey, here are all the reasons we can't be successful. And I heard it afterwards. And I didn't know if I heard it as like an echo, or these were new issues. And so, I think we all started paying more attention at some point. So many of those have been taken away, if you really want to get it done. So, I'd say most of the big infidelity exists, but most of the big impediments, you can have someone who grabs the ball and can run with it. And so, I think in again, setup top, I'm a nerd. So, I think in terms of numbers, and so if we're looking at innovation, diffusion, you'd never have 100% of the organization who are the person who grabs the ball and then runs it in, right. And that's okay. But if we have 10% of the organization who can do that, and we benchmark that and we show that can happen, then all the way through early adopters, we're demonstrating to them, Hey, this can be done. It's just different from what you're used to, or different from work. And so, I think we're a whole order of magnitude better in terms of policy. And what's even more interesting than that is we get exceptions to policy, when we are very specific with an issue. Someone will say I hate this policy; this is blocking me. Okay, let's figure out what that policy is. Let's figure out the impact. What its intention is, is it still serving that purpose? We have eight current active exceptions to policy because the rule makers and the rule enforcers believe us that the impact is greater than the original intention of the policy. It's eight down from 11, because some of them have just made been turned into permanent policies. So, I'd say from a culture perspective, if you're thinking about working with the government, find that operator, that person who is a champion who really gets what the operation means. And that puller within a within acquisition, who wants to make something happen, recognizing it's going to be a lot more work than just doing the status quo, and then find those to pull through. So, I would say from a culture perspective, we have proven that this is very possible in pockets. And then from a diffusion perspective, I believe that we are in that death to the Valley of Death era. If everyone just tells a friend to be that person, and we prove this outright.
Lauren Bedula 24:59
I love that And I have one follow up. Because when I hear about cultural issues, a lot of it, especially with where you are, especially at the on the PEO side is around taking risks. How do you How did your team think about taking risk? Or is their top cover provided? Do you have any advice on that front?
Justin Fanelli 25:18
Yeah, let's slice it into two paths. So, number one is, where are we coming at? Like, what is our perspective on risk? And so, if we're looking at operational risk, then, like, we're thinking about a Red Sea mindset, or a Ukraine mindset, or a Davidson window mindset with China and Taiwan, and we say, hey, from these is doing something different in a small pocket a net positive or negative, is there more risk or less risk than doing this? That is that is a like that kind of the globalization of risk. If we're localizing this, we can localize it at many levels. But if we localize it down to the person, is it riskier for me to do something different than I'm doing today? Yeah, it's probably more risk for me, because I may not get rewarded for that. But it's more risk for the warfighter, for me to optimize on me. And so, if we are optimizing on others, then then the fabric of the public private mesh, the economics of it, and the warfighting readiness of it is very clear. Now, we can say that, and I feel good saying that, like, that type of talk gives me chills at times, especially when I hear the folks saying it to us and say, Hey, you delivered three times faster, we never thought we'd get like, those are good feelings, we have to be serious about the actual risks as well. And so, this is why we bring data. And so, we are doing a lot more piloting, and a lot more beta in so that we can that's a verb, now, and we can tell a story about what the actual risk is. So, we had one recently where we said, hey, we're going to try this thing. It's called Flow three, I don't know what you guys think about this. It does a lot of things. But one of the things that it does is it can work the alternatively to VPN to virtual private. And, and they said, Okay, let's try it. And so, we kind of ratcheted that up and more people are using it. And then our VPN goes down outright. And we said, hey, we've tried this on a small and a, like, medium sized basis, can we open this up to everybody? Yeah, we have the data. Isn't that more risk? No, it's less risk. Also, they can't work, which is a huge risk in terms of productivity. supportability like to actually translate across those two, it can be tricky, right? And so, where we have data, and that generalized context, we can make better decisions. But it's again, it's so big, that it's very easier tempting to localize the risk with data. And with that general context, I think we can do a lot better. And we are.
Hondo Geurts 28:20
Yeah, Justin, you know, when I hear you talk out here to kind of words come out in my mind, you know, professional curiosity and professional humility, as keys to this. How are you seeing that apply it on both sides of this private public partnership? And how does that humility play, if you're a vendor and you want to do work, maybe you haven't done work with the government. Or if you're a government program manager, and you're trying to, you understand a risk equation, and you want to try and do something differently, but aren't quite sure kind of what steps you should take to try and do something differently.
Justin Fanelli 29:01
I love those. what those look like the way those play out for me is, it makes if you buy in on those, it makes work both more fun and faster. It may be circuitous at times, but it's because you're learning things that you're going to lose later. And so specifically, you made me giggle a little bit because under professional curiosity and intellectual curiosity, I, I was we were, we're hiring a lot of people right now. And so, we were going down the list of the checklists that I use this kind of verbose, two or three sentence things to my team. I was like, here's, here's what I think we're looking for. And they have to just enjoy work. And all of these things in there like me, just professional curiosity, and I was like, Yeah, I guess that's a much shorter way of saying it right. But point is, there's a power laws difference between people who love this stuff and love learning versus not a lot of people who raise their hand, and they say they want to do that. Okay, well, we have a meeting in an hour, I had planned on doing training. Is it an in-person training? No, it's a virtual, can you do it later and then learn this thing, the people who want to learn and then go back and compile, and they have questions, it's just an expedite everything. And then on the, on the on the vendor side, they're just there a ton of private sector, really, really smart people. But they don't know. The same things. We know, we don't know the same things with data, right. And so, like this meshing is kind of educational in nature. And there are logic pieces that the government is maybe behind on at times. And so, without that humility, you could jump over those steps. So, what I'd encourage for everybody is, like, recognize that we don't think it's right. But this is a rule. And so, we might discover something along the way. And so, if you're talking to someone who gets it, and is that player coach and wants to get after it, then there are some things that we have to go over so that we can kind of tackle those together. As I'm thinking through this, probably the best way to describe that that I can think of is we often jump to the solution domain without fully understanding the problem. And so, if we spent a little bit more time in the problem domain, and maybe it takes some humility, I, I love solving a problem, they have to hold me back and said, do you understand the problem before you solve it? Because you're See, you're going to take minutes or months. Okay. And so, we'll, we'll spend a little bit more time in that and where we can do that and where we can kind of abstract that and frame that. We want to do that. I'll ramble one more second on this. We had 21 fairly well-defined problems. We said, Hey, we did two pilots last year within Program Executive Office digital, and we'd like to do a lot more. How many more do you think we can do? I think we could do five or six. So, we said okay, let's ask industry. So, we did an RFI, we did a cattle call, we got 150 Oh, shoot, can't handle 150. Let's tell some people what we're doing. We're measuring based on outcomes. Let me see if we can get some more money. So, we got money for 21, we had 21 problems, we had money for 21. Not everyone made it. But that's a pretty good ratio compared to what it would have been. And in those 21, we either transitioned them, killed them or sent them back to go. And so, the set, all the ones that got sent back to go, were Hey, either the folks who are supposed to receive that weren't ready to receive it, or we didn't quite nail down the problem. That's not a failure. We after a few weeks, or months better, when it's weeks, we understood, hey, this was a problem that was incorrectly framed. Let's put this team on a different problem or take a smaller chunk of it. So those 21 pilots that we did last year, over half of those will field and I think it's a crazy ratio to me. And then I think even more of those will go as soon as the portfolios are ready to divest them of some of the new things coming in.
Lauren Bedula 33:14
Just saying well, you know, we often say on our show, while there's a lot of focus on technology and policy, this is ultimately a human endeavor. And to hear you talk about your team and your optimism around just the people you work with is so encouraging. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? And also, what you're doing at Georgetown, why invest so much and others and team building? Or is your outlook on the workforce positive? In a sense?
Justin Fanelli 33:42
Yeah, yeah, I wish this was like the selfless thing where I'm just teaching to just give back, I had, I wanted a DARPA trip recently, and a pm come up to me, it's, it's time for me to give back I want to teach and I was like, oh, I should give back more. I learned as much from my students as, as they learned from me. Previously, I said, I learned more from my team. I think that's true. I think I learned more from my team than I do from my students. But they're fun, because we're talking about kind of textbook things usually. And they just they bring a different kind of like angle to it. The Georgetown in the Security Studies program, a lot of those folks are either working full time, some in the DOD and intelligence community or one, two, and then doing a little bit of work up at MIT. These are folks who are more excited. So, like our numbers on stem on their, their, they could go up right like that we have room for improvement there. That why that's important to me, is because there's more good tech than there's ever been. And without the right educated buyers in the government, even if it's only for a few years, we're not going Like to make all of the best decisions that we could. And so, I am constantly recruiting. And this is one of the reasons that I teach and interact is because I want those people who, hey, I want to go to industry, I want to make something, you can make something in government and then go smarter to industry, or you can be a dual citizen and kind of bounce back and forth. This is a real path that's available to folks. And don't get me wrong. Like it. That's not to say that one's better than the other, I run into private sector patriots all the time, if you're creating a kick ass product, and you want the government to use that, because you want the government to be better at defending this nation and the world, then like, yes, let's do that. And this is why we do hack for defense. This is why we try and just connect those dots and make sure that we're doing that kind of smartly and gliding the path and then on the people part. It's man, it is. We make sure the army has it right. Mission First People always. And so, like the idea of like doing any of this without your flywheel support folks. It's one plus one equals three, every single day and where that one comes from, if you don't have a few lined up, you're not going to get there. And so, like we're pulling in kind of different people. I talked to nonda, who I know has been on the show the CTO and CIA. And in general Shanahan, they put out a paper not too long ago called Software Defined warfare. And so, this is all open-source stuff. Why aren't we teaching students about this? I don't know if they'd be interested, right? And this is what some say. And so, I, I've talked to MIT and Georgetown, and I said, Hey, what do you think about curriculum about platforms and about like, understanding? Let's do it, I think there'd be really high interest. And so, kind of connecting dots on where those are. And showing that to the point earlier that like, this is, in a lot of ways, a software defined world. And so, if we have information technology folks and engineering folks who get it, who can be proactive, it's going to be a how're laws type trajectory, if you get it and you're proactive versus if you're not. And so, we just want to make sure that we are doing some speed to Fielding, certainly speed to learning and speed to saving lives. It's that takes the village.
Hondo Geurts 37:53
So , Justin, we often talk about we need to transform from kind of industrial age thinking and industrial processes to more network thinking. And your job. And I know many of the audience may not know from my previous role I do you almost touch every part of the Navy in one way or another. You're not a kind of a product, by definition, your kind of a network office, how do you interact, both with industry and all of these different offices, so that you can be effective across such a broad range of stakeholders and players? What? What's your strategy to bring it together? Because I think as a government, we really struggle when we have to integrate lots of different things together, we're pretty good at doing an aero plane or a ship. But getting everything to play together is really hard. In the government. How do you approach that problem? What's working for you? And where do you still see opportunities to do more?
Justin Fanelli 38:55
Yeah, yep. So, this is a, it can be tricky, right? Because there's a lot happening. Everyone has to go fast. When you go fast, it's easier to kind of lock in and execute. We're told to be more agile, but agile sometimes means slower up front. And so, this is a real problem. A couple things we've figured out. One is that motivation usually works better than coercion. And where we can make something very clear, it's more likely to scale. And so, we've used investment horizons just to shed some transparency on our scouting approach. I don't go at least when I started in this job, I didn't go more than three days with someone different asking for a roadmap. Do you have a roadmap? Let me see your roadmap, what does that look like? And so, but it's in a not in a postindustrial in a digital age? What if technology is moving faster than our understanding of the problem? And so, a day Active road mapping means that we have to pay attention to what's going on, as opposed to only being able to look at it from a waterfall perspective. And that's scary because we haven't necessarily solved that. What we've shifted to is these investment horizons, three to one zero, shed light on what's available. And so, when something in horizon one, which is production, either goes down, or the agreement changes, and it's now triple the price, we can say, oh, shoot, what do we do about this? Or we can say, what are the three alternatives lined up? Oh, okay, from the outcome driven metrics perspective, we can make some tradeoffs there, or looks like we're kind of empty in that part of the funnel, what's happening in horizon three, on, and DARPA, and industry IRAD, all have something here, but we have a gap. Let's know about that earlier. So, we can start to accelerate that. So, point is, we have a little bit more transparency. And there are some groups that are adopting this faster than others. One of the groups who did this, an acquisition organization moved in said, Hey, we're going to do this, they saved billions of dollars avoided a lot more than that, in terms of cost avoidance, and they won an editor award for top scientists and engineers in the Navy, that's an acquisition. Normally, that's reserved for someone who is getting patents in a lab. This is something that has scaled to millions of users. This is that affects the casinos charge to have more players on the field. And that affects the Marine Corps charge to fight smarter. So those funnels, specifically the investment horizons, and the outcome driven metrics, in this case, the world class alignment metrics, the winds have allowed us to pull that forward, we have you might like this, design concepts so that they can scale a little bit easier. So, they're called Agile centered design concepts. ACDC is so that we can write this down, get some more adoption, talk to each other. What's resulting is, hey, we talked to this group last week, we talked to that group, you did all that without us telling you Yeah, we don't need centralized meetings for that. So, the, the decentralized coordination as observably object
Lauren Bedula 42:23
Destin, it's funny you brought up earlier in this conversation, the idea of frame and context switch, and then real focus on the problem, but the idea and the team. I've heard you do that in real time, and almost every answer and story you've given. You've definitely got my wheels turning. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your energy and some of these examples that we hope others can follow. You were fantastic. Thanks so much, Justin.
Hondo Geurts 42:52
Thanks, Jason.
Justin Fanelli 42:54
You guys’ rock