Change Agent Interview with Jer Donald "Don" Get- Part I
May 8, 2006
Thanks to our colleague David Yang, we were able to secure a recent phone interview with Don Get who is the Executive Director, Air Intelligence Agency, at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Don was kind enough to spend nearly 40 minutes with us covering a range of topics including historical military change agents, change agent communication styles, and the profiles and characteristics of change agents. Given the sensitivity of his role, the conversation was recorded and transcribed by media liaisons from Air Intelligence. We are thankful to Don and to Joe Wiggins for their time and effort in having this conversation with us.
From Don’s biography we are told, "Mr. Get assists the Commander in reviewing, evaluating and formulating policies, concepts and objectives governing the mission of the globally dispersed agency. AIA’s mission is to gain, exploit, defend and attack information to ensure superiority in the air, space and information domains. The agency's people worldwide deliver flexible collection, tailored air and space intelligence, weapons monitoring, and information warfare products and services."
Don has had an amazing career in the government. "Mr. Get served in the U.S. Army from 1973 until he retired in 2000. While on active duty, he served as a cavalry platoon leader, a military intelligence field office commander, a combat electronic warfare and intelligence company commander, a signals intelligence operations battalion commander, and a multi-discipline intelligence brigade commander. His military assignments included tours in Germany, Korea, Japan, and the Pentagon where he held an alternate specialty as a China foreign area officer and served as politico-military affairs officer for China on the Department of the Army’s staff."
Given the length of the interview we have divided it into two parts. Here is Part I. Enjoy:
Forrester: What it is your definition of a "change agent"? What do those words mean to you?
Don Get: I look at a change agent kind of like a catalyst in a scientific sense. It’s something that is critical in engendering the change without actually being changed itself. And change agents basically convert the exhaust into less toxic exhaust, but the catalyst in the converter doesn’t change itself, so change agents in organizational structure are folks who actually are critical to the execution of change, be it good or bad.
Forrester: Can you think of the first time you might have heard that term "change agent"?
Don Get: I would say pretty early on in my career. I started out my professional career in the United States Army and I came in 1973, just at the draw down of Vietnam. The Army was going through obviously some downsizing and some pains from that, and recruiting wasn’t what it needed to be. The all-volunteer force wasn’t doing all that well. There was a slogan, "Join the People Who Join the Army" that fell flat, and a guy by the name of Max Thurman came in to Recruiting Command. He created a slogan, "Be All You Can Be". Max Thurman retired as the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. He was probably one of the most incredible change agents, and he was spoken about as a change agent for the Army for a long time. So I’d say, you know, even in the mid to late 70’s there was discussion about these folks who would affect change. And the Army does a lot of its teaching to the study of leadership through history.
And they point out those people who have had major impacts on the organization or institution. So again, in early readings there’s a book about former Army chief of staff Creighton William Abrams and again he was pointed to as being a change agent for the United States Army. He did some marvelous and incredible transformations. He’s the guy who’s responsible for putting so much of our force in the Reserve and National Guard component.
Forrester: What does that mean?
Don Get: That means that the United States Military could never go into a major conflict without the mobilization of the Reserves and/or the Guard component. Which means that the American people would have to be affected by any major operation, as they were in Desert Shield/Desert Storm and of course OIF, as opposed to a conscript force in Vietnam, where very, very little of the Guard or Reserve was ever mobilized. So, you know, the American, the average American, unless they had a relative who was drafted, didn’t feel it.
Today, every town, every community in the United States feels the burden of the war in some way. So and then as we study transformation and change, and I took a course at West Point that was called History of the Military Art, and it studied the art and science warfare. They focus on great leaders and those who were very innovative, who were the change agents of warfare like Napoleon, like Lee, like Grant. So, it’s something that the Army, institutionally, has paid attention to for a long time. And then as I joined the Air Force three years ago I find the same appreciation for the people who are truly the inspirational leadership to make major changes in force. Billy Mitchell being one, the Italian air power sort of guru today.
Forrester: In your career, what are the common attributes at the core of change agents? What makes them special?
Don Get: First and foremost, they have to have a vision of the future that is different than the conventional wisdom. The successful ones have to be willing to articulate their vision and have a persistence to see it through even if among their peers they’re considered heretics. So you know Billy Mitchell was, in fact, court-martialed. I remind young officers who are very aggressive with new ideas not to be afraid of that because he also retired a General officer. There is a guy who led the development of armored warfare for the United States Army, which meant the demise of the horse cavalry. Ada Chaffee was his name, and he was heretic, and he was hated. But now there’s Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and there’s Chaffee Range, Chaffee Road. You know, half a dozen buildings, etcetera named after him on Fort Knox, which is the home of the Armor Community for the Army. So I think change agents have to have conviction in their belief, in their vision for the future, and a willingness to sort of suffer the slings and arrows that are thrown at them and persist. The most successful will also understand how to work change processes, and how to convince senior leaders to adopt change. Having a great idea, and having it rejected by everybody doesn’t affect much change.
Forrester: When you have to sell an idea up the chain of command, which is a place where change agents often find themselves, talk to me a little bit about how you structure your briefing. How do you structure your messaging? The change agents that I interviewed had many different techniques and tactics. And so take me into that realm of what are some of your lessons of connecting with senior leadership around innovative ways to change thinking processes.
Don Get: It helps to have a carefully crafted argument, where logic is on your side, because leadership takes their responsibilities very, very seriously. And if you just throw...if you’re a random idea generator with no logic behind your idea, you just kind of think something’s neat, and you want to do it because you feel it’s neat, and you can’t articulate why it’s good for the enterprise, you’re probably going to fail. Now sometimes it’s a stretch into an unknown area. I mean, you know, you’re doing your correlation and regression and you’ve got a couple of known points, but there are some real unknown areas. Again, you have to have a logically constructed argument to say that the benefits of going into this unknown this way probably will outweigh the costs of inaction, and then you’ve got to set up some bench marks for some small successes. But, I think most successful change agents will at least put the idea out in a forum with some decent logic behind it and then let the debate begin. The most successful ones I’ve seen have done it that way. So they have to have very good organizational skills, they have to have pretty good writing, briefing, and personal interaction skills.
Forrester: A certain percentage, Don, of change agents are very visual thinkers. Any mention of that in the way you structure your briefings? In other words, do pictures help to tell a story better than words?
Don Get: For some they do. Early in my career, when I was working counter-intelligence and learning a little bit about interrogation and things, I took a course called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Advanced Body Language. There are some people who will respond to the visual, there are others who are oral people and they will listen for key points of your argument. Lawyers are very oral people.
I do find we’ve been so inundated with commercial advertisements that visual is becoming more and more important. But I think the change agent has to be able to visualize in his or her mind what the future looks like. And that’s not just change agent. I think that’s for great leaders, great captains anywhere. You really see a vision of the future, and then you start building your briefing, your slides, your construct. I will tell you in today’s world, with the complexity we have, some of the most successful change agents are not only visual people, but they are able to provide a parable or metaphor so that their audience, the wider audience, can understand what they’re saying or getting to.
Forrester: Why is that important?
Don Get: Because getting the boss’s buy-in or the senior’s buy-in is typically not enough in a large organization, be it private or public sector. You somehow have to inspire the rest of the work force, and being able to tell a story, being able to provide a metaphor of what the change is about and why the future...in some changes, you have to sort of accept on faith or you can paint a picture so that people see the goodness of it. Probably one of the most modern, remarkably successful change agents is a master of the metaphor. He used one about changing an organization. And they're saying, "Well why would we ever do something like this?" and he talked about the construction of Dulles Airport in Washington D.C.
Forrester: And what was his name?
Don Get: It’s Mike Hayden. And at one of the briefings he’s talking about Dulles Airport. And I grew up in Washington. I remember when I went through Burke, Virginia, Population: 4. And as we drove out to Dulles on a Sunday afternoon, on the airport road where once you got on the road you couldn’t turn around until you got to the airport. And we went to see the people transporters and the modern architecture, but as we drove back we remarked, "Who in their right mind would ever build an airport so far away? I mean, that’s absolutely nuts. Nobody’s going to use this thing."
Somebody understood the expansions that were going to take place that would build the Baltimore, Washington, Northern Virginia metroplex. And a much simpler metaphor is, you know, the Gretsky Metaphor. Gretsky is so good because he’s not chasing the puck, he’s positioning himself on the ice to where the puck’s going to be. And so General Hayden, at that time, was the director of NSA and he said, "You know, we’re not going to chase the environment, we’re going to position ourselves to be ahead to where the environment’s going to be, to do our job." And when you think about that using a sports metaphor or...and he was talking in the D.C. area about Dulles, and everybody immediately understood. Yeah, you know, there’s this growth, there’s this expansion, there’s this change in the environment they’re going to do to you, unless you get ahead of it.
Thoughts or reactions? Please send them to us.