Part II of Change Agent Interview with Jer Donald "Don" Get
May 10, 2006
In part II of our interview with Don Get, Executive Director, Air Force Intelligence Agency, we discuss working within a bureaucracy, and how the change agent makes progress. We also discuss the 80/20 rule of innovation, and how much change an agency can take on. Don also commented on an innovative forum he has created inside the AIA, where even junior team members can offer their perspective and learn the ever important "why of change," something often missing in change initiatives. Read on to learn more.
Forrester: What are some of your lessons learned in brushing up against policy and brushing up against the various aspects of the bureaucracy that could slow down a change agent? What would be your advice to other aspiring change agents on how to work with the system?
Don Get: First of all, that the bureaucracy and policy ar not your enemy. And I don’t think most people who work in our bureaucracy, what I call professional civil servants or professional people, who are charged with executing today’s mission- I don’t think any of them wake up in the morning saying, "If anybody comes here and tries to change something I’m just going to do them in! I’m going to kill their idea!" The status quo is not always a bad thing and, you know, you’ve seen industry, you’ve seen organizations lurch through change after change and then kind of come full circle back to the way things were. Sort of, you know, back to the future sort of stuff. So you have to understand that. But if you do you truly have a better idea, or a different approach, or it’s time to change something, change a policy. I’d say do your homework. Understand the genesis of why that policy is in being. and make the case. Build your case that the environmental conditions have changed, be it technology, people, demographics, culture, whatever it is, and then approach it from that point. Don’t just say, "Well this is a bad policy," or, "This doesn’t relate anymore." Why is it out of date? Why do you think the policy is obsolete? Why do you think your idea is better? And then make your case- but don’t automatically start out with, "These people are just an impediment." I think they’re doing their job to the best of their ability, with the knowledge base that they have, and you sort of have to educate them to why there’s an imperative for change.
Forrester: When we talk about "change initiatives," and why they get traction or they don’t, it’s interesting to hear you focus on the "Why." Do you think that most bureaucracies or most agencies on the verge of change do a good job of explaining to people in agency why change is necessary?
Don Get: I don’t think we communicate well enough that I could give us a universally good mark. The other thing...and let me back up a step. I don’t think a lot of professional servants, or actually sort of the mid-level management who constitute most of the bureaucracy, wake up saying, "I’m going to prevent them from doing something." But I do think that if they feel threatened in their position, threatened in their livelihood, their power base, or if it’s going to put demands on them, or that somebody hasn’t explained why they have to sort of bring it up a notch, there will be resistance. That’s probably the greatest resistance to change is that, "I’m comfortable and I don’t to leave my comfort zone. Again, it’s not that really I want to hurt your idea, but you haven’t convinced me to leave my comfort zone. And oh, by the way, you are threatening my livelihood."
There’s definitely going to be resistance there. And we do not do a very, very good job of telling the entire work force why we’re changing something. It’s like these mandates from on high, "We’re going into a new process," you know, we started out with management by objective. "Oh, this is great, this is going to fix everything." "Well, why?" "Well, because some guru said it will." Without a lot of explanation, they want to do things on the cheap, they don’t want to take the time to educate enough folks. And then we go through all manners of operational effectiveness, and then the total quality the Air Force, and we have a new one; LEAN. And they talk about LEAN, and they put out a paper on LEAN, but they don’t really spend the time to explain where this thing came from. And they don’t actually allow...sort of an open debate, as far as I’ve seen, of where LEAN principles apply, where they don’t apply. You just, again, get this pronouncement, "We’re all going to do LEAN." What does that really mean? So, I give us probably C+ marks on the communication piece.
Forrester: And Don, when you think about some initiatives that you’re trying to get enacted, given your role in the Air Force, how much time do you spend with people, working and answering the question, "Why?"
Don Get: We spend a lot of time, because I believe in trying to be able to develop a well thought-out argument to articulate downstream. What we do around here, when I’m in town, which is not as often as I’d like, but we have a standing strategic brainstorming brown bag. And it is our staff leadership, what we call two-letter offices, are invited but not required to attend. And we’ll throw out an idea. Like, say we want to take a leading role in some area of the intelligence community, and the first question that comes across is, why? And we just start hammering at it; "Well, I think that it’ll be better for the nation, better for this part of the intelligence community, better for the Air Force." "Well, why do you think its better? How is that going to be better?" So we just really hammer away at it. It’s been very useful, and we’ve been doing this for two and a half years now. And you never know who’s going to drop in, you never know what perspective they’re going to bring. I mean we’ve had the chaplain, the doc, the lawyer, the personnel specialist, the logistics specialist, the operations specialist, we’ve had other staff members, we’ve had public affairs in. And I mean, the last time it was a chaplain asking all these really tough questions. And so we do spend a lot of time, and it’s been very useful, because the environment that...I can tell you very honestly and frankly when I first arrived we had just gone through a major change so there weren’t going to be a whole lot of change initiatives in my first or second year here. Well we’ve kind of settled down, we’ve looked at those changes, some were good some, some...I won’t say they're bad, some we questioned. And so, three years later, now, there’s been a leadership rotation and a change in the external environment, with new laws, new leadership, new organizations, something called the Director of National Intelligence, that we can start throwing forth some new ideas. And what’s neat is having hammered each other on the "whys" and the "hows" in the last two in a half years, when my current boss General Koziol says, "Hey, I’d like to put together some thoughts on this initiative," we’ve been able to do pretty good work for him.
Forrester: You’re anticipating the questions somewhat, aren't you?
Don Get: You know, I never called it strategic planning, it's strategic brainstorming, and we are just trying to just throw as many questions out there as we can from as many perspectives as we can. Again, we have a very, very diverse audience both from their functional requirements and capabilities as well as, you know, gender and race.
Forrester: How do you set a tone in those meetings so that the more junior folks in the room feel comfortable bringing forth an idea? Is that a tone that you set as a leader or has that happened organically? It's not always intuitive for someone who is junior and may have a good idea to be very vocal in those settings. How do you foster that environment where they want to share?
Don Get: It's very hard because you know the first thing the military does is it imposes a discipline on its workforce. And it's not blind obedience, but the more junior you are, the more you’re expected to just execute without a lot of questions. So, you do have to set a different climate, and you set ground rules and boundaries. In this forum, everybody’s idea is valid. It's, you know, it's not what you're wearing on your collar, or your epilates, but you know, it’s the gray matter that you’re bringing to the table. And give everybody a fair hearing. But it's hard. It's really hard because, in a lot of cases, I used to think when I was a young Lieutenant, that all you needed to do was be smart. You know, you didn’t need any of this experience garbage, you just had to be smart. The older I've gotten the more appreciation I have for experience. And so when you apply the intellect, and sort of season it with experience, you probably get better results. So, that is a very, very tough thing to do, to empower the junior folks to be able to speak up and contribute. I think a good leader, if they set the framework…but you’ve also got to warn the junior folks, "Hey, if my first reaction is I burst out laughing don’t take it personally." You can’t have thin skins up or down.
Forrester: In the change agent paper, Jerry Hultin from the Navy had a phenomenal quote where he said, "Change agents have to think about and apply the 80/20 rule to how much innovation they’re going to bring forth in the context of a major change initiative." And he said, you know, "Sit back and look at an agency and you could see everything you’d like to change. And if the change is an attempt to do 100% of innovation they’re going to fail. And that’s why you choose 20% of business processes to focus on and you sort of leave everything else as is, because the innovation scope that you take on can kill the initiative." And I’m wondering if you could comment on the idea of innovation, and what have you learned about how much innovation a bureaucracy can take at any one time.
Don Get: Yes, I’m going to waffle on you, and my answer is, "It depends."
Forrester: Okay.
Don Get: There are some things that are so dramatic that they will require wholesale changes, huge changes, more than the 20%, and technology ends up driving a lot of that. And then it’s a timing factor. So, if you say, "I’m only going to try to initiate a 20% process change"- if 20% is your baseline, your block zero to get it started, and you’d have a five-year plan so that you’re going to get to the 80% solution by year five, I’d say, "Yeah, that’s probably a reasonable approach." If you say the goal is 20% and that’s it, then I think we can do better. So, I attribute success in change or in just leadership to three things: performance, luck and timing. Everyone...the change agents have to perform. Like I said, they have to do their homework, they have to be able to articulate the reason for the change, they have to bring it down to something that people understand.
So performance is performance, and you’ve got to be working to your maximum. Luck is luck, I mean...but you’ve got to...it’s kind of like you’re never going to win the lottery unless you buy a ticket. But timing is sort of a misunderstood aspect of leadership and change. Some things...you’ve heard, "It's a great idea, before it's time." If you do your homework and understand the environment, and you’re locked and ready, then when the environmental conditions present themselves- you go for it. So be it a new TV show, a new style, or a new idea...and you kind of float stuff out to see if the time is right for it, or if the technology is ready to deliver on the promise. So, you know, like cell phones. The first cell phones were these big giant brick things, and they weren’t going to be popular until technology came out to the point where you can put it in your pocket. So the guys who invested heavily into it initially with these giant things, and some pieces of that change didn’t take place, like you know, the big satellite consolation, iridium.
Forrester: Right
Don Get: Because the timing wasn’t right.
Forrester: It wasn’t right, was it?
Don Get: No. So I think that’s another piece of it that we have to pay attention to.
Forrester: Finally, how do you measure success in your tenure in your current role, and how will you know you’ve been successful?
Don Get: If I can get to an 80% solution of the stuff I’ve teed up for the boss, my current boss, and see it realized in the next three to five years, I’ll look back on my tenure here, which will be, at that point, looking at 6 to 8 years serving in AIA, and say looking back, "Wow, we got it done." Because the stuff we’ve been teeing up recently, we actually have timelines, a program of action, and milestones. So we have transformation plan. So for us in this particular circumstance at this particular time, it’s not that hard. I’ve been on other jobs where we really haven’t teed up anything, so it wasn’t really sure how to measure how successful we were. And in the private sector, you come up with a new idea, it’s real easy to measure; your sales increase.
But I think we do have some milestones and goals, and we have a construct and a concept we hope to see realized. And so I think we’ll come back and we’ll be able to say whether we were successful or not.
Forrester: Don. Thank you very much for your time and thoughtful responses. End
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