Mission possible? Navigating tech adoption in the DoD.
Dave Bittner: Hello, everyone and thanks for joining us here today for this N2K CyberWire "Special Edition." On today's show, N2K's Brandon Karpf speaks with Pete Newell, Founder and CEO of BMNT. They're talking about challenges associated with technology adoption and change in the DoD. [ Music ]
Brandon Karpf: I am here today with Pete Newell, the CEO and Founder of BMNT. And Pete, today you and I are going to be talking about Defense Innovation and Innovation Adoption, some of the core problems that we have around technology adoption. But I'm glad, really pleased to have you join us today. Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Pete Newell: Oh, thanks so much for the invitation. I'm looking forward to this.
Brandon Karpf: So, if we can just start off with your net assessment. At the high level, where do we stand today in terms of defense innovation, technology adoption for DoD problem sets?
Pete Newell: I think, you know largely, I hate the word "innovation." What defense needs to be able to do is accelerate its accomplishment of certain missions. And one of the things I learned on the battlefield, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan was it was the speed of adaptation of technology that was really a challenge. Now, we were significantly challenged in how long it took us to recognize that something had changed on the battlefield. New technology, new operating concept, there's something. And then being able to articulate that change in plain English so that somebody could go out and recruit people to help solve that problem to build a prototype of something to get back to the battlefield, so that people could touch it and say, "No, that's not really the problem," or "Yes, you're moving in the right direction." That cycle time or that OODA loop is turning faster and faster and faster and faster to the point where we take so long to articulate the problem that by the time we go find people and build a solution, the problem's already changed, because the adaptation has taken place. So, I'm really big on talking to people about mission acceleration. It's first understanding, "What the organization's mission is and what it is on the ground?" And what they need to do to increase that cycle time. Now, innovation, there's a process you can use to increase that cycle time. But at the heart of it is how do we accelerate accomplishment of the mission.
Brandon Karpf: So, it's tying everything to a mission objective, whether it's a high-level mission objective or in the weeds mission objective?
Pete Newell: Correct and being able to change that mission objective to keep up.
Brandon Karpf: Okay.
Pete Newell: It makes sense.
Brandon Karpf: So, what you just described to me, I -- you know, we primarily here talk about technology, and we also focus on cyber security, how technology relates to human systems and business and government and national security. What you just described sounds like a very human-centric process. You described a person observing a change. A person dictating what the mission objective is, a person taking that lesson learned and bringing it back to someone who can interpret it and turn it into a technology or a capability. Can you walk us through -- I mean, is that human cycle working today, or is it -- or is it not totally connected in that loop that you just described?
Pete Newell: It varies dramatically from organization to organization to organization. First and foremost, innovation isn't a technology problem. We have plenty of tech.
Brandon Karpf: Right, yes.
Pete Newell: We have old tech. We have new tech. We have technical -- we have plenty of technology. It's a people problem. And I incorrectly, I called it a sociology problem. It's really an anthropology problem, as I was corrected by one of my analysts.
Brandon Karpf: Leave it to the analysts to be pedantic.
Pete Newell: I've got such stinking, smart people working at BMNT that I'm almost afraid to walk into the room and open my mouth some days. And we encourage them to challenge us. And --
Brandon Karpf: Well, that, yes.
Pete Newell: You know, I had this conversation and she's got a degree in anthropology, but since you're talking about culture and laws and rules and human interaction, that's anthropology. Not sociology. I'll stick to my wrong definition. It's a sociology problem because everything you just described requires a person to take action, or not take action. So, it's really people learning how to apply different rules or learning how to recruit networks of people to actually accelerate how fast they come together that is the challenge of getting things done. Now, in some organizations, they recognize that and they're starting to train their people, and they've written what we would call a doctrine for how the innovation process works within the organization. Senior leadership shows up to encourage people. They're engaged. And the organization is starting to actually coalesce around certain things faster and faster and faster. That's different than organizations where there's an entity at the side doing something, still butted against the rest of the bureaucracy or the organization. They're still trying to find a foothold or they're still fighting for their presence in something else. A really different, different application, all right? Like in, you know, I give a shout-out to the Transportation Security Administration, which you would not imagine would be at the forefront of actually doing this, but they are the first government organization to actually write a doctrine document for innovation that explains how the process works within the organization. They train it. They execute it. The TSA Administrator shows up at different events around the country to actually talk and listen and do, and then he goes back and tells the staff what they need to change. The Defense Logistics Agency is the other one that's really starting to spiral up because they figured this out. And they're starting to pull people together. They're teaching them and defining what that doctrine will be. I suspect that DLA will actually write their first doctrine document this year as well. That's an amazing change from ten years ago.
Brandon Karpf: Well, what it sounds like to me that those two organizations have done, they've made that -- a cultural identity. They've turned it into a core competency of the organization. So, as opposed to what you described as a lot of organizations having the unit that's off to the side, that is doing innovation, kind innovation theater, actually incorporating it into the core process and the core functions of an organization. That's actually, it's a great observation about TSA. That's not one that I would have made, but now thinking about it, I've seen them just in the last few years adopt new technologies and new capabilities and the speed at which I even get through the security line at almost every airport has increased. So, it does seem like they are actively making changes that we're not even aware of.
Pete Newell: Well, they are such an amazing test tube for the innovation problem because their footprint in the airports is severely constrained. That space that you see them in, that's what they get. And everything they do to extend their mission has to happen within that space. So, it's an amazing example. I think what you see coming from what I would say the view of both organizations is they're playing the long game. They realize that they now have to breed people internally who play by a different set of rules, but understand what the rules of the rest of the organization are. And so, they're training a core, and they're growing them, giving them experience and moving them into positions where they can actually do the work. And at the same time, they're training on a periphery. They're training finance people and contract people who aren't core innovators but actually touch the system so that when the innovation sells or whatever, have to start building something that's fragile to get something new, they have people across the organization who can reach to, who understand the mission, understand the rules and will help them do that. That is different from say the Defense Innovation Unit, NavalX, AFWERX, SpaceWERX, and all those others. If they don't have a large body of people to draw on, and their services are not raising people who will eventually take those jobs, so when somebody leaves DIU, they go shopping for somebody new. And then they spend a year, two years, getting on the ground of trying to learn the job. And then they spend a year on the job and then they'll leave. So, and I come back to the sociology problem. If you don't build a new school to teach new rules and then give people the opportunity to get experience applying those rules in different circumstances, you're not going to build a bench of people to replace these. And you're constantly going to be fishing for people to take the job. You can't scale that way.
Brandon Karpf: I'm interested then to pull the threat into the specifics here. And you're starting to hit on why really I and this podcast have been reaching out to folks in the defense innovation world and you and your teammates and understand these lessons learned, right? We work in the cyber security world where we've seen, you know, if you listen to the first episode of this podcast in 2016, you'd be hard-pressed to realize that that wasn't today. So, what that shows is eight years, eight years of technology development and new tools and new capabilities and the shift from on-prem to cloud, and now cloud to hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. And yet, we're still facing the same issues. All of that new tech hasn't really fundamentally changed anything because it's just been bubble gum and duct tape on top of the same old problems. And so, I'm really curious though, you know, how to -- how to implement what you're talking about? The sociological solutions to the human problems of security, whether it's national security, defense technology, what have you, cyber security. And you started talking about education. And so, you know, how can organizations, whether it's DIU or Palo Alto Networks or the DoD itself, or the Department of the Navy, how should they think about education and implement education? What should they be looking to accomplish there?
Pete Newell: I think at the end of the day, you're looking for people to gain experience. That's the hard one. And we can talk about Hacking for Defense. Of course. And what that does for student teams in terms of giving them experience. And I'll quote, you know, the Stanford -- A Stanford student from the course cohort that we taught, and this is a student that got to the end of it and said, and this is, you know, I mean Stanford student who'd been at Stanford for six years. He was bachelor's and then he went through his master's degree. And he said, "In my time at Stanford, this is the hardest class I've ever taken." He also said, "This is the only class that allowed me to use everything I ever learned at Stanford, every network I ever built, to work on a real problem with real people that gave me real experience that will lead to the job that I want to have. And I'll never say harped on real, real problem, real people, real experience. Those students leave the course with such a sense of confidence that they understand how to do discovery around a problem, and then do discovery around tons of solutions, and then discover pathways by which they can deliver things, that they have a pattern that will stick with them for the rest of their lives. They're amazing in what they do after the course, in terms of either building companies or going to work in the government or some place else. Now, when we first started Hacking for Defense, you know, we had a lot of support from the Joint Improvised by the Threat Organization. And one of the things that John Young [phonetic] who was the JA who looked at me and said, "I'll -- yes, I'll give you problems with the Stanford course," he goes, "but solving one problem a year for me is really underwhelming. I have thousands coming into the building." He goes, "My problem is my people who are supposed to solve problems aren't solving problems anymore. They're just moving paperwork. They have too many to do." In fact, they even have zombie problems and abilities nobody will touch." He goes, "I can't even kill problems off because I don't have the time to focus on them." And what he said was, "I will help you with this university class if you come to my organization and teach my people to do the same thing in order to start clearing problems." And that was the genesis for the development for hacking for defense and the development of being the T as a government-facing organization. Well, our job is to help the government organization at the total length while the common mission project is focused on the education platform. From a problem-solving standpoint, the government has yet to internalize a professional military or civilian education system that does that, except on a couple of small places where the organizations are involved, except in the places where those organizations who are involved in Hacking for Defense is supporting problems as problem sponsors or by actually getting people in a classroom. That's different than -- I'll give you I guess the counter to that. In the U.K., Hacking for Defense is taught at Sandhurst, their military academy. If you are a senior military officer, you go to, I guess, the defense war college at Kings College. At King's College, you can get a degree in NASA Security Innovation. The capstone course for that degree program is Hacking for Defense. Those officers are now being taken from that course and being placed in higher-level staffs to help them sort out how they're going to do mission acceleration and how they're going to build these innovation processes for the long run. So, in the U.K., the higher level, all the way down to the lower level, they are starting to invest in people and trying to figure out how to connect the dots between the two. We've not figured out how to do that in the U.S. yet. Yes, we're still pushing things to the side and doing a lot of one-offs thing. But there's no doctrine for it.
Brandon Karpf: Right, and tying that back to your earlier statements, it -- what the U.K., it seems like they're doing, is they're internalizing the skills, the norms, the process as just part of their professional education. They're not saying, "This is the unit that does it." They're saying, "Everyone in this organization at a certain level needs to have the knowledge, the skills, the experience, having done it so it becomes part of our organizational norms."
Pete Newell: Correct. And it's like, you know, the U.K., because they don't have the economy we do, they don't have the budget we do, has to focus on people because that's the place where they can make grounds. I think it's unfortunate in the United States because we have these massive budgets. It's easy to throw money at tech --
Brandon Karpf: Right, yes, totally.
Pete Newell: -- and ignore the focus on the people. I'll give you an example. I read a great futures document that the army built upon about the future operating environment. You know, I think of the last page. There were two paragraphs, and one talked about the need for invested people. Got to recruit the best people. Got to have the right people. And then the next paragraph talked about the need to transition tech faster. The missing link between the two is you're not going to get that last one unless you teach people how to do this. I mean, literally, I've got a wartime document that's called, "The Missing Link." You're not connecting the dots between growing people who understand tech and the mission and the ability to transition tech, you're not going to get there at scale. And by scale, it's not just scale in terms of numbers. It's scale in how fast things -- the cycle speed has to scale faster.
Brandon Karpf: Sure, the clock speed, yes.
Pete Newell: I don't know what you would call that. The clock speeds go a little faster.
Brandon Karpf: The clock speed, yes.
Pete Newell: And it's not just in one organization. It's across the entire board.
Brandon Karpf: We'll be right back. [ Music ] So, then where we are today, I mean, where do we go from here? What is BMNT's role and in the next five years, what do we need to get done to close that loop, to find the missing link, to actually connect those two components?
Pete Newell: You know, the beauty of what BMNT has done and continues to do is we are expert observers of the entire system. And because we have clients, but from one end to the other, we actually see the cause and effect of most successes and failures, and we're able to document those things that work and understand why they worked, and those things that didn't work, and we know why they failed, which allows us to rebuild models that we actually take to clients. It's okay. We understand where you are versus where you want to be. And if you adopt this model, simply because that's where you want to be, you're going to fail because you haven't done these following things. So, let's work on these following things in order to get you there so that you can actually absorb this model and do it over time. And you know, it's a lot of, I would say, tailored integration, but we're able to deploy people into those organizations to help the people who have that mission actually see themselves and see their organization in order to make something happen correctly. More broadly, because you know, BMNT is part of a tight ecosystem of BMNT versus a common mission project versus the wider reach for a D-system versus Steve Blank and Pete Newell, we can send you to take on new topics every year where we spend time researching those topics and listening to people across the ecosystem. And then we bring them together for an event we call a Red Queen. We're running Red Queen 6 at the end of October, focused on the topics of transition and leadership, where we bring in senior leaders from across the defense and the intelligence ecosystem and about to have a large contingent from the UK coming this year. And sit them down with our observation, but we're also bringing people to talk who are experiencing both the failures and the others, to create some synergy amongst them. Then we'll take what we learn from that and reflect it back and say, "If we want to continue to push these down, here are the things that are broken. Here are the people who are doing good work on them. Here are the people who need to be integrated and to try to bring that organization -- try and bring this organization together and actually make progress." And it's amazing what you can learn, you know, for instance, we'll have Doug Beck, the current DIU Director, sitting in a chair next to Raj Shah, the old one. And we can do a reflection on the experiences of both. And it'll help to hear Raj Shah talk about, "Here are the things I needed my leadership to do for me that they didn't." And to see how that's reflected with Doug Beck. But there are tons of people in this room who need to hear that conversation, so they recognize their role as single leaders and raising innovators and entrepreneurs in service and keeping them, but also protecting them from the system.
Brandon Karpf: Does this process scale? You know, does -- how do we take this and grow it beyond the ecosystem that you live in, and have it impact positively other core ecosystems that face the same issue where it's a people problem, a sociological or anthropological problem?
Pete Newell: I would say, it is scaling. And you know, for instance we could take Hacking for Defense, you know? We started the first class at Stanford in 2015. It's the ten-year anniversary is this spring. But Hacking for Defense then became Hacking for Diplomacy. The State Department still runs their own Hacking for the -- actually, University of Connecticut is teaching it this fall. Hacking for Climate. In the U.K. there's, you know, Hacking for the Ministry of Defense for National Security. There's Hacking for Sustainability. There's Hacking for Transportation. There are actually also launching Hacking for Programming at the high school level in the U.K. this year, which is amazing. So, in terms of scale, the education piece is starting to scale in different places. In the U.S., as I said, there's a complete absence of, now we've taught Hacking for Defense at the Air Force Academy and the Military Academy and Naval Post-Graduate School. Not in the Naval Academy yet, and I'll stomp my feet one more time, just five years of my trying.
Brandon Karpf: I'm doing my best.
Pete Newell: It's certainly not in the senior level -- not War College.
Brandon Karpf: The War College. Yes, the staff and .
Pete Newell: Yes. So, because there's no doctrine, there's no professional military education. And because there's no professional military education, there's no way to standardize what we've learned and promulgate what's different about this cycle speed and the rules that it works with, versus what we've done for the last 30 or 40 years. It's like we've got to get to the point. I love what King's College, and the Ministry of Defense have done with their master's degree program. You know, I, for instance as a War College graduate, went to the Joint Advanced War Fighters School, which was intended to train me as a strategist for a four-star headquarters. I never did the job because I became a brigade commander, but at least there is a model that says, "We're going to take 14 or 20 students a year, and put them through a one-year course and then insert them in our higher ed course as a strategy officer." Why can we not create the same thing for all their Chief Innovation Officers that we keep appointing who are literally -- they're appointed and thrown into OJT.
Brandon Karpf: Right, totally.
Pete Newell: And by the time they finally figure out what they're doing and start to have an effect, their senior leader champion moves to a new job, and then they get hammered by the whole system again.
Brandon Karpf: Right, yes. And the world spins madly on.
Pete Newell: Yes. So, if we really want to move forward, and I think it's not just Department of Defense, it's the government as a whole or public service as a whole, we have got to find a way to educate public service in a different system.
Brandon Karpf: So then, you know, with that call to action, I'd like you to leave us with -- with painting a picture. And the picture that I'd love you to paint for the audience is, "What do we risk by not doing this?" And then alternatively, "What are the opportunities that when we do this, that we will see come to fruition?"
Pete Newell: We risk relevance. And you're not talking about risk as an entrepreneur. If somebody says, "Oh, the risk of something failing or the risk of you know, something going bad," it's like you're missing the point. The entrepreneur's risk isn't failure. It's in not recognizing and seizing an opportunity. That's a completely different risk mindset. Can you imagine if we ever fired somebody for not seizing an opportunity and run with it? If you're an entrepreneur, if you miss opportunities and you've taken investment from people, you will get fired by your investors in a heartbeat. That's the fundamental change. So, by not doing this, we're continuing to punish people for accepting the risk of going after things rather than encouraging them to butt up against the boundaries or what's appropriate or allowed, and starting to change those things. And as they get experienced, you give them more latitude. And at the same time, also protecting from all of the bureaucratic people who want to investigate them to death. So, take it back to the official. You know, the official becomes one of relevance. If we do not do this, our protagonists will. And we will find that we are running way too slow to even make -- to even stay in place, which is kind of where the Red Queen thing came from. You remember the scene from "Alice in Wonderland" where the Red Queen grabs her and they're running and running and running, and finally, Alice falls on the ground and says, "I'm exhausted from all this running, but I'm running faster and faster and I'm staying in one place." And of course, the Red Queen, you know, says, "If you ever want to get ahead, you're going to have to run faster and faster and faster and faster." That's us.
Brandon Karpf: Pete, a perfect place to end this first interview. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great --
Pete Newell: No, . I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.
Brandon Karpf: Yes, we're looking forward to having you back to talk more and to speak more with BMNT and the Common Mission Project.
Pete Newell: Awesome. Thank you, Brandon.
Brandon Karpf: Thanks, Pete. [ Music ]
Dave Bittner: Our thanks to Pete Newell, Founder and CEO of BMNT for speaking with us. That was N2K's Brandon Karpf on the mic. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you again next time. [ Music ]
