The Experiment That Succeeded How a Government Startup Beat Amazon, Leveraged Innovation History and Changed Air Force Culture

Introduction

This book explores one simple but ever-troubling question:

Why do some government innovation efforts succeed while others fizzle and fade?

There are many answers to that question, and these pages examine how the evidence reveals a set of common factors key to achieving innovation success. My own experiences grappling with these factors were strongest when I was leading the AFWERX (pronounced aff-works) innovation organization during our startup years. It is my hope that these insights will prove useful to you and your own innovation efforts.

AFWERX was created in the midst of urgency and uncertainty. In the summer of 2017, the senior leaders of the US Air Force issued a document declaring the Air Force’s most important strategic priorities. Priority #3 was Drive innovation…to secure our future. This led to a Pentagon effort to solicit ideas, frameworks and leaders for a new innovation mission; the name AFWERX did not even yet exist. I volunteered to contribute my vision and approach, and was selected to be part of the initial steering committee for AFWERX’s formation. In early 2018, I was asked to become the AFWERX Mission Lead and transition AFWERX from a committee-style method of guidance to a single, unified vision for operations. I discussed that request, and its significant time impact, with my wife Karin. With her support, I accepted the duty.

In the summer of 2020, as AFWERX was concluding our third year in existence‚ we were ranked 16th in the world as a Best Workplace for Innovators by Fast Company’s annual innovation evaluation process. They had analyzed 865 organizations from around the globe, and our ranking placed us ahead of other world-class innovators such as Amazon and Intel.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that our talented people were recognized for their incredible efforts. At the same time, it was never our goal to win world-class recognition. Earning that world-class accolade was a welcomed by-product of our continuous learning and experimentation, but the core AFWERX mission was always to help solve our warfighters’ challenges—and we did not do that alone.

Critical portions of our best innovation practices came from our business partners such as theDifference, ROCeteer and Capital Factory as well as our nonprofit partners such as Virginia Tech-Applied Research Cooperation (VT-ARC), DEFENSEWERX and the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN). With their collaboration (and in under three years), AFWERX went from an idea written by one person to a small core team who, with the help of a motivated Coalition of the Willing, collectively produced innovations such as:

Connecting over 60,000 military, academic and business members (a majority of the business members had never worked with the government previously)

Attracting over $1 billion in private capital for Air Force technology development interests, saving taxpayers significant development costs

Creating volunteer (and productive!) innovation teams and offices at over 70 Air Force bases

Helping solve over 250 challenges through prototyping and technology evaluations

Forging a COVID-19 response process that was leveraged by the federal government

AFWERX did not come ready-made with obvious plans and processes, and so we had to learn and experiment our way through numerous difficulties and obstacles. There was no obvious blueprint for connecting government, business, and academic capabilities in a manner that would create greater agility for our 680,000-member organization as well as our nation’s defense. Creating and growing AFWERX was like solving a challenging puzzle where all the pieces were the same color and the puzzle’s final shape was not known in advance.

It took time to assemble and create a relevant set of best practices from organizations and organizational research. We looked for successful factors from across history, spanning from Sun Tzu to Silicon Valley. Much of that learning was integrated on the fly as we were growing, or as we often said back then: We are building the AFWERX plane while it is already in flight. Such was the pace of fast development and results during our startup years of 2017 to 2020.

Our mission had an extra challenge as well. We had to assemble our innovation system within the bulky and constrained government bureaucracy of the Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD’s structure had emerged over time from good intentions to responsibly handle taxpayer dollars, but what responsibly handle often meant consisted of thousands upon thousands of pages of rules, policies and laws that hindered agile contracting actions, limited marketing efforts and slowed personnel hiring.

While useful and well-intentioned, many of those historical rules simply were not current enough to allow innovation to flow freely. Of course, this type of bureaucracy is not unique to the DoD. It exists at the federal, state and city levels, as well as any government institution where taxpayer dollars are involved.

Whatever degree of government bureaucracy that you are facing, this book examines the major frameworks, mindsets and considerations that helped AFWERX achieve its ranking and its many accomplishments…even within a government setting. Hopefully, by learning from our experiences and seeing our journey unfold ahead of (or in tandem with) your own, you will not have to take the same wild ride that we did on the learning curve. Our AFWERX journey does not offer any single answer to the innovation question. However, it does offer considerations (and a few warnings) about how to build and advance your innovation mission within the government—no matter how daunting that mission may seem some days.

Now, let us begin to connect some dots…

1

Creating Innovation Flow

AN ALL-TOO-COMMON GOVERNMENT BLOCKAGE

There is a minimal—and some might say negative—incentive structure within government when it comes to innovation. Consider this chain with four links:

1. Our bulky government bureaucratic system prefers (understandably) to promote people who do not fail. Somebody with a reputation for failing is less likely to be promoted.

2. Maintaining the status quo is a way for many government workers to not fail.

3. Yet innovation requires experiments, and many people’s experiments do fail. For example, Thomas Edison failed with over 3,000 thoughts and experiments during his quest to invent a useful lightbulb.

4. Therefore, government members who start or join an innovation effort risk missing career promotions due to the failures—or at least the risks of unsuccessful results—that can occur within their innovation experiments.

Together, these linked conditions shackle the mindsets of many government members and make them less inclined to try innovating. To help you and others find ways to break through these and other government limitations, we are going to journey together through a framework that describes the Factors Linking Organizational Will for innovation efforts; it is the framework that I developed within AFWERX for focusing on all of the efforts that would be necessary for our success. It is a mouthful of a description, so I abbreviated it as the FLOW model. As the full name suggests, the model focuses on our will. Why? Read on, brave innovators...

WILL IS AT THE HEART OF ANY EFFORT

Committing our energy to an effort that has a chance of failing requires courage. Courage is the will to take action when there are known risks, and it is distinct from a foolhardy we can do anything attitude. Careless innovators filled with ignorant bravado are more inclined to take unnecessary risks, and adding more risks to an already risky mission increases the chances of failure. Remember, failure is not something that the government’s many judges—such as government supervisors, contracting officers and lawyers—want to support, and their aversion to risk is understandable.

Even so, not all risk is the same. Some risk is manageable—otherwise, why would we get up every day, sit in vehicles that weigh thousands of pounds and accelerate to death-producing speeds while performing the uncoordinated dance of daily driving with hundreds of strangers? We risk driving every day because there are already a number of factors for successful driving in place, including commonly understood rules that allow for independent actions so that people can reach their desired destinations. As this example hopefully illustrates, courage and intelligence about an Environment’s risk can guide us to understand what influences acceptable risk levels.

Whether you are driving a car or driving innovation, it is easier to generate the will to take action when there is a flexible structure of guidance within which to operate. For example, the 2018 National Defense Strategy included the guidance to shed outdated management practices and structures while integrating insights from business innovation. Those stated priorities helped generate support from our senior leaders, as well as our AFWERX partners and allies, to create processes that would allow our innovation efforts to flow more freely. Leadership support can appear in many forms, including the often-overlooked form of a policy change. Policies that increase flexibility can motivate you through the darker times, when progress is not occurring as quickly as desired.

Understanding the common factors that influence how to generate will can greatly aid our causes, whether they are for innovation efforts or other goal-oriented objectives. Alternatively, a lack of situational awareness of these elements can kill an effort early. The FLOW model encourages multi-layer, multi-stakeholder perception. We will examine each layer in more detail in the coming chapters, so for the moment, a glimpse of the full model is:

As you journey through the FLOW model, you will begin to see how each layer supports or hinders the others while working through key innovation tasks such as:

Starting or expanding your program

Producing prototypes

Explaining the program to people who control resources that you could use

Building an inspiring culture

Holding a strategy meeting (and holding meetings in general)

Communicating success and failure (hint: within an experimental culture of innovation, it is only failure if nothing is learned)

The FLOW model, like any model, deliberately presents an incomplete abstraction of the world. Much like a map, it is the model’s simplifications that provide its usefulness. The FLOW model provides insights into personal and organizational will much like Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs provides insights into human behavior. Whether you are performing innovation efforts for the Air Force’s 680,000 members or creating a new project with a team of six or eight members, this model will help focus your scanning of a situation as well as your thoughts and your energy. The FLOW model was created in the spirit of George Box’s observation that All models are wrong, but some are useful. FLOW’s simplifications can provide quick insights that solve situations, particularly when dealing with abstract concepts such as the will and probabilities of success.

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: PROBABILITIES OF TRUE SUCCESS

Probabilities and statistics can be deceiving. It is a sentiment captured by at least one humorous expression: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Often, the lie is that some statistical number is being used to claim that some factor X caused outcome Y. As a thought experiment on how easily that misinterpretation of causal relationships can happen, please imagine 64 people standing in a large room, each with a quarter in their hand. One person on the sidelines shouts Flip! and all 64 people toss up their coins, catch them and look to see if the side showing is heads or tails.