Continuous Improvement of NASA's Innovation Ecosystem Proceedings of a Workshop (2019) / Chapter Skim
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5 Strategies and Tactics for Creating the Desired Future
5 Strategies and Tactics for Creating the Desired Future
Pages 27-61
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From page 27... ...
The topics of the four sections were Career and Talent Management, Portfolio Management, Program Leadership and Management, and Classical Enablers and Impediments to Innovation. The morning portion of each breakout section included presentations by outside experts followed by a discussion period; the afternoon portion of each section had an exercise (different for each section)
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From page 28... ...
Team performance over individual "Pigs" and "Chickens" Both Need Food The first pillar, Fraser explains, comes from the business parable, "When it comes to making a breakfast of ham and eggs, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed." In short, when a company is undergoing some sort of change, some employees will be truly committed to the change -- they are "all in" -- while a much larger group will be involved, or affected by the change, while not being totally committed. The principle expressed in the first pillar is that all of these workers, both those who are committed and those who are involved, must be taken into account in the planning and execution of a new program.
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From page 29... ...
" he asked, arguing that the impulse to always be A-plus students can have a "chilling effect on innovation." He described an experience in which he and a colleague had been talking about delegating hiring authority to carry out some pilot projects or demonstrations at the different NASA centers. "And my folks came back, trying to get an A in compliance," he said, "and what they had done was they had narrowed that authority and approached it from a perspective of not letting too many people use it.
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From page 30... ...
To put the third pillar into practice, Fraser said, NASA should "make expedient decisions to give people the safety and freedom to create and grow new businesses." Doing this will often involve implementing short-term fixes that are neither sustainable nor scalable, she said, but that is just fine. At this point, rigor and scalability are red herrings.
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From page 31... ...
SOURCE: Janice Fraser, Bionic, "Career & Talent Management," presentation to the Workshop on the Continuous Improvement of NASA's Innovation Ecosystem, November 30, 2018.
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From page 32... ...
"But it doesn't go all the way up to a general safe zone to make new mistakes, and then once you make a mistake, you end up at the gulag somewhere." Fraser responded by pointing out that in her model the "gulag" is part of what she terms "sidelines and laterals." This is an alternative career path for people who are not given stretch assignments and are thus not given the chance to move up the usual career path. "A lateral is a move from one position to another at the same level," Fraser said, "and often laterals lead to sidelines [or the gulag]
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From page 33... ...
Fraser explained that her model was originally developed when she was trying to understand why women and underrepresented minorities were not advancing into positions of leadership, and what she found was that being given lateral assignments was one way that people found their careers stymied. So the lateral moves in her model are what might be called "non-growth laterals," in contrast with what she called "rotational stretch assignments," which shift people from one place to another in an organization with the goal of having them extend their skill set or their understanding of the organization.
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From page 34... ...
For 3 years, she said, P&G has been working to bring lean innovation into the company and transform how it innovates. "We learned early on in the journey," she said, "that there were some human systems things that needed to change about the company in order to enable this new innovation ecosystem." She is part of a team that is experimenting with different human systems across the company to determine how best to improve innovation.
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From page 35... ...
"Where we have these structural elements in place, those teams are learning the fastest." The third element is the talent ecosystem. A particularly important aspect of that is how to recognize and reward innovative work.
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From page 36... ...
Referring to Fraser's model, which found stretch assignments to account for 70 percent of advancement and sponsorship to account for 20 percent, he said he believes that the numbers are wrong and that sponsorship is actually a much bigger percentage. The reason, he said, is that sponsorship is what leads to the opportunities to have stretch assignments.
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From page 37... ...
And we have to make sure that leaders at all levels of the organization are doing that." In response, Fraser told Turnbull that that was "the best description of sponsorship I have ever heard, and I've been thinking about this and talking about it for 4 years now." QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SESSION After lunch, there was a question-and-answer session with the three panelists. The first question, from Dan Ward of MITRE, referred back to the third pillar that Fraser spoke about, "Do the easy thing that's good enough." In discussing that, she had said that this will often mean implementing short-term fixes that are neither sustainable nor scalable and that this is just fine.
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From page 38... ...
"We have to think about our chickens with compassion," she said. "It's easy to beat on them and think, ‘You're an impediment.' No, they're humans." At the end of the question-and-answer period, Fraser asked Dan Ward to explain his theory, "The Simplicity Cycle," which he said is intended to help people think about complexity and its effects in designed objects.
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From page 39... ...
Under human systems, a more urgent task that had been classified as easy was "Incentivize leaders to sponsor innovative people." It was noted that incentives both provide a signal of what is important in an organization and lead to more of the incentivized behavior. Another more urgent but easy task suggested was "Create short-term stretch jobs to identify innovative leaders early in their careers." This was a product of the extensive discussion in the section about how stretch jobs can provide tests of people's capabilities.
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From page 40... ...
If NASA people could not work at an outside organization for a year or two, perhaps they could do it for shorter periods of time. "There might be a better return on investment for a longer detail," Gibbs said, "but at least that's a great stepping stone." PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT The breakout section on portfolio management examined the general question of what it takes to have a healthy portfolio of investment in innovative technologies.
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From page 41... ...
cost reductions, transform supply chain targets in each division • Develop 6-12 new solutions across company • Product 2: Win new customers; deliver scalable, cost-effective − Unit cost process; install capacity for demand/customer satisfaction − Gross Margin incrementals Live Our Values: All Seven, All the Time, All Around the World © 2019 Corning Incorporated FIGURE 5.3 Corning "one-pager." SOURCE: Martin Curran, Corning, Inc., "Portfolio Management," presentation to the Workshop on the Continuous Improvement of NASA's Innovation Ecosystem; ©2019 Corning Incorporated. objectives are things like "Stabilize returns and build new businesses" and "Grow at double-digit rate," while the product goals include things like "Deliver growth," "Win new customers," and "Demonstrate process capability and supply chain manufacturing readiness." To one side is a collection of specific financial targets, including for cost reductions, revenue growth, and capital spending.
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From page 42... ...
She mentioned Monte Carlo simulations used to predict how various portfolios are likely to perform -- there are various analytic methods; iPort, which uses an internal enterprise database to track individual projects and aggregate portfolio data; and the Enterprise Portfolio Simulator, which is now in testing. Dalton's job at Pfizer, she said, is to manage the company's venture capital investment portfolio, which she referred to as "a portfolio of disconnected science projects." The company makes venture capital investments in various ventures in areas that Pfizer is already involved in or that it may become involved in.
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From page 43... ...
Finally, Dalton spoke of the role of failure in innovation portfolio management. "Failure comes with the business," she said.
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From page 44... ...
Next, he spoke about the company's portfolio management activities. Any company must decide how it will allocate its investments -- in high-growth areas, in quality improvements, in new markets, etc.
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From page 45... ...
Pruning the Innovation Portfolio Getting rid of poorly performing projects -- "killing things" -- is essential to the success of innovation organizations, McClusky told the portfolio management section. It is not easy, he said, but it is one of the key factors that separates excellent innovation entities from mediocre ones.
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From page 46... ...
The Key Lessons In the afternoon plenary session, Matt Szugye, the managing director of Newry, offered his summary of the key points of the portfolio management section. In coming up with the list, he said, he had talked with a number of the other section participants and gotten their input.
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From page 47... ...
. Make sure that it's streamlined and that when people have a great idea, they can run with it without running into management." Ways to Improve Portfolio Management In the afternoon portion of its section, the group was asked to brainstorm ideas for how NASA can improve its portfolio management.
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From page 48... ...
The outside experts were Wanda Sigur, a former vice president for space systems at Lockheed Martin; Julie Setser, vice president of innovation capability at Procter and Gamble; and Michael Gazarik, vice president of engineering at Ball Aerospace and previously the associate administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. (Because Gazarik's presentation focused mainly on the challenges facing NASA, it is described in Chapter 4.)
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From page 49... ...
Another bright spot is how NASA is working with commercial entities, she added. Program Leadership at Procter and Gamble Setser began her presentation by commenting that as she was listening to various people speak at the workshop, she had been struck by how similar the problems at NASA are to the problems at P&G.
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From page 50... ...
She drew a distinction FIGURE 5.4 Procter and Gamble's "architecture of discovery." SOURCE: Julie Setser, P&G, "Program Leadership and M nagement," presentation to the Workshop on the Continuous Improvement of NASA's Innovation Ecosystem, November 30, a 2018.
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From page 51... ...
"That's all it is." The second element is "invest like a venture capitalist." One of the key questions that is asked in this step is, What are the big problems we need to solve for humanity? That might sound big coming from P&G, she said, but she offered an example of what she was talking about.
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From page 52... ...
Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office; Tom Ingersoll, former chief executive officer of Skybox Imaging; and Christopher Shank, director of the DoD Strategic Capabilities Office. During the afternoon segment, section participants generated concrete suggestions for actions to improve NASA based on what they had heard during the morning segment.
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From page 53... ...
"Innovation is actually really, really hard, and you need your best engineers and your smartest people and your most disciplined people." Process The second category of ingredients discussed in the section was process, as Kundrot told the plenary session. "You want to be doing enough of it to be helpful," he said, "but not get too wrapped around the axle in the process itself, which is our big challenge now." For example, in the breakout section Ingersoll spoke of how his teams working on defense programs at McDonnell Douglas (acquired by Boeing)
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From page 54... ...
"We brought in 25 people to have the team present their status and have them think it through." This was a way of ensuring that there was discipline and accountability, he said, both of which are key to successful innovation. Define the waypoints, but then give your innovators a lot of leeway in how they get from one point to the next.
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From page 55... ...
He went to test pilot school, helped built airplanes, etc. "And as you might imagine in that community, there's frustration with higher headquarters and things that don't happen fast enough." Therefore, he said, when he set up the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office, he pulled 90 percent of them out of the flight test community because those were the people he believed could figure out ways to do things more quickly and with fewer resources.
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From page 56... ...
"The other thing that I found in innovative organizations," Ingersoll said, "is those people actually are really, really smart, and you have to surround yourself with smart people." He said that he had seen a pattern, especially in large organizations, where there are pockets of competency but that not all parts of the organization are competent. "Smart people attract smart people, and dumb people attract not so smart people," he said.
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From page 57... ...
It is not money, Ingersoll told the breakout section. The best innovators need to have enough, but what really motivates them is a compelling vision and the opportunity to work on an interesting, challenging project with other innovative people.
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From page 58... ...
Steve Shih, the associate administrator for diversity and equal opportunity at NASA, expanded on Ingersoll's point about diversity. Having people with different talents and different ways of thinking helps identify and mitigate blind spots, and it provides a cognitive diversity that can increase the likelihood of successful innovation.
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From page 59... ...
Such rotations would not have to be limited to the deputy chief technologists and the 10 NASA centers. In the past, there was a military exchange between NASA and DOD; that could be reinstated.
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From page 60... ...
Thus another recommended action was to use more flexible hiring permissions. DARPA has special hiring authority, Kennedy explained in the plenary session.
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From page 61... ...
If the expectations are stated in this way, as long as there is a definitive yes/no answer, the work is not seen as a failure but rather as informational concerning the next step to take. "I really do think it's important that we stress that in experiments and demonstrations of the kinds we like to do, failure is not defined in the normal way," Kennedy told the plenary session.
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