5 Key Lessons to Building a Winning Playbook with Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III, Deputy Director for Special Operations

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:08]:
All right, I'm Bonnie Evangelista. I'm with the Chief Digital and AI office CDAO. I'm here with Brigadier General Jasper Jeffers. Did I get that right?

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:00:26]:
You got that right. Thank you. Thank you for the intro, Bonnie. It's really cool to be here in Nashville and have the opportunity to talk to you a little bit. I'm in the Pentagon right now, so I'm down in the basement. I am the Deputy Director for Special Operations, which is a joint staff position and doesn't have AI in the title. But I would love to talk to you about technology and AI.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:48]:
That's okay, because with AI comes a lot of things like buying, procurement, acquisition. That's why we have these conversations. How do they get you out of the Pentagon? Come down here to Nashville at the event of the year, spook Tech 2023.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:01:03]:
Yeah. Well, that's a super long story, and that's probably the Special Operations part, so you got to have to be a little sneaky to make your way out. But no, I talked to my leadership about it, and it was a good opportunity for me to come out and connect some folks. I think a lot of really good connections made today, both for me personally and then what I watched happen in between people while we're out here.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:27]:
Yeah, so you opened the event. There was a part that kind of resonated with me. You got me. I thought you were talking about a serious story. You were totally talking about a football story. I was hoping we could talk about that and we could share that with the audience in terms of, in particular, having a playbook. And you were talking at it, I think, from a tactical perspective, and I think of it from my acquisition lens, and I'm like, we need playbooks, too.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:01:54]:
Yeah. I mean, I guess for the folks listening, the lens for trying to connect to the audience with that is to tell the story of this great event in Super Bowl 49. And, like, a lot of people know about it, that the Seahawks were really close to winning a second Super Bowl championship, and then they don't. And a lot of people think it's because of the decision that they made not to run the ball and kind of close that last yard right, the last 36 inches between them and history, and then they don't do it. And what I try to tell in the story is that that's not the only thing going on that the other team had prepared, to your point about kind of having a playbook. But I even think it's even bigger than that. It's about the system that the Patriots in that case were able to kind of put together that allows them to consistently be successful in those moments and that's top to bottom that's organizational It's.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:02:47]:
Leadership that totally came across. I was definitely drawing parallels to your community, the end users and through the Peos and going all the way up to the Pentagon and having that system actually working in lockstep with each other so that when you get to that moment, that Super Bowl last play moment, they were ready and they got it done.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:03:09]:
Yeah. The things that stop us from doing that almost often, or most often, I think are us. It's the rules that we put on ourselves and it's the approach that we have to it and we don't spend enough time kind of questioning that. I think one of the great things about football and other sporting events is they get to test it every week. They're going against another team every week and the measure of effectiveness is whether you won or lost and it's really clear the outcome. They have that very clear kind of measurement to hold themselves against. And if it's not working at the end of the season, people make choices about who stays and who goes and what you're going to spend your resources, human capital and money on the next year. And sometimes ours aren't as clear. Like when we have to make choices and we don't have those directly clear lines to force us into those decisions.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:04:02]:
Yeah. Can you recap your five lessons? Can we unpack that a little bit?

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:04:07]:
So the lesson and again, it's going to be tough without having kind of, like seen the whole story of it. But I say you can't tech your way out of problems. That even though we're here with all of these great folks representing either individual technical expertise or their company provides a technical solution or a lot of ways, it's just that they are able to kind of, like provide something that has to do with technology for the really exceptional folks that have to use it. But you can't win that way. That you can't tech your way out of these problems that in almost every case for the types of organizations that we represent, certainly what I represent on the military side is it's really about people and integration. The technology is there that we have to be better at, the tools are there. Yeah, there's likely an answer for every technological problem that we have or a piece of tech that would solve the problem that we have. And then it's about how do you integrate it, how do you do it in a way that takes advantage of the people that are going to need to manage it and then what are the barriers that prevent us from doing that? And most of those constructs don't have anything to do with the technology. They are much more about the organizations that we built around us, about us, and the rules that we put on ourselves and then our ability to integrate.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:05:33]:
I could not agree more. Yeah, I could not agree more. There's a colleague of mine. She's here, Stephanie Wilson. You'll meet her if you haven't already. She likes to say, we policy all over the things we don't understand, because it makes us feel know whatever you're feeling. I think there's an emotion there that we're trying to satisfy. Yeah, maybe. Okay, what was number two?

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:05:58]:
So number two is more about the individual athletes, the players themselves. I don't want people to forget that in the Malcolm Butler interception moment, and people may have to Google that later, but Malcolm Butler is a rookie free agent from West Alabama, not a big college. He's a rookie his first year in the NFL, and he's a free agent. He was not in the draft in the way that kind of people think about those kind of athletes. Exceptional individual athlete, but not the person that you would have picked out of the lineup to be the hero. And I want people to remember that human capital, that human talent. One, it may not be in the places that you thought it was going to be in the technology space. Maybe you're going to maybe it's going to academia, and you're going to MIT, and you're trying to collect up young folks from there, or a place that you would have historically or habitually thought that you would go to find some of these experts. Maybe that's not where they are. I think that's one thing that I like to kind of point out with his particular story, and the other one is he makes a great individual play, is that you can find really good players that are able to do these kind of great individual actions all over the place. And you need to be conscious of where they exist in your organization. You need to be trying to find them. But the lesson that I say is that you put them in a system. The system that puts them in the right place at the right time is probably more important, because there are a bunch of good athletes on the other team, right. And they did not win and don't consistently win. They're not the dynasty in the Patriots Seahawks football discussion. The Patriots are the dynasty the Seahawks aren't.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:07:38]:
Right. Because their system, I think that's a.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:07:41]:
Huge contributor to it. It's complex, but I didn't think football.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:07:45]:
Would be this interesting. There's a ton of parallels that I'm drawing from what you're saying, even on I would correlate that on the industry side, like, from an acquisition perspective, a contracting perspective, when we're looking for solutions to problems. So maybe not the athlete in the system like you're talking about. It may not be where you expect it to be. Right. So are we setting up an environment to grab the thing we need when we need it in the moment we need it.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:08:13]:
Yeah. So lesson number three is execution is hard, right? Especially for folks trying to provide technology or a solution to a customer. In this case a customer who's got a really important job. Right. I think in the military the risk is incredibly high, both for us in the military, kind of like all the way down to the individual level, but all the way at the highest level of being able to fight and win our nation's wars. And that's incredibly challenging customer to work for. But the execution for the individuals that have to deliver the technology or to deliver the solution, it's really tough and you can have the best idea in the world, but executing it all the way through is hard. And I use the football analogy, say like every play that walks in is be like, man, that's a beautiful play. You draw it up on the whiteboard and that's going to like, if you do this exactly right, if you execute it perfectly every time, it'll score a touchdown. And obviously not every football play scores a touchdown. So you've really got to think through, like even if you got the best idea and you got the best players and you got the best system, still got to execute it and make it work.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:09:25]:
Follow through.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:09:26]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:09:27]:
With the follow through, this might be a bold statement. I think our follow through right now, or our execution, I think of that as delivery of whatever the solution is. It might be a tech solution. Super. We've got a huge barrier because of our ATO process. So are we thinking ahead enough to really do that execution part? Because execution is not just getting the contract awarded, it's the actual performance and delivery as well. And sometimes our follow through, to your point, our execution is lacking. I would say yeah.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:10:06]:
I think it's just every leader at every Echelon and every individual that's part of that whole process has just got to remember that it is tough and there's no one part of it that's going to win. And if you want to win consistently, it's really hard. Lesson four is one that I think depending on who's looking from the outside on, the story is like, oh, that just doesn't just maybe it doesn't necessarily apply to them. It's all about like, hey, these time sensitive decisions are going to come. And the way that I pull that lesson out is in the moment. The clock is ticking down at the end of the Super Bowl into the low double digit seconds and the coaches both have to make a decision. Each coach on each side is making what ultimately could be the defining decision of their careers and kind of the teams that they have. And they would argue that one coach is better prepared to do that than the other. And that plays out in that story is that one coach kind of looks in this case. Bill. Billicheck. He looks across the sideline, he sees disarray. He applies his own kind of experience and his own assessment of the situation to be able to say, like, hey, I'm going to wait, not call a time out here. The other coach kind of folks come on the field, they come off the field, looks a little discombobulated, forces that one coach like he makes a leadership call to force the other team into making what ends up being a bad decision. And when those time sensitive decisions come, and they always come, they always do, everyone thinks that maybe in their domain or in the part of the role or that they serve, that they're not going to end up in a place like that. But almost everyone does. And you can either be ready for that moment or not. And use another football metaphor to talk to some of my more junior leaders. When I talked to them, I was like, you've got to be ready to be the quarterback to come in on third down and throw a first down. You never know when that's going to come. You never know when somebody's going to walk in and be like, hey, the number one quarterback is down, the number two quarterbacks down. You have to go in on third down and long and throw to pass, and it's got to be right or we're going to lose the game. And you can prepare for that moment. It is very possible to prepare. Sticks, discipline, focus. It's always good to remind people.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:12:16]:
I think it's less about preparing for maybe the outcome, but it's preparing for how you handle the pivot. I call it the art of the pivot, right. Going into it with confidence. And it was interesting. I never watched a football scenario, and as we were watching play out like it does, and I never realized how many things are happening at multiple levels to execute a single play. And when they were pointing out how the coach was having that moment you were talking about, I felt like there was a little intuition in that as well, which I thought was really interesting. He even said something looked off, he didn't know what it was. And like you said, how do you prepare for that? I don't think he was preparing for whatever outcome he was expecting. It was more like, how do I react in this moment?

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:13:09]:
Yeah. Well, I think even that intuition is informed by experience and opportunities that he whether he did it consciously or not, he put himself in positions to learn what that would look like. And so in the moment, it can seem very instinctual and very much based on but I just don't think it's innate. I don't think he was born with it. I think he placed himself in positions all throughout his coaching career to be ready to make that call and knew I think he knew that at some point, those calls come and you have to be ready to apply all those resources that are available to you. In this case, like all his experience, all the different things, he saw his playbook and be ready to make a decision.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:13:54]:
Right.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:13:55]:
So that takes you to the last lesson. Lesson number five. Even with all that, just the one I like to close with there is I put a picture up of in this case, Malcolm Butler, the rookie free agent that we talked about, is we're going to get it wrong. I don't know what we're getting wrong. And you can take that and apply it to whatever thing that we're doing at any scale, but we've just never correctly predicted the future. Right. The only truth about the future is we've never accurately predicted it. So I'm going to assume uncertainty. I'm going to assume that we're going to get chunks of it wrong. So how do you build some margin into either your organization or into the system to allow you to buffer out when you do get it wrong? And I think that's all about rookie free agents from West Alabama. That's all about people and having the right people on the team and empowering them, teaching them, give them some experiences so that they build some of that intuition so that when we do get to the point, we've like, oh man, it's either the wrong tech or it's the wrong application of it or it's the wrong overall approach. We can pivot fast, we can move quick, and we're on to the next thing.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:15:09]:
I think it's hard to foster an environment like you're talking about where you can really embrace whether you call it failing fast or getting to that point where you know, it's not that you're wrong, it's that you have to go through this process to get to right whatever right looks like.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:15:30]:
No, that's a really good way of talking about it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:15:32]:
Yeah. I'll put you on the spot for a second. How do we do that in the government?

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:15:38]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:15:39]:
From your perspective, of course.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:15:44]:
I don't know. Right. I'm still in the process of as a leader, getting experiences at more senior levels to kind of understand it. And I'm not sure I think most really complex things can be simplified. So if I just used that approach and just said, hey, I'm going to go as what do I believe is right about how I would try to solve it, because this is super complex and it's highly scaled, is that you try to get it down as small as possible. I mean, you take one of these small teams or some of the groups that are people that are kind of finding themselves together around a table downstairs, and you super empower them and you kind of nurture that up and let it see what kind of disruption that'll create.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:16:36]:
Yeah, I think that goes to one of your other lessons. There's skill at every individual, and you have to prop them up or tee them up in the right scenario or the right moment. Ikin that to also in terms of innovation, the innovative stuff is not coming from the Pentagon, to be quite frank. We got to empower at every level for that stuff to come out and shine. And you can't do that unless people are allowed to break some.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:17:05]:
I mean, obviously, I got to live it at the lower level for a long time, and I was part of organizations that allowed that kind of freedom routinely. So I come with that natural bit to think that, yes, that's the answer. That's the right way. I probably would say the more experience I get at the more senior levels is, like, there's a balance. Right. There are parts of the system that we want to move really fast. Really fast. To your point about, like, Atos and some of the things around the digital technology space and some of the emerging technology space that we're going to want to move really quick. There's parts of it that we probably need to be judicious about and that there shouldn't be a one size fits all system that we're going to need to go a little slower. And I kind of think about things that like a tank. Like, we have tanks, parts of the tank maybe we need to move really quick on there's parts of the tank we should be maybe more careful. Maybe the speed is appropriate and the system works. So I think we need to be very eyes wide open.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:18:05]:
Intentional. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. I don't think we should be totally free love and we're all here just doing things randomly. We should have some intent.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:18:19]:
Of course, going back to execution is hard, which implies a level of discipline in your approach, and you can be as crazy as you want to be. But at the end of the day, there's got to be some discipline, execution into the system.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:18:37]:
I like that. Yeah.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:18:39]:
Carving out a chunk of the organization to be really crazy.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:18:43]:
Right.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:18:43]:
But you cannot do that, like, wholesale, I don't think. I don't subscribe to that is you can't do that wholesale.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:18:47]:
Sure. No, I subscribe. You got to have something reliable. I get that. So I heard a rumor that you write science fiction.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:18:56]:
Yeah. I think that implies that I've done it, like, more than once. So I would say that I've done it at least once, that it is something I'm super interested. I read a lot of science fiction, but there was a time when I was working for General Austin Scott Miller, and we were working some disruptive activities, and I went to the Army's Mad Scientist, not a forum. I don't know if you've ever been like, they have an organization, the Army Mad Scientist.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:19:29]:
No, but I love the title. I was like, what?

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:19:31]:
Yeah, it's amazing. So I went there. And the army was trying to do something very similar to what kind of like we're seeing downstairs, where trying to connect a bunch of people who think differently. And one of the things they were doing is they did a writing contest. It was like 5000 word Sci-Fi story, talk about future operating environment. But it was a blind test. So, like, you submit and talk about it. And I wanted to write ultimately, the thing that I wanted to write about was the democratization of artificial intelligence. I think that the barrier to entry for AI, especially in the narrow AI space, is just going to continue to go lower and lower and lower. And that has all kinds of implications, I think, for who that technology is available to and how they could use it. And then I wanted to talk about how do we, as an organization that needs to hold its values in direct parallel with its effectiveness, we can't just be effective. Lots of military organizations are effective. We have to hold our values as important as our effectiveness. How do we balance that out with this technology? And so I wrote a story about it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:35]:
Was it published?

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:20:36]:
It was published, yeah. So you can get it on? Get it on. The Modern Warfare Institute and MIT's Technology Review published it in a magazine a few years ago.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:48]:
Very cool.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:20:49]:
The idea is to have a conversation about it. Right? It wasn't about like it was have a conversation. No, that's a great how do we do this?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:55]:
That's a novel way to start a conversation. To have a conversation starter. Thank you so much. I appreciate you willing to have a conversation with me.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:21:05]:
I love that. We were just like yes. Hey, let's do this. Let's get the podcast going.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:21:09]:
Awesome. Thank you so much.

Brig. Gen. Jasper Jeffers III [00:21:10]:
All right. Thank you.