Developing Innovation Skills with Project Mercury’s Dr. W. Ethan Eagle & Julie Janson

Ethan Eagle [00:00:00]:
Excellence is positive deviance. Innovation is positive deviance. And so where is the space in your daily life for you to challenge the status quo and for people to support you? And that's the niche that mercury has carved out in the air force, in the DoD.

Ryan Connell [00:00:35]:
My name is Ryan Connell, and I'm with the chief digital and artificial intelligence office here today with doctor Ethan Eagle, who runs the Mercury project, and Julie Janson, who has gone through as a master coach in the program. Ethan, Julie, welcome. We'll just do a quick introduction of yourself. And, ethan, I'll start with you.

Ethan Eagle [00:00:53]:
Awesome. Ryan, thanks for having us. Really excited to be here and to get to know the defense mavericks community. I wouldn't have known to use the term, but certainly apply it to myself almost every day. So, since 2019, Project Mercury has existed within the United States Air Force to build culture, community, and competencies in innovation. I love the line in this podcast. How do we shorten the learning curve for government transformation? And our approach to that is through the people. If we can't get individuals to really adopt the practices around experimentation, we don't get there.

Ethan Eagle [00:01:30]:
So since 2019, I've been coaching cohorts, about 40 people per cohort, over twelve weeks, part time to adopt them, and again, those culture competencies and communities for innovation. And as of 2023, this is my full time gig. So I used to be full time as a faculty and part time innovation, but now I'm full time with Project mercury and adjuncting on the side. And that's me in a nutshell.

Ryan Connell [00:01:53]:
Awesome. Yeah. Appreciate that. And, Julie, want to give a quick intro to yourself?

Ethan Eagle [00:01:56]:
Yeah.

Julie Janson [00:01:57]:
Julie Janson. I am a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force. I am information operations by trade. I came through project Mercury very early on. I believe I was cohort three, immediately became a coach, and kind of just worked my way up the chain in a sense of then coaching, training coaches, running my own workshops. So that's kind of how I got that quote unquote, master coach level. I love this program because as somebody who's in the information operations field, we are developing very fast. Information warfare is something that is very much a reality and is moving, you know, at speed.

Julie Janson [00:02:36]:
So I have had to apply these practices in my job, and I see the benefit that our students get out of the program, and I think it's. I think it's extremely valuable to the service.

Ryan Connell [00:02:47]:
Yeah, great. Appreciate it. Ethan, I'll go back to you. Just help me understand at a kind of basic level, you talked about cultural coaching, things like that. How would you describe mercury? At a more tactical level, people somehow get involved. How do they become part of a cohort? How long is it? All of those types of things.

Ethan Eagle [00:03:07]:
Yeah. So the academic underpinning is the business school. Faculty member Jeff DeGraff at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan created this curriculum. I partnered with him in 2014 to create what was at that point, a two day executive education on leading innovation and developing it into a practitioner level. How do I, again, actively adopt the actions and habits? I think we often are drawn to? The creative thinking side. That's the really fun brainstorming part. The breaking your habits down and rebuilding your life around innovation is work. And so the tactical side of our twelve week program is that how do you understand your current habits? How do you look? You know, what are the big rocks on your calendar? And how do we help you make innovation? That four to six hour to 10 hours a week where you're dedicating some time to that? And part of it is coaching.

Ethan Eagle [00:04:05]:
Part of it is culture. So, understanding that when we come together in community, man, human beings are social animals. So it is really helpful to not feel like you're in a silo as an innovator. I think it's Jeff Bezos who says life is too short not to hang out with people who are resourceful. Or maybe the opposite is too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful. And coming to a project Mercury cohort, for many people, the pilot community, they say it's like breathing oxygen, which I had to ask my decoder ring, like, hey, guys, what does that mean? And when you go hypoxic, everything kind of turns gray. That was clever, because the curriculum, the very foundation of our curriculum, is called the competing values framework. And there are four colors in that framework that help you to understand the culture and behaviors that you're seeing both in yourself or in your organization, and to really give you.

Ethan Eagle [00:04:56]:
I've often likened it to organizational yoga. Stretch in the right ways, you gain strength. But if you are a bodybuilder professionally, man, this is a whole different set of competencies than you have developed. And so understanding that there are different ways to be athletic, mentally athletic. So we would say having an adaptable mindset is kind of that core foundational principle. We come back to over and over again. Resilience, you might hear it, or grit and these kinds of things. Really, the number one thing that prevents people from being creative is their own fear or the organizational risk that they feel like they take on.

Ethan Eagle [00:05:33]:
So we see resistance to risk adoption. And as a leader in that program, I try and give people a safe space to create an experiment on their own so facts don't change people's minds. I could lecture at them all day, but when I say, look, you need to go try something, and it might fail, but you get to decide what you're going to try, and you get, you know, where are you going to go for growth? Holding people to that and seeing them practice it and they don't lose their jobs and they don't get yelled at forever. Sometimes they get pushback. In fact, I think if you're innovating and not getting pushback, you're not maybe not doing it right. There should be some defense of the status quo going on if you're really pressing on the right buttons. And I think Julie has some thoughts to share there as well. But understanding that as an individual and then having a community that supports that deviant behavior.

Ethan Eagle [00:06:29]:
So excellence is positive deviance, innovation is positive deviance. And so where is the space in your daily life for you to challenge the status quo and for people to support you? And that's the niche that mercury has carved out in the air force, in the DoD.

Ryan Connell [00:06:45]:
Yeah, I love those last couple taglines related to positive deviants. I wrote it down in my notes. So I appreciate that, Julie, love to hear from you. So prior to being a master coach and now turning yourself into an enabler for others, I want to kind of dig into, like, your time going through the cohort and what it was like for you, potentially unpack some of the challenges that you went through, any sort of problems that you helped resolve or think through. Would love to just kind of hear the tactical from your perspective.

Julie Janson [00:07:15]:
Yeah. So, I mean, I was already kind of a deviant thinker before I joined Project Mercury. But what I've realized about myself as I've gone through the program and been part of future iterations is that I think an innovative mindset is like a muscle, and if you are not exercising that muscle, you're going to lose it. So it even happens. I'm in a training course right now where we had kind of a really quick deadline and we all jumped in and we started solutioning, and I stopped and I was like, we need to stop because we don't understand the problem. We're jumping right to a solution, and that's that muscle kicking in. It's just something that I have seen myself increase with over time, some of the people who've gone through the program of just building that muscle, because at the end of any course that I'm a part of, I tell everyone in the course, like, your journey is not over just because you've gone through the initial project Mercury does not make you an expert innovator. You don't get to change the world tomorrow.

Julie Janson [00:08:10]:
This is something you have to keep working because there's still so much room to grow from the other side of kind of what Ethan was mentioning. I have really been shown firsthand some of the cultural challenges that we have developed in the military. I think people see movies where everyone in the military is getting screamed at and like, they think that we're just like this really intense feedback culture. But I've come to realize we've gotten very cordial and very collaborative in a lot of ways, which is great, but we can really struggle with that constructive criticism. And I don't think it is as built in to our everyday working as it needs to be. And something that project mercury does, and I watched cohort after cohort really wrestle with this, is you are going to get candid feedback. It's going to be constructive. It is meant to help you succeed, but it is going to be candid.

Julie Janson [00:09:00]:
And we're not going to beat around the Bush. Sometimes you have a couple minutes to get feedback, and we're going to give you the best feedback we can give you. And that is another muscle that I think we need to exercise regularly because we are in a very uncertain environment right now, and we cannot just be in violent agreement with each other. These are very complex problems, and we really need to challenge our ingrained thinking, and we need to challenge each other's thinking. So that gives you, and then you notice another benefit of the program is it is forcing people out of their stovepipes. So you may get the topic you wanted, but then you're with a group of people who maybe have never worked that topic or have only worked it from a completely different perspective, and you're going to get different perspectives whether you like it or nothing. So that is also just a really big benefit of the program.

Ryan Connell [00:09:53]:
Got it. So, so help me. And if we need to make up a made up example for the purpose of the podcast, we can, but like, so you're given kind of day one or week one, you're given a problem to solve. Is that. Am I tracking that correctly, or are you bringing your own problem to the table?

Ethan Eagle [00:10:11]:
Yeah. So I'll jump in. Ryan, we like to say, you know, there are lands east of the river and west of the river. We're trying to help you stake a claim, and so we will point you in a direction that is strategic. So we read all the same national defense security strategies that everyone else reads, but we try and read the tea leaves about where might this be going in the next three to five years? And if those things come true, where do we think the problems are? Or where do we need some diverse skill and thinking around? So, right now, we're in the midst of cohort 13. We have six teams, and they're looking at everything from predictive maintenance through AI and sort of tankers, to translation services for people working with overseas partners, and space force readiness and resiliency in space. So these are very broad, strategic level topics. The interesting part about Mercury is just goes back to what Julie was saying.

Ethan Eagle [00:11:11]:
We don't jump to, let's answer the question. We look at the question and say, the question that you were given in week one isn't the right question, what can you do to improve the quality of the question? And there's two benefits to that. The first is answers go stale. So the answer to that question in 2024 is going to be different than it will be in 2030. But if you really get the right question down, answering that question in 2024 and answering that question in 2030 might be the same question you need to answer. So that's a benefit. The other thing is getting certainty on the problem and the stakeholder is more important to us than your technical credibility around the solution. Again, this goes back to what pistol was mentioning.

Ethan Eagle [00:11:55]:
Understanding that one to three people out of a six person team might have had prior experience on the topic means that you are enrolling subject matter experts, your team, to build credibility. You're building the bridge or the building the team as the project evolves. This is the sort of core differentiator for us between project management and innovation. We're not trying to follow a Gantt chart. Towards the end of twelve weeks, we're really expecting the team to enroll the sponsor. We're expecting the team to have identified a better version of the question, and all of those things are going to go through the iterative cycle. So you're going to have a first guess at some of those things, and then you get that candid feedback that Julie was talking about. We push you and say is that really true? You know, do we really need to go to the chief of staff of the air force to solve this problem? No one else has the authorities to tackle it.

Ethan Eagle [00:12:48]:
Right. And so we start to provoke and push the team around a little bit in terms of not just did they come up with one kind of best answer, but how many answers did they come up with? So, again, once you have a good kind of meaty question, hopefully there are a dozen ways that we could potentially attack that. If you have a mundane question, the answer to that question seems like there's one answer or none. So those are the ways that we get after forming teams, they go out and attack their challenge by first finding the right problem and then finding the stakeholder, and then, in the very end, coming up with some very rudimentary from the team's perspective. But who are those key experts who should be a part of that team moving forward? And they pitch at not just the showcase, but to a sponsor about, hey, here's an idea, here's a topic that you should be tracking, and here are a couple of key people, and a good idea that you can put that arrow in your quiver.

Ryan Connell [00:13:47]:
Got it?

Ethan Eagle [00:13:47]:
Yeah.

Ryan Connell [00:13:48]:
And so the sponsor part of it is interesting to me, too. So results, impacts, outcomes. Aside from what I would call the obviously cultural tenets and disruption as part of the process and the learning for the cohort members, do you have success stories that have actually, hey, because of this cohort, it enabled this regulation change or this impact to the warfighter or this impact to the user? Have we seen, I don't know, where you are on a maturity level. Have you seen things like that occur already?

Ethan Eagle [00:14:18]:
So, yeah, I would say every cohort, we have four, at minimum, four, maximum eight teams. The average is about six of those cohorts. So we don't prescribe success is not guaranteed. This is very much the Shackleton adventure. Certain death awaits these kinds of things. We're a little tongue in cheek at the beginning, but we don't want people to feel like this is a set path. This isn't just follow these ten steps to your innovation success. There's risk involved.

Ethan Eagle [00:14:50]:
Now, pistol mentioned she came through cohort three and they had a talent management idea, which was, why isn't DoD talent management more like the Waze app, detour alerts and speeding all of the meaningful alerts that would be there to track your progress through talent management. Now, that solution didn't get adopted or translated from their pitch, but I can do a dotted line between that idea existing in the DoD and a program like Pathfinder, which is pulling 300 airmen out of their traditional AFSC promotion pathway and saying, hey, how can we replace core elements of the promotion path with these innovation experiences? And so this is one of those challenges where, like, success has a thousand parents, right? And so what is the causal linkage between people having more innovative conversations, considering more radical alternatives? If it's a technology solution, that's the kind of clearest answer. Like, hey, cohort twelve, we had a group look at what was going on in Ukraine. They're putting up microphones and iPhones, and they're using that for counter UA's. Man, that was exciting for a general so and so, and they're working out with thespin and the Singapore Air Force to try and prototype attack. That is not what Mercury is about. But if it discovers that we want people to be able to leverage those core capabilities. Mercury is about students getting to know the defense innovation ecosystem.

Ethan Eagle [00:16:24]:
And I call it flipping your first pancake. Ryan, I don't know if you make breakfast at home for your family on the weekends, but I'm a breakfast dada, and I can tell you for certain that the first pancake when we're on vacation and I have a new stove and a new pan is either burnt to a crisp or 50% underdone. You have to learn by doing. When we ask students to come to mercury and actually engage in the innovation space without telling them that they have to succeed, they actually take some risks, they actually get their hands in some dough. And I think at the end of a mercury program, we showcase some of those first pancakes, and now they're not beautiful. But if we get buy in from the innovation sponsors and stakeholders that, hey, we're identifying and developing your person talent, don't look at the idea as much as you look at what are the skills that this person has after they've graduated. And, yeah, it's great if we hit a home run every once in a while. I know the home Run derby was recent.

Ethan Eagle [00:17:24]:
You know, you think it's a single player on a team that is going to win you the World Series, but, man, it's a team effort. And so we're trying to develop that bench, the bench strength of innovation in the DoD. And that's the thing. 450 graduates that I'm prouder of than any one team project. You know, when is success luck or hard work? You betcha, right? It's both. So we're taking the risk to get some of those rewards. But again, I think it would be false pretense to say, hey, it's the innovation project successes that we should measure ourselves by. What risks have we taken? And this, I'll steal this line from pistol, but if we didn't hear anything out of a cohort where somebody said, how dare you? Whatever that pushback is, we're trying to be those provocateurs.

Ethan Eagle [00:18:13]:
What is our heresy of the week? Who's our heretic of the month? Because if you look back in history you see a lot of heresy in defense innovation, an unfortunately large amount. Right. There's actually a book, Norman Dixon the psychology of military incompetence, that says militaries. They surrender, they sacrifice their innovators. So again, that culture and competency piece we're hoping that doesn't have to remain true that we can bring people together and we can help the ideas succeed without having people to sacrifice their career.

Julie Janson [00:18:43]:
And I would say the two second order effects that come out of the program is so with a team taking the time to really understand a problem. I have worked some very large and complex problem sets and one of the biggest benefits like that I wish I'd had at the time because it was before my project Mercury time is a team to like look into one aspect of my problem because there's always with these really complex programs, you know, dozens of problems. And so I tell the teams all the time, make sure you're getting your ideas out into the public common because you are at least helping us understand the problem better. And in our line of business you don't always have that time. So to be able to be taking the time to understand the problem better I think can be a force multiplier. But also and more importantly the experts and the connections that you make within the program are invaluable in that I have, since my first cohort, had really difficult problem sets and I had access to experts. We have these innovators and residents who are from industry. I have had access to some of the best to discuss my problems with and get, you know, and think of ideas and think of a way forward.

Julie Janson [00:19:52]:
So that's also becomes an incredibly powerful tool in the toolbox as everyone moves forward.

Ryan Connell [00:19:58]:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One kind of program question and then maybe breath in and I'm Julian, go back to you on something. Just help me understand. Is this available for anyone in the air force? Is it civilian or military? Is it junior or leaders? And do you like sign up and buy it or is it congressionally funded? Just the tactical on how you actually.

Ethan Eagle [00:20:21]:
Get involved yeah, that's a great question. And as any good innovator, it's evolving innovation programs. So prior to 2024, it was a United States Air Force Air university funded project. And so we took teams, teams largely of Air force. I like to think it's the. It's, and I would be happy to be proven wrong, the most diverse class in the DoD at any given time. We had airmen first class to colonel and enlisted, you know, staff sergeant, tech sergeant, master sergeant, senior master sergeant, chief master sergeants, some air force civilians. We brought people from, you know, maybe G's nine to G's 1415.

Ethan Eagle [00:21:00]:
So all of that, no guarantee. You get all of those in one team with six or seven people. But that's a typical cohort is we are trying to pull from as much cloth of the Air Force as we can because we feel like that gives us the best chance. There is a concept of, in complexity, the team can only solve a problem as complex as the team is itself. And I love that as a heuristic. So where is my team, and how complex is my team or my team dynamics? And that is a predictor of how complex the solution or the problem that I can tackle is. So we take that very wide swath so you can apply if you're interested in Mercury projectmercury us. And we take.

Ethan Eagle [00:21:44]:
Right now, I think the interest form is open for cohort 14, which should be launching in October. And the program at this point, it will be open to any and all in the dodgest. So we just recently had some folks enroll from the office of Personnel Management, OPM, and they are helping us to review the syllabus and credentials and curricula. Too early to say what the determination of that will be, but we're hoping that all of government isn't too far off. Now, why do I say that? Because this summer, we launched a cohort with NATO. So they sent a team through in cohort. I sent an individual through in cohort five, and then a team through in cohort nine, and they have bought in. So we are spending time out.

Ethan Eagle [00:22:26]:
We just were in Romstein launching six teams in Aircom with support of the D, the commander there, General Hecker. We also have a program very similar to mercury, but with the Republic of Singapore Air Force. So this idea that militaries need a way to self authorize at the unit level, this is something that we believe this is how democracies win should conflict arise, is by pushing decision rights down to the appropriate intermediary level. And so this is practice for that this is practice for adaptation. This is practice for making decisions that are slightly riskier than they might have been otherwise at that sort of practical, tactical level. I love what Julie said about having access to the network and to resources. That is something, certainly, that as the community continues to grow, we are very in tune with, in fact, outside of my control. But there is now a mercury innovation council that's alumni who are getting together to just keep that flame alive.

Ethan Eagle [00:23:30]:
And I'm really excited to see what happens and what a group of mercury alumni who are passionate about that community involvement are going to do as they move forward.

Ryan Connell [00:23:38]:
Great. Appreciate it. Okay, I'm going to go to Julia. I want to unpack your kind of transformation of going through the program, and then what I assume is just being very inspired and wanting to give back and help create future leaders, all of that stuff, and turning into a master coach. So I don't know if you want to talk to that at all. That'd be helpful.

Julie Janson [00:24:03]:
Yeah, I mean, kind of talking about why I stuck with the program. So, again, just going through, initially, I recognized that anything that we do to push us out of our comfort zone, think about different problem sets, build that network of experts around us. This is where we're going. I mean, it's where we've been. But if you read our national security strategy now, we say our number one strategic asset is allies and partners. So I am ecstatic that the program has reached out to NATO, is reaching out to more aspects of government. So I just have continued to see the value of staying in the program. And from the coach side, what can get really interesting is that I think we have this mindset that when you're a coach, you have to be the expert, the subject matter expert.

Julie Janson [00:24:47]:
That is not true for us. It is impossible, really, because you never know what direction your team is going to go. So I have also been challenged in whether it's a team I'm directly coaching or teams coming to me for advice of, like, hey, I'm looking at logistics. Hey, I'm looking at drone support. It's like these areas that I don't know anything in, but I'm not listening to the subject matter expertise I'm listening to, how are you approaching the problem? Have you identified the problem? And these are the sticky conversations I end up having with students. And I really like mentoring them through that because it's telling them, I can help you find subject matter experts through the community who are going to help you with your very specific questions. But what I need you thinking about is, did you really identify the problem? Have you really understood the environment properly? Because we have to do that now. We are truly moving as a military into an area of campaigning.

Julie Janson [00:25:41]:
A campaign is a finite operation. It has an end. We are in campaigning now. It is ongoing. There's a lot happening in the gray zone, kind of below that threshold of conflict. And we train so much for conflict. We know exactly what we're going to do as far as a plan can get you. But in this more nebulous zone of campaigning, you are going to be handed a blank sheet of paper sometimes.

Julie Janson [00:26:11]:
You are going to be given a problem set that you have no subject matter expertise in. That is the name of the game. So I believe in this, and I have evolved through this, in seeing that I'm not teaching people how to solve a specific problem. I'm teaching them a way of thinking. And that is the, I believe, also a strategic asset for us if we have a cadre of people who know how to think differently and that can teach other people to think differently and will be that voice in the room saying, maybe we need to think about this differently.

Ryan Connell [00:26:45]:
Yeah, that's a powerful takeaway for sure. Something that you said along the way, reminding me of the moneyball movie where Brad Pitt is talking about defining the problem and they all are solutioning, and it's just like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We need to all agree on what the problem is. So it just reminded me of that. So I appreciate it. Yeah, I'd love to. You know, either of you, I don't know if you have thoughts here. Sorry.

Ryan Connell [00:27:09]:
How many years has this been going on, this project?

Ethan Eagle [00:27:11]:
Since 2019. Okay.

Ryan Connell [00:27:14]:
Okay. So, yeah, five years or so in, like, what is two years? Five years look like from now, in terms of, like, future vision, like, where do you think this will be? How do you scale those types of questions?

Ethan Eagle [00:27:27]:
Yeah. So, pistol hit the nail on the head when she said, we don't need more subject matter experts. And I laugh because I asked this question honestly to technologists, and there's a paper that me and a co author wrote provocatively back in 2016. I think, you know, are there problems? Are there environmental problems technology cannot solve? And if you go to an engineer and you ask that question, they say no. Every problem could be solved by technology. And this is that if I have a hammer, all the problems look like nails. So understanding the problem requires both analysis and synthesis. But far, far too often, the answer to solve this problem is analyze it, break it down, reduce it to its parts, assemble it, put it back together and it's fixed.

Ethan Eagle [00:28:16]:
That is not the case for an innovation understanding new environmental factors, the new synthesis of how will this, what are, you know, the answer to your question in two to five years, what happens after? What happens next? So I think that that kind of forecasting is something that innovators want to do or want to do. It's not just that the future is predictable. There's plural futures. And, man, what happens if there's a conflict in the Pacific? And, man, what happens if there's an increase in non state actors? I think structurally, where this problem succeeds is when we graduate people and they come back and coach and they come back and coach in this new way of thinking, in this new way of. I don't have to be, you know, I'm not going to show you the way. I'm going to ask the questions where you, you do the path breaking yourself, where you are. We reduce the fear of novelty enough that everybody can successfully democratize innovation. At the DoD, I think that's my kind of call to action.

Ethan Eagle [00:29:21]:
That's my North Star, is we have coaches who can empower, just like you said, who is this program for? We want it at all levels of the DoD, for people to have a common language for how innovation happens at the individual level. Now, I think there are a number of concerning trends that I hope project Mercury alumni are motivated to turn the tide against. Books by, I think Blair Shepard's book, ten years to midnight, written in 2020. That gives us until 2030. John Haidt's new book, the Anxious Generation, sort of calls out how we've sent our kids to Mars to be raised by social media, by Instagram and these technologies. And only now is that sort of coming back to. To show us the folly of our ways. And I think Tristan Harris and Azeraskin in their AI dilemma and the social dilemma in climate change.

Ethan Eagle [00:30:16]:
Right? So how many this, if you haven't heard the term metacrisis yet, maybe don't look it up because it's not a good news story. But, man, we need people to not just use hope as a strategy. We need people who are coordinated and acting on the best possible information to really try and do things a little differently. I do not think we can proceed business as usual and get ourselves out of some of these wicked problems. I do think as a defense enterprise, we could and should have what the air force, I think is 630,000 people. If we had 2% of them who could think differently, maybe that's enough inoculation against lazy or poor thinking, that we get those kind of creative ideas and they can survive. I think that's my best recollection of the number of people who persist in their creative thinking throughout their entire life. 2%.

Ethan Eagle [00:31:12]:
And that's like torrence test for creativity, kind of genius level creativity. I would love to see more people embracing kind of radical ideas, risk tolerance, experimentation, and to see those pockets of ideas transition from just one offs. I don't know. I think the easy answer would be, oh, well, we transitioned successfully. Some programs a record. Maybe that's me. My maverick sense is that, like folding into the existing definitions of success, programmatic success, big r requirements. I secretly hope, and not so secretly once this podcast comes out, but I secretly hope, that we are weaponizing spark cells to be solution centers for their local airmen, where it doesn't take me rewriting a big r requirement to solve somebody's problem, that we actually accelerate the pace of delivery.

Ethan Eagle [00:32:06]:
And I'll use this metaphor because our innovatrium's founder was an early chief operations officer for Domino's Pizza. And this is my crappy metaphor. That's probably wrong, because I don't know enough about defense acquisition, but I think the DoD is forecasting pizza deliveries two years in advance and asking people today, hey, do you think you're going to want pepperoni and sausage on your pizza on June 27, 2027? And then we're organizing the pizza assembly operation so that we deliver 400 million pizzas on time and on costs and on schedule. Now, that is certainly a kind of important delivery, but I think the innovation cell of, hey, man, you know what we need right now, in 30 minutes or less, who can I call? Who can deliver that kind of capability? And I think that's the kind of like what Julie said, hey, it's not by coming through this program that I'm doing that, but I'm building myself a network so I can call on somebody and they can audible, provide some support. I think that's the thing we need more is this robust, informal network of people who are willing to solve problems. And I'm seeing it in things like the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum and in places and communities like this where people who are willingly applying the defense maverick label to themselves. Those water cooler conversations, I hope, don't turn into deserts, right? We really want those oasis. Those oasis, and whatever the plural is there to grow.

Ryan Connell [00:33:36]:
I was at dinner last night. We were talking about sort of like that network of network, or like that, that interconnectivity or loose connectiveness, as you kind of grow mature as a maverick or in this space, entrepreneur, whatever title you want to give yourself. And, you know, I had just shared something along the same lines of what you just said, which is, it seems like every little, even, like, minor success, job change, impact that I've been a part of has been really less to do with me and more to do with, like, hey, this person. Meet this person. Here's an idea, like, what's solution in real time and far less away from the domino's pizza example of predicting something several years out. So I could definitely appreciate that comment. Um, hey, we're getting, uh, close to time here, so, uh, just wanted to maybe give you each kind of a platform for any kind of last takeaways that you want to deliver. Uh, and, Julie, I can start with you if you want.

Julie Janson [00:34:28]:
Sure. Um, everything that I go into when I'm, like, thinking about, do I join a program? Do I want to try this thing? It has to meet two criteria. It has to scare me a little and inspire me a little, at least a little. And I think project Mercury sets a good forum for that, because people do come in. There's a high unknown factor. There's usually a high discomfort factor in the beginning, but people come out inspired, and I think perhaps even more so empowered and in this environment, as I. As I keep, you know, alluding to, it's. It is not going to be big top down decisions and big acquisition programs that are going to save the day.

Julie Janson [00:35:05]:
It is going to be empowered people who know that they can change the world around them at whatever level. And so I think programs like this are critical to, frankly, our national security right now, in that I can empower individuals who can empower other individuals, because they know they can take on a problem and get after it. And that is critical right now. So I don't have a long or flowery answer. I just think we need to be scared. We need to be inspired. And I do think that this program gives a healthy mix of both.

Ryan Connell [00:35:40]:
I love that. Ethan, over to you. Any closing comments?

Ethan Eagle [00:35:44]:
Yeah, so I'll quickly touch on one other question I think I left on the table from you, Ryan, and that is, how do I get involved? So, at the individual practitioner level, we welcome applications from anyone and everyone who wants to join the movement to sort of improve the culture, innovation in the DoD. If you're not aware of the armed services committee hearing, Adam Grant says the quiet part out loud, the culture of the DoD is a threat to national security. I think we're trying to be a lever in the opposite direction there teams who might be interested. So why not just join as an individual? If you can find five others who'd want to join from your organization, the ability to bring that problem area where you'd like to explore opens to you. So if you're coming as an individual, we'll put you on a highly diverse team and you practice the tools, but don't necessarily bring immediate organizational solutions back. You become kind of that project next. If you bring a whole team to the mercury experience, then you get to explore in your own backyard. But we do.

Ethan Eagle [00:36:51]:
If you've brought six people, three of those people might stay attached to that problem and three are going to be spread around. So we, we take that deliberate diversity quite seriously. Those are the, you know, program application elements. It's a twelve week program. We do a one week intensive where you appetizer every tool that we're going to expect you to become proficient in. Some people liken that to drinking from a fire hose. I liken it to being pushed into the deep end of a pool with lifeguards. We're not drowning you and resuscitating you, but, um, it's even worse than drinking from a fire hose, right? You are totally immersed in a thing that you're not used to breathing.

Ethan Eagle [00:37:27]:
And so when you do your first natural instinct, but suck in air because you're a little scared, it leads to the worst possible outcome. So understanding that there's that kind of dual operating system, you know, how can I operate in an environment that's not what I'm used to? That swimming analogy is really important. And if you've ever seen a toddler really wanting to learn how to swim with mom and dad standing by, paranoid that junior is going to drown, hopefully you hear this phrase at least once. I want to do it myself. That's the kind of person that we're looking for in project mercury, right? Come here. Because you want to do it yourself, and we're here to help and we're here to provide that. We'll get mom and dad to hopefully shut up for let go and let you try, but also keep, keep the guardrails up. So maybe your mom and dad and you got that toddler who wants to do a bunch of stuff yourself and it terrifies you and that's, you know, great.

Ethan Eagle [00:38:21]:
You hire the swim coach to go do the scary part. So I think that metaphor hopefully resonates with a couple more people than just myself. But we're trying to help people do the scary part, that part that frightens you just a little bit. But hey, once you know how to swim, man, what an empowering feeling. Now the takeaways for, you know, what are we all about here? Hopefully that little sound bite is helpful. We are about doing the steep gradient work. I think it is really easy to build an 18 month plan that changes 2% the grade. It's like walking up to the.

Ethan Eagle [00:38:57]:
Could you walk to Mount Everest? Well, wherever in Tokyo, there's one mountain there. You walk up the steep side and you walk down the gradual slope. And the gradual slope has been machined. Right. It's where they drive up the stuff that for the. The cafe that sits on the top of the mountain. And it's not that scenic. It's right.

Ethan Eagle [00:39:15]:
It's boring and programmatic. I think we're trying to help people have that more rock climbing version, right? It's not a stair, it's not a ladder, it's not an escalator, it's not an elevator, it's not a helicopter. You're kind of hanging out to dry on the cliff face, learning about yourself as you try and find the next place. And sometimes you have to stretch in order to find that comfortable handhold. So understanding that it isn't just sufficient to do project management and hopefully the book recoding America is familiar to this audience. Clay Shirky's quote in there, waterfall development amounts to a commitment on all parties not to learn anything during the development process. If I could say the absolute opposite is true about Project Mercury. That's what I aspire to.

Ethan Eagle [00:40:02]:
We do not want people to come in with an idea and execute for twelve weeks. That would be a failure. We want people to come in with an idea and every two to four weeks radically reshape what their perspective is enough so that they say, man, that was interesting, and I'm glad I had that idea. But we have a totally new idea about what the real problems here are and where we need to go. There's a quote that's powerful and I've forgotten the source at this point, so you have to look it up on your own. But coming into a project, we have to be willing to let go of certainty for long enough to figure out what's really going on. And far too often I see people come in who are certain they know what the problem is and that their version of the solution is, that's their version of leadership is I'm going to convince people that I know what's going on here and that the issues are poor alignment and lack of execution and man, in 2% of cases, that can be true. But I think real innovation leadership comes down to gaining buy in, helping collaborate with others, understanding that your first early perspective, there's a bunch of stuff that you don't know and you need to learn.

Ethan Eagle [00:41:14]:
So Patrick Lencioni has this book, the ideal team player. He says the ideal team player should be humble, hungry, and smart. Now, my grandfather, when I was very young, told me that, Ethan, there are two kinds of people in this world, those who are humble and those who are about to be. And I always laughed at that. But understanding that leadership and ideal, being an ideal team player means bringing your best ideas to the table, but it also means listening with a lot of humility. And we don't just run cohorts. We also run project mercury innovator workshops. And man, the lesson on feedback and listening to feedback and listening, those are some of the things that people come away and go, wow, I didn't know that there were four levels of listening.

Ethan Eagle [00:41:58]:
Auto sharmer. In this work, it's really important. If I want to learn things, I need to be open to learning them. I can't just come into a conversation in download mode. I recognize in a podcast environment to the audience out there, of course you're in download mode. We can't really be in conversation in this format, but would invite you to those forums. We have our project Mercury LinkedIn. These kinds of places.

Ethan Eagle [00:42:23]:
Reach out, find a person in your network. There's more of us than there used to be. So you're never more than two calls away, I think, from a project mercury alumni and the DoD. Talk to somebody who's been through the experience and figure out, guess what? It's never the right time. It's never the right time. The only time you all agree on when you need to go for growth is when you're going bankrupt or the war has already started. So that's too late. And what we're trying to do is overcome.

Ethan Eagle [00:42:51]:
I forget one of the very earliest project mercury students said the Air force doctrine is three P's, and he was joking, but the Air Force doctrine is three P's. Procrastinate, number one. Number two, panic. In the panic, you get access to your creative self, and then, number three, prevail. Right? And so we're trying to be a lot more deliberate than just panic about how to approach creativity. I do think avoiding that procrastination, looking and doing the hard thing first, or at least the harder part first, the high gradient part, and then figuring out what really works what works for you is not the panacea for all. And so the foundational parts of the competing values framework also help you train as a leader the thing that you know in your heart of hearts to be the solution. 75% of the organization will find odious, right? Or doesn't resonate with them.

Ethan Eagle [00:43:42]:
And so those personality clashes and the style clashes of leadership, man, it's really helpful to have a decoder ring for understanding your organization. There is no better lesson than experience for embedding those key parts of this curriculum in the student's mind. And not all experiences are educative. So we build in a lot of time for feedback and reflection. It's not just hit the high marks and go win. Even in those failures, I think we learn the most as a community. Why didn't that work? And we pull it apart and we talk about it. And so that embracing of not every team needs to succeed, but when one team does, that's a cohort success.

Ethan Eagle [00:44:25]:
I think those are those elements of building, empowerment, camaraderie, culture, community, and competencies and innovation. And if you're interested, Project Mercury, we're out here. Come join us. Yeah.

Ryan Connell [00:44:36]:
Awesome. I don't think I've had a podcast where I wrote down so many little nuggets and phrases, so I got a full page here. So thanks for the inspiration for that very least, me. Ethan, Julie, thank you so much for joining me today. This was an incredible conversation. Looking forward to seeing what happened to Project Mercury in the next two or two to five years. So thank you and appreciate it.

Ethan Eagle [00:45:00]:
Yeah. Ryan, I listened to your introduction from Bonnie, and I will share my one other piece because I know she asked you to keep it fun. The two closing questions I have for every cohort of Project Mercury. Are you having fun yet? How can we help?

Ryan Connell [00:45:15]:
Awesome. I love it.