Incentivizing Change in the DoD with Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jack Shanahan

Jack Shanahan [00:00:00]:
The incentive is to be conservative and not take risk and you'll survive. It is hard to find people that are willing to take the risk and say this is for the good of the department, it's the good of the warfighters, the good of the country. So there's this everybody has to understand that the incentives are aligned in a way that if something goes wrong, and I know we tend to just throw this word out there about fail fast, but it's true. In that case, you should be allowed to do some things don't work out because you can pick up the pieces and just move on to the next one.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:46]:
Good afternoon, everybody. Ladies and gentlemen. I have the one, the only retired Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, the first director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. My name is Bonnie Evangelista. I'm with the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. And I was not at the Jake, the Joint Artificial Intelligence center when jack, you were there. I was there under your successor, lieutenant General Groan. So I think there's an interesting story here I'd love to chat with you about in terms of the beginnings and the momentum that you had to build to get to the point where when I got to the Jake, I had a tremendous opportunity in front of me with trade wins, but I think there was a lot of work.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:28]:
There's a story there about all the work that you and others, including my former acquisition chief, Will Roberts, had to go through to get to the point where people like me could be empowered and do the things we're doing today. So I greatly appreciate your time today and be willing to share the story with me.

Jack Shanahan [00:01:47]:
Is that oh, Bonnie, it's so good to be with you. I've heard so much about you. As they say, your reputation precedes you in all the best possible ways. But this is such an important conversation. First of all, I applaud you for doing this because there are messages that you need to get out there and there tends to be probably a little bit too often the doom and gloom side of the acquisition and contracting side of DoD. There is plenty of bad news. Let's not pretend that it's not a tough road to go down. However, between an experience in Project Maven when we stood that up, and then as I took those experiences with me into standing up the Joint AI Center, we got a lot done.

Jack Shanahan [00:02:22]:
I think it would be surprising for a lot of people to learn how much we were able to get done within the confines of the Federal Acquisition Regulation or the DFAR. The defense version of that. So I'm really happy you're doing this, and I'm happy to be part of this conversation because there's a lot to talk about.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:02:37]:
Well, I think the only place we can start is the beginning. And I'm curious. You mentioned Maven. I was not as familiar with Project Maven as soon as I came on board. This would be August 2021 time frame. Project Maven had very much been a thing that people had lauded in the department as a huge success, and they were trying to continue scaling that success. Would you say the Jake and you're clarifying for me as well, preceded Maven, or was Maven the operational imperative that kind of drove the beginnings of the Jake?

Jack Shanahan [00:03:17]:
Yeah, so Maven was there first. And I say this, and I do not say this glibly, but I really do mean in some ways. I look at Maven as almost a big bang, and a lot of things came out of Maven, and it still to me, is the most singular success story in terms of getting AI at scale. Speed and scale were always our imperative. We got the speed part down. It is always difficult to get scale in the Department of Defense. But now that the program has transitioned to National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, I'm very hopeful, I remain optimistic. It really starts to get to scale both across the intelligence community and the Department of Defense.

Jack Shanahan [00:03:52]:
But we got started in 2017, and I'll make a very long and somewhat sordid story, very short, by saying we had the imperative of figuring out how to do exploitation, analysis of full motion video in the intel community, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. And this is my classic example of we did not start with an AI solution in search of a problem. The problem was we couldn't solve it with any other technology that we had available to us. Human analysts were looking at too much video, could not get to it all, and it was just a common problem of information overload. There's a term I actually have used called catastrophic success. More collection from more sources at all classification levels than at any point in history. Than at any point in history. But humans could not get through it all.

Jack Shanahan [00:04:37]:
We just didn't have the tools available other than when we went out to Silicon Valley and said, sure, we have some things that you might be interested in, beginning with computer vision. So we did a little pilot project, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, who had been looking for projects that he could designate as the AI pioneers for the department and hadn't seen any up to that point. And we're talking about Fielding, right? This is not research and development, which continued to be world class. No questions about the R D side of it. This was about getting stuff into the hands of warfighters. So pretty much on the spot, almost in a literal sense, where he signed a memo just maybe a day later after he saw our little pilot project and said, okay, you are the Algorithmic Warfare cross Functional Team, which was always our formal name in 2017, also known as Project Maven. And that's where we got off to the races. So once that had demonstrated enough success over a year and a half, the department knew in the terms of the secretary, the deputy secretary, they needed to go something bigger, right? This question of scale well beyond the intelligence enterprise, which is what we were focused on, into everything else that the department needed to bring AI against, we knew we were woefully far behind in terms of what was happening in commercial industry.

Jack Shanahan [00:05:51]:
So the thing was, what should this look like? And after a long and again very interesting discussion of what it should look like, we became the joint AI Center. And I was asked, because I was the three star that had done Project Maven, who else could you ask to do it? And of course, there's the dialogue and a debate about should it be a civilian from the tech industry, on and on. But one thing I know is I know bureaucracies. I know how to lead organizations. I know how to stand up organizations. I know people, I know money. I do all those things about how do you bring an organization to life? So I was asked. I said no politely.

Jack Shanahan [00:06:23]:
They asked again. I said no again, even more politely. And then the third time, when Secretary Mattis went to then Deputy Secretary Shanahan and said, let's ask him one more time, what could I do? But I said, okay, I'll do it. And the reason I was reluctant, I knew exactly how difficult it would be based on all those lessons learned from Project Maven. And one of those big lessons learned, of course, that we're going to talk about is acquisitioning and contracting, which was central to what we did in Project Maven. And equally important, once I got to the jake So, there's the story of Project Maven, and then about a year and a half later designated to stand up to join AI. Jake.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:06:58]:
So I'm curious. I mean, it's not often someone at your level kind of intentionally centers the acquisition element around an imperative like you're discussing. I'm curious if that was an easy or an obvious thing that you said, yes, we absolutely have to do it, or were there kind of the resistors amongst the group that weren't sure what you were doing?

Jack Shanahan [00:07:23]:
As a fan of Churchill's, I'll use that blood toil tear and sweat, to say that it was a painful experience. I got lucky. I'll put it that way. Lucky in many ways. And the person running Project Maven was then Marine Corps Colonel Drew Kucor, who's a force of nature, somebody that you exactly wanted in that place at that time because he was a disruptor and he was a classic innovator and he wouldn't take no for an answer. And by the way, he's now retired. He's up at Morgan running their AI and data for them. So he's in a very good position up there.

Jack Shanahan [00:07:51]:
But here's where the Serendipity comes in. He's also a level three certified acquisition professional. He was an intel officer. He had experience in combat, very much knew what was happening in the operator's side of the world and said, this is I'll just say BS. We cannot allow these old technologies to keep being put in warfighters'hands. We've got to give them something much better. We have to do it much faster. So he comes in knowing the boundaries of the acquisitioning and contracting world, right? He understood the defar inside out.

Jack Shanahan [00:08:22]:
He knew how to push up against every single boundary and did it very successfully to the point where once in a while I have to go through, are we good on this? Are we legal? And he always knew exactly where we stood in terms of being able to do what we did. And we did everything. We were able to jump right on board an army research lab existing contract, which may even still exist today, at least probably did when the Jake stood up. So we already had a vehicle we could use. We worked closely with DIUx because they were in the business of getting things on contract very quickly. They understood what OTAs were, other transaction authorities, they understood what commercial solutions offerings were, or openings. Always get those two words back to back. And so there were opportunities for us to use more than people gave us credit for.

Jack Shanahan [00:09:05]:
This is where people, I think, I hope, are surprised in a good way. Within four months of being formally designated as Project Maven, we had four startup companies on contract in Project Maven. And then about a month and a half later, we had Google on contract. And I can imagine what that was like when you're negotiating with lawyers from one of the biggest and most successful tech companies in America. But we were able to do this because I had someone that knew what the system is. So all of those lessons I learned, I had to bring over with me into the Jake. I could list a dozen things that you would be very familiar with. Bonnie, you live this world as well as I do.

Jack Shanahan [00:09:42]:
Is small startup companies that need money on the books, right, or they're going to go under or they're going to take money from China if we don't give them money. They've never worked with the government before. So how do we do a contract with you? So these would be very in depth conversations with these startup companies, never mind Google, about the things that, again, you've been working with for all the time you've been there, is intellectual property protections, data rights, licensing. All those things those companies need to understand about their product. What makes their product special? How do they get paid for it? We were incredibly flexible in this process. And one of the great things we had going for us, it was all R D or research and development funding, which gave us more flexibility than if it was called operations or procurement funding. And Congress knew this, and Congress was very supportive. Bilateral support, bipartisan support, you name it.

Jack Shanahan [00:10:31]:
We had support on the Hill for what we were trying to do, and we were going fast. We had a Deputy Secretary of Defense that was willing to push over any bureaucratic hurdle that he could possibly knock down to help us. So all that to say that by the end of my time in Maven, I knew that as important as anything else. And we always start with data, right? When we talk about AI, that's always sort of the beginning point, building a data management pipeline, bringing in the right talent, on and on and on. But I would put acquisition and contracting right near the top of the list. In some cases, at the top of the list. So when I came into the Jake, I had a plan then we can talk more about what that plan was. So it was, how can I duplicate the successes of Project Maven, but understanding that we were going to start getting a lot bigger than Project Maven? Project Maven was small.

Jack Shanahan [00:11:15]:
We started with a half a dozen people. By the time I left, it might have been up to 25, 30 people, most of whom were reservists, that Drew Kucor had known from his Marine Corps days. And they were the kind of people that hated working for him until they stopped working for him and then were willing to come work for him again because they knew that we were making a difference. Right. This was an exciting time. We just felt like we had the capability to change the way the department was operating. And a big part of that changing the department's processes was an acquisition and contracting. So I walked in, and again, I'll turn a little bit to good fortune here and say, somebody said, you need this person.

Jack Shanahan [00:11:49]:
That person's name is Will Robert. Not available right now for a variety of reasons, but you really ought to go talk to this person because he's doing some things in the Air Force that are pushing some boundaries, and it sounds like that's what you're looking for in the J. And I had that conversation with Will and we agreed we would work together, but I couldn't get him right away, so I was willing to wait painfully long time. It may have only been a couple of months, but to me it felt like a century, because we had a lot of things moving very quickly, and I needed his expertise when he came in the know, drew was really an operator with an acquisition background. Will was to his core. Somebody understood acquisition and contracting, which was precisely the thing that I needed. Those characteristics he brought to the table meant everything to me, because here's what we learned almost immediately, and it wasn't a surprise to me. It was probably a surprise to some other people in the organization because they didn't have the Maven experience.

Jack Shanahan [00:12:42]:
You started growing fast enough that you couldn't do boutique contracts anymore. In Maven, we had one contract at a time, fortunately mostly under the umbrella of Army Research Lab. But still a lot of negotiations going on with these individual companies. And it was hard work, but we rapidly exceeded our ability to do that in the jake. One, we didn't have many people to begin with, and two, we just saw the growth curve and it was going to be exponential. We couldn't do this one off. So we started thinking about how we get Will onto this and start really doing this in a disciplined way, pushing boundaries, taking risk. And I'm always going to use that word, risk tolerant.

Jack Shanahan [00:13:18]:
It's everything. As you know, Bonnie, this is all about risk acceptance. Like knowing where the risk are, knowing who accept the risk. Could will accept the risk. Can you accept the risk? Did it need to come to my deputy? Did it need to come to me? A lot of times it ended up on my plate because we didn't at the time have acquisition contract authority. So we were relying on an awful lot of other partners, like Diu, like DHS. People go DHS. What were they doing with the DoD on AI? They had an umbrella contract vehicle that we used for our Humanitarian assistance and Disaster Relief mission project.

Jack Shanahan [00:13:50]:
So we relied on a lot of other people. I couldn't ask for better support. It was wonderful. However, you can only rely on partners for so often, especially when their priorities trump your priorities.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:14:01]:
So you also admitted to me that you did not want to do trade Wind. I'm imagining in my head knowing Will, he's got big bold vision, and he comes to you and says, I have an idea or I want to do this. What was that conversation like? Because to your point about taking risk, I think it took some risk on both your parts to implement this thing maybe nobody had done before, or that was custom to your mission set at the time. What was that like?

Jack Shanahan [00:14:29]:
Yeah, so it was a little bit of a fear of the unknown because it was so new. But on the other hand, the imperative was you can't live under the old way of doing business. You need some umbrella contract vehicle that people can come into with IDIQ way of doing business. And so it was a very deliberate process on his part to use information operations against me to be able to convince me that this was the right thing to do. Now, my deputy at the time. Steve Holmeier knew enough about acquisition contracting that I would say he was reluctant. He was reluctant, and the chief of staff was reluctant. He said, this is asking for a lot.

Jack Shanahan [00:15:04]:
I'm not sure we're ready for this because it will bring a lot of scrutiny on top of us. It'll bring some oversight, and especially the acquisition authority we're asking for would really start bringing more people looking closely at what we're doing. But I was okay with that, right? It's back to this risk thing, but I wasn't ready to do it right away because I just wasn't comfortable enough with, what is this thing, how do we put it together? But to my credit, I think we had the team come in from Indiana University Innovation Institute led by Gene Renwart, former four star commander of Northern Command. Came in and said, here's what we're proposing. What do you yeah, you know, it's one of those I think this has got a lot of merit to it. And then kind of COVID hit and things started slowing down a little bit. But I was enamored with the concept, if not the actual implementation yet, because I just didn't know enough about how we would make this thing work. And so by the time I walked out the door in July of 2020, I was there.

Jack Shanahan [00:15:58]:
Philosophically, we just weren't there as an organization yet, because all the pieces had not been put into place. Was a noble intent, right? Make this as easy as possible for any company trying to work with the DoD, from the smallest startup to the biggest company in the world. Now, the biggest companies, you know them, they know how the process works. They have armies of people that understand how to go scrub websites, find the work, get the RFPs in, get on contract, get security clearances. It's a well oiled machine, I'll put it that way. But many, many companies that we wanted to work with were not in that position. Never worked with the government before. And so we were trying to avoid scaring them off and making it as easy as possible.

Jack Shanahan [00:16:39]:
So it was more of a reluctance just out of I didn't know how to make this work. But I was on board as a concept, and by the time I left and then I was applauding from the sidelines when I saw all that had happened since then. To include your role in this, which you have a website out there, these five minute videos that companies can submit. It seems like it's going down the path that I always wanted to go down. Now you have to tell me if it's working the way you hope it worked.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:17:05]:
Well, I was going to say, to your credit, we do have acquisition authority. CDAO has acquisition authority because of the Jake. So a lot of the thing, the values that you're talking about, I think, are still hold true. And I think where we think or we believe we have kind of niched ourselves in this DoD ecosystem because we're not trying to be diu, we're not trying to be all these other innovation hubs like Softworks because of the things you were describing about lowering barriers to entry. You didn't say it but basically speed the contract. You didn't say it like that but I mean, I was feeling that how do we do this quickly because of operational imperatives. We've still, I feel like, held those values through all the changes and all the transitions and that's where I continue to tell people that's kind of our wheelhouse now is we know how to do quick entry points. We are not as good at the either transition or sustainment part.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:18:00]:
I think that's the part we need to build at because now our organization demands that. That was not the demand at the time, but we are very, very good, as you can tell, at developing novel contracting strategies, stacking authorities in such a way that we can quickly bring in people from an experimentation or a pilot perspective and then move them where they need to go if it's going to go to Enterprise or Scale. I'm kind of nerding out with you because you took a chance on something that you didn't know if it was going to work out. Jury is still out, I suppose, but I think we've had a lot of success in doing something differently for the sake of doing it differently. Whether people agree with our approach, we won't get into that. We also know one of the truths in this world of emerging technology is you have to let go of what was done in order to embrace something new. And we've taken that same approach in contracting. So we're constantly thinking about how can we make contracting processes more agile and flexible and hopefully that's what people are seeing as that outward facing trade wind construct that you started.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:19:09]:
And I love the story because there's not many modern examples in the department where people were allowed or empowered to do something different. It's very unusual, someone like me. So I love this story because then I came in and I'm the person who just wants to go, go, give me commander's intent and we'll get after it. And I had all the tools there because I tried doing something very similar to trade wins a few times in my career, whether it was in the army or I was in offensive agency. And I didn't have all the pieces that I had here and to yours and will's credit. We had acquisition authority, we had funding, we had leadership support. I was like it was tremendous for someone like me who thrives in these unstructured startup kind of environments. So I think to your credit, it was a great opportunity.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:03]:
You guys really set a foundation so that even though you didn't know what it was going to look like, you let people at the Action Officer level build it.

Jack Shanahan [00:20:12]:
And so there are several things there that I just want to reinforce bond, because they're so incredibly important. First of all, the word empower empowers everything with me. I was willing to let people run as fast as they wanted to run, and as long I knew what the risks were. And both with Drew at Maven, but also some of my team members at Jake would come to me and say, all right, boss, here's what I'm going to do. I just want to let you know, okay, fine. That's all I want to do is make sure if something goes wrong, that I know it's going to go wrong and I'm on the hook. Other than that, run with it. That was the first thing you said.

Jack Shanahan [00:20:42]:
But also, this idea of bold action now is a million times better than no action five years from now. It's an inferential equation, because I'd much rather be bold and take the action in something like this. We're not talking about building satellites to five nines of perfection. We're talking about software and emerging technology that needs to get out into the warfighter's hands. That was a big one. And your speed to contract. You're right. I didn't say it, but I should have said it because it is exactly what we were trying to do.

Jack Shanahan [00:21:08]:
You also said something that is equally germane to this, which is sustainment. That's where things get tricky, even with Maven. Right. Okay, who's going to pick this up five years down the road? So we worked closely with the military services to say, we'll fund this for the first three years, or whatever the number was, because we know you didn't put it into your budget, but you've got to pick it up. That was a wonderful conversation, because we gave them an out. We gave them an out for three years, but we said after that, you got to figure this out. And then sort of also relevant to the things you said, the person that I don't think seems to get enough credit for what she did during this time was Ellen Lord, because she was seeking opportunities for the department to get better and better. The Software Acquisition pathway, adaptive acquisition framework, they put some pieces in place that I think were kind of bold in DoD terms, bold in terms of, know, these don't have to go through this Jaced crazy process.

Jack Shanahan [00:22:01]:
They don't need to be treated as a major defense program, even though they may be high dollar amounts. We know that software is the key to success, so let's go faster and faster on that. So I just wanted to reinforce everything you said, which was my philosophy. So I think there's this sort of cliche as it is. Planets are aligned. In this case, you had me, you had Will, you had NAND as the CTOs came from Silicon Valley. Like, what do you mean we're not moving fast, sure as hell going to do everything possible to get moving faster. And then you came in, you've got that same philosophy.

Jack Shanahan [00:22:32]:
So the alignment is as important as just about anything else in this conversation.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:22:36]:
Yeah. I will say that this alignment you're talking about is not the norm. Do you agree with that?

Jack Shanahan [00:22:43]:
I agree with that and it's unfortunate and there's a lot of reasons to include people rotating every couple of you know, I hate to say it, but it never should be dependent on any single person. I hate to say the sort of great man, great woman theory of history. However, when you look at alignment with Maven, we had secretary, deputy Secretary, undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, me, Greg Krist, and then down to Drew Kukor. The alignment was all there, and everybody supported what we were trying to. Not only supported it, but would hold me accountable for not moving even faster, just like my boss did at CIO. Dana Deezy. I don't know if you had any overlap with Dana when you came in, but boy, that guy, he came from Business, he came from Jpmore, and he's like, Jack, what have you done for me in the last 24 hours? Well, boss, I can't quite move that fast. But why not? It was one of those love it right, it's painful, but it's exactly what you want an organization like the Jake or CDAO to be doing is moving at the speed of the relevance of the operator.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:23:39]:
So what would you say to those who maybe aren't in an environment where they're feeling or seeing that alignment, know in all those benefits that we were just talking about, whether it's empowerment and allowing risk taking? What would you say to people who maybe don't have that situation and what can they do to maybe gain some confidence or feel secure in that? Maybe I need to fight for this in my situation.

Jack Shanahan [00:24:04]:
Yeah. And this raises an issue for the department, Bonnie, that you've dealt with many ways, I have no doubt. And it's an incentive structure that's warped in the department. The incentive is to be conservative and not take risk and you'll survive. It is hard to find people that are willing to take the risk and say this is for the good of the department. It's the good of the warfighters, the good of the country. So there's this everybody has to understand that the incentives are aligned in a way that if something goes wrong and I know we tend to just throw this word out there about fail fast, but it's true. In that case, you should be allowed to do some things that don't work out because you can pick up the pieces and just move on to the next one.

Jack Shanahan [00:24:43]:
So we have to get the incentive structure right. You can actually reward people for coming to the table. Like on Friday afternoon, we used to have pint. And pies over to Jake and people would say, okay, raise my hand. We f this up this week, and let me tell you how bad I effed it up. And by the end of it, everybody's know applauding that person for their willingness to sit there and say, I missed the boat on this one. But on the other hand, the person next to them said, yeah, but look what we were able to get done in that same week. That was great.

Jack Shanahan [00:25:09]:
It was a very open atmosphere where people trusted each other and you felt empowered in doing it. So to what you're asking about is there has to be a lot of honest conversations in an organization, and if it's a closed organization that doesn't allow feedback to come up and go back down, you're in trouble. So I think if you're asking somebody, how do they get to that same point, try the conversation with leaders in the chain of command and say, this is what you know, this was Will's approach to me, right? He chipped away at me day after day after day. He wouldn't take no for I give, you know, and he would have the facts to back it up as much as we had facts and we still had a lot of missing you know, you get to a certain point, you get people bought into your idea and you know how this is, right? Convince the leader it was their idea and they'll be so on board, you'll never have any problems ever again, even if it didn't come from them or from me. Oh, yeah, Will, I take full credit for that. I give Will all the credit in the world for trading his idea, and he sold me on it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:26:08]:
I think you will appreciate this. I was at the Pentagon yesterday and I saw a poster in an executive's office and it said, our strategy is take action. And I thought that was so funny because that is such the antithesis of everyone in that building.

Jack Shanahan [00:26:23]:
It's probably gone. They've probably taken it down by now. They said, Rip that thing off the wall. Who the hell wants action in this building? You don't get paid for action.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:26:31]:
But I would love that to be the culture in terms of that was, to your point, incentivized to a degree where know almost got excited about trying something and they didn't know how it was going to work out. And there was a girl who wrote an article about trade winds, actually. Her name is Ellen Sumi and we're friends from my PEO EIS army days. PEO Enterprise and Information Systems. And she wrote a statement, and this is like my tagline now, and she said, built to refuse failure and sacrifice speed for certainty, tradewinds has found a way to still get things done and stuff. And I was like, man, well said.

Jack Shanahan [00:27:10]:
That's it right there. That summarizes it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:27:14]:
Do you think we can change the narrative. Do you think we can change that tagline something maybe someday it'll say I'll.

Jack Shanahan [00:27:21]:
Give you the optimistic side of me and I'll give you a little bit more cynical and Pessimistic side which is an unfortunate side, but it's real. So the optimistic side is if I look back to where we were in 2017 and where things are today, a lot has happened in the Department of Defense, a lot that should be applauded for all that's happened to at least get this thing moving. But it's also hard to move this bayemuth called the Defense Department, it doesn't want to move, it's reluctant to move. So the pessimistic side of me says what I fear is it will take a crisis to really drive the level of change, magnitude of change that's required to make this baked in to the very structure and the fabric of the department, which then brings reorganizations. All the things nobody wants to see. But unless we do it to ourselves, it will be done to us. And I even say ourselves, knowing that I'm out of uniform. But I still feel like I'm so tied to the success of the department because I want to see this succeed.

Jack Shanahan [00:28:15]:
We all want to see it succeed. So if anything should be a wake up call, I hope. Ukraine is for a lot of people, and I've heard more than once some people in Silicon Valley that were very reluctant to work with the national security enterprise are now know, maybe we ought to take another look at that decision not to work with the department because it's so critical what's happening in Ukraine right now. So I think there's a wake up call. I hope people recognize it that you look at what they're doing right, moving unbelievably fast, getting things on contract overnight in a 24 hours literal sense, if not sooner, things are on contract and will they have to pick up some pieces after the conflict to clean up some bureaucratic messes? Sure, who cares? The country has returned, returned to its original borders. That's all should matter here. So yeah, I'd like to believe that there are now a couple of generations of people like you, you came from PEO, that's where you understand how the real work gets done in building systems. So get more of this philosophy embedded into the Peos, into the system program offices and then as people rise up to the deputy undersecretary or deputy assistant secretary or one star, two star level, they start bringing that same philosophy and culture with them and they inculcate it in.

Jack Shanahan [00:29:32]:
So it does take to me, I always said I thought it would take at least two more generations and maybe that was too optimistic. It might take three of leaders to rise up and say, nope, there's a better way of doing business.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:29:43]:
Well, what else in terms of wisdom that you gained at the Jake or from Maven that you want to kind of impart on us, as we call ourselves, the Defense mavericks. What else can we glean from you in terms of how to start moving the needle in the right direction?

Jack Shanahan [00:30:01]:
From your standpoint, this may be a little different. And I've been chewing on this for a while and I used to talk about it and then stopped talking about it because I was out of uniform. I still think it's a pretty relevant idea today, which is how do you build more partnerships between sort of the traditional defense industrial based companies and the smaller startup companies? And I've seen examples of that and some of those have been extremely successful. I know Boeing's partnered up with Spark Cognition and some really interesting drone work and there are other examples of that. And what you then get is a big company that understands how the department works and very comfortable with it, but startups who have intellectual property that nobody else has. Now that's not an easy path to go down because those companies can be bought out. They can just take the talent and apply the talent elsewhere or send them to sort of out to pastor, so to speak. So it will require sort of this disciplined approach of getting the best out of both worlds, that really fast moving tech world culture, that is, we're going to go out and get things done and we're going to be focused on operational imperatives and then working with other companies.

Jack Shanahan [00:31:06]:
Not always the best solution, but I think it would give both sides sort of a little bit more of a comfort factor about how to get things done and then the other one is directly relevant to CAO today. Bonnie, and you will appreciate this because everything we've just talked about is along this line. I always spent the first 18 months until I retired focused on the military services because I had to get them on board. At least they kind of knew who I was and gave me some trust and credibility. But it was still a difficult journey. But I knew that the real thrust of the effort should now be in the Combatant Commands, the warfighters hands, because they're the ones that should be driving. How do you get things done for war fighting in the future, which requires the military services to be on board? But I know the CDAO leadership should be out there talking all the time to the Combatant Command leadership saying, we're here for you because the way the CDAO is going to succeed, quite honestly, is the four star combatant commanders come into the building and say, look what they've done for us. We love this organization, do not get rid of it.

Jack Shanahan [00:32:03]:
In fact, I need more of it. When and if that happens, it's a sign of success. And if it, you know, we'll see. The bureaucracy is a tough place to operate.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:12]:
Oh man, you're speaking my language because you're stealing my move. This is how tradewinds has gained any success today, is because we not the combatant command level by any means, but we built tremendous relationships and honestly, that's kind of how we did our best learning was we went out and talked to people. We didn't tell people what they should do. We started to understand where the pain points were and we would try and find ways to solve those pain points. And that's really where it started to show some momentum and start to see some of the stuff you see, whether it's in the public space and whatnot. So I'm going to double click what you just said right there and hopefully CDAO also takes that approach as well in terms of let's just focus on building relationships and rather than the what and the know, because I think that stuff kind of figures itself out if you've got the right people in the room talking about the yes.

Jack Shanahan [00:33:12]:
So your listeners can't see me. My head is moving up and down at a high rate of speed because all I can do is say I agree with everything you said. I love the idea. And this core to my philosophy is go listen to the customer. We got away from that in the Defense Department in a lot of ways over the decades by saying, here's your system, take it, kind of use it, whatever. But now it just doesn't work that way. It can't work that way. It's listen to the user.

Jack Shanahan [00:33:38]:
What are your real problems? What can we help you with? And then iterate with them. The idea of min viable product out there and say, yeah, it's not great, but here's what we can do to make it better for you. And on and on and on. So this obsession with the customer, and I even use the word customer, right, and people get recoil a little bit that's, oh, that's not war fighting business. You know what? The operator, the warfighter, the analyst, the backroom person working finance, they are customers. They're all customers and we should listen to them and say how we can make their life easier and better. And you said the most important thing of all, bonnie, despite all this focus on obsession, on technology, what is it? It's a human business. It's about human relationships.

Jack Shanahan [00:34:15]:
It's about building networks. It's about me and you trusting each other. And you build that trust over time. I guarantee you, you'll help me and I will help you when crunch time comes. That is what it has always been about and it's always going to be about that human relationship piece.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:34:29]:
So I do a lot of interviews. And as you probably have figured out by now, and what you just said is a constant theme amongst most of the people that I talk to in terms of the technology is not going to get us out of Dodge or this isn't a technology problem. It's a human behind. Technology and solutions are people. And so if you treat it as such, if you remember that we are people, interacting with other people could potentially be creating a different environment, fostering a different environment that maybe upholds the values that we've been talking about. And I'll take your customer title and take it a step further. I've started calling customers consumers because to me, if we forget who is consuming what we're selling, that's good.

Jack Shanahan [00:35:16]:
Yeah.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:35:17]:
We're probably not actually doing any good for the department. So it's like changing the script a little bit and we'll see how it lands. But I 100% agree there's a ton we can learn from our consumers. And to your point, consumers can be anybody.

Jack Shanahan [00:35:32]:
That's right.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:35:33]:
Not just the soldier in the field. I mean, you can take this across any functional element. We have consumers and business lanes and engineering lanes and whatnot. So I would love to see more listening and actually hearing where are the pain points rather than us assuming what problems we're going to solve. Where's that demand signal? I like that term, too. Demand signal.

Jack Shanahan [00:35:57]:
Yeah. It is the only way to go. And even on something like acquisition and contractor, I know of at least one company out there that's using generative AI to help other companies respond to requests for a proposal, which is pretty cool, right? I can get this done in now two days instead of 30 days or a month, two months, whatever it is. That just seems mundane. But it's not mundane for that company because it's a chance for them to get recognized and get on board and send their video in. Have you or the team watch it and say, hey, kind of like what you see. Bring them in. It's all about speeding that cycle up and then putting it in the hands, as you said, of a consumer, wherever that consumer is.

Jack Shanahan [00:36:33]:
So it's about the entire department getting better at this.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:36:36]:
Well, this was amazing. I am in your gratitude for having a conversation with me, and I greatly appreciate you imparting some of your journey with us to help us learn a little bit more and maybe take it to the next level.

Jack Shanahan [00:36:51]:
Well, I just say to you, Bonnie, thank you for all you've done to try to make this real as an idea that germinated, what, three years ago? Three and a half years ago. So it just shows you the importance of, again, the people that carry these ideas on from person to person. Because you could have come in and say that's know, forgive my language, but I'm say that we're going to get rid of that because it wasn't my idea. Instead, actually, it probably was your idea. You and Will probably plotted against me well before I know who you were to make this happen. But it does matter. It does matter. Do you have this continuity in the department to say we were onto something good here.

Jack Shanahan [00:37:25]:
Let's figure out how to make this thing shine and work for rather than against the department. So thank you for everything you're doing in your role of CDO.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:37:33]:
All right. Thank you so much again.