Risk Taking in Leading Rapid Capability Development Initiatives

The Honorable James "Hondo" Geurts, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, presented his leadership concepts, in his presentation on "Risk Taking in Leading Rapid Capability Development Initiatives". Some of his main ideas zeroed in on learning from failure; - learning when something doesn't go well. He stressed learning on smaller projects or subsets of major systems where failure does not have a significant impact, rather than on the overall project itself. He said that acquisition professionals should not expect outcomes to be driven from the top of leadership, but that the individual program management team would need to take the initiative to make their programs successful and that they were authorized "to be bold." He also said that he preferred the term "agility" over "innovation" in describing the modus operandi for a project team. Finally, he talked about "bad rebels" - pessimists, versus "good rebels" - optimists, and stressed the need to manage, not avoid risk.