“People are our most precious resource,” said U.S. Navy Commander Evita Salles, co-host for DAU’s Flagship Event of the Summer. During the first of three sessions of Taking Point, speakers tackled topics like leading the way in talent superiority, preparing the workforce for different futures and working with entrepreneurs to make bigger impacts. 

Talent Superiority: Cultivate the Workforce  

U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Michael McGinley, Director, GigEagle Agile Talent Ecosystem Initiative, introduced attendees to the program he is leading: GigEagle. GigEagle is an agile talent ecosystem that will reform how the Department of Defense (DoD) will match talent to different problem sets. “GigEagle is a whole of nation talent marketplace,” McGinley said. “GigEagle can transform military service and turn the DoD to a national security collaboration golden age.” 

“The DoD is in a war for talent, and this is not a war that we can afford to lose,” McGinley said. “It’s not that America doesn’t have the talent. We’re a country that prides itself on speed, but we’re too slow to identify talent we have and too slow to engage it.” GigEagle is designed for moving beyond the information era into the exponential era.  

GigEagle is “an idea that may propel the DoD to victory in this war for talent,” McGinley said. “The tool provides those using it with an opportunity to serve their country in ways never before seen possible.” With Russian and Chinese militaries having access to more people than America, DoD needs to make the best use of the talent available. In addition, America’s industrial era personnel systems fail to identify and properly exploit talent. 

“Each Service has its own stovepipe talent platform that doesn’t get us where we need to go,” McGinley said. “If we continue to cling to our existing processes that got us here, we will lose.” GigEagle treats talent as an enterprise weapon system, breaking outside of existing stovepipe structures. McGinley described it as a “mash up of LinkedIn and Uber…matching people to mission at lightning speed.” 

“This is about unlocking the skills you have developed over the course of your career to make a tangible difference in national security. An opportunity to do something truly extraordinary. … We’re going to win this war for talent, and we’re going to win it together,” McGinley said.  

Backcasting to Build Enduring Advantages 

“Many of you have been told to start with the end in mind. But what if that end is a decade or century in the future?” asked Philip Freidhoff, Vice President, Human Centered Design. This can cause an acquisition program to end radically differently compared to what was forecasted.   

“Forecasting misses the futures that break the rules or are away from our expectations,” Freidhoff said. “The best way to see ahead is to take a look back.”

Forecasting has multiple uses, including for systems that can be used for decades. With this long of a time horizon, Freidhoff asked how the acquisition community can narrow the set of futures. Freidhoff proposes ‘backcasting,’ a technique that can help imagine alternate futures. Backcasting allows the workforce to “visit futures to get there and back again,” Freidhoff said. Forecasting also breaks down in the exponential age, as changes come faster and faster, increasing the number of potential futures beyond what humans can forecast.  

Examining the future helped to change Friedhoff’s perspective and allowed him to better analyze possible challenges. Freidhoff realized that “We are designing for a generation that does not remember a time before touch screens.” Extended reality – a combination of augmented and virtual reality – has proven to be a powerful tool for backcasting as it allows teams to work on technology and solutions in a variety of ways. Future submariners and warfighters of all kinds are already familiar with this technology.

“We have to take point on the alternate futures coming towards us and prepare for the unpredictable,” Freidhoff said. He shared his experience working with those training to become the submariners of 2035 to identify and solve challenges. “We have to look for provocative futures over plausible futures, but the provocative futures must still be plausible,” Freidhoff said. 

Freidhoff provided two exercises to help with backcasting. First, is by mapping out the impact and certainty of various drivers. Freidhoff recommends picking just two, to match with possible futures and produce a limited universe of alternate futures. The second tool is to adopt a new mindset, with Freidhoff quoting Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.” We must combine these tools to maximize the effectiveness of forecasting and backcasting to “give warfighters every unfair advantage possible,” Freidhoff said.

Warfighters have experienced technology in different ways, and backcasting relies on speaking with different members of the warfighting community to use those experiences and apply it to the world of defense technology. “How can we design our systems and solutions to be robust against the futures that people will grow up and live in?” Freidhoff asked. 

“Take point and go visit some futures,” Freidhoff said.

Expeditionary Entrepreneurship: Activating Uncharted Networks  

Expeditionary Entrepreneurship (EE) is about finding the right people who can incorporate allies and partners at every stage. Jesse Levin, Senior Cultural Chameleon and founder of Tactivate, explained, “As a national security community we devoted a lot of energy to attracting and retaining the right human talent so we can achieve mission impact. As an acquisitions community we have worked hard to continuously reach out to the tactical edge to source requirements from our warfighters. Unfortunately, neither of these approaches are optimized for today's emerging security environment where operational footprints are minimal and access is restricted.”

“We need more people to help us breach into contested VUCA [volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity] environments,” Levin said. The people who are skilled in this are called expeditionary entrepreneurs. “Expeditionary Entrepreneurs or EE"s are individuals that are culturally dexterous. They leverage humor, creative currency and the ability to identify and court local force multiplies for rapid impact in humanitarian crisis and conflict environments.” Other skills included using a variety of tactics and traits to counter insurmountable challenges with little to no resources.  

DoD and other government agencies should seek out these entrepreneurs to improve national security and to solve problems quickly and creatively. They activate uncharted networks, identify and empower unrecognized force multipliers and use unconventional currency to improve the impact they deliver. 

“EE's offer us a blueprint for how we might think to compete in warfare domains of the future,” Levin said, pointing to how these strategies have been used in defense settings, like Ukraine, and in disaster response operations, such as in Puerto Rico. The operation in Ukraine began “on a handshake and no money,” Levin said. Two months into the Ukraine war, Levin’s team was contingency operations for Ukraine's largest insurance consortium and running supplies and donations to front line units.

EEs acquire local volunteers and provide significant resources and aid at no cost to the taxpayer. This operation began as a volunteer effort before turning into operational support for in-country businesses. “Over the next two years, leveraging infrastructure of these local companies we converted for humanitarian impact, we were able to procure over 220 metric tons of critical supplies,” Levin said, including training soldiers and civilians on life saving skills and providing post-traumatic stress disorder courses.

In Puerto Rico, Levin and the EEs managed to procure, install and operate satellite equipment with air support from the Department of Homeland Security and the Navy. They installed communication equipment to reestablish point of sales systems, a critical technology needed to recover from Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Finding EEs isn’t a new concept, Levin said. They are available and many are currently working with the military and embedded across the national security apparatus. "They are closer than you think. They are in our units, in the halls of the Pentagon,” Levin said. EEs are just one example where finding the right people can make a significant impact. 

Connecting to the Technology and Future

The day’s three sessions provided interconnected commentary. Keep your eye on DAU.edu for a deeper dive into the second and third sessions of the day with speakers like Justin Fanelli, Chief Technology Officer, Department of the Navy and Technical Director, Program Executive Officer Digital, who shared how to adopt an innovator’s mindset. An innovator’s mindset is one of the many skills that an EE would have with backcasting as a skill to help innovators solve problems. “You’re the difference between the last 10 years and the next 5 years,” Fanelli said. Likewise, Alexis Bonnell, CIO, Director of Digital Capabilities, AI Steward, Air Force Research Library, discussed the exponential age. Her discussion highlighted accelerating transformation and providing insight into the importance of reducing toil to improve the experience of the people working in acquisition. GigEagle and EEs are just two possible ways to find out how to leverage the workforce. “Every project comes with a compressed deadline and expanded expectation; this is the exponential age,” Bonnell said. 

Check out the DAU Flagship Event of the Summer event page and review bonus content and resources related to the topics and skills discussed during the event on the xTRAs page. View the talks from McGinley, Freidhoff and Levin on DAU Media (sign in required).