Navigating uncharted territory in GovTech innovation

Every hard problem you're facing has one thing in common: no map, no playbook, no one who's done exactly this before. The instinct is to plan harder for the future you expect. But the future isn't a single destination you can forecast your way into.

In this episode of Mission O/S Live, Rise8 VP of Enablement Adam Furtado sits down with Dan Ward—author, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, and co-founder of The SparkLit Group—for a conversation about navigating the unknown, and a preview of the talk he's bringing to the Prodacity stage this August.

Dan has spent a career on the frontier of defense acquisition and now helps mission-driven leaders ask sharper questions and challenge hidden assumptions. He'll connect that work to strategic foresight—not prediction, but a practical way to see the futures that could actually arrive.

Adam Furtado (00:30):

Hey everyone, and welcome to Mission OS Live. This is our last episode of season one. I'm Adam Furtado, Rise8's Vice President of Enablement, and I'm thrilled today to have one of my favorite people in the world here, Dan Ward, joining us. And Dan spent more than 20 years in the Air Force, the acquisition officer, retiring as a lieutenant colonel where he led high speed, low cost technology development programs and helped build AFRL, the Air Force Research Lab's rapid innovation process. He's the author of a number of great books, including F.I.R.E, P.U.N.K, The Simplicity Cycle, and also Lift, which we'll talk about a little bit today. He's also now the co-founder of the Sparklit Group, where he helps mission-driven leaders ask sharper questions and challenge the assumptions they didn't know they were making. Oh, so he's also taking the stage at Predacity next week, which we're excited about.

(01:21):

So we're going to get a little bit of an early look on that talk today. Dan, we are really glad to have you here. Oh,

Dan Ward (01:27):

Adam, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for the opportunity to have this time together. And I'm really looking forward to next week. That's going to be a fun

Adam Furtado (01:33):

Time. I don't know if you saw one of the last episodes we had, we had Simon Wardley on, which was an incredible conversation. And he brought you up twice as one of his favorite people too. So we got some straight cred being built throughout our episode so far. That

Dan Ward (01:47):

Was such a fun surprise. I listened into that episode. I'm like, wait, did he just say my name? Oh.

Adam Furtado (01:52):

Yeah, that was really fun. Yeah.

Dan Ward (01:53):

So

Adam Furtado (01:53):

Simon,

Dan Ward (01:54):

Thanks for listening. Thanks for the

Adam Furtado (01:55):

Shout out. Yeah. So Dan, I would say the folks that we work with at Rise Eight and who generally have on these live streams and our events and that sort, they're kind of of a specific shape. They're forward-leaning, well-intentioned folks who sort of find themselves in these positions, leading large, important technology programs within the government. They have budget authority and leadership authority, but they've largely inherited someone else's strategy and the baggage that comes along with that. And the system they're in is sort of older than their tenure and kind of built to outlast whatever change they showed up to make. So let's start here. So as someone who generally wants to do this well and they want to do it for the right reasons, how do they make sense of this kind of tough situation or system they generally find themselves in?

Dan Ward (02:42):

Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great description of a very tough and very common situation, especially for gov tech leaders. And so a couple of questions come to mind when I think about how do you make sense of that? How do you get clarity around that? What does success even look like in that kind of an environment? And then the success question always makes me think, what does failure look like in that environment? And then how do we get clarity around all of that? And kind of one of my favorite moves for getting clarity on anything is to define our terms, my engineering roots coming through here. So my favorite definition of failure is when effort does not produce the desired result. So failure is when effort doesn't produce the desired result. I like that definition because it doesn't imply any blame. There's not even a lot of judgment being put in there.

(03:28):

It doesn't mean you've made a mistake. It doesn't mean you didn't try hard enough. It doesn't mean it was anyone's fault. It just means we put in some effort and we did not get the result we wanted. But what I love best about that definition is it kind of begs the question, what was the desired result? Did you know? Did you make that decision? Did you say the result I'm trying to produce here, the output, the outcome, choose carefully between those? And do we get clear about that on day one? Are we clear about that on day minus one? How much of that can we determine before we even find ourselves in that situation? And then what do we do if we end up in those failure situations where we put in the effort, didn't get the result we wanted? Kind of what's next?

Adam Furtado (04:14):

Yeah. You sort of have to kind of break it down into these smaller chunks, if you will. So like you, I spent most of my career within the government about 15 years where active duty or as a government civilian. And we sort of have built this wild system where there's a ton of changeover in these leadership positions. So like you generally, you're given two years to solve a five year problem most times. So when we talk about success or failure within that construct, how do you break that down? Because the success of the program, the intent of it at least when the acquisition strategy was developed is one thing. But then you're joining that thing probably halfway through and then you have to figure out what does success look for you within what I can actually change within this period of time?

Dan Ward (05:01):

Yeah. Yeah. So if you've got a five year program and you come in a few years into the program and you're leaving a few years before it ends, how do you make a positive contribution in the time that is available to you for the decisions you get to make, for the changes that you get to introduce, for the stuff you get to do? So I think one of the big questions that I like to encourage people to ask is how do I set a foundation that the next person can build on? Not that sort of lines up with my own preferences and my biases and my things that I like, but how can I genuinely make something that the next person who will have their own preferences, their own biases, their own vision, that they would still find it useful, whatever it is that I provided for them.

(05:44):

And then looking back into the past, what did the previous person do? In their two year contribution to this five year problem, is there something there that I can build on that I can stand on? And so kind of looking to the past, looking to the future helps us deal with the present. When we look to the past, what's the foundation? When we look to the future, who am I passing this on to? What am I building that someone else can stand on? And then to shape, okay, in my two year contribution to a five year problem, what is the thing that I can feel proud about that I would call a success at the end of my two years, this is the thing that I've been able to do independent of maybe we don't even know what the next person's going to want or be.

Adam Furtado (06:26):

Yeah. Sort of this idea of layered learning, I guess, but in service of this north star that we've agreed upon and hopefully remains even with that changeover. Hopefully the impact we're trying to make is constant. This sort of reminds me in reading your book in Lyft, you sort of tell these stories about how the history of aviation and how nobody really did it themselves. It was sort of this same idea of layered learning over time. So I think it's probably a pretty good analogy there.

Dan Ward (06:58):

Yeah. I mean, my book, Lyft, was so much fun to write. As a writer, to be able to tell largely untold stories is such a gift to come across these untold stories and to get to tell them. So the book takes a look at five aviation pioneers who predate the rights.

Adam Furtado (07:14):

So

Dan Ward (07:14):

These are five people who designed, built, launched and crashed flying machines in unsuccessful attempts to fly. None of them successfully solved this problem, but they all advanced the field. They all moved things forward. These are sort of the shoulders that Orville and Wilbur and Catherine, by the way, they had a sister. Her name was Catherine. I try to call them the rights, not the right brothers. Wilbur even said, "If history remembers us in the field of aviation, it must remember our sister. So we promptly call them the right brothers and we act like Catherine didn't exist." Anyway, side note there.

Adam Furtado (07:47):

Well, I though it was great. I mean, I'm probably telling myself here, but I've been in the Air Force my whole life basically. And I learned about all five of them in your book.

Dan Ward (07:55):

Yes. Yes. Well, and what made me know that, or one thing that confirmed in my head that I was on the right track as I was writing this book, I was talking to a four-star general in the Air Force. A four-star general who was in charge of technology development. And I said, "Yeah, I'm working on this thing about aviation pioneers before the rights." And he literally said, "There were people before the rights." I was like, "If somebody should know it, it would be this guy."

Adam Furtado (08:17):

You're

Dan Ward (08:18):

The plane guy. You're the airplane guy. You're in charge of. And so it is as an Air Force guy, it's part of our heritage. But just as a technology guy, it's a good standard model that any problem that we're tackling, whether it's computers or airplanes or ships, I mean, kind of pick your domain, somebody came before. We're generally not the first. And so what are the lessons we can learn from these early pioneers? Even though they didn't succeed, what did they do? What foundation did they provide in terms of the tech, but also their method, their process? Are there imitable practices we can learn from their experiments, from their approach to data collection, to intellectual property management, all of that type of stuff?

Adam Furtado (09:03):

Yeah, that's great. And I think one of the things that stood out to me was certainly technology problems and physics, but it was also sort of like how they thought about problem solving and how they learned from one failure and tried to use different methods to try to fill some gaps, I guess, and learn. That was pretty interesting to me.

Dan Ward (09:28):

Right. Right. I'll jump into one of the stories from Lyft. This guy, Otto Lillenthal, a German engineer. And he was literally an engineer. That is, he made his fortune building engines. And he built steam engines and they were lighter and more powerful than anything else on the market. Was able to retire at like 40 or 41 on the millions that he had made from his engines. So he decides to build airplanes. And as we all know, an airplane requires what? A powerful lightweight engine. This is the thing that he has dedicated his career to building and he's the best in the world at it. And he realizes that the engine at that point in time, in the 1870s or so, was irrelevant, 1880s. That the next problem to solve was actually stability. You had to get the aircraft under control. And until you get that aircraft under control so that it's not like bopping all around, it doesn't matter how good your engine is, how powerful it is, how lightweight the engine is.

(10:27):

So he did a remarkable thing, remarkably humble thing. He began building gliders that didn't have engines so that he could solve the next puzzle or the next piece of the puzzle in line. And it's easier to manage stability and aircraft control if you're not going too fast, if you don't have an engine. And so he did these gliders. Interestingly, he did die in a glider crash and his death is what made Wilbur and Orville be like, "Oh, we want to do this now too." Which is a weird decision to make. This guy died in a plane crash and you're like, "Let's do that." But part of it was they realized he was on the right track in terms of solving the correct next problem. And they said, "Oh, that is the problem. We've got an idea for how to maintain stability and control." And that was their big breakthrough.

(11:19):

Once you got that done, now you can bring in engines. Now you can bring in the other pieces of the puzzle.

Adam Furtado (11:24):

It's sort of fascinating. Well, before he died, I guess. But it's sort of fascinating to know that there's a person who's an expert in a specific thing. And you mentioned humility. It's like, okay, we're good enough here. I got to figure out the other parts of this that make this system go and come together. And it makes me think about in our context as government leaders within these software programs, generally people get put into these kind of big program leadership roles and they're probably an expert in one of the things that's important to be successful, whether that's like an acquisitions professional who understands the far in and out or somebody who comes from the tech world. But generally, they're not experts at all of the things you need to know, whether that be compliance or software development or what have you. So I think it does speak to the humility you need as a leader to be able to understand what you're good at and where good enough is, but then be able to stretch yourself to go learn the other things that you may maybe gaps and may not look as good because you're learning in real time, all those sorts of things.

(12:31):

So I think it's kind of a pretty cool analogy even to the world that we're in.

Dan Ward (12:36):

Oh, absolutely. One of the big themes I think in chapter three in Lyft is that diverse teams are better at solving hard problems than homogenous teams are. And that the people who made the most progress are the ones who were not like the narrow subject matter experts. They had expertise for sure. But the people who made the most progress were the ones who worked with the broadest range of the most people across national borders, across specialties. And the more diversity we bring into our teams, the more effective we will be at solving hard problems. Because if you just get a bunch of FAR experts, then you're going to solve the FAR related problems, but you're going to miss the tech related problems. And you get a bunch of tech experts and then nobody can tell a story. You're going to solve tech problems really well, but you're going to have marketing problems and people will know who you are and what you do.

(13:26):

So building in a broad range of skill sets does require humility, like you said, because it requires us to acknowledge you have a skill that I don't have. And that is an important skill and I want it to be fully contributing and fully on display and fully valued. And for me to value a skill that I don't have, I mean, that's what the best leaders do, right? Is they value the skills that they themselves don't have because they know what they have and don't have. And they say, "Oh, you're better at that than me. Let's work together."

Adam Furtado (13:57):

Yeah. So I've always thought about, in thinking about the programming for Pudacity as an example, I've always thought about this idea of what do you need to know to be really effective as a software innovation leader in this space? And I always think of it in the context of like, what do I have in my satchel? So generally, I want to figure out how can we help people gain new skills, new tools to have in that satchel to be able to apply at any given time. Because if you're an acquisition leader and you're leading this program, cool, we may be able to solve the acquisition strategy problem. Maybe we found some kind of creative way to get on contract with the vendor we want or what have you. But then you're just like, then you have the next problem, which is like, okay, how do we deliver to production at the speed we want to and at the scale we want to?

(14:40):

How do we solve the ATO and compliance challenges that come with that? It's really hard to be an expert in all of those things. So there's just work you have to do to kind of chip away at knowing enough or knowing where you have resource gaps or were you going to bring people in and partner and all that sorts of stuff. And I think it speaks to just an understanding of problem solving at a system level that is not easy for everybody. But I think like Priyasi as an example, that's actually how we built the entire agenda. It's like, here are all the things and here are some resources and people. What you do with it's kind of up to you.

Dan Ward (15:13):

Right. I love that. I think one of the temptations of expertise, again, whether it's with FAR or tech or communications or marketing, pick your area of expertise, is to overprioritize that and overapply it. We've all probably heard Maslow's hammer. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. And that's a very common sort of problem or a pattern, an error in thinking. I have this great hammer. I'm really good at hammering things. And let me go try and cut that piece of wood into two parts with my terrific hammer. If you're going to try and cut a piece of wood in two parts, the hammer is not what you need. You need a saw. But I do have a bit of a twist on it. I call it Dan's corollary to Maslow's hammer. And that is, if you've never seen a hammer before, if you have no mental construct of the concept of hammer, then every nail is an unsolvable mystery.

(16:08):

I do not know how to solve this nail problem because I have no mental construct of a device that I would swing and convey some force to drive it down into the wood, which is the thing I'm hammering it into.

(16:21):

And so learning what your tool is, learning a variety of tools, kind of building up your whole toolkit so that when you approach the problem, is this a nail problem? Is this a one piece of wood that should be two pieces of wood problem? And then tapping into people like, all right, I know saws exist, but I'm not a good sawer. But Adam, you've got a terrific saw. Can you come in and do that cutting with me for me? Type approach.

Adam Furtado (16:44):

Maslow's hammer, same guy as the hierarchy of needs, the same dude? Same

Dan Ward (16:47):

Guy as the hierarchy of needs, right? Can you believe that guy came up with two things that entered the zeitgeist like that?

Adam Furtado (16:53):

Hierarchy needs

Dan Ward (16:54):

And the hammer?

Adam Furtado (16:55):

Third most famous hammer though, I think behind Maxwell's silver hammer. And Thor's probably a little bit more famous. But to have the third most famous hammer I think is pretty incredible. I love it. Yes. But I agree. People feel comfortable with the things they're good at. So that's the first thing. You going to have to break down that bias to be able to see the other opportunities in problem solving there. And you can't be experts at everything. You can't put 10,000 hours into eight different things. So there's sort of like real skill in being able to know that and attribute it and find ways to kind of solve those in different ways more creatively. It doesn't require expertise.

Dan Ward (17:39):

Right. And I think we've got to try a couple different things and sort of see there's what we're naturally good at. There's what we can learn to be good at. And there's the things that we try and we're like, "All right, I tried that a bunch of times. I'm not good at. Let me go bring somebody else in." But that does require, I like to sort of describe it as preparing for success. So one of my favorite stories from early aviation is this guy named Muyard. He was a Frenchman living in Algeria. And he had built basically like a, we would think of it like a hang glider, but instead of hanging below it, it was like wings sticking out from his waist. So you can picture this guy. He's afraid of people making fun of him. He says, "I did not want to expose myself to possible ridicule." So he's out on the back 40 of his farm.

(18:24):

Nobody knows where he is. Nobody can see him. Nobody can make fun of him. And he's got these two large wing structures sticking out from his waist with suspenders holding him on. And he's running and jumping. And he looks ridiculous, of course, because this isn't going to work. But he's walking along the sort of raised pathway over an irrigation ditch and he decides to take a running jump and jump over the ditch right at the point when the gust of wind picks him up and he begins to fly. And so I have here in front of me the book where he writes his experience, he's telling the story. As he's beginning to fly, he says, "Oh, the horrors." He's actually just terrified. "Once I crossed the ditch, my feet did not come to the earth. I was gliding on the air and making vain efforts to land from my airplane had set out on a cruise.

(19:13):

I was skimming along without the power, like one foot off the ground. "So he's zipping along. He calculated later about 11 miles an hour, a foot off the ground and just scared out of his mind. Because the thing that he designed, the thing that he built is suddenly working, but he hadn't thought through what if it works? Can I steer it? Can I control it? Would I be able to land it safely? Apparently these are not questions he had though through or had tried to answer. So as we think about success and failure and what can I do in my two years, what happens if you do happen to catch just that upcraft and you're zipping along? His fear was like, what if it gets me a little bit higher, a little more wind? Now I'm 10 feet off the ground. Now I crash, now I break my leg.

(19:57):

Nobody knows where I am. They won't find me. I can't walk with a broken leg back to civilization. So that's the terror, the horror.

Adam Furtado (20:09):

He did not intend for that thing to work. He

Dan Ward (20:14):

Did not. He did not. But my other favorite part of this story is when he did land, he broke one of the wings, but he was uninjured, thankfully. The next thing he did was he went back and he measured where he took off to where he crashed. It was 138 feet, which is 18 feet longer, 18 feet farther than the right's first flight. Yeah. It's a very engineering move to go from absolutely terrified to let me go collect some data.

Adam Furtado (20:40):

So he

Dan Ward (20:40):

Maybe didn't plan for success, but he's like, "All right, I'm going to measure this distance." And now we have that number.

Adam Furtado (20:48):

Right now, one of the things we're seeing internal to our company everywhere else, as we get better and better at vibe coding as an example, being able to create things, we're all falling into that same success chop where it's like, "Oh, this tool works for us now." Then it's like, "Oh shoot, we have to manage this now and figure out what does day two look like?" And all that sort of stuff. So there's a bit of a-Thinking

Dan Ward (21:09):

What does day two look like? That is such an important question. A related question is, what does it take to maintain this? I think as people like to come up with new ideas, innovators who are all about the next shiny new thing, we don't often ask that question, what would it take to maintain this? And I think that's an important question to ask on day one, hopefully before day two.

Adam Furtado (21:33):

I do wonder if you characterize yourself as an innovator as an example, you think about the first part of that. It's all about the experimentation and creating something new. It's like somebody else will solve the problem of this thing working and having to implement across real life or those sorts of things. And I think as the innovation part of things gets quicker and easier to do, at least technically, those roles are starting to blend together. And I think us innovators need to be thinking like operators and vice versa.

Dan Ward (22:10):

Totally, totally. So I do like to be real specific when I use the word innovation. What do I mean by it? Innovation is one of those words that gets used more often than it gets defined. A lot of people mean a lot of different things when they say that word. I actually found a research paper where some researcher went and counted 60 different distinct definitions of the word innovation in use in the literature and places. And some people think of innovation as an object or a process or a mindset or such a huge range. So when I say the word, what I mean by it is novelty with impact.

Adam Furtado (22:44):

Novelty

Dan Ward (22:45):

With impact. I like it because it's just three words. I can remember three words. I can't remember. Innovation is a process or a theory that if it's a long stacked synonyms, I can't keep that on my head. Novelty with impact, I can remember. I also like it because it's an accurate definition of innovation because innovation isn't just about introducing novelty. It's not just about making a new thing. It's about something different that makes a difference. And so for a lot of self-proclaimed innovators, I have so many ideas and I make a whole bunch of new cool stuff. But did they have an impact?

Adam Furtado (23:18):

Yeah, it's good.

Dan Ward (23:20):

And so getting clear about what is novel about what I'm introducing and what impact am I trying to have. Now I have a new technology that saves lives, a new process that saves time, a new X that does Y. If we can fill in the X and the Y. Yeah, it's both

Adam Furtado (23:34):

Those things. Now

Dan Ward (23:35):

We can have a meaningful conversation about innovation and it avoids us doing that. Innovation theater, innovation for innovation's sake would be like just the novelty, not the impact. Yeah.

Adam Furtado (23:45):

I mean, it's a good segue. I mean, we at Rizeta at Prudacity, our focus is on, we talk about mission outcomes in production. And it's sort of like if it's a mission outcome, it's in production obviously, but we want to say it purposely. So we want to be clear that just building the thing is irrelevant. It needs to be in a user environment where those things are actually being utilized and you can measure the impact and those sorts of things. But speaking of prudacity, would you mind walking us through a little bit of what are we going to hear from you next week? What is that talk shaping up to be like? Yeah.

Dan Ward (24:15):

Yeah. So next week, the title of my talk is Navigating Unchartered Territory in Innovation: Learning From the Past and Learning from the Futures. There's an S at the end of futures, so spoiler alert there. So we're going to talk about what are the lessons we can learn from the past, largely drawn from aviation pioneers in the late 1800s. And then we're going to talk about how do we navigate the ultimate unchartered territory, which is the future. So I say the future is surprising. The future is unpredictable. But the fact that the future is surprising should not surprise us. We should expect to be surprised. There will be surprises, but the fact of the surprise is very predictable. And then we're talking about what can we do in the present? So we look at the past, look at the future, and then what are the moves that we have available to us now today in the present to make good decisions and to adopt productive strategies as we navigate into this unpredictable future.

(25:15):

So you get three two-word phrases, three two-word methods that people can begin applying immediately. Quick spoiler alert, they are study failure, build scenarios, collect signals. So if you want to know what any of those three, two-word phrases mean, you'll have to tune in. And there will also be juggling. I am a juggler and I'm going to be bringing my juggling clubs and we, I, we'll be doing some juggling on stage. It's going to be a fun presentation. There

Adam Furtado (25:43):

You go. There you go. Looking forward to it. All right, cool. We're going to wrap there for today's Mission OS Live. Dan, thank you so much for being here. Really fun conversation. Always loved talking to you and we're excited to see more of you next week in Nashville. If you want to learn more about Dan's work, we're going to drop a link in the comments to his website as well. So feel free to reach out to him. Go pick up his book Lyft or any other great books around innovation, particularly in government. And as you heard, Dan will be at Pradasia next week. It's happening August 25th to 27th in Nashville. You're not going to want to miss that. If you're part of a government software program, there's not another event like it. It's a place experts and practitioners who care about getting mission outcomes into production really come together to learn from the best in the fields and leave with the real playbook for navigating that uncertainty and uncharted terrain that Dan just mentioned that we're all working through.

(26:33):

So we'd love to see you there. The registration link will also be in the comments. And if you can't make it, the traveling won't work. We did open up a virtual option. We know that traveling for government folks is really hard this year. So we wanted to make sure people could still see all the great content. And we had an incredible demand for this. It's been really cool to see. So take a look at that. You can join in and watch the content next Tuesday and Wednesday live from your office, your house and that sort of thing. So love to see you there at least. With that, we will see you next time. Quick programming note, this is our last episode of season one. We're going to be back in the fall, probably mid-October with a new cast of characters that we're excited to kind of bring to our audience.

(27:12):

So hopefully we'll see you there. But thanks for tuning in today. And Dan, thanks again for joining us. Adam,

Dan Ward (27:16):

Thanks. This is the blast. Appreciate it. We'll see you in Nashville. See

Adam Furtado (27:19):

You soon.

Dan Ward (27:20):

Yep.

‍