Episode 01

Bryon Kroger (00:04):

I've been doing critical missions for 14 years. For the first seven, as an active duty intelligence officer, I supported everything from counter-terrorism to major theater war planning. And for all seven of those years, I was stuck using really terrible software. I want you to understand what I mean by terrible. I'm not talking about inconvenient software. I'm not talking about slow load times or a bad user interface, though we had plenty of that. I'm talking about software [00:00:30] that actively got in the way of the mission, software that was so counterintuitive, so prone to crashing, so fundamentally broken that it became an obstacle that we had to fight against, just like we fought against the enemy. I wasn't in a business where a slow app cost a sale or ate into margins. I was in an armed conflict where a slow app could cost a friendly asset or where a bug could mean a target gets away or worse, an innocent life is put at risk.

(00:57):

I saw missions fail, I saw needless mistakes [00:01:00] get made, and I saw people die. A defining moment for me was when the US forces struck Kunduz Hospital in Afghanistan on October 3rd, 2015. There were 105 patients and 140 staff members in the hospital from doctors without borders. The AC-130 gun strike lasted an hour. 42 people were killed, including 24 patients, 14 staff members, and four caretakers. 37 more people were injured. In the reports, the hospital said they provided coordinates to the Department of Defense [00:01:30] often and had done so as recently as September 29th. There's an official report that you can find online. What I'm going to give you is Bryon Kroger's opinion. I believe software played a huge role in what happened that day. Yes, many different people made many different mistakes and there was also fog of war at play. But we forget that software can solve a lot of these problems.

(01:51):

When we ask humans to do the near impossible and they fail, we never blame the software or the acquirers of the software or the lack of software. [00:02:00] Now, I can't say for sure that if we had fixed the software issues I saw that it would've prevented it, but I definitely believe it to be true. I went down a rabbit hole of looking into these issues. I found out the problem had been identified as a deficiency years prior. The deficiencies made it on contract and into a contractor's backlog. They had actually been fixed and those fixes were sitting on the shelf waiting to go through the risk management framework to get an authorization to operate. I believe the cost of delay was lives, [00:02:30] that our risk management process was actually just passing risk onto the field and getting people killed. I became obsessed. It wasn't just the Kunduz hospital incident.

(02:40):

Everywhere I looked, this was happening. What's worse is the cost that was and is still yet to come. The cost of being disrupted on the battlefield. We struggled to conduct mobile strikes in Afghanistan, a completely permissive environment. How are we going to defend the United States in a major armed conflict? After trying to solve this problem by engaging in the enterprise's [00:03:00] process for software modernization, I quickly realized I was going to have to do it myself. It was an arrogant and naive belief, but that's what fuels all founders. I decided to leave intelligence and applied for acquisitions, which in my opinion, I was leaving the coolest job in the military for one of the worst. Sorry for any acquirers that might be listening. But I pulled strings and I got assigned to the program management office for targeting software. And the day I arrived, I called DIU and told them my plan, [00:03:30] starting a chain of events that would lead me to co-founding Project Kessel Run.

(03:35):

We set out to hack the largest bureaucracy in the world and we did it. This wasn't a Skunkworks project in a garage. This was a 500 person organization with a quarter billion dollar budget operating inside the most complex command and control system on the planet. We were continuously delivering critical mission software that users actually loved in some of the highest compliance environments. It was a massive success, but it was an overwhelming and [00:04:00] brutal journey. We made tons of mistakes. The bureaucracy also came close to crushing us more times than I can count. And every single day was a fight for survival, a battle against the inertia, and against a culture that was allergic to change. When I left the Air Force, I founded my company, Rise8, with a single purpose to take every lesson, every scar, and every hard won victory from that fight and build a playbook, a system so that others wouldn't have to go through the same fires that we did so that the next [00:04:30] generation of change agents would have a map.

(04:32):

That system is Mission OS. Mission OS is a digital operating model, but it's more than that. It's more than a buzzword or digital transformation theater. It's philosophy. It's our answer to the warning that Mark Andreessen gave over a decade ago. Software is eating the world. If software is eating the world, then it's certainly eating the war and every other critical mission that our government faces. If the military is disrupted on the battlefield, for instance, [00:05:00] or if our critical services to citizens fail, we can't afford that. Transformation isn't a business strategy. It's a life and death imperative. And the core idea of Mission OS is simple. We exist to create critical outcomes in production. Let's break that down. Critical because the stakes are non-negotiable. Outcomes. Because we're not measuring activity, we're measuring changes in human behavior that lead to mission success. And in production. [00:05:30] Because if it's not in the hands of the end user, in their real environment, it's just a science project.

(05:36):

That phrase is everything. It's not about bits and bytes. It's about the people we serve, the soldier on the battlefield, the patient on the operating table, the family waiting for a disaster to be averted. What we do is measured in lives saved. Our job is to deliver for them in their hour of need. And that means we have to do more than just build good software. We have to build great teams. [00:06:00] We have to build a transformed culture that embraces an agile, process-driven, digital philosophy at every single level. So who is this for? This is for you. I'm talking to the digital change agent with a critical mission, to the person who stays late trying to make a broken process work, to the person who writes a script on their own time to automate a soul crushing task, to the person who sees the immense potential of their team being held back by decades of technical debt and bureaucratic [00:06:30] inertia.

(06:31):

The person inside the system who is frustrated, who sees the gap between what's possible and what's happening, and who is willing to relentlessly drive progress. I know you're out there. You're the reason I created this. You are a hero. Think of me as your guide on this journey. I'm going to be with you every step of the way as you build not just great software, but a great organization. And you'll be equipped with all the knowledge and skills so that your path forward doesn't end when this series [00:07:00] does. It's just getting started. So here's my promise to you. Over the next 16 episodes, I'm giving you everything. No secrets, no paywalls. This is the entire mission operating system for free. All I ask is that you use it for good, for real, for users in need. We'll cover every aspect of people, process, and technology.

(07:24):

In the people section, we'll talk about how to build a generative culture, how to affect and grow talent, [00:07:30] and how to create an environment where your best people want to stay. In process, we'll tackle the monsters of finance and acquisitions head on. We'll show you how to build lean governance models like the growth board and align the entire organization around measurable goals. And in the technology section, we'll show you how to build platforms that don't suck, how to create a secure path to production in high compliance environments and how to develop applications that your users and your mission demand. You'll have the knowledge to transform [00:08:00] how your organization builds and delivers software and the inspiration from the stories of people who have already done it. Transformation starts with the ability to learn, and the first way we build that capability is through continuous delivery. That's where we start.

(08:14):

The obstacle is the way, and we have to walk it. So the only question left is, are you ready to get ship done?