Episode 15

Bryon Kroger (00:05):

We're coming to the end of our Mission O/S journey. So far, we've built the system for continuous delivery. We've mapped their strategic landscape, and we've established a scientific process for iterative learning and for alignment. We have the what and the how, but none of it, not the best platform, not the most brilliant strategy. None of it matters without the who to bring it to life. The ultimate success or failure [00:00:30] will come down to this one thing: your people. This is the episode where we talk about building the team that can power your transformation. In a traditional enterprise, managing people is a delegated function. It's outsourced to the human resources department. Leaders are just passive recipients of talent and they receive a team and instruction to manage it. This is a fatal flaw. In a high performing digital organization, people operations is a core [00:01:00] leadership competency.

(01:02):

It's not something that you can delegate. The transformation leader has to be the organization's chief talent officer. You have to be obsessed with attracting, growing, and retaining the high performing, cross-functional talent that's the foundation of your balanced teams. We introduced this as a component of the second leadership pillar: operations. Now we're going to go a bit deeper on the people operations. You cannot ship outcomes and create mission [00:01:30] impact with a B team. This work is just too **** hard. The reality of the modern talent market is that in creative work, the top 10% of engineers, designers, product managers, they're not 10% better than average. They're 10 times better than average. They're like complete force multipliers, as they say in the military. And they have a choice about where they work. They won't choose to work in a soul crushing bureaucracy with outdated tools in a super vague vision [00:02:00] and mission.

(02:01):

So your first job as a leader is to build an organization that draws that kind of talent. How do you do that? You do it by deliberately shaping the employee experience. We talked about the transformation flywheel in an earlier episode with its three interconnected components. The employee experience, the customer experience, and the shareholder experience. While the first push is most likely to begin with a customer win, especially when teams are under-resourced [00:02:30] or starting from zero, the employee experience fuels the flywheel in the long term. So when you're starting, and most aspects of the employee experience are admittedly terrible, you have to market to a niche group of people. On the diffusion of innovation curve, these are to the left of even early adopters, right? They're the innovators. And what does that mean in this context? Well, first, they can buy into this idea that we've spent the last 14 episodes talking about without ever [00:03:00] actually seeing anything.

(03:02):

They're the true believers. And what's more, they're actually looking for the experience of fighting their way from point A to point B. In other words, many aspects of that admittedly terrible current state, that makes it fun for them. It's ironically a good experience for them, not for everyone. And they thrive on making positive change and fighting their way through that. But they have to be aligned on what the change is. So last and [00:03:30] most importantly, they are mission obsessed. The bad news is that there aren't many of them. And a lot of people say they want those things, but they're complaining by the end of the first week. So really choose wisely. Really interview people deeply. And I would say, tell them all the reasons why they shouldn't take the job. Tell them about all the bad parts. And that will allow people to self-select for this first stage.

(03:57):

With each turn of the flywheel though, you get [00:04:00] to move farther and farther to the right on the diffusion of innovation curve, which opens you up to more people. Eventually getting to early adopters, early majority, and even late majority. Those people will have less of the qualities I started with, and that's okay. As long as everyone is held accountable to the same standard of shipping outcomes and creating mission impact. If they're doing that, it doesn't matter how long it took them to believe or how early they were willing to join. [00:04:30] The Warfighter certainly doesn't care. Neither do our adversaries. The mission is agnostic. Impact and outcomes over everything. Let's talk a bit more about the employee experience though. A great employee experience enables a great customer experience, or said another way, the customer experience starts with the employee experience. So it's easy to say that ... I hear this in the military in particular...

(04:54):

It's easy to say everyone should just be mission obsessed and work out of a dump with bad lighting, no problem. [00:05:00] But that isn't reality, at least not one that scales. Happy, engaged, and empowered teams build valuable software that users love. And that's not a soft feel good statement. It's a hard economic reality. And so you have to reinvest the resources you get from creating that great customer experience and shareholder experience back into making the employee experience even better. And this is a virtuous cycle, right? This [00:05:30] reinvestment is what keeps the flywheel spinning. Employee experience driving customer success, which earns trust from leadership and unlocks resources to fuel your next phase. So what constitutes a great employee experience? It's not about beanbag chairs and free snacks and ping pong. It really boils down to three things. First is mission and purpose. The best people want to work on hard problems that matter.

(05:56):

And your job as a leader is to constantly connect their daily work, [00:06:00] the line of code they're writing or the user interview they're conducting, back to the big picture why. They need to see a clear line of sight from their keyboard to the mission impact. Second is a great work environment. This means giving them the tools they need to do their job without all the friction. It also means building the safety to learn that we talked about where they feel safe to run experiments. And it means ruthlessly eliminating the needless bureaucracy that drains their energy and sometimes insults their intelligence. [00:06:30] And third would be growth and mastery. Elite performers are driven by a desire to improve their craft, and you have to build an environment that fosters that learning continuously. This means dedicated time for learning, a culture of mentorship and pairing, and clear career paths that show that they have a future in your organization.

(06:54):

I once told Eric Schmidt and the entire Defense Innovation Board that there is no talent shortage [00:07:00] in federal government. Just a shortage of environments where government employees with a growth mindset can learn and thrive. But much like with the best products, the best workplaces don't always win. And that ties back into what is perhaps the most overlooked and misunderstood of the three pillars that we introduced: branding and marketing. And I know for many technical leaders in government, those words feel like dirty words. They loathe the branding, marketing, and sales [00:07:30] that get aimed at them. And to be fair, most of that is dirty, so I empathize, but it doesn't have to be that way. I will say that thinking that your digital transformation doesn't need or shouldn't engage in branding and marketing is a dangerous and self-defeating mindset. The hard truth is that if you don't control the narrative of your transformation, the bureaucracy will.

(07:54):

So in episode four, we talked about how perception becomes reality. And if the rest of the organization [00:08:00] perceives your team as rogue cowboys or an expensive science project, that's what you'll become. You'll be isolated, marginalized, and eventually you'll lose your funding. That applies internally as well. So internal or employer branding and marketing is the deliberate act of shaping how your transformation is perceived by your own employees, your leadership, and the talent that you want to attract. So why do we do this? There's three reasons. [00:08:30] First is to drive desired behaviors. You get the culture you celebrate. So when you publicly brand and market a failed experiment or one where the hypothesis was wrong, if you market that as a valuable learning opportunity, you're sending a really powerful signal about your cultural values. And when you brand and market a story of a team that went above and beyond for the user, you're reinforcing a culture of user centricity.

(08:57):

Second, we do this to attract the right talent. [00:09:00] You have to be the admired brand in the market that you're targeting, right? You have to build a brand that makes the best people inside your organization and outside of it say, "I want to work there." So Kessel Run's edgy rebellious brand was not an accident. It was a deliberate marketing strategy to attract the kind of talent who was tired of the status quo and wanted to be part of a rebellion. It's important though that you pay attention to audience segmentation here, right? At that point in time, we were [00:09:30] targeting those innovators. And then as we shifted to targeting some of the early adopters, that messaging had to change, including as you start scaling and you need early majority and late majority. And so pay attention to audience segmentation and also evolve as the organization does. And finally, the third reason is to fuel the flywheel.

(09:53):

You have to constantly market your successes to your shareholders. Every time your team delivers a win, you need to [00:10:00] package that story up with user testimonials, data, mission impact, and market it relentlessly up the chain of command. This is how you create the great shareholder experience that unlocks the resources you need to improve the employee experience and keep that flywheel spinning. And ultimately, this all comes down to one thing. The leader has to be the chief storyteller. The transformation is a story. It has heroes...your people [00:10:30] and some of your shareholders, hopefully. It has a villain, which is the bureaucracy and the status quo and the red tape. It has a really compelling plot. There's this critical mission that you're trying to enable, and it has your desired ending. Your vision. Your job is to tell that story over and over again with passion and with conviction.

(10:52):

You tell it to your team to give them purpose. You tell it to prospective candidates to inspire them to join, and you tell it to your leaders [00:11:00] to convince them to continue investing, including in the employee experience. This story becomes the invisible architecture of your culture, but it doesn't live in isolation. It's part of a much larger picture that connects your people to your mission and your mission to the value you deliver. In our final episode, we're going to bring that all together. We're going to show how every part of Mission O/S, every process, practice, every principle fits into a single unified system to build unstoppable [00:11:30] momentum.

(11:40):

So if you're a technical leader or working with one who is uncomfortable with this marketing and storytelling, I would say like anything, it's a skill that you're going to need to develop. You should develop it. But sometimes the reality is you've got to also develop a hundred other skills and you're prioritizing and [00:12:00] maybe based on where you are and where you need to get to, that's not the next most important thing. And so at a minimum, you have to find somebody in the organization, ideally at the leadership layer that can be that storyteller. Maybe it doesn't have to be the commander or the leader or the CEO, but it probably needs to be their right hand or left hand. But somebody in the organization needs to develop this skill and it's a skill like any other.

So the best thing you can do is just get started. Put out your first iteration, tell it internally to the leadership team, collect a bunch of feedback on it, iterate on it, release it to a small subset of the organization, the people that they're willing to give feedback and they're not going to [00:13:00] have that play into their employee experience. These would be like your true believers, your kind of like lower tier of leadership, and then just keep doing that over and over and over again. And one thing that's super underrated hack that I tell to everybody, no matter what kind of talking or speaking you're trying to do, is record yourself on a camera and watch it back. It can be super uncomfortable until you get used to it, but every talk that I give, I watch back and I write down my own feedback for myself.

(13:29):

And I find [00:13:30] that that's the most powerful way of iterating and improving on my messaging and how I speak. So I would offer that up to you as a hack, but there's just no substitute for getting the reps in, learning and iterating.

(13:51):

The first and simplest internal marketing action that you can take in the next week to start controlling the narrative around your team's work [00:14:00] is case studies. Take the work you're already doing... the great work that you're already doing and get crystal clear around the value narrative. Why is it valuable to who? And so you're going to identify a few different audiences there, and they might not always be as neatly aligned as you might like. So if you're building for an operation center, you've got a value narrative for the users, you've got a value narrative for the larger operation center and let's just say the commander that's [00:14:30] in charge of it, and then a value narrative for the program management office and all of their stakeholders. And then of course, you've got a value narrative for all of the people inside your organization that you have working on it.

(14:44):

Now, why do I call those all internal, even though some of those messages might also go external? It really helps the teams see the value they're creating, right? They can usually see the first order, the value they're creating for the user, but when they get to see the value they're creating for the larger [00:15:00] operation center and the bigger picture mission, as well as those program management folks and the people and acquisitions, it becomes much more compelling. And an added benefit of doing this is that once you start defining the value that you want to see, it helps teams align their ways of working to that. So when the teams see you celebrating those kind of value narratives, they're going to work way left. Before [00:15:30] they ever write their first line of code, when they're planning their next iteration, they're going to start doing it in the context of like, what's the value prop to these different people?

(15:39):

And so you get like this twofold benefit from it that's really great. You get something you can push internally and externally as well to really get people excited about what you're doing and you're already doing the work, so you just have to record it, you're just documenting. And then it also reinforces the ways of working that produce more and better [00:16:00] outcomes. And so it's a really great way to create a super virtuous cycle.

(16:08):

The Kessel Run brand was very rebellious and edgy and the story of how it was conceived is actually pretty straightforward and far less interesting than what I think the real story is, which is how we had to will it into existence against all odds. And so, the short version is that we had a really great culture and it was electric [00:16:30] and everybody really shared that culture. And so we crowdsourced the creation of the brand and ideas about the stories we would tell and how we would tell them. And then I kind of served as that chief storyteller along with Adam Furtado. And together we were able to move very quickly because we had an army of people helping create all of these stories. And then we were the filter that made sure it was cohesive and we were segmenting to the right audiences. And we didn't always get that right by the way.

(16:59):

There were plenty [00:17:00] of times we missed on both message and audience segmentation. So if you have some missteps along the way, just know that we did too. But as long as you're learning and moving in the right direction, it'll be good. But I think the interesting story here is how it was willed into existence. And so we started putting our brand on merch. We created these t-shirts, agileAF, which is hilarious in retrospect. I can't believe we ever got people in the Air Force [00:17:30] to think that was okay. We jokingly said that it stood for Air Force. And I think some of the, we'll say people of a certain generation might have not realized that it meant a different version of AF. But we had these hoodies and these t-shirts and coins and we really, we put it out on LinkedIn. Again, we created like product one pagers that were really crisp and beautiful and sent those to leaders.

(17:58):

We branded all of our slides that way. [00:18:00] But what you need to know is that Kessel Run wasn't actually an approved name. And in fact, in the acquisitions community, it was called the AOC Pathfinder, and that's what they wanted to call it, and they wanted us to call it that. And they were very upset when this internal, what they viewed as our internal thing that we could do whatever we want with, started becoming the outward facing narrative. Everybody in the community referred to it as Kestel Run [00:18:30] and leadership said, "Oh, this is creating confusion in the Pentagon because they call it AOC Pathfinder and it has to be tied to the AOC program office and congressional funding lines and everything else." And we said, "Easy enough. Kessel Run is the AOC Pathfinder, but we're calling it Kessel Run." And I actually got a phone call at one point from a senior leader and they told me flat out, "You've got to shut this down.

(18:57):

I don't want to see any more hoodies or stickers or LinkedIn posts." [00:19:00] And we at that point had just ordered, I think, 150 sweatshirts and t-shirts and a whole bunch of other stuff and had them stocked in our office. And so maybe one of the only times in my career that I've been just outright [in]subordinate, we just kept doing it anyways. And not only that, but we took it up a notch. We started trying to get our stories published in [00:19:30] commercial publications. And shortly after this, we had gotten published in Fast Company, which is like a big deal for a government program to be featured in Fast Company. And there were many others too, but that was probably like the big one. And at that point, there was nobody that could put the cat back in the bag. And so we achieved escape velocity. And I think back to that moment a lot, because again, it was like a bit insubordinate and [00:20:00] I feel like if I hadn't done that, we would have never escaped the bureaucracy.

(20:07):

And so for right or wrong, at the end of the day, you're marketing and branding, your whole reason for doing it is to get yourself outside of the bureaucracy's narrative of you. And that means at some point the bureaucracy is going to come for you. They're going to tell you, "Shut up, stop. You're not allowed to say that. You're not allowed to call yourself that, and you'll have to make a decision. [00:20:30] Do you want to be somebody or do you want to do something?" And I chose the latter. I didn't care what it meant for me or my career. I knew the only way we were going to be successful is if we took control of the narrative and I knew that meant I had to do things that might get me fired, might not make me the favorite of my superiors, but you do it anyways.

(20:51):

This is John Boyd's famous roll call.. to be to do... and we came to that fork in the road and I don't regret the decision at all. I don't think we would exist today if we [00:21:00] had not made that decision.

‍