Many of you have heard John Carney talk about performance acceleration, and Carney's goal of applying this principle not only to individual performance, but the performance of teams and teams of teams (an enterprise). Much of our current work is focused on accelerating individual performance, by developing training programs, simulations, games, and related products designed to greatly reduce the time needed to achieve an individual's desired proficiency at specified tasks or jobs. However, an increasing proportion of our planning and business development efforts is being focused on expanding our ability to conduct organizational interventions and design solutions that will greatly accelerate the performance of teams and even entire organizations. We are working to acquire contract vehicles, win project work, and hire employees which will allow Carney to provide our clients with solutions involving workforce planning, business process re-engineering, change management, teambuilding, and many other interventions.
Understanding this vision of our future may, at first glance, be difficult. I've tried to explain it to some of you in various forums over the last couple of months, and you have asked a number of excellent questions along the way. Why does Carney want to offer these other solutions? What does it have to do with my current work? How will what I do fit into Carney's future plans and work? What does it mean for my future at Carney? I've tried to answer these questions as best I could, and I've probably met with uneven success. But because I think the answers represent very good news for virtually all Carney employees, I've continued to think about how I can answer these questions in a clearer manner. And last Sunday morning at about 2:00 am, I think I found a better way.
About that time, my dog Quincy was out in the back yard (doggie door) barking at who knows what. After calling him in, I had trouble falling back asleep so I laid in bed flipping through the cable channels. I came across an old war movie called Twelve O'Clock High (1949) starring Gregory Peck as an Army Air Force general in charge of a squadron of B-17 bombers conducting dangerous daylight bombing raids over Nazi-occupied France and Germany during World War Two. (Yes, the Air Force was part of the Army until after the war) I'd recommend it even though it was made before most of your parents were born, and it got me thinking.
My Father was a bomber crew member during World War Two so I know a little bit about the context of Twelve O'Clock High. A typical squadron of bombers during that time was comprised of between 50 and 100 B-17s. The actual number varied widely because these planes were shot down a lot. Replacement crews and planes came in all the time in order to keep up with the heavy losses. Several squadrons would contribute bombers to a given raid against the Germans. They flew in a very tight defensive formation so that German fighters couldn't isolate individual bombers and easily shoot them down.
A B-17 bomber had a crew of ten. Collectively, crew members functioned as a combat team. The combat team consisted of a pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, radio operator, and four gunners. The pilot also functioned as the aircraft commander and carefully managed all aspects of mission preparation and conduct. In addition to acting as a member of the combat team, each crew member had specific job duties that were critical to accomplishing the mission of putting bombs on a ground target and destroying it. Individual recruits were carefully tested and screened for specific aptitudes and skills before being assigned to a crew position. All crew members were carefully trained before being assigned to a combat team.
Starting to sound familiar? It took the effective performance of crew members (individuals), B-17 crews (teams), and squadrons (teams of B-17 crews) to successfully accomplish an assigned mission. To achieve this effective performance, crew members had to be carefully recruited and selected, and they had to be carefully trained to perform the job duties of their assigned position. Then crews had to be assembled and taught to perform effectively as a combat team. They had to be aware of what the other crew members were doing and why, and they had to communicate effectively with each other. Conflict between crew members often had to be resolved. Then B-17 crews had to be assembled into squadrons. These squadrons had to conduct workforce planning to make sure that all available bombers had complete crews, and succession planning had to be done on an ongoing basis to replace planes and crews as they became casualties (In Federal agencies, succession planning refers to having a plan to replace key employees or skill sets lost through employees retiring or taking new jobs). Business processes had to be devised to guide the planning and conduct of missions. And strategic planning had to be done to ensure that adequate planes, crews, facilities, and supplies were in the right place at the right time to win the air war (and we did win after all).
The point I'm trying to make is that Carney, in the future, doesn't just want to develop and deliver training for the bomber crews. We definitely want to always be in training business for sure, but not just the training business. Carney, going forward, wants to be able to provide the squadron (Federal agency) with all of the solutions required to make it successful and to accomplish its missions. We want to provide solutions that accelerate performance at all levels of the enterprise. Doing so will make us stronger as a company, even more indispensible to our clients, and create growth opportunities for all of our employees. I think that's a pretty good start to answering your questions. What do you think? (More to follow)