Week 4 - Gordon Bennett - How to come up with a cunning plan!

How to come up a cunning plan and think differently! Or as Blackadder highlights below - start to question whether getting out out our trenches and walking towards the enemy very slowly - the same plan we used last time - and the 17 times before it! Is not a great idea.

I had the opportunity to sit down with the Canadian LCol and author of the book, Misfit Thinking: Using Design Thinking to Energize Innovation and Creativity - Dr. Gordon Bennett. He is an accomplished academic, but more importantly, he is an accomplished practitioner with great use-cases to leverage throughout the digital insurgency!

His cunning plan was fighting a fundamental issue that have been impacting the Canadian Armed Forces for decades. There are not enough instructors to run courses for the Canadian military. This causes two impacts:

The first is that the schools need to rely on incremental staff to come teach their courses. The burden is huge as more soldiers have to leave their families for three months to teach courses in Gagetown, NB (when they actually live in places like Edmonton, etc) then is required to support the mission in Ukraine. What I mean, is the Canadian military - tracked by task days - deploys more people from across the country from outside the Combat Training Center (CTC) to support it - than it deploys to Ukraine every year. Not surprisingly, the middle leadership (Sgt to senior Captain) do not want to be on task for three months away from their families. This makes it harder and harder to find support. CTC is also probably less than one third of the instructor incremental support as well, so imagine that there is almost as many people deployed to support individual courses as there is to support expeditionary operations.

The second is that a lack of instructors creates massive backlog. Sometimes more than a year. The students have to sit in holding pools awaiting training. A lot get out or lose motivation. When you are having a hard time recruiting, and you tell the recruit that they need to wait around on a base away from their family for one year, you have a hard time keeping them.

On top of all this, Gordon was grappling this fundamental problem during the COVID19 pandemic where infrastructure restrictions meant that you could only train 25% of the course in a building.

Gordon saw this problem and had used his Design Thinking to tackle it. Of course, as a great digital insurgent, he didn't go after the biggest problem with the biggest risk and challenge. Instead he found a digestible problem that he could prototype. He chose the Operational Procurement Contracting Course (OPC Course).

The course happens six times a year and requires three CJOC contracting officers to spend three weeks to teach the two week course. The course teaches 30 students with a total of 180 taught a year. All of the instructors and students have to do the course in Borden. This means the military has to pay for rooms, food and travel expenses to attend. It is hard to get instructors to be available and it is expensive to run. Gordon and his team chose modified blended training to solve the problem.

1. He got one of his internal officers to be the course subject matter expert to run the course. This saves a new CJOC team arriving one week before each course and having to relearn the instructional methods. He then worked out what he actually needed the CJOC staff to teach. It ended up being 90 minutes of instruction the first day and 90 minutes on the last day. They didn't even need to travel as the presentation could be done remotely. He reduced the burden on the CJOC instructors by 97.5%.
2. He reduced the work for the course officer as well. Instead of 'death by PowerPoint', he gave all the policy material to the students, and every three days they conducted simulated problem sets and case studies through distributed learning. This could be operationally focused. The students found the material more engaging and enjoyable.
3. The whole course could be done through distributed learning. This had never been considered, but as with most courses in the CAF, you do not have to sit in the classroom for the presentation or instruction. This meant that the students worked through engaging material online in their homes. With no room, food and travel expenses, there is approximately 92% cost reductions for the course.
4. Lastly, digital solutions and distributed learning allow you to scale, so Gordon had the flexibility to run the course more often and double the participation. 60 students could attend and he could run an adhoc course as required. He doubled the attendance on the course.

So to sum up quickly, on a small example - he reduced the burden on the operationally focused incremental staff by 97.5%, he improved the engagement, reduced the cost of the course by 92% and doubled the attendance. From there he gained momentum and continued to iterate. As he said, "there are two ways to kill the enemy, carpet bomb the enemy, or use precision guided munitions." He chose the targeted approach.

He had a targeted approach on reducing instructor support. He reduced his Phase 4 distance learning instructor cadre. He focused his field exercises significantly. He leveraged the textbooks and case studies to significantly reduce the instructor overhead on the Phase 3. This meant that the instructors only needed to be available for the classes they taught - about a 2/3 reduction - which improved instructor morale. Because instructors only had to be in Borden while they were teaching - for a reduced time - they volunteered to be instructors more!

Not all courses can do this - Gordon will be the first to acknowledge that there are courses that need physical training. But even there he quickly automated and found efficiencies using a digital tracking system. The driver certification used to follow a deliberate vehicle schedule where the number of vehicles were the limiting factor. Some vehicles were taught that are not even used anymore. He improved the round robin of vehicles, tested more on competency models (of prior learning) and was able to train significantly more vehicle types that the candidate would see in the unit.

I am only touching the surface of Gordon's work, but in three quick examples he was likely able to save the CAF 10,560 hours of work a year. That is roughly five full time positions. We should celebrate Gordon for leading the 10,000 unnecessary hours club. I would recommend introducing him to your own digital insurgency and find ways to think differently. Not all these solutions require more technology, they just need you to use technology differently. Ohh - last thing, but most importantly - 350-380 students waiting 8 months on average (mean) to about 30 waiting for 38 days.