LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va. –
The 1st Fighter Wing Commander called them fifth-generation Airmen. Men and women who fly, maintain and manage a fifth-generation aircraft. Aircraft with such a leap in technology, they require a completely new rule set.
"Fourth-generation thinking only gets us half way. We need fifth generation Airmen to take us over the line," said the commander.
With nearly 30 years in the fighter aircraft business, all I could think was, "What is this fella talking about?"
Historic moments are not accidents. Historic moments are outcomes of hard work from focused, dedicated and unyielding people. The 1st and 192nd Fighter Wings recently celebrated two historic moments in military aviation. In September 2010, the best Logistics Compliance Assessment Program inspection the Air Combat Command Logistics Standardization and Evaluation Team had seen in the last three years, and in April 2011, five "excellent" and five "outstanding" ratings were received from the Air Combat Command Inspector General; the best Phase One Operational Readiness Inspection result given to these fighter wings since the activation of Air Combat Command. Could these results be flukes?
The answer is "no." If you asked them to do it again today, the Airmen of these two aviation wings could repeat the feats, as well if not better than before. This is because on the journey to reach this level of performance, the men and women in these two wings metamorphosed. They became fifth-generation Airmen and they operate a learning organization; an organization that encounters new and difficult problems every day, and systematically works through them. But it was not always this way.
Fade back to 20 months ago...The wings were conducting Rapid Improvement Events and Eight Step Problem Solving events in some of the wings critical-value streams. There was positive improvement and typical change management challenges including difficulty in pulling teams together and maintaining the concentrated follow through needed for full effect.
What became evident was that in the flying wings, with their relentless ops tempo, taking a team out of the work center for up to a week to work on a value-stream-mapping and improvement event would stress the unit's daily mission, and become a scrutinized return-on-investment proposition.
It was not unusual to have "events" pushed to a less busy time, and then pushed again as new external demands emerged. The customer was politely telling us that fourth-generation process improvement was great, but they had overwhelming issues they were dealing with that took every man and woman available every single day. How could the AFSO21 Office help them without negatively impacting the accomplishment of the daily mission?
No one in the AFSO21 Office knew the answer and neither did their peers in the AFSO21 community. They quite literally had to perform multiple process-improvement cycles on themselves to find the answer.
They started at a strategic level and came to intimately understand the wing's current state. Based on the enduring mission, they conducted a full blown, strategic-planning meeting with leadership and developed three- to five-year goals and annual objectives. These became the wing's future state. The challenge was to identify the right obstacles along the path to the future state, tackle them and overcome them. This became the living action plan.
In the first year, as the wing worked through 10 major projects and juggled the same number of improvement activities every month, the AFSO21 Office became intimately aware the process was only one part of the improvement recipe. The other part was the human interaction with the process. That is, how the human operates and manages processes. The AFSO21 Office found that mentoring people to operate a high-performance process was a skill; one that our training had not prepared us for.
The Quest
The AFSO21 Office started studying. They studied organizational culture, consultation techniques and the genesis of "lean management." They studied how to coach, how people learn new skills, and how the Japanese masters applied their skills on the continuously moving shop floor of Toyota. As they learned, they tested applications of the new knowledge and slowly added additional layers of skill to their repertoire.
What emerged was a methodical way to apply all the elements of a Rapid Improvement Event and Eight-Step Problem Solving in the work center while the work was underway. They challenged the status quo with questions about process observations and in trying to answer, the Airmen's creativity ignited. The AFSO21 Office mentored managers and leaders in the art of observing problems first hand, and developing leading indicators to respond to what they observed in real time.
They began coaching individuals to run the cycle of improvement on a much smaller scale. In doing so, individuals were able to run them at a higher pace on problems as they arose. Nothing in the AFSO21 standing model was lost; it was all there, being applied in small rapid steps.
In hindsight, while it didn't feel like orchestrated improvement events, this is what the textbooks call "incremental improvement." It felt like the AFSO21 folks were part of the coaching staff, helping the team sharpen their tools and refine their techniques in addressing and solving problems during mission execution.
AFSO21 became the quiet undercurrent, unobtrusively moving anywhere leadership saw swirling eddies, and applying targeted mentoring that helped the river itself convert its eddies back into meaningful flow.
Leadership used AFSO21 terms in the form of questions to their Airmen. Individuals and teams throughout the wing independently sought to better understand problems and seek solutions. A pattern emerged; Take a step - Check results - Study the reasons they got those results- Hypothesize the next move - Take the next step - And check the results again. As improvements and understanding progressed, leadership fanned out across the continental U.S. to educate others on the uniqueness of the fifth-generation fighter, and on concepts of operations that were totally new and innovative.
Challenges
With the Logistics Compliance Assessment Program inspection fast approaching, dusty programs were discovered. At times it felt like the ops tempo, the Raptor learning, the looming ORI, and now attention to compliance, would be simply too much to do.
"How can we get it all done without 'blowing up' the units?" asked one commander. The answer was found in the first tenant of visual management: "What gets seen gets done."
Leadership sent out teams to dig into the smallest crevice of the organization to find compliance items that needed attention and report them up the chain. The items in need of attention became visible and got worked.
The return on the extra hours invested was the expansion of management awareness to include attention to compliance. To know exactly what the Air Force Instruction stated and pay attention to the finer details. The understanding of details set the stage for the next challenge; the ORI.
The impending ORI made everyone in the 1st & 192nd Fighter Wings dig deep and develop new competencies. The finer timing elements of the inspection forced a focus on efficiencies. The demands of the tasks dictated top-notch quality first time, every time. The Airmen acknowledged each problem as they arose, and the Airmen owned the solutions.
The switch gets thrown
The final metamorphosis occurred in a very public way. Practice of a major piece of the ORI scenario was underway; the last practice before "the big one." It had taken 18 months of relentless work maturing the process to this point, but something was wrong! Engines were running way too soon. The process was being performed out of sequence. Disaster!
Leadership sped out to the flight line to stop the carnage. They asked the production supervisor why he was out of sequence. What was he thinking?
"This is my generation and this sequence shaves hours off the process," the production super calmly answered back.
With that single sentence, the transformation of fifth-generation Airmen was complete. These Airmen publicly declared ownership of their processes. Confidently knowing there is no impossible scenario and that there is always a better way. They know how to seek it out, and they know how to communicate it.
Immediately following the ORI here, a maintenance team was dispatched to the next F-22 Raptor wing inline to receive an ORI. The team had only a few short weeks to coach the sister wing's maintenance group on the successful practices at the 1st & 192nd FW. That wing subsequently passed their ORI, demonstrating the success was tangible and replicable.
The coaches became the students
The LCAP and ORI results are independent evaluations which reflect the tireless efforts of the men and women that keep the Raptor ready at a moment's notice. They are forever fifth-generation Airmen. Along this nearly two-year journey, they taught as much as they learned. They taught the AFSO21 Office that they too must learn, improve and adapt to an ever-changing environment. With their heartfelt efforts the 1st and 192nd FW Airmen brought forth fifth-generation AFSO21.