What is Design Warfare
Changing the Air Force’s culture has to be a deliberate effort. Unfortunately, this change cannot be directed by leadership or arbitrarily provided by a company. These are only catalysts and require a network of empowered, motivated Airmen to actualize innovative ideas, processes and changes.
Through a Design Thinking curriculum, installations across the Department of the Air Force are seeing success at sparking an “A”irman innovation mindset. To assist in enabling an Innovative Culture across the Air Force. Local units, Wings, MAJCOMS, and Directorates offer to scale this model!
Project AllSpark is providing the academic foundation. However, the course should be considered an expert summit where every participant contributes to the Air Forces’ unified innovation culture. Participants then act as a catalyst to propagate the culture back at their home installations.
Design Warfare Goals
Objective:Teach teams of Airmen how to be intrapreneurs within their installations. Just like an entrepreneur founding a small business, intrapreneurs must be able to make thoroughly researched end-user-centric decisions. Design Warfare combines design thinking, Spark Cell operations, and project-based learning with problem curation.
End Result:
Motivated, open-minded Airmen will be given the knowledge and experience to be
their installation innovation leaders, effectively seeding the growth of culture amongst each base. These Airmen will seek more efficient and imaginative approaches to AF problems, aligning Airmen at each installation with Gen. Brown’s four Action Orders, executing on “Accelerate Change or Lose.” and delivering capabilities required to quickly and effectively operate in contested environments.
Students:
Design Warfare is a no-rank course; therefore, all ranks, from Airmen to Major, are
welcome. Highly motivated students may be asked to become mentors for future cohorts hosted at their own bases. Nominated members should be someone who has an innate ability to challenge the status quo, can be empowered to make a change, and will be in their wing for the foreseeable future. While in the course, students should be fully dedicated to the process to allow the sole focus on Design Warfare academics and Spark Cell responsibilities.
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THE RECOMMENDED DESIGN WARFARE READING LIST
Gives an outlet to apply all garnered knowledge in a formatted deliberate exercise. Great for demonstrating agile mindset and design thinking in new groups such as ALS, NCOA, FTAC, CGOC, or any peer group setting.
The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.
Why are Spark Cells/innovators important? Loonshots covers a brief history of innovative companies and defines different types of techniques utilized or miss-used
How and why project-based learning is an effective teaching tool. Through personal stories and hard-earned lessons from Summit’s exceptional team of educators and diverse students, Tavenner shares the Summit model’s learning philosophies and offers a blueprint for any parent who wants to stop worrying about their children’s future—and starts helping them prepare for it.
When innovation is properly utilized within the DOD. Displays struggles and success to empower members to answer Why they should innovate. The Kill Chain offers hope and, ultimately, insights on how America can apply advanced technologies to prevent war, deter aggression, and maintain peace.
Guidebook to creating a culture of innovation. Gives insight to future advocates, partners, hurtles, and builds buy-in. Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before being sure you have the right solution?
How to break stovepipes and create cross-functional teams. Understand the ‘Us vs. Them’ mindset. By giving small groups the freedom to experiment and share what they learn across the entire organization, teams can respond more quickly, communicate more freely, and make better and faster decisions.
Understand idea pitching and engaging with hard discussions to promote ideas. People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers had little in common, but they all started with WHY. They realized that people won’t truly buy into a product, service, movement, or idea until they understand its WHY.
Design thinking is not just applicable to so−called creative industries or people who work in the design field. It′s a methodology used by organizations such as Kaiser Permanente to increase the quality of patient care by re−examining how their nurses manage to shift change‚ or Kraft to rethink supply chain management. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization‚ product‚ or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.
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