Talking about AFSO21

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Clark Staehle
  • 100th Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs
The Marauder sat down with Dr. Ron Ritter, Dr. Ron Ritter, Special Assistant for Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century to Michael W. Wynne, Secretary of the Air Force, and Deputy Director of the Air Force Smart Operations Office Dec. 5 to discuss AFSO21 and its affect on today's Airmen.

Marauder: What is AFSO 21?

Dr. Ritter: AFSO 21 for us as an Air Force is a program to help us all collectively improve our ability to develop Air Force operations. It's important in that context to understand that improving operational capability of the Air Force is something we have been doing ever since there was an Air Force.

We have been inventing new ways to build a better, faster, stronger Air Force for our entire history. Typically in the past, we have depended mostly on new aircraft, new technology, new people, new training new organizational structures which are all very, very important.

What (Michael W. Wynne, Secretary of the Air Force) would like to do is help bring the best process-improvement tools available in the world - available in the industry - to bear, so all our Airmen are even more capable then they were before in improving Air Force capability.

People often ask, "Well, how do I know I'm working on the right things? How do I know I'm running in the right direction?" Well we talked a lot about this concept of five north stars; five prime directions.

And at the end of the day, it's about improving the productivity of our most valued assets - our people.

It's about making our most critical assets - airframes, buildings, you know, physical things that we depend on - more available.

It's about increasing our agility and making ourselves more responsive. I don't care whether that's generating aircraft sorties more quickly than we did before or decreasing the time it takes to respond to a leadership query. Anything we can do to accelerate the ability to respond and react.

It's about improving and sustaining the safety and liability of our operations, both flight and workplace.

And then the final one is improving our energy efficiency. A lot of folks don't understand, but the Air Force's consumes almost 60 percent of the government's energy. So energy efficiency for us is an enormous opportunity and it's important for us to look for all abilities to improve operations, not just manpower but also energy.

What AFSO 21 is not: it is not some short-term reaction we're putting in place due to head-count or manpower reaction. We need to build this thing as a long-term, everlasting effort to strengthen the Air Force.

Marauder: So AFSO will never go away, it will become a way of life in the Air Force?

Dr. Ritter: Yes, and the only reason it ever goes away is if we stop talking about it because it becomes normal, if it becomes normal life for every Airman, every leader in the Air Force. Last week, for example, I was in Germany. We were out on the flightline with some NCOs and they were saying, "I'm not sure I understand this. I'm not sure I want to do it."
And I said, "Do you get up every Monday morning and figure out how to run this operation better?" and they said, "Yes sir, we do."
And I said, "That's what we're doing."

Every leader in this Air Force has the ability and the responsibility to understand how their operation performs, to identify ways to improve it, to implement those changes and to measure and ensure effect. It's as simple as that. We don't need to put any

Japanese-kind-of-Lean Toyota thinking into this, beyond the fact that it's about getting up in the morning and thinking about how to improve the capability of the operation.

Marauder: From a big-picture perspective, how has AFSO changed the way the Air Force does business?

Dr. Ritter: I think at a big picture level, it has got us focused on operational capability as a strategic element of managing the Air Force beyond training and aircraft and technology, but again, focusing on process improvement as a strategic capability for the Air Force. It is getting us increasingly focused on metrics and measuring and managing our performance. It has got us focused on the vital role that our front-line Airmen and our front-line leadership, both senior NCOs and junior officers play in running the Air Force.

It has got our senior leadership focused increasingly on understanding processes that we run in the Air Force, which is different than the organizational structure- so for example, thinking more about flying airplanes versus running a MAJCOM- less functional and more focused on the processes that we run here.

It also has senior leadership thinking a lot more about priorities and what areas are the most important for us to focus on. AFSO 21 is kind of interesting in that for this to succeed, the frontline Airmen and frontline leadership (and really to be honest, the bulk of this is enlisted) - they will be the ones to come up with the ideas and solutions, and many of them they have and have had in their heads for years. At the same time, it's also equally important to for our leadership to lead, to set direction, and to make clear what the most important desired effects are. What is more important - C-130 availability or C-17s?

How do we think about what's important in the medical community or on the flight line or in the case of fuel and energy, bringing that to our attention and saying, "Fuel and energy management are critical." So I think there're important roles for everybody at all levels here. At each part, we're all going to have our part in this to make this an effective program.

I think one thing we should be clear about: this Air Force has a fantastic culture. It is a very, very strong group of people who are great leaders, incredibly committed and very, very capable. To me, that's a big plus. That means we have wonderful people to work with who will really make this thing go.

One of the changes I think we'll have to go through is creating a culture where is not only acceptable, but it is very well rewarded to have people be willing to stand up and be candid about opportunities to improve. And to view it as a sign of strength, to say, "My process has broken. I have wasted my operation."

That's not a bad thing, that's actually a good thing. We want people to be open and transparent about ways to improve their operations. And another thing is getting our minds around the idea that efficiency is strength and power. When we talk about being more efficient, that's not weakening, shrinking and diminishing, that's making us stronger and more capable.

I also think that something we are focusing on that's important is productivity. Sometimes there's a tendency to think about productivity as shorthand for force reduction.

In fact, if you turn it on its head and say, "If people, if Airmen, are our most valuable asset," then we ought to measure how productive they are. We ought to pay close attention to it and when we design processes, we should design those processes so those Airmen have a fighting chance of coming to work and doing real work.

I think a lot of what we've go out there is a lot of great people in processes that guarantee they will spend most of their day not turning and wrench and flying an airplane, but walking in circles looking for a part, trying to get information, redoing things that weren't given with clear instruction. Nobody should feel that any of this is critical of anybody in the Air Force.

This is not about a people failure, this is about processes that were designed to be inefficient and need to be changed; that can be changed. It's a strange thing, because we talk a lot about "negative" things, like waste and walking around looking for parts. But in a sense, it's all good news because every time we see something like that, it's an opportunity for us to strengthen, to be stronger.

And actually the difficult day will be when we wake up some day and can't find that waste - that means we're no longer able to improve. I personally don't believe that will ever happen. The smarter we get, the better we get at seeing these things. We will always find more opportunities to improve what we do.

Marauder: What are the biggest challenges to incorporating AFSO 21 in day-to-day operations?

Dr. Ritter: I think there's a couple. One, it's relatively easy for us now to go to into an area and for the team that owns the area to identify a better process, a better way of doing things. It can be very, very difficult for us to sustain the performance gains we identify.

It's getting up Monday morning and saying, "OK, we did a redesign. We used to have a Ford; now we've got a Ferrari." It takes a lot of day-to-day leadership capability and a lot of persistence and dedication to running these operations to these new high standards that we have.

And I think we're probably underestimating right now how difficult that's going to be. None of this is easy and I don't think we should kid ourselves. I think another thing is building performance metrics and treating those not as ways to micromanage frontline teams, but as tools for frontline teams to manage themselves and drive performance gains in their operations so that they feel like they're really having a lasting effect.

It's not that hard to move the copier, but it's hard to say, "Did I really make a difference? Did I make ourselves more productive? Did I make some airplane more able to fly?" I think that's going to be difficult. I also honestly think that we would be naïve to think that exactly the same skill sets and exactly the same abilities and the exact same people, in some cases, that help us run this Air Force will be perfectly matched to the future.

We're going to change processes all over the place and I think it's going to change the skill sets and abilities that we need to run those new processes. So we are looking very hard at, for example, "How should we change (professional military education)? Does (Basic Military Training) need to be different?

Does the Senior NCO Academy, the Air War College, General Officers Training- how does that training need to be different in order to help develop a different set of skills in all of our Airmen to be able to run these new systems and to operate to a much higher standard going forward."

I also think we have a challenge to a program like this which is turnover in leadership, and we should be every honest with that. We have the secretary, we have four-stars, we have three-stars, we have chiefs, command chiefs. We have all kinds of important, valuable people with limited tenures in their current role.

There are a lot of good things about that, and we shouldn't try to change that, but we should be very thoughtful about that and think about how we're going to handle our changes in leadership because they are coming. One of the things we're trying to do is build these skill sets and capabilities into the entire Air Force so that whoever takes command or a leadership role is prepared to understand AFSO 21 and to do things that are consistent with going forward.

We're not communicating well enough right now. I had somebody last week who was a great guy, he was actually doing some fantastic work- never heard of AFSO 21. We walked in and we started asking some questions and he was very professional, very polite, and he said, "By the way, who are you guys- are you some kind of efficiency experts?" My answer was, "No, but you are."

I flew over here on a C-17 with a crew with fantastic pilots, very committed to what we're doing, but had never heard of AFSO 21 before. We need to do a better job of communication. We need to do a better job of sharing. We are still solving some of these problems 43 different times because to be honest, we're not communicating all around this huge and great Air Force.

We have cases where we have teams working on exactly the same problem in complete isolation from other teams that were trying to work on the same thing. We spent today with part of the RAF high command and there were things the RAF was working on that we are working on.

So we're also not even talking to a very close cousin to ourselves. We need to learn to how to do that better. It's nobody's fault, it's all good news. When we do learn how to do it, we'll go even faster.

Marauder: It's important to get that communication to everybody so you can get that buy-in.

Dr. Ritter: That's right- an understanding of what we're doing, why we're doing it, how everybody's doing it and what their role is.

Some of the things I've seen in USAFE are fantastic. There's so much to be proud of here. We have a long way to go and we understand that but there are some very, very bold actions being taken - on the maintenance side, on the base (operations) side, on the flight line - that are as innovative and progressive as anything anybody's doing anywhere.

We have absolutely proven this stuff works. And I didn't prove it, Brig. Gen. S. Taco Gilbert, III, AFSO 21 director, who's my counterpart, didn't prove it. The secretary didn't prove it. The Airmen proved this stuff works and it can make a major difference all over the Air Force. What we need to worry about now is not whether it works, but how to get more people doing it, faster and better and making sure when we do it, we get all the benefits from it so we can make good choices about how to keep our Air Force going forward.

Marauder: Sir, is there anything else you'd like to add?

Dr. Ritter: Two things. One, people aren't going to be on their own, taking initiatives, deciding how to do things and how to engage and be a part of AFSO 21. We know that because we have such a high commitment among all of the Airmen. What I say to them is, wherever you are, whatever process or operation you run- remember to think back to those five key points.

Is there a way for you to improve the productivity of your team, of your Airmen? Is there a way for you to make some high-value asset - an aircraft, a building, a computer - more available and more ready?

Is there a way to decrease a response time or increase our agility in some way? Is there a way to improve safety or there a way you can improve energy efficiency? If you remember one thing, do that.

The flip side of that is, what we not interested in is the number of AFSO 21 events you do, or how many people you've got trained. We know those things are important, but success is not doing an event.

Success is having an impact with demonstrated results and something you care about. And the cap stone to that is this should be in your interest, right? This is not for the secretary, this is not for the chief, this is not for the AFSO 21 office, this is for you.

So, run this program and do the things that matter to you. If finding a way to get a fighter of the ground is important to you as a wing commander, then focus on that. If finding a way to decrease vehicle-registration time is important, then focus on that.

But this is for you to improve the operations in the areas that you need and you see fit. We'll make the tools available, we'll support you, we'll create as much back-up as we can, but do this for the things you care about and the things you want to see improved.

I guess the corollary to that is on behalf of the secretary, our admiration, our respect and our thanks for the hard work that is being done. This will happen because Airmen do it and for no other reason than that.