Speed and Risk, Part 1: The Goldilocks Fairy Tale
Today we have Dr. Erin Ryan, a thought leader on how U.S. capability development should be restructured to keep pace with a changing space environment. This is the first in a series of three posts adapted from his excellent book Designing for Principles vs. Principled Design: Moving Beyond Systems Engineering to the Next Phase of DoD Capability Development. – Barbara Braun, Editor-In-Chief
Go Faster! (But not too fast.)?
There’s a lot of talk across the space community about the need to go faster. We’ve all heard it. And we all know the driving rationale. Adversary threats to U.S. space capabilities are mounting at a rapid pace. By most accounts, the U.S. is moving too slowly to stay ahead of these threats, thus imperiling our nation’s long-standing status as the preeminent space power.?
When you look at our competitors, large and small, one of the things you find they have in common is they’re moving very, very fast. And we are not.
—General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [1]
Further, given our country’s enormous dependence on space-based capabilities, the implication is that U.S. national security is at significant risk.
But risk is a funny thing. It’s kind of like “beauty” in that it’s largely in the eye of the beholder.??
For instance, there is undoubtedly risk in not moving fast enough; a creeping decline in national moxie might allow one or more adversaries to surpass U.S. space capabilities, which could result in dire economic and military consequences for the foreseeable future. Various strategy documents, defense posture statements, and commander’s edicts are replete with such warnings.
On the other hand, there may also be risk in moving too fast. Space missions are notoriously hard as it is; it takes time to deliver the exquisite capabilities that users have come to depend on. The act of accelerating capability development activities is likely to lead to more program failures, which may throttle innovation before it can take flight and actually slow us down more in the long run.
[I]f a new system failed the first time—which is generally to be expected, and sometimes is the goal, because you want to make something fail on purpose to see how far you can push it—it would make headlines, get lawmakers’ attention and result in an investigation. And if it failed a second time, also generally to be expected, the program could be canceled altogether.?
—General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?[2]
So there would seem to be risk in going too slow as well as going too fast. How do we reconcile these risks? Is there a way to go faster, but just not too fast? Perhaps a happy medium between the two extremes that represents a goldilocks solution? Something like this??
I sincerely hope this graphic didn’t fool you. This depiction of the problem is mostly nonsense. No, there isn’t a goldilocks region nestled happily between the equal poles of risk. This is a false dichotomy based on a prevailing but specious paradigm that propagates three detrimental myths:?
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If one or more of these myths ring true to you, that’s okay. That probably just means you’ve grown accustomed to a particular fairy tale about how speed and risk are related. Or it may be that you recognize an abiding truth: Most everyone says they’re willing to accept risks in order to go faster, but few are willing to tolerate the consequences.
Over this three-part blog post, however, I’d like to spin a different tale that paints a markedly different picture of the relationship between speed and risk. This picture looks more like the following:?
In this picture, the vast majority of programs already reside at or near the slowest part of the spectrum (and at the point of greatest risk), so there is ample opportunity to go faster even if the risks were actually symmetrical as depicted in the preceding graphic.?
Crucially, though, the risks are not symmetrical. Going back to the aphorism that few are willing to tolerate the consequences of failure … what if the consequences aren’t what we think they are? What if programs could be restructured so that they could go faster without increasing the risk of failure? And what if the restructuring also meant that program failure was no longer a big deal? And, most importantly, what if program failures—instead of jeopardizing the delivery of key capabilities—actually helped accelerate the overall pace of delivery?
This picture also suggests that moving faster generally reduces the risk of being surpassed by adversaries, no matter how fast we go. Most likely, at some breakneck level of speed, risk begins to increase again (that’s the reason for that little uptick toward the end of the curve). But that eventuality occupies a distant and imaginary Neverland that needn’t concern us today.??
Besides, most everyone agrees we should be going faster. It’s not like there’s a vocal contingent out there declaring that space programs ought to take longer. The question is how we go about doing this. How do we dispel the three myths that distort the true risk picture and provoke fear about the wrong things? How do we expose the fairy tale of the first picture and realize the reality of the second?
In part 2, we’ll take on this objective using a famous fable involving a race between a slow and fast participant. Spoiler alert: the moral of this fable is that the perceived negative consequences of going “too fast” are overblown and are, ultimately, not to be feared. Going faster has far lower overall risk as long as we fully commit to it. From a strategic perspective, nearly all of the downsides in this debate are associated with the slow-and-steady status quo.?
Reference
1. "A Conversation with General John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 21, 2020.
2. "Risk Aversion and Secrecy are Costing US Its Military Advantage, No. 2 General Says" Military Times, October 21, 2021.
Erin Ryan is a senior project leader in The Aerospace Corporation’s Engineering and Technology Group. He has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, a master’s degree in National Security Strategy from New Mexico State University, and a PhD in Systems Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology.
Getting It Right focuses on industry collaboration for mission success by sharing lessons learned, best practices, and engineering advances in response to the nation’s toughest challenges. It is published by the Aerospace Corporate Chief Engineer's Office.