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Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division is embracing
Navy leadership’s vision of strengthening its people through culture
change with high-velocity learning (HVL) as the tool to identify and
implement this change.
Dr. Tom Marino, an engineer with the
Corporate Business Office and Carderock’s HVL lead, has been holding
regular brown-bag meetings to educate the workforce on what HVL
means, how to use it and what it can help them achieve. He held the
third of these brown bags at Carderock’s West Bethesda, Maryland,
headquarters August 9, 2017.
“HVL really comes from Chief of
Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson; it’s an initiative he puts
forth in his Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority,” Marino
said to start the brief. “He has four primary objectives:
strengthening our naval power, strengthening our people,
strengthening our teams and strengthening our network of partners.
HVL is really about strengthening our people through culture change.
We do that by leveraging knowledge.”
Marino went over HVL
basics for first-time attendees and spoke about the four S’s of HVL:
see, swarm, share, sustain. He said the “see” part is about
detecting problems as they occur, identifying normalized
deviation–workarounds used in daily work that can lead to long-term
problems–and reporting those problems, as well as the solutions.
“HVL is not a template for solving problems, but for how we
report them, and that plays in with sharing, as well,” Marino said.
“Normalized deviation can kick the can of a problem down the road to
someone else separated by time and distance.”
Marino also
talked about swarming, saying it’s about applying resources quickly
to all available shareholders to prevent bias from entering a
process. He then introduced the brown bag’s first speaker and
Carderock’s director for unmanned vehicles and autonomous systems,
Reid McAllister. McAllister has been a Carderock employee for 32
years and is now seeing an idea he had back in 1991 come to fruition
through HVL today.
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August 9, 2017 - Reid McAllister, Naval Surface Warfare Center,
Carderock Division’s director of unmanned vehicles and autonomous
systems, discusses high-velocity learning during a brown bag at
Carderock’s West Bethesda, MD headquarters. Carderock and other
entities within Naval Sea Systems Command are holding regular
meetings like these to educate the workforce on this tool for
professional culture change championed by Chief of Naval Operations
Adm. John Richardson in the Design for Maritime Superiority that he
released in January 2016. (U.S. Navy photo by Edvin Hernandez)
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“It had everything to do with collaboration and how all
the Warfare Centers come together and focus,” McAllister
said. “I realized that Carderock Division does unmanned
systems, so do the Dahlgren and Panama City divisions. They
all have pockets of autonomy capability, but we’re not doing
it together. What we’re doing is absolutely duplication of
effort across all the Warfare Centers.
“I wanted to
put together a team that kind of addressed that and instead
of us duplicating each other’s efforts, we would bring the
right expertise from each of the Warfare Centers and we
would do this a lot cheaper, more effectively and
collaboratively.”
The
Unmanned Vehicle and Autonomous Systems (UVAS) Warfare
Center Working Group stood up in September 2015 with
representatives from all 10 Warfare Centers all swarming the
same problems. Since then, the UVAS Group has held weekly
phone conferences and periodic off-site meetings
incorporating younger engineers and seeing and swarming
problems together.
“What we’re trying to do is find
out where we should actually be going relative to unmanned
systems as an organization of all 10 Warfare Centers,”
McAllister said. “We’ll use some tools to ‘see’ the problem.
One is a SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats. Then we drop into that swarm mode
where we start centering on concepts and ideas and how to
move forward organizationally to solve problems. We are on
the phone every week sharing our failures and successes,
providing awareness on upcoming events.
“As far as
‘sustain’ goes, what we are trying to do is go after the
culture. I’ve spoken to engineers at other Warfare Centers
who said they weren’t willing to work with Carderock before
we started doing this. Through relationship building,
negative perceptions are waning. I try to operate in total
transparency and I’m happy to report that two years in, it
is working and relationships are getting stronger. Operating
transparently can be a pain and it has its costs, but it
certainly has greater benefits than operating alone. I think
it’s better for the warfighter and that’s the most important
thing.”
Jonathan Hopkins heads up a similar
organization, Carderock’s Additive Manufacturing Warfare
Center (AMWC) Working Group. He said this group is looking
at different ways to build quality, usable structures for
the Department of the Navy that deliver on the promise of
unmanned projects like the Optionally Manned Technology
Demonstrator, a 30-foot proof-of-concept hull that is
modeled after today’s SEAL Delivery Vehicle, but cannot yet
operate in the water.
“We’ve helped grow this working
group into an executive committee that brings in the Marine
Corps and everyone across the naval enterprise to align our
efforts and make sure everything is building toward enabling
this technology as quickly and safely as possible within the
fleet,” said Hopkins, a mechanical engineer who also
oversees Carderock’s Additive Manufacturing Project Office.
“My team is collaborating with industry and academia, as
well as with Dr. Joe Teter, Carderock’s technology transfer
director, to develop cooperative research and development
agreements with different companies. There are constantly
announcements about new processes in additive manufacturing
(AM) and we want to make sure we are making the right
investments across the Navy, but that we are also abreast of
the newest developments so when we are called on, we can
make informed recommendations on how to move forward with
the technology.”
Hopkins said AM software is maturing
to better understand the intricacies of the processes
involved in 3-D printing and the working group is doing
research to build on these advances. He called collaboration
with partners like Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the
other members of the working group key to Carderock and the
Navy using this technology to its full potential. He also
talked about Carderock’s Manufacturing, Knowledge and
Education (MAKE) Laboratory, a facility that inspires
creativity and innovation by offering training to all
employees in this enabling technology, including those
unfamiliar with the 3-D process, and encouraging knowledge
sharing among employees.
Hopkins and McAllister
agreed that all federal employees and contractors can
benefit from HVL, not just those at Carderock and NAVSEA.
They hope to continue to sustain the knowledge sharing
fostered by their working groups and believe these groups
are a good model for others to emulate in building
relationships through HVL. The next HVL brief (date to be
announced) at Carderock will discuss iNFUSION and its
applications for HVL, according to Marino.
By U.S. Navy Dustin Q. Diaz, Naval Surface Warfare Center,
Carderock Division
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2017
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