Page 21 - Williams Foundation Integrated Force Design Seminar

Designing the Integrated Force: How to Define and Meet the Challenge?

There was a lot of resistance initially as the DIRC team pushed the group outside their comfort zone of a
traditional engineering approach, Professor Bucolo says.

“One of the really crucial things we did was we brought the stakeholders, the end users, into the room,” says
Wing Commander Reid. “We had an air traffic controller who told us about what it’s like on a dark and stormy
night, with zero visibility and a plane coming in with no ADS-B.

“We had a pilot who had a near-miss incident of less than 50 feet. He told us what went through his mind at that
particular time – including his three young children.

“We had the Chief Engineer talk to us about the complexities involved in trying to fit this capability into an
aircraft with little or no room to fit anything.

“Suddenly all of these tough engineers started to empathise and become design thinkers – and the solutions they
came up with were just incredible.”

On the last day of their week with the DIRC the group helped write the requirements for the Hawk 127 project –
Wing Commander Reid says such early, comprehensive and open supplier involvement in the requirement
definition phase of an acquisition is unheard of in Defence. The tender went out the following week, with 10 days
to respond.

“We had 16 responses but, more importantly, four of the companies said they wouldn’t respond because it was
not for them and that we had saved them over $2 million in bid costs,” he says.

On the face of it, this project was about building a ‘thing’ for an aircraft, he says. “But what I really care about is
the shift in thinking that’s happening.”
The Hawk 127 was an example of design thinking applied to a specific problem, Professor Bucolo says, but
design thinking is also being applied to big-picture strategy within the RAAF, showing the way for others.

Wing Commander Reid says defence forces around the world – like many businesses – realise that they can’t
sustain an advantage for long, that ‘transient’ advantage is the new normal.

“Our potential adversaries are moving at a pace that is unpredictable, with threats and capabilities increasing
rapidly,” he says.

“We develop a capability advantage, and it will last as long as we don’t deploy it. As soon as we deploy it the
advantage will be gone – which means we have to have the next capability advantage ready to go, and the next
one and the next one.
“To do that we need a system of systems, not just one thing. We need speed and capacity. And design thinking is
going to be at the forefront of that.”

https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/design-innovation-research-centre

The kind of partnership approach is crucial to any effort to effectively incorporate new technologies within an
open-ended approach to program or stream development envisaged within joint force design efforts for the
ADF.

At the Williams Foundation seminar on Joint Force Design, the kind of partnerships envisaged in shaping a
new acquisition approach was described by Air Commodore Leon Phillips, Director General Aerospace
Maritime, Training and Surveillance, looked at ways to reshape the acquisition and sustainment of the

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