From the Crows' Nest

Ken Miller (00:09):
Welcome to From the Crows' Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening. In today's episode, I sit down with Mr. Michael Madrid, he's the Executive Director of the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum, or DEF. It's a national nonprofit organization that convenes events for just partnerships and delivers tangible solutions in order to promote a culture of change and innovation in national security. Michael, it's great to have you in From the Crows' Nest. Thanks for joining me.

Michael Madrid (00:39):
Thanks, Ken. It's great to be here.

Ken Miller (00:40):
We recently were talking and I was very intrigued by the mission of DEF and largely because a lot of our conversations here in electronic warfare, electromagnetic warfare community, when we're talking about future war fighting, comes down to innovation and that's really what you specialize in. I wanted to have you on the show to tell us a little bit about your organization and then how you hope to change the culture in DOD.

Michael Madrid (01:02):
Absolutely. And before we get started, your listeners know the drill, but I'll do a quick disclaimer because I actually still am active duty Navy, but the views expressed here are my own and do not reflect the Department of Defense or the Navy, my time with DEF and service, the organizations, definitely in a personal capacity. So with that out of the way, the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum started very much as a grassroots type of movement and network. Back in 2013, there was a group of junior to mid-career professionals in national security, many of them active duty service members who are frustrated with the status quo, who believed there needed to be a fresh wave of innovation and more disruptive thinking. One of those was Ben Coleman, who was a Navy F-18 pilot and a mentor of mine from a summer internship because I was still a midshipman at the Naval Academy in 2013.

Michael Madrid (01:46):
And he and this other group of founders put together a conference in Chicago in October. And he told me I needed to come out for it so I may or may not have snuck out of Annapolis for the weekend, flew to Chicago for this event. And this group of folks, they put it together, never having met each other in person, largely by organizing online on social media, by writing blog posts. Ben published an article that made the rounds called the Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers in the Small Wars Journal that fueled a lot of this initial movement. And so when they met up in Chicago to pull off this conference, they didn't know if anybody was going to come, but it turns out there were over a hundred people. It turns out there were a lot of people who felt galvanized by this mission, who wanted to have outsized impact and contribute to new technology, to new innovation, to new culture change.

Michael Madrid (02:29):
And the organization has just grown exponentially pretty much since then and incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in 2015. I actually put together the first DEFx or regional conference in 2014, but then I went overseas for four years, two years on a ship in Japan and then two years on a ship based in Rota, Spain. So in that time, I tried to do some local efforts at those bases, but really just kept in touch with the organization. Through the people I've met and the relationships, they quickly became very fast friendships and mentorships.

Ken Miller (02:54):
And you can see kind of from the start how the recognition for this movement was already in the minds and hearts of a lot of people. It just needed to kind of that forcing function to start to bring people together in kind of a different capacity than what they might have had access to previously through their normal channels in DOD or military services.

Michael Madrid (03:11):
I think that's exactly right. And we've seen that proven again and again over the years, which I think is one of the reasons DEF is still around and as vibrant as it is today. It brings together people who may be in very different stovepipes or very different organizations, but are fueled by a common passion and a common mission. And that I think is the majority of the magic of the community, because these people are coming from such different backgrounds and mixing together.

Ken Miller (03:33):
You have a tagline of inspire, connect and empower. And I really liked that because it kind of creates almost like a circle because obviously, one leads to the other. But when you start to empower people, you actually then end up inspiring more people. And there's that cycle of growth that starts to spread around the defense community.

Michael Madrid (03:52):
Yeah. That's absolutely right. And empower is a really important piece of that to me because we're an action-based community. One of our core values is to have a bias for action. So at the end of the day, we don't want it to just be events and conversations and discussions. We want people to go out there and put action to their words and be able to experiment, be able to try and build minimum viable prototypes, to be able to collaborate with each other to produce new outcomes. That's definitely an important piece to us.

Ken Miller (04:19):
I want to get back just to that idea of bringing people together and really leveraging the expertise, not just that resides in the Pentagon, but also in commercial sector, even across all types of commercial sectors, whether it's telecom or healthcare or energy, there's things that we can learn and bring into DOD, into the DOD culture that can help us be better innovators across the board.

Michael Madrid (04:45):
I wholeheartedly agree with that. I'm in radical agreement. Yeah. Cross-pollination is definitely one of the ways we go about that. And I think one of the unique benefits or values of our community specifically is how wide ranging the membership is. At any given event or at any given moment of interaction, you'll have people from the private and the public sector, from the military services or the civilian services and contractors to those people in the private sector who are at startups, medium-sized companies to the big primes. You have people from academia, from other nonprofits, from all these different walks of life. Originally, and still to this day, a lot of the focus of entrepreneurship in our name and in our discussions is about taking that mindset, that set of values, that set of business practices and bringing that into the world's largest bureaucracy and seeing what we can learn from it and also vice versa.

Ken Miller (05:38):
You mentioned earlier about the DOD bureaucracy and one of the kind of the fundamental attributes of any bureaucracy, but it's especially relevant or prevalent in DOD is this notion of, or this avoidance of risk. When you look at the modern battlespace, what you need to do to win in the next conflict. You need speed, you need to connectivity, you need agility and you need to do that faster than you've ever been able to do it before. Obviously, the threat is constantly changing. From an electromagnetic spectrum perspective, it's a complex and congested environment that every day we have to rethink how to get an advantage in at the time and place and for the duration that we need. So this requires risk. So from your organization, how do you begin to address this? And then from that, how do you allow that risk to lead to the next capability that we need in the field tomorrow?

Michael Madrid (06:42):
And as we dive into this, I should give due credit to the balance that exists. Bureaucracy was developed initially for a reason and has its necessary attributes. So I'm a bureaucracy hacker, and I may not feel like I thrive in a bureaucracy, but I also understand when and where it's necessary. And so when you apply that to risk, there's obviously risk and situations of failure that we cannot tolerate and that we should not tolerate, but the differentiation there is key. I think there is risk that we should take on that we can manage. And we should also be cognizant of the risk of not innovating or the risk of not embracing new technologies and new strategies.

Michael Madrid (07:17):
Entrepreneurs deal with risks all the time. And they manage that by iterating, by failing, all the phrases that we're familiar with now, failing fast, failing forward, failing often, and most importantly, learning from those things, and building minimum viable prototypes before you invest endless amounts of time and resources into something so that you can learn and adjust while it's still in the early phases. Those are some of the lessons of entrepreneurship that the people of DEF want to make part of our organization's or the DOD's organizational DNA.

Ken Miller (07:50):
When you talk about risk, I think that we oftentimes talk about risk with prototypes, technology development, experimentation. There's a cascading effect to how it affects other capabilities in development, other technologies. And I feel like sometimes the bureaucracy for good or ill starts to contain that. And so you get these pockets of bright spots, but it's not necessarily contagious throughout the wider bureaucracy. So what is the next step? So when you start to accept this, when you start to experiment, when you start to innovate, how do you take that next step to kind of bring into that contagious aspect of innovation, where it catches on in other areas?

Michael Madrid (08:32):
Yeah, many of our members have many opinions and very strong theories on this, which leads to really engaging discussions. I appreciate that you brought up pockets and sort of this idea of isolated cells in which innovation might occur, but then the struggle to really transition that into the broader culture and the broader organization. And I think if you look, if you take a step back and you look at the last eight years that DEF has been around and what the national security ecosystem was like when it started versus what it is today, you see definitely a large trend of innovation. And in the early days of DEF, they referred to it a lot as disruptive thinking, but I'll say innovation has definitely caught on, right? Everybody now wants to do innovation, talks about innovation, recognizes the need for it. The word is honestly a bit cliched and hard to hear sometimes.

Michael Madrid (09:19):
And sometimes a lot of that innovation can be personality driven, which is great and necessary, but sometimes insufficient. If it's just a single personality in a leadership role who champions it, who creates something new, but then that organization struggles to remain viable in the long run, whether it's for resources or legitimacy after that personality moves on. And this happens in all industries and all sectors. And again, just this idea of innovation is something that happens in that cell, that group of people over there on the other floor. They're the ones doing innovation, keep it over there and stay out of my way. I think we still have a little bit, or maybe a lot of that, that we need to overcome, and so DEF's mission statement of being to promote a culture of innovation. When we say that we're thinking of generational culture change across the whole organization, something that will take and then lasts much longer than any of us on the volunteer team for example.

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Ken Miller (11:28):
You mentioned the role of personality sometimes in advancing innovation, at least sometimes that creates a spike in the short term where things move forward, but it doesn't necessarily have longevity to that change. And so I want to talk a little bit about leadership, the role of leadership, because we talk about having people in the right positions, but we also have to have those positions crafted in such ways, so that leaders can come and go. Particularly in DOD, where you change in and out every couple years, you need the position itself to be a leadership role that allows the personality in office to take ownership of the problem while they're there. So can you talk a little bit about what your views are in terms of how do you strengthen leadership in DOD so that people in various positions can take ownership of a problem and really push for change that is long lasting and has an enduring impact on the development of new technology?

Michael Madrid (12:27):
Well, I think two things come to mind when you ask that question. One is it's, I believe, in a whole of enterprise approach because we do have great leaders and we do have champions of innovation, champions of change and many of them are champions of DEF and DEF members. But you need, I think, a whole of enterprise approach and I'm certainly speaking for many folks when I think, when I say we've witnessed senior leadership supporting an initiative or supporting a change or supporting a mindset and then that not ripple throughout the whole of the organization. And so you can have junior folks receive, as we would say, top cover from a senior leader, let's say to go do a project, to go make a prototype, or to go experiment with something.

Michael Madrid (13:09):
And you can still see that die on the vine. Even if they have 2, 3, 4 star coverage, sometimes it still dies on the vine because there are so many layers to our organizations and we're not really bought in as a whole of enterprise on the importance of this innovation or the importance of letting people stray off the golden path, for example. And that brings me to the second thought of your question that when we think about people's careers in the military or in the services, in a lot of cases, there are golden paths where there are things that they are supposed to do and not do. And we still see many folks who've been involved in innovation, end up where their careers ended or stalled, and they might go and serve at Kessel Run, for example, and then that was their terminal tour and what a shame that is.

Michael Madrid (13:55):
So when you think about culture and you think about being systems and norms that drive behavior, the things that really drive your behavior, in my opinion, are not the words on the motivational poster in the conference room and on the wall. It's the incentives and the disincentives and the processes you use every day. And so we have to protect and promote and value the leaders and not just leaders, the people in the organization who care about innovation, who are willing to be brave, and to try to do something different. We need to protect that instead of betray that.

Ken Miller (14:26):
Yeah. And with protecting people, there was a hearing back in April before the Senate Armed Services Committee. And one of the witnesses was Dr. Adam Grant. He talked extensively about this notion of a culture in DOD and he said that DOD is culture is a threat to national security, but really... Which was a bold statement. Obviously, it got a lot of people's attention, but his underlying point was there's this role of people at all different levels and the role that these people play both to, as they try to advance their career, as they try to find their place in these new agents, in these agencies that can allow them to push new ideas up through development, really tried to experiment. So what are some of the things that DOD can do today that can really help these people throughout DOD, throughout some of the other adjacent sectors to really take advantage of the opportunities in their professions in DOD to advance innovation?

Michael Madrid (15:31):
That was quite the bold statement, that testimony that you referenced. And I believe that Dr. Grant was... You're referring to a lot of his time on the Defense Innovation Board, which was... The executive director there is Joshua Marcuse, who's a DEF board member and long time champion. So it was definitely a striking statement. Could perhaps not be a better rallying cry for an organization dedicated to culture change in DOD, definitely galvanizes a lot of people in our community.

Ken Miller (15:55):
Obviously his point wasn't to offend or anything. It was a strong point that got people's attention that really kind of got to the heart of the issue between technology and people.

Michael Madrid (16:06):
Exactly. And you're so very right. This is a point I try to bring up often that when we talk about innovation, a lot of the time, people are thinking and referring to technology and to emerging technology and all of its different shapes and forms. And it really just comes back to the people. You really have to get the culture and the people portion of it right as well. And I think that is another thing that differentiates DEF from a lot of complimentary organizations and movements in the space, is our focus and emphasis, not just on the technology side of innovation, but on the people side and how important culture is.

Michael Madrid (16:38):
And so everything from diversity to psychological safety, to again, empowering people no matter where they are in the organization, if they have a good idea and they're willing to work hard, inculcating a culture of experimentation and learning, and changing a little bit how we think about failure and risk. A lot of the things we've already talked about just in the last 20 minutes, these are all meta themes that people in DEF believe in, that think about, write about, try to bring to their jobs every day.

Ken Miller (17:04):
So we were introduced this week, obviously, and in previous conversation. And so I think there's a natural alignment between AOC and DEF. And so we are working on a future event sometime here in July in person where we bring our organizations together a little bit and talk about innovation and talk about EMS superiority, and the role that that has. So I wanted... And these are called Drink and Thinks. So I want to kind of go ask you, it's great concept, but what are some of the things that DEF does to bring these people together from a programmatic perspective, these types of in-person events, as well as you have some online or virtual activities too to bring these people together?

Michael Madrid (17:46):
Yeah. So from a programmatic aspect, our community is organized locally into agoras, that's what we call our chapters. And it definitely is that historic reference and was also chosen back in the day to kind of convey this sense of people not just coming together, but also again, the sense of action and this theme of coming together to exchange ideas and to do things and accomplish things together. There was definitely supposed to be this element of action and vitality to it. So thousands of members all over the country organized into these different agoras at different hubs and cities around the country. The one in DC of course is quite active. It turns out there's a lot of national security here. And one of the ways that's expressed is with a monthly or roughly monthly events, many of which are called Drink and Thinks. To your point, there are lots of creative names. Our different groups use like Link and Learns and such, but Drink and Thinks is of course the popular one.

Michael Madrid (18:34):
It's amazing the kinds of conversations that can come together on a weekday evening with a little bit of happy hour, a little bit of reception, perhaps a speaker or a panel, or in many cases, like an interactive, a hands-on workshop. There's lots of different formats that takes. There's lots of different topics we explore, like the one you just shared and you're right, the DC Agora is excited to get back to in-person events after the last year and a half or so of having to do everything virtually. And we're also looking forward to our annual conference. I started this by telling the story of that very first one in Chicago. It's been in different cities over the year from Austin to Denver and came to DC for the first time in 2019. And we've adopted a model of alternating in DC every other year.

Michael Madrid (19:18):
And so 2021 is the DC year. We're planning for October 21 to 24, an evening, a happy hour on a Thursday, and then two full days of content in Friday and Saturday, and probably a brunch send off on Sunday, but those are fantastic opportunities. It feels like a reunion for a lot of the people who've been in DEF for a long time, but it's also an opportunity to grow our community and meet tons of new people. So I definitely encourage your listeners to join in if they're in DC with the DC Agora, but wherever they are, there's likely members near them.

Ken Miller (19:46):
We'll definitely look forward to that. I saw that on your website. It looks like a great event coming up, so we'll make sure to keep our eye on that. And the other thing that you do, and this is another reason why I wanted to have you on the show is DEF does have its own podcast too. So we're hoping that this new relationship here that we can start to work together, maybe use the podcast platform as a way of sharing expertise and sharing opportunities to kind of talk about some of these issues.

Michael Madrid (20:11):
Yeah, that'd be fantastic. We affectionately named our podcast, the Minimum Viable Podcast or MVP, and often to be honest, a lot of those episodes are actually recordings of our virtual events that we've been having over the last year and some that are post-produced for the podcast. Because we definitely like to promote live interaction, but then there's also often so much good content there. We like to be able to make it available in some form or fashion after the fact to our members and to those listening.

Ken Miller (20:38):
All right. Well, thank you for joining me, Michael. And for any of our listeners who are interested in learning more about DEF, you can go to def.org and learn more about the organization. But I thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with me today and looking forward to working with you in the future.

Michael Madrid (20:56):
Same to you. Likewise. Thanks.

Ken Miller (20:57):
Right. Thank you. That will conclude this episode of From the Crows' Nest. Thank you, Michael, for joining me. I know AOC looks forward to working with DEF in the future. Finally, don't miss our newest podcast, The History of Crows, which chronicles the history of electromagnetic spectrum operations. All of our podcasts are available on our website at crows.org/podcast. Thanks for listening.