Vanguard Magazine

June/July 2013

Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR

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T Transformation Defence Renewal Seeking a better way of doing business "Finding efficiencies" might be an overused cliché, but allied defence forces from Australia to the United States have undertaken significant efforts in recent years to better understand business performance and manage costs. As part of newly developed white papers, both Australia and France have looked at business reform; the U.S., of course, has been dealing with the implications of sequestration; and the United Kingdom has spent the past several years addressing issues around defence renewal. Canada, too, has made reform a high priority. When he became Chief of the Defence Staff last fall, General Tom Lawson embraced a renewal process already underway and said the program would be his centre of gravity for the next three years. In February, Rear-Admiral Andrew Smith was appointed military lead for the Defence Renewal Team (DRT). Together with Kevin Lindsey, Chief Financial Officer of National Defence, and a small group of 20 military and civilian personnel, he is analyzing business functions across the department and the Canadian Forces. Smith, who is retiring this summer, spoke with Vanguard about the team's mandate and the challenges of changing culture. 26 JUNE/JULY 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com Q General Lawson has said the DRT has three tasks: reduce administrative overhead; energize business renewal; and establish performance metrics to measure progress. Could you expand on that? The mandate is consistent with what is true for management in public or private practice and that is a responsibility to continually wage war on overhead. I draw a clear delineation between the Strategic Review and the Deficit Reduction Action Plan initiatives and Renewal. SR and DRAP were externally generated expenditure management deficit reduction exercises for which targets were established and for which Defence had its role to play as any other government department. Renewal was initiated internally, by Defence, for Defence. It's not a budget-cutting exercise, there are no targets, it's not about workforce adjustment. It's about a reallocation: it's about looking at value streams that cut across the department for inefficiencies and better ways of doing business, harvesting those savings without eroding operational capability, and then reinvesting elsewhere in the department. It is for ourselves. For the moment, the DRT has a three-year mandate and we'll see where it goes after that. I have been involved in several change initiatives over the course of my career and what distinguishes this initiative from any other is a focus on changing culture as well. It's not only about the performance metrics-based piece. That's obviously key. But it's about having that culture of continuous improvement, of getting that into people's mind, of going from tribalism to stewardship, from risk aversion to risk acceptance, from change resistance to championing change. It's a culture shift and you don't change culture in six months; we might not even fully change it in three years. But hopefully in three years you would provide some irreversible momentum toward changing the culture.

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