Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/337874
M MARITIME 14 JUNE/JULY 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com intuitively and we teach our folks to deal with, but then there are the more corporate and strategic risks. Systemically, we are not as skilled at linking risk assessment and decision-making as we should be. The risk matrix is an attempt to identify and measure the right risks in order to inform the right decisions, and then mea- sure whether you are mitigating the risk the way you thought you would or whether that risk wasn't affecting what you were trying to achieve the way you thought it was. There are a lot of people in defence working on this very issue; the Deputy Minister and the Chief of the Defence Staff are seized with this. Q The plan speaks to the importance of institutional credibility, especially around shipbuilding. Much of that seems to hinge on timelines that aren't necessarily in your control. Can you mitigate against that risk? I don't think a lot of people appreciate the degree to which I have limited influence in terms of the whole shipbuilding business across government. We talk of "down and in" and "up and out": inside the guardrails of the navy – those things that we actually control – and outside the navy, those things that we can influence. Shipbuilding is a great example. The inside-the-guardrails activi- ties come back to the previous question around how we manage our business, how we improve our processes, how we account for the money we are given, how we demonstrate that we are doing a better job of delivering what we need to deliver with the in- puts that we have. That all speaks to institutional credibility of the RCN as a business. And that all feeds into how we can then help broader departmental efforts and also how we can use the cred- ibility we have earned to try and convince people that we know what we are doing, and when we raise concerns about things it shouldn't be seen as us just playing "chicken little." Shipbuilding fits nicely in the context of "down and in" and "up and out." There are a whole bunch of things that we need to do as a navy, down and in, to prepare for the delivery of the ships. That covers a full spectrum of continuing to work with the mate- rial folks, the government agencies involved, and the shipyards on defining the requirement, which then shapes how the process goes forward. There is also a lot that has to do with backend-of-the- business things such as how we prepare our people or how we set up scheduling. From an "Up and Out" perspective, the RCN sees part of its credibility being tied to this massive investment called the Nation- al Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy. We are a big part of this, clearly; but it's not the Naval Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy. I have characterized our part as "the best supporting actor in a shipbuilding role." In the end, the navy will operate the fleet that is produced by NSPS. But there is a lot of work that has to go on between now and then, and much of that is not in the navy's guardrails. We will master and own those things that are inside our guardrails. Outside our guardrails, there are a range of challenges on a number of fronts, but the key issue, from my perspective, is sched- ule. If we don't meet the milestones that the government has laid out, then there are going to be a lot of second and third order impacts. There will be a lack of confidence within industry with respect to our collective ability to do what we said we were going to do. There will be downstream impacts in terms of delivering the capability itself. There will be huge cost implications. And then these legitimate concerns of Canadians around our ability to If we don't meet the milestones that the government has laid out, then there are going to be a lot of second and third order impacts.