Training the Next Generation of Government Innovators with Sabra Horne

All right, TGIF, and welcome back to GovTech's In Case You Missed It. Good to see you, Joe. It's been, uh, been a week, but, uh, what a wild, uh, set of activity in our market as it continues to accelerate.

Absolutely. The market is showing no signs of slowing down.

Now, as we think about the market, one of the biggest challenges that we hear outside of cybersecurity is around workforce. And it's not just workforce recruitment and retention, but it's really thinking differently about that new workforce, that new generation, you know, the cultural dynamics, the training and reskilling that goes into it. So today we're going to dig into all of that and more and talk about training the next generation of government innovators. And so we have the former chief of CISA's Innovation Hub, an author, and DMNT entrepreneur in residence, Sabra Horn, joining us to discuss how and why we can do this today and what it takes to do it right. So Sabra, welcome to In Case You Missed It. Glad to have you on as a first-time guest, but I know you'll be on many more times in the future. So maybe just to start, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background in the public sector.

Great. Thank you so much, Dustin. Great to be here and good to see you, Joe. I came to government about 18 years ago, had a nice, fantastic career for 15 years in national security and intelligence primarily. I was honored to be able to join the Office of the Director of National Intelligence dealing with open-source intelligence from a stakeholder perspective, became Chief of Staff of the National Maritime Intel Center. Lastly, headed up a unified intelligence strategy for cyber at ODNI before I moved to Department of Justice. And then NSA, I was the Deputy for Information Sharing and Collaboration and got to work on some amazing capabilities while I was there. Lastly, I went to CISA, as we've already heard, and stood up its innovation hub after already having worked on stakeholder engagement and then transition of the organization from its prior agency to the full-component agency it became. So 15 years in government, learned a lot, saw a lot of amazing things, and was thrilled to be part of national security. But I had already had an 18-year career in academic publishing, primarily in the area of criminal justice professional textbooks. And it was 9/11 that changed my life, as it did so very many lives. And I was able to use that as a springboard to find my way to be part of the fight here in DC. So quite honored to do so.

That's amazing. So let's talk a little bit about how that experience in the intelligence community, Department of Justice, and of course in the cybersecurity space helped inform your new book, Creating Innovation Navigators.

Thanks, Joe. I will say I was always asked to do something that was different, had never been done before. There was no record of having done anything like this previously, and we had to figure it out from scratch. So first and foremost was joining the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shortly after its standup and figuring out how we would work across the 17 intelligence agencies to unify and grow open source intelligence. There was no policy set. There was no documentation of how we might do it. We had to make it up from scratch. When I went to NSA, I joined to be part of the National Threat Operations Center. But yet the person I was going to work for— this was 5 days after Edward Snowden released classified information that he did in 2013. We stood up a small group that dealt with that release of classified information. Of course, there's no way to understand what had actually been released to the public and how that would impact the agency. Yet we had to figure out what it was and how we would handle it from an organizational perspective. The last effort I worked on at NSA was dealing with the 2016 presidential elections and the Russian intrusions into the state and local election infrastructure at that time. Incredibly dramatic impact on our entire country, as we well know. Yet we didn't know how we were going to deal with it from an organizational perspective. I then moved to CISA and was asked to stand up our elections task force dealing with the same issue at that time. As you can see, each and every time it's something that has never been done before. That informed my thinking when I was then asked at CISA to stand up the election— excuse me, innovation hub. It was an amazing way to really transition all that I'd done, not only in my government job but also in my previous publishing job as well, to figure out how do we communicate in the right way about what it is that we're trying to accomplish with innovation in our organization and how do we create a construct that is really going to work for the organization and how do we bring that to bear in a way that makes sense for every single person in the workforce. It was a great opportunity when I came to BM&T to be able to sum up those experiences and to draw upon my publishing experience and to be able to put that into a book. And so I was thrilled to release last year Creating Innovation Navigators, which was the book I wish I'd been given the day that I was asked to stand up the innovation hub.

Yeah, that's an amazing background and experience. So let's dig into the book a little bit because I know it's meant to kind of be a blueprint for any organization, mainly government and public sector leaders, but those that want to foster a culture of innovation among their existing workforce. So, you know, maybe the first question is just, you know, why is innovation so difficult in the public sector?

Well, bless our hearts. I'm going to start there, right? We are doing God's work. We are doing incredibly hard tasks. things that only folks who've been in the public sector and been in government really understand. It is such an enormous mission that we are being asked to do. And government is inherently bureaucratic. We have to make slow and deliberate decisions. We have to be collaborative in how we approach every single issue and every single decision. We have to weigh carefully a wide range of perspectives. We have to be careful in how we make decisions. And we have to roll those out beautifully. And so this is not not fast, easy work. It is slow, hard work, and we do it because there are laws and policies and processes that govern how we must enable that work. And so we are doing the best that we can in government given those creaky, creaky bureaucratic processes that we have built up over literally decades and centuries. So we're all doing the best that we can. That having been said, All that was built up to do things in a deliberative and incredibly important slow fashion, that works against innovation. In innovation, we're trying to act with speed. We're trying to act by taking risks and doing things that are going to move us forward quickly. We don't have the time to consider in a very deliberative fashion every single perspective. We need to make choices that we think are going to pay off and we need to move out quickly to see if they will work. If those won't work as solutions, we need to pivot and move forward from there. So they really are antithetical in many ways. Yet there are ways that we can draw upon the best of what we've seen from the world of innovation and actually from the world of startups in many ways, right? They work with speed, they act with speed, and are able to do things at a much faster pace than we can in government. So how do we pick and choose the right places and take that risk where we can?

You know, this week we had our first California State Government Innovation Summit, and the state is really trying to foster that culture of innovation that you were just talking about. But perhaps maybe you could share with us some of the negative consequences or things that arise when that culture is not there or you're stifling or you're failing to encourage innovation. Maybe if there is someone in our audience now listening in around and thinking to do the same thing, how do they avoid stifling innovation?

Well, first, I always like to look at the positive first. And so We know in government, so many miraculous things have been achieved and have been created from nothing to make amazing things happen. I always go first to NASA and its actual moonshot in the '60s when President Kennedy asked NASA to get a man to the moon. And we were able to make it happen in 9 short years. How remarkable is that? You can look through the history of the entire US government and you can find so many incredible opportunities that we've seized and moved out on quickly. I also love the example of when President Johnson realized in 1957 that Russia had just released the Sputnik satellite, that we may fall behind in technical superiority. And that was when DARPA was stood up within the Defense Department to do really innovative research activities that had never been done before. Most recently, IARPA is a spinoff of that DARPA model within National Institute of Health and Health and Human Services to find new ways to break through biomedical breakthroughs that would change the way our world works in this country. It's exciting to see ARPA-H succeed in that way. I would say though that we have learned that we are often caught in those bureaucratic processes and it's difficult to get out of adhering to those processes and sticking to the processes that we've been taught, the procedures that we've been taught, the ways that we have to stay within the And so there are ways, though, that we can look at small changes that we can make, whether it is in technology, not just technology, but processes, strategy, communications, goals, ways that we approach our work. We can make small changes in any number of these places and begin to move at a different pace. And once you have those small wins and you build upon those small wins, you're going to have more successes. you're also going to be able to find people who are operating in those same kinds of ways, that they're moving with speed. You can recognize in their behaviors that they're moving at a different pace as well. And so you want to look around and you want to find those folks who can help us really move forward quickly. We know because the US government used to be the primary funder of emerging technology a number of decades ago, we know that over the last 4 decades, there's been a dramatic shift in the government's ability to fund fund those emerging technologies that really take us to a totally different place. That has now been replaced by not only private sector but venture capital support, private equity support. We're seeing the growth in this startup world as well. And so we need to be able to learn the lessons from those folks and be able to apply it to the work that we do. How do we free up from the shackles of bureaucracy that have been built up over so many years so that we can focus on the end user and focus on the mission and get that accomplished more effectively. We want to replicate the best of what we've seen in startup world and in private sector and replicate that where possible in public sector. We know we have laws that don't possibly apply in the private world. We have to stay safe and we have to do things in the right kind of way. But that doesn't mean we have to be moving at a glacial speed.

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, when those that are listening in kind of hear you talk, they may think this is an uphill battle. Changing the culture or mindset of an agency can be a very daunting task in addition to like the policies and procedures that you were talking about. What advice do you have for them as they're kind of navigating this period of rapid change with AI and everything else and trying to balance being safe and also leaning into the future? Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think there's just like all change, it is a process. And it is a difficult process and we have to be patient and we have to figure out how are we going to get through this. So I've got 3 big recommendations. One is we need to be able to look at various levels within an organization and be able to communicate and work with each of those various levels. We have the senior leadership within an organization that's critical in setting the vision for what the organization is doing and moving forward by saying, this is what we're going to do and here's how we're going to move forward. I will say when I was at NSA and worked on the media leaks task force responding to the Snowden leak. It was really remarkable how we had to so very quickly completely shift how that agency spoke about itself to the public. At that time in 2013, NSA meant No Such Agency. So we were able to quickly think about how do we understand what the public wants, and then how do we make sure that the senior leadership speaks externally in a way that echoes what the public cares about. And so kudos to senior leadership at NSA at that time for really being able to set the standard and move forward an entire organization to get to a different place. Next, there's middle management, right, which is responsible for executing the programs and policies, um, and most of the workforce as well. And we know that oftentimes middle management is caught in a very difficult bind, right, between that which the senior senior leadership wants, which is a change oftentimes, and then that which is the workforce, where perhaps there's less forward movement often. So they are the ones that are critical to get them energized and move forward as well. Lastly but not leastly, the workforce, absolutely fundamental in moving forward an entire organization. If you're trying to create change, you have to win hearts and minds of the workforce. And I would— there are any number of examples of how we've been able to really bring about innovation in a new way at that workforce level. I would first salute the Air Force's AFWERX, which helped create the Spark Cells across the US Air Force that served as real incubators for great ideas and allowed airmen to pitch fantastic ideas about how they could bring about innovation in a new way. It was really exciting to see how they were able to energize that entire service quickly. So looking at 3 layers is always critical in bringing about change. Next is how do we communicate? First and foremost, you have to set the vision about where you're trying to go and how you're going to get there. I always look to Chris Prebs, who is the director of CISA, when I stood up the Election Task Force and also the Innovation Hub. He was fantastic in being able to move from the old organization, NPPD, to the new organization, CISA, by setting the goals about what we were going to do and talking about them all the time, everywhere he went. It was his primary job, and he did a fantastic job, not only with the workforce, in the public, on the Hill, in the executive branch. He was a powerful speaker. So I salute him in setting that vision and bringing about a new organization that had never existed before. Not easy to do in the US government. Execution of what you're talking about in your communication is fundamental. And I go back to when I joined ODNI in those very early days after the standup of the organization as a response to the 9/11 Commission's report and the congressional mandate as to how we as a government would respond to 9/11. Our first task each and every morning when we showed up at work at 7:30 was to sit down the entire staff and go through a spreadsheet that highlighted the 72 recommendations that Congress had given us as to what had to be accomplished across the entirety of the intelligence community to move this to a different place. That was the drumbeat and the cadence that was set every day. And it created a sense of urgency you can't possibly imagine. And it was a sense of mission that no one could say no to. I would also say you have to repeat the message. That is a fundamental of communications. Say it once, twice, 5 times, 10 times. You think you've said it a gazillion times. Somebody hasn't heard it. Say it again. And that way, you're going to be able to move forward together. And then lastly, I would say change is a long process. It is not easy. It's not fast. And sometimes it's not fun. When I was at NSA, we did do a reorganization based on what had happened per the impact of the Snowden leaks. And that organizational change was called NSA 21. It was about a 3-year process and involved literally every single person in the agency who had to actually reapply for their job. So it was a fruit basket turnover. You can well imagine the impact to the workforce, but we were able to sort it all out. I would say it was probably a 5-year process to begin with. If you think you're going to get change done in 2 months, good luck.

You know, when you looked at federal government's approaches to innovation, you found that commercial technology acquisition was the most common pathway, and that's not too dissimilar to state and local government. So pretty, pretty much identical there. When it comes to acquiring and implementing new tech, why does government seem to have difficulty keeping up with demand?

So let me tweak that a little bit. When you look across the US federal government, the most common application of innovation is bringing in emerging technologies, purchasing and bringing in emerging technologies. So within DOD, there are about 154 innovation organizations that do just that in some way, shape, or fashion. a big enterprise, especially within Department of Defense. But I do think you're right in that a new way that we're looking at innovation across not only the federal government, but at state and local levels as well.

Mm-hmm.

How do we bring about innovation in our acquisition? That is one of the things I love about innovation is that you can apply it to literally every single job. How do I do something different in the job where I sit? And how do we make this work better, faster, easier, and sometimes just simply less painfully? So we've seen a number of places within the federal government where there's some really wonderful things that are percolating to change how we acquire not just emerging technology, but any services and products as well. I first and foremost go to salute DHS's procurement innovation lead, right? Trying to bring about that process in a, in a new way. But we also have the NASA Acquisition Innovation Laboratory. GSA is doing some fantastic work in the defense acquisition space. Acquisition Unit University as well. Why do we have a problem in bringing able to bring in technology, and why are we running so very far behind? It's simply, and this is no news to anybody. We know that there's just been a challenge in how we're able to bring in technologies quickly, and and we aren't good at it. And we know that the standard defense process, the PPBE process. Is literally a 9-year process. When you look at gathering requirements, budgeting, and executing funding, it is a remarkably long process. We have to get better at doing that. There have been a lot of great changes, and so good for the folks who are trying to bring about those changes quickly. I would say that there's a lot of opportunities that we have, and we've seen some great successes. For instance, the Defense Innovation Unit has, I think, really changed the way we're operating in a lot of different ways. They're using some— what was once upon a time a very creative authority, uh, the Commercial Solutions Opening Pilot Program, to, to buy stuff and bring it into the government faster, easier, cheaper. Um, we were able to use that same authority at CISA while I was there and actually were able to purchase the technology in 18 days, which— I'm sorry, that's a miracle in federal government. I'm going to give us all Big round of applause for that one. But I think it's freeing ourselves up from the challenges and the shackles that have been put upon us and figuring out how do we do this in a different way.

Yeah, I love that. 18 days is definitely light speed too, even for our market. So that's great. So in your book, you talk about the need for government to understand startup culture. And, you know, when I've talked to agencies about this, you know, some get it, Some don't. Some are like, well, startups, you know, they fail and we can't fail in government. Failure is not an option. But how do you think government can really benefit from the startup mindset?

Absolutely. I think there's some things that we can see by looking at that culture and understanding how it operates. And first and foremost, I would say it's really accepting a level of risk that in government we are taught not to accept at all. We know that nothing less than perfection in many ways is what's accepted in government. I mean, whether it is the 10-page white paper that you're delivering to the 2-star, nothing can be wrong in there. You have to check every single thing, including the images. I remember that once. That was a really delightful 2-week process there. Um, but we have to really stay focused on how do we find places where we accept risk. And there are so many places that we can accept risk. We just have to really question what it is that we're doing and where we might be able to embrace that much more effectively. I would also say we in government operate in an environment of fear in many ways. A failure to be less than perfect is not acceptable. And so we have to get away from the fear of of failing. We have to be willing to accept the fact that failure is something that is actually good in many ways, right? We can learn from what didn't work. And there are so many examples. Let's go back to the example at NASA, right? We know it wasn't— it took 9 years to get a man to the moon. That was not a perfect and easy process. You had to learn from what took place, uh, and, and make changes in a positive fashion to get there. So it's, uh, it's just part of the culture. But I would also say we really have to look at those people who really are innovative and what are the characteristics that they have and how do we operate in ways that draw upon those characteristics and help leverage those for the organization as a whole. And so it's acting with speed, being able to work quickly and to do things effectively in a very fast fashion. As I said, accepting risk. It's having a bias to action rather than what we're taught in government again, which is deliberative and slow and consider 1,000 options. It's basically, let's pick something that we think is going to work and move out and see if it works. If it doesn't, how are we going to do that differently and how are we going to keep moving? It's being creative and curious and learning from everything that you see around you. It's collaborating with others and recognizing where you might be able to use additional tools, resources, ideas, strategies, etc., from other folks who are doing things like what you're doing. It's being persistent and optimistic so that you can drive forward and keep getting up every single day because we know it's hard to keep doing this work, right? We have to keep trying. And lastly, it's having courage in, in doing that work over and over every day.

Do you think that the courage, the speed, the approach to risk, all those things you just talked about in terms of a mindset are the same components that would be involved in having an innovative organization?

100%. I think that's the perfect analogy, which is we see that in startup worlds. How do we apply that to what we're doing in government? Beautifully said.

Love that. So, you know, our private sector audience is familiar with the concept of a sales pipeline, but you kind of introduced this innovation pipeline and would love for you to talk a little bit about how an innovation pipeline can help bring about real change in an organization.

Yeah, so an innovation pipeline is a concept that BM&T created to help figure out how we might be able to find opportunities to use innovation to make positive change. There's a 5-step process where we use our ability to recognize and find problems. We're sourcing problems from a lot of different places. We want to talk about how we might be able to think about those problems and curate them and then prioritize them. We're working on the most important problems only. We wanted then to really discover from the end users who would be working on those problems and the solutions we're proposing. We want to talk to the end users and discover what potential solutions might exist and what that might look like. We want to incubate those solutions and then we want to transition those into operational capabilities. So the innovation pipeline is a way to find opportunities and grow them into innovation solutions. But that's one of 6 ways that we can bring about innovation within our organization. I would also emphasize the importance of using the entirety of our agency's resources to really get after these innovation problems, to figure out how we might be able to solve these problems. We oftentimes forget our friends in legal who are oftentimes our best friends if we're able to work closely with them and create a shared vision. They can help us get to yes in wonderful ways. We want to create a vision for what it is that we're trying to do with innovation so that we can help ensure that people understand here's where we're going and here's why we want to take on utilizing innovation. We also want to think about the wide range of stakeholders that we have available to us and people that we can leverage and also people that we have to include in our solutions so that we can ensure they're perfect solutions. And then we also have a wide range of innovation tools, which I know you all have talked so often about, the different ways that we can bring about innovation. There's so many great tools that we can use to address our actual specific problems that we're So we kicked off this episode talking about workforce being a challenge.

What's the one piece of advice you'd have for state and local agencies in terms of either attracting people with an entrepreneurial mindset or retaining those employees that they may already have that are demonstrating those, uh, those capabilities?

I love how you said it, Joe. I think we have to focus on the folks that we do have already that have those characteristics that I mentioned earlier— acting with speed, ability to take on risk, creativity, learning, perspective, optimism, and courage. We have to help them grow those skill sets from the positions that they're in and help them to achieve innovation from where they sit. We also, I think, in attracting employees, have to do a great job of articulating why innovation is important to us and how those characteristics that we talked about, which of course Those characteristics will help us create the innovation organization. We have to help new employees see that we care about it. Not only do we want to hire for those skill sets, we're going to train for those skill sets, we're going to reward those skill sets, and we're going to incentivize those skill sets as well. Oftentimes we know colleagues who have ended up doing amazing innovative work, which often goes against the grain of the organization and causes a lot of stray voltage. in so many ways. But we have to reward those people who had the courage to take on those tough roles and do that hard work to stir up some difficulties and challenges within an organization. But if we reward those folks and encourage those folks, we can use their skill sets to help our organizations even more.

All right.

Final question for you. The easiest question. Where can our audience go to connect with you and also to get your book?

That's great. Thanks, Dustin. I am on LinkedIn, Sabra Horne, S-A-B-R-A H-O-R-N-E. And you can go to bmnt.com/about and you can find not only the Creating Innovation Navigators, but a description of the executive education course that we teach in conjunction with the book, which is the Innovation Navigators course.

Well, Sabra, thanks so much for joining Dustin and I on this Friday afternoon and walking us through all these wonderful insights on innovation. Until we See you again on another episode, which will be in the near— hopefully in the near future. But until then, have a wonderful weekend, everyone.

Thanks, y'all.