aligning team goals, fostering inter- nal and external collaboration, and granting autonomy to empower the acquisition workforce. Organizational pressures in ac- quisition either strengthen or erode existing systemic attributes. These can involve policies, processes, regu- lations, time constraints, innovation prioritization, the balance of work demands, budget constraints and resources, personnel turnover, reli- ance on routines, political exposure or public sector scrutiny, personal reputation, external events, and or- ganizational relationships. Stress Testing Innovations to Scale The full value of DoW innovation is realized only when its benefits are more broadly circulated. While local- ized or one-off innovations may offer immediate operational improvements to the implementing unit, they fail to produce systemic change or address enterprise-level challenges. Issues with cross-boundary coordination, resource constraints, heavy workload, and conflicting goals can contribute to innovations remaining local. This reduces the return on investment in terms of saving time, sharing labor, and increasing institutional learning. From an organizational perspec- tive, the spread of innovation is essen- tial to fostering institutional adapt- ability and resilience.
and lost opportunities for enhanced mission outcomes. AIWs actively foster innovation dissemination throughout an orga- nization. The AIW is a co-design strategy rooted in systems engineer- ing, which stress-tests innovations to scale. Anchored by the IMPActS Framework—comprised of five di- mensions: Ideas, Mental Model Alignment, Pragmatics, Actors, and Sustainment—AIWs address the fre- quent disconnect between promising interventions and their long-term vi- ability. AIWs convene diverse stakehold- ers—including operational staff, orga- nizational leaders, and the workshop facilitators themselves—in a struc- tured forum to critically examine po- tential interventions through the lens of the five IMPActS elements. The process blends guided dialogue with qualitative assessment, enabling par- ticipants to identify misalignments, unveil system-level constraints, and refine interventions with practical foresight. Through facilitated ex- ercises and shared understanding, the workshop fosters alignment and builds adaptive capacity into interven- tion design from the outset. In our pilot at AFICC, AIWs proved effective in surfacing hidden imple- mentation barriers, aligning stake- holder assumptions, and refining interventions in ways that less struc- tured methods could not. The importance of aligning men- tal models across stakeholder roles,
which is foundational to both inter- vention design and long-term viability, emerged as a key theme throughout AIW probing. Participants also valued the framework’s focus on sustain- ment, which highlighted the need to anticipate future resource demands, institutional support, and engage- ment strategies beyond initial adop- tion. Later workshops expanded the process to include practical mitigation planning and integration of ideas from grassroots innovation efforts. Across all sessions, participants reported increased ownership, im- proved clarity of implementation trade-offs, and enhanced confidence in proposed solutions. These out- comes demonstrate the AIW’s poten- tial as both a diagnostic and genera- tive tool, supporting scalable change across complex operational systems. Leadership Support When supported by leadership and institutional mechanisms, grassroots innovations can be assessed for scal- ability and integrated more broadly across the enterprise. Fostering a culture of innovation that encourages calculated risk-tak- ing supports organizational learning, promotes alignment across teams, and grants autonomy is essential for sustainable transformation. Leaders play a pivotal role in cultivating this environment by providing “top cover” for experimenting, aligning incentives, and championing promising innova- tions.
When innovations are restricted to specific units, other parts of the organization continue experi- encing inefficiencies or capability gaps that have been solved else- where. This results in duplication of effort, wasted resources,
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