Public Procurement Change Agents

Bonus Ladder of Leadership Topic: Moving Authority to Information

Dustin Lanier, CPPO

Dustin Lanier explores the idea from L. David Marquet’s "Turning the Ship Around!" is about decentralizing decision-making authority to those closest to the relevant information. He highlights how empowering individuals at the local level can accelerate crisis response and enhance operational efficiency.
Public Procurement Change Agents
Bonus Ladder of Leadership Topic: Moving Authority to Information

SPEAKER_00:

He talks about moving authority to information. The submarine has a lot of built-in structure whereby information is channeled up the chain of command to decision makers, right? It's really easy to call a command center and say, this happened, what should I do about it? Or I'm reporting this. One of the things he talked about was really thinking about deconstructing decision authority and pushing it to where information lives. So don't move the information to the authority, move authority to the information, right? Not everything can be done that way. Certain things, they're at a different level where they have to come up. But if we're able to say there are certain places where we need to have the authority at the level to be able to make decisions that benefit a client or decide whether something moves over to finance or can it just be addressed internally, build in the infrastructure to put the authority at the place where the information is so that actions can happen. He has a couple of different stories that he tells about both proactive action and then common reporting. He talks about how a fire on a submarine is one of the most life-threatening accidents they could have. And over time, they built up a variety of procedures to deal with different kinds of fires, depending on what they were or how close they were to hose or whatever. But it had gotten to the point where the procedure had come the master and not the servant. The mission is put out the fire. Our objective was to put the fire out, and we didn't care who was on the hose in order to do it. So take action and then report. Put out the fire. and report the fire.