Hacking for National Security: Students Moving the Military into Tomorrow

We recently wrapped up a successful pilot Hacking for National Security class at the University of New South Wales. Two enthusiastic teams of students spent autumn semester working to address critical national security challenges. Their efforts far exceeded our expectations for how the pilot class would go.

Hacking for National Security is our Australian version of a global course started in the US five years ago as Hacking for Defense – a way to engage university students who would never consider working on national security problems engaged in keeping their country safe and secure. The class teaches teams of students how to use modern entrepreneurial tools and techniques such as the Lean Startup process and Problem Curation methodology, to solve critical national security problems at startup speed. Established at Stanford, the class is now taught at more than 50 universities in the US and the UK as well as here in Australia.

In our inaugural class at the University of New South Wales, student teams addressed problems provided by the Defence Science and Technology Group, talking in each case with 50+ stakeholders to better understand the problem and who it affects, and working to devise possible solutions for addressing it.

The first group examined solutions the Australian Defence Force (ADF) could use in the event that critical communications systems go down. The second team worked to find ways to improve military leaders’ decision-making skills amidst uncertain or ambiguous situations.

Here’s what they accomplished:

Team AGSM, MBA students from the Australian Graduate School of Management, were tasked with addressing the following problem: military commanders and controllers need frameworks for coordinating actions under degraded conditions when standard communication channels are lost – a problem underscored by Australia’s recent historic bushfires and the pandemic .

Conducting in-depth discovery, the team made several pivots along their journey through the class – looking first into alternative communication methods, then gathering additional learning and context as they reframed their problem statement several times in response to feedback from various stakeholders. They looked at crisis communications and communications in natural disasters before settling on operational-level liaising between ADF and other agencies.

We were pleased to see the team reap the core benefits of Hacking for National Security: they learned how to get deep into the weeds of a problem and to be agile in navigating the maze of information gathering and stakeholder buy-in; and they received valuable guidance from their sponsor about how to take an issue to the next level (and, perhaps more importantly, how to identify dead ends).

They’re now creating a portfolio of people for continued outreach to further test their hypothesis.

Team Public Health, made up of Masters of Public Health students, dove into military commanders’ and controllers’ need for cognitive skills and strategies when deciding and acting in the face of extreme uncertainty, unpredictability, and instability (issues also illustrated by the pandemic and bushfires over the last year). The team developed at a training program called “Cognito” to help demystify these issues.

Their training module looks to develop leaders over time, helping to effectively differentiate uncertainty from ambiguity, which is important in mission-critical situations.

The team explained that in 60 interviews with 40 leaders across the Department of Defence, military leaders said the same thing: We need to differentiate uncertainty and ambiguity -- but it’s hard to train for. And while they knew that risk assessment was not the same as ambiguity tolerance, converting these ideas into formal training hadn’t been done systematically.

As they advanced in their conversations and their project gained momentum, the Public Health team found that the problem was not unique to the ADF -- Cognito also has applications within police forces, which were already developing a vaguely similar program. This prompted them to examine how they could differentiate their offering.

A big thanks to the many people who helped make the class possible including the teaching team of David Burt, Phil Hayes-St Clair, David Heslop, the leadership at UNSW, our problem sponsors, our mentors, our Common Mission Project international network who generous shared their insights, and of course the 100+ beneficiaries who spent time discussing the problem set with students.:

As Steve Blank, co-creator of the program with BMNT Inc. CEO Pete Newell, put it when he stopped by the final class session on Zoom to offer his congratulations, bringing this course to University of South Wales was a big step for Australian entrepreneurship and Defence. It is a way to facilitate bright minds to become pathfinders as they work to make the world a better place.

To learn more about the Common Mission Project and Hacking for National Security visit www.commonmission.org.au/.