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McGuire AFB: A center of excellence, a learning organization

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Michael Paston
  • 305th Aeromedical Squadron
MCGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE, N.J. --  Every center of excellence may superficially be understood as the organization's ability to realize its vision, accomplish its goals and solidify its reputation consistently. However, a deeper understanding shows every center of excellence to be an organization that values learning.

A center of excellence is a learning organization. Realizing our vision, McGuire last year achieved 98 percent departure reliability on its way to become America's strategic mobility base and premier joint base. Other great wings in Air Mobility Command have also realized similar results in undertaking 18th Air Force and AMC taskings for our nation.

For McGuire to become a center of excellence, we must focus on and invest in our advancement and education of young Airmen in all manner of formal and informal professional military education, mentoring and modeling, and rewarding and encouraging excellence. Our goal must be to create a reputation for our Airmen, of whom later in life other Air Force commanders will say, "Yes, that Airman was once stationed at McGuire, that explains it." This concept is similar to the Indian Air Force's concept of the Commodore, a distinguished alumnus of that air base who regularly returns to the base and is honored. In sum, McGuire must strive to create and polish our Airmen, to open the minds of Airmen to that knowledge, and to enable Airmen to take best advantage of their Air Force opportunities.

It's the concept of a center of excellence that encourages Air Force opportunities to be taken, because opportunities are taken when Airmen are encouraged to respect ideas and their free expression, to rejoice in discovery, to pursue excellence in a spirit of productive cooperation and to assume responsibility for the consequences of personal actions.

In reality, there are barriers and restraints to creating a center of excellence. As leaders, we must seek to identify and to remove constraints on Airmen's full participation. Airmen must be able to innovate and explore their capabilities and interests in the framework of accomplishing our mission, and thereby develop their full human potential. This is a sign of a learning organization - a true center of excellence; but on the other hand, a center of excellence will not thrive if it fails to create an environment in which Airmen leaders can rely on the principles of learning, discovering, innovating and, above all, producing excellence.

The key to managing learning, change and improvement is our Airmen. Although good processes deliver results, which is the thesis of reengineering, processes don't learn - Airmen do. Airmen learn then processes improve. Only Airmen can aspire to change and make change happen. No other asset of the organization can do that. Airmen are at the heart of the accelerated-learning, high-performance organization. Leadership must fully recognize and respect the human face of change. That's the Airmen. McGuire's leadership can do this by paying particular attention to local policies, operating instructions and award incentives: nucleotides of McGuire's learning culture. In short, McGuire's Airmen must encode learning into their very DNA.

If McGuire's contrails are to buffet AMC as the leading center of excellence, we must further develop our learning organization as not only one that learns but accelerates learning. The great benefit of making McGuire's learning processes explicit is we can then improve and accelerate our learning - in the service of global air mobility that achieves the results AMC wants and our America needs. Three opportunities exist to accelerate learning: 

- Make the internal environment healthier.
- Improve the learning infrastructure.
- Improve people's knowledge and learning skills.

Much of this sounds conceptual. Fortunately there are seven questions that provide vector checks on our learning organization:

1. Do Airmen learn from their duties at McGuire?
2. When Airmen leave McGuire does their knowledge remain?
3. When a team completes a task, does it distill and document what it has learned?
4. Is knowledge generated in all parts of McGuire sought out, validated and made available to the whole organization through databases, training and other learning events?
5. Does McGuire recognize and reward the value of knowledge created and shared by individuals and teams?
6. Does McGuire systematically assess its future knowledge requirements and execute plans to meet them?
7. Does McGuire facilitate experimentation (thus enriching experience) as a way to learn?

Leaning is not an end in itself. The point is to create a future that benefits our Air Force. The 305th Medical Group believes the concept outlined here will enable McGuire's Airmen to do just that, by developing the collective intelligence of the organization and allowing it to work.