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AETC team strives to build innovation culture

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Chip Pons
  • Air Education and Training Command Public Affairs
JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-RANDOLPH, Texas --  Empowered Airmen, supportive leadership, and honest feedback cultivates innovation. –Lt. Gen. Darryl Roberson, Air Education and Training Command commander, 2016 Strategic Plan.

Forging innovative Airmen to power the world’s greatest Air Force, a familiar phrase to Air Education and Training Command Airmen, speaks to the importance of innovation and continuous process improvement.

An innovative culture is exactly what the members of the Innovation and Transformation office here endeavor to develop.

“While the ITO works to build AETC’s CPI capability and celebrates all improvement results, our ultimate goal is to build a culture of innovation across the command,” said Sean Harrington, AETC’s Innovation and Transformation Office acting chief. “That is why we exist and what we are trying to accomplish.”

As the minds of this division have come together to standardize execution of Air Force and AETC continuous process innovation guidance, members of the various wings will have an opportunity to utilize their skills and knowledge to help further these developments across AETC.

The ITO works hand-in-hand with wing process managers to make this a reality. WPMs serve as the wing-level expert on CPI and work with trained facilitators to improve processes and increase process improvement knowledge and capability.

“We have seen impressive improvements and innovations across AETC,” said Maj. Travis Nelson, AETC master process officer. “With the strong support of wing leaders, WPMs are able to apply a structured problem solving approach to wing-level issues and expand the use of root cause analysis by individual Airmen at all levels.”

In 2016, Lt. Gen. Darryl Roberson, AETC commander, publicized his strategic plan citing innovation as a top priority. According to his plan, innovation is the way Airmen continuously learn and improve how to recruit, train and educate.

“Innovation is one of the most important areas in our Air Force right now,” said Roberson. “There is only one constant in our every day - change. One of my four priorities is innovation and it has been a priority of mine since day one. As leaders, we should be thinking how we can make things better every day.”

“We have done great things to improve our practices and the overall state of our command,” he continued. “The wing commanders have all been challenged to support this by encouraging an environment for change. But we need to keep doing more.”

In support of Roberson’s vision, members of the ITO hosted a workshop with WPMs to develop a standardized and executable plan to improve the CPI and innovation culture across AETC.