Christopher Kirchhoff: evaluation

Transcript context

…What is it you learned from that dissertation that helped you do Unit X military procurement, more innovation? I’m really grateful I got the chance to go do a PhD and, in particular, to do it in the British system rather than the American system. Why? It’s shorter. That’s always nicer — three years rather than five. Rather than spend all my time studying for qualifying exams, I actually got to read the classic tomes of political science and sociology and understand them. I’m so grateful for that chance. I ended up studying breakdowns in the national security state. What do you do after a catastrophic breakdown that the regular political system can’t contain? I ended up studying government commissions, in part because I had had the chance early in my career to serve around a couple after-action reports and investigations. My first job out of college in 2003 was for the Space Shuttle Columbia accident investigation, a look at NASA’s safety culture. Not only what was the physical cause of the Columbia disaster, but what was the organizational cause behind the physical cause? My second job was a chance to go to Iraq and work on a team of historians that was writing an official history of the reconstruction, another major breakdown in American foreign policy. In fact, I’ve gone on to specialize in disaster in a few other areas. I wrote the Obama administration’s after-action report of Ebola. I used to joke that if I showed up in your office, [laughs] you were really having a bad day. What I learned is that expertise is often wrong, and settled notions of how business should be done is also often wrong. Those settled notions often kill people, and especially when they kill people, that’s a strong signal that it’s time to go back and take a fresh look at everything, to always be curious, always be skeptical, and always be as rigorous as you can because established ways of thinking don’t often evolve in ways fast enough to accommodate changing circumstances. What is it we need a commission for today, where it might maybe plausibly succeed?…

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