Designed an intentionally analog space that helped senior Navy leadership make sense of complexity and act decisively.
Navy executives need real-time clarity to lead the sprawling Naval acquisition and sustainment enterprise, yet mission-critical inputs arrive fragmented, ambiguous, and context-dependent. Automation and data analysis alone cannot furnish the needed clarity.
Despite abundant data, operational understanding remains siloed. Teams use different tools, speak in different terminologies, and interpret metrics in isolation, leaving leaders without a unified, actionable picture. There is information overload but very little decisive sense-making.
The Wartime Acquisition & Sustainment Support Plan (WASSP), an ASN(RD&A) initiative, partnered with our team to design tools to make sense of the complexity and help surface insights and actionable recommendations.
At the time I began supporting, our team had already successfully run several tabletop exercises (TTXs) with ASN(RD&A) WASSP, bringing a human-centered design approach to some of the Navy's toughest acquisition and sustainment issues.
However, as the knowledge accumulated, it became clear we needed a way to make sense of the ever-larger amounts of inputs, data, perspectives, insights, and recommendations generated and co-created with participants at TTXs. Our teams produced reports afterwards, and these circulated, but we felt the need for more collaborative sense-making — especially one that felt grounded and real, not just more PDFs floating in a Teams channel. We also saw that we needed to communicate findings out and up to advance implementation and affect change across the Navy.
This led us to propose a war room: a physical space where leaders could gather to immerse themselves in the intricacies of the situation while also being able to take in the whole of it — a concept with real currency in the military world.
Once we secured a physical space fit to hold the sensitive materials we had gathered, I co-created the space along with a fellow design strategist, business strategist, and the Navy captain in charge of WASSP. We painted one wall with whiteboard paint, covered the others in butcher paper, and began sense-making. Sticky notes proliferated wildly. We filled the walls with sketches of the problem space, captured the Captain's illustrative anecdotes from his vast experience in acquisitions through illustrations, and began mapping it all out.
We had acquisition and sustainment leaders from the Marine Corps, Navy, and industry come in and share their perspectives — roughly 2–3 groups a day, 3–5 days a week, for about 2 months. We'd walk them through and they told us what was wrong, missing, fanciful, or intriguing.
I observed where visitors would drift off and what questions they kept asking. I mapped this out as a service blueprint, tracking visitors' journey from initially hearing about the War Room to what we wanted them to do after leaving.
With these feedback loops and iterations, the War Room improved. We started receiving progressively more senior personnel. The images, diagrams, and other visuals on the wall began to solidify. The most important ones were digitized and printed out.
This evolved into an ecosystem model I helped theorize:
The War Room became WASSP's physical focal point for modernizing naval acquisition and sustainment: a place where leaders could surface their own experience, learn from others, and both socialize and co-create solutions.
The War Room hosted notable, high-ranking Naval officials, which led to an action memo being sent to the Navy SYSCOMs and PEOs that enacted 6 of our highest priority strategic recommendations.
It also became a place for industry partnership, gathering executives from organizations such as AWS, Palantir, and Boeing — acting as a connection point between industry and naval acquisition leaders.
From here, our team identified an opportunity to scale the impact and messaging of the War Room through a digital footprint, which materialized as the WASSP Portal.
