YouSaid · the spoken record

Hugh C. McElroy

lines on the record: 75
first: 2022-06-29
most recent: 2022-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But how do you think about that balance, right? You talked about a little bit, but if I step all the way back and I am old enough to remember what flying was like before September 11th, the goal was not tons and tons of surveillance or identity verification. It'd be cool if you didn't have knives and guns in the plane. Okay, how do you get back to that state? Because I look at the increased amount of surveillance as a net negative. I think it's fascinating that you are talking about it as a net positive. Like we'll do more surveillance and your life will be easier because we, the government, will be able to trust that you are a secure person because I don't know you haven't bought a bunch of fertilizer in the last six months or whatever, right? Like that is effectively what pre-check is doing is it's keeping tabs on you so that when you get to the airport it knows, well, your profile is safer than average. Well, how do you get back to the place where it's what we're going to focus on is the scanners.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around it. We have worked so closely with Civil Liberties groups through PreCheck and the data collection we're doing as we're doing more around biometrics as well and mobile driver's licensing, that trust component, right? That value of trust is front and center in how we're rolling that out. And then only second to is it increasing security. I always look at TSA precheck as an amazing opportunity to keep pushing innovation forward. What can you do in this space recently a pre-check lane has opened up in the Bahamas, right? That is another new innovation to move the boundaries of TSA out a little bit. Now we're doing our level of screening at another location and we're allowing customers that option to come through.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just so happy you were the first one to bring up pre-check as an innovation because this is something when I came into TSA it was a lot of conversation What are we doing around new technology? How are we adopting AIML? What's our policy going forward on IoT? And it was for me kind of going, can we take a step back and everybody acknowledge that the biggest breakthrough innovation we've had since Inception is TSA pre-check? And it's a process innovation. It's a network innovation. It's a partner innovation. It's not tech focused in how it's delivered, but it's adding a tremendous amount of value to the traveling public and it's adding a tremendous amount of value to the TSA operations, right? We have a whole other class going through the checkpoint that we do have additional information around. I understand your point, right? Am I giving up more information and the unease?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say the only real innovation I have felt in the last 20 years of the TSA is pre-check and clear. And I'm signed up for both of them because I'm a very impatient man and I don't like to stand in line. And every time I go to the airport, I think I have allowed some amount of increased government surveillance of me because I am impatient. I am uncomfortable with that balance every time, but then I get through the thing faster and I'm like, well, it was worth it. But that feels like the big innovation that we've created kind of two classes of travelers, one that's okay with increased surveillance and everyone else taking off their shoes. That something that we should innovate on because it feels like the ripest area right at the customer experience that also keeps everybody safe.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a lot more micro than that. That's the macro view. This is where the kind of divergence happens. And everybody listening should be really happy that there is still the operational side of the house that is doing the day-to-day everything they need to do. And then there's the innovation side, right? We kind of share people back and forth. We pass problem statements and ideas back and forth. That deter, disrupt, detect is really in the larger part of TSA, our 60,000 person screening force for those daily activities. I don't have a lot of insight into that, but what we're doing is kind of making sure that technologies and processes in place to allow people closest to the problem to innovate around it and solve for it and then naturally move it into transition where it does get refactored into the rest of the organization, which is, again, mainly focused on those three elements.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned that the three pillars deter, detect, and disrupt. That sounds pretty good, right? You deter the bad guys, you detect them, and then if they try to do something bad, you disrupt them. Are those the key metrics? Do you measure that? How well that's going? Is there a dashboard that's like 15 deterred, 20 detected, 1 disrupted”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will actually add value, or we think that it actually opens up a new security vulnerability. At the end of the day, we're still a security agency, and it makes it hard to innovate sometimes in highly regulated spaces. But we have ideas that fall out of the pipeline plainly because it opens up some new risks that we weren't anticipating. And that's our metric of success is how many of those ideas are getting life, they're getting oxygen, and they're moving through this process, this common process that, again, we're not telling people exactly this is how thou shalt innovate. We are saying that if you do these kind of activities, you will naturally move into an innovation space.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The process, so it really is just, oh, you're going to do these five things as we sat down to put together our innovation doctrine, which is kind of a multifaceted, it's a new communication method to the field. It's a communication method to industry, but the big thing we wanted to put in there was these aren't hard and fast rules. This isn't a prescriptive way to do innovation. It's guidance. It's the idea that if you do these things, it will start to happen organically. What we look at is the success of that pipeline is really ideas to velocity and volume to velocity. How many good ideas are we curating and then moving into the next phase? How quickly are we moving those ideas through the pipeline? And some of those are ideas that we kill. Some of those are ideas that come in and we go, this doesn't have a fit in our enterprise. We don't think this.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From an operational perspective, right, this is where I think every government group kind of says this, where our failures are public, our successes are quiet. From a TSA perspective, as a whole, it's are things moving as they should. If we break it down to our three main components, deter, detect, and then disrupt, are we doing that successfully, right? Are we disrupting attacks before they happen? Are we detecting anything at the checkpoint as kind of our last line of defense? As those are moving along, I think that's the metrics of success, at least for the public and public trust that most resonates, right? We're catching firearms at the checkpoint. We're catching potential explosives. For innovation, those KPIs and those OKRs that we're really trying to figure out right now, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves and then sterilize.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back with Dan McCoy. Would say the government rightly or wrongly is often perceived as having more inertia and more resistance to change. I would also connect that to the idea that it's hard to know if the government is doing a good job One of the big tech companies, they're public. You can see how many iPhones Apple sold. You can see what the stock price is doing. There's just all these public metrics of success or failure. In a way, the government can't really provide. I think my key question here is, how do you measure success at the TSA? How do I know it's working?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scope of TSA, but we've recognized its value. How do you make sure a program like that is resonating well with the workforce? How do you make sure that the outcomes of it still have the ability to grow even when they go back to their home organization or they move outside the innovation scope? How do you make sure that that takes root? So that's really what I meant. Sounds probably a little bit worse than it should. I apologize for that.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if there's three types of innovation that we kind of look at, there's continuous process innovation. How do you make things move a little bit better along the standard path in our standard op model? There's business model in our situation, mission model innovation. How do you deliver in a little bit of a different way? And then there's disruptive innovation. Those ideas that are either new trainings or new opportunities that are outside the standard scope of TSA, how do we make sure that those take root? And I've probably sounded a little pejorative about it. This is really what we're here for is something like a design thinking training, not necessarily within the standard operating”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is I think the third time you've used the word protection, I think this is the first time anybody, Andy Coder, has described their job as protection inside of an organization. What specifically do you mean by protection?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not all of the decisions around innovation should be coming into me, which is good, right? There's an old Defense Innovation Board publication around what does a chief innovation officer do? And it hits on this idea that the notion of a chief innovation officer pulling in all innovation projects defeats the purpose, right? Having one choke point for innovation really defeats the purpose of why you would want innovation throughout an ecosystem, why you would want it throughout your organization. So I try to limit the decisions I make, but really when it comes up to me, it's because we've hit a barrier, we have genuine enthusiasm around something, or it really does need some type of protection from my level to say, let's keep this on the tracks, let's make sure it happens, or we make the decision to dial it back, and we do that quickly when we need to do that.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The team is the heart, but really that's it, right? It gets back to that idea of chief facilitation officer. The things that I decide on a daily basis are really working in concert with the rest of TSA in my team. So specifically for the innovation team, right, they'll come to me. We've got this down. Again, we stole it from kind of agile, but they come to me with blockers and they come to me for intent. So, hey, we outlined this new thing that we want to get done. We've done customer discovery. We know it's going to add impact, but we're running into this barrier. Do you want to come in and try to remove it? Do you want us to work around it? Let's have a discussion around that.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sits within our front office. So I think a key learning from the first pass of innovation at TSA, I have one predecessor, was the innovation group has to be as close as possible to the administrator. A lot of times what we're doing is disruptive, even if you look at mission model innovation, which is akin to business model innovation. There's not always the appetite to push back against the standard procedure. For a lot of projects, a lot of process development and a lot of new technology development, it was pretty critical that we sit as close as we can to leadership. So we have that background protection to get done what we need to get done, which is an innovation in and of itself. It is end user value, but sometimes it is a little disruptive to the standard way that we do things.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, main structure right now, I would say everybody interacts right with the field. So we have four large groups, two are generally support groups. So there's operation support and enterprise support. If you think of it just by definition, operation support, main focus is on the field and making sure that the checkpoints have all the new technology, intelligence, vetting services, things like that. Enterprise support, IT, human capital, all the way down the line. The mission focus and where people will interact most likely with TSA is our security operations, which is in the field. That also is the folks that work in cargo screening. It's people that work in multimodal. So anytime you see teams, TSA badged at MetroSops or Amtrak, that's that group. And then we have the federal air marshals as well, which came over following the cutover to TSA. And that is our second operational group. My team.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So prior to For me, it was this idea of okay, how do you bring that all together into one innovation portfolio? And then what agency really has the authorities in and of itself to go build that? And luckily, TSA is one of those agencies. We have a lot of autonomy given to our administrator to build things like that. So it was an amazing opportunity to come in and say, how do we build that really big innovation portfolio, test what elements work better for us, which ones don't? Because again, we have a pretty unique mission that we're going through and testing those different viabilities now.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're using a lot of, I think, pray for listening as a show, familiar language about how to, no, I mean, it's great, but it's right. This is pretty familiar. Language around agile development or faster processes or turning ideas into products. What's your background? How did you become the chief innovation officer of the TSA?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's say it's a really operational focused org that culturally they just don't like to take risks. They don't like to do things outside the standard procedure. Or is it that they just don't have the tools to necessarily do it at the local level? We need to go drive training around design thinking, agile development, lean model development into that specific area and then let that innovation, that natural diffusion of innovators, that 2% in that group really take hold and say, we're going to solve our own problems. But my role in that facilitation realm is take the macro view of all of the challenges to innovate at TSA and start to see where it's really getting bogged down and then focus in on removing those barriers. But you're right. We have a lot of operational capacity and it generates a lot of ideas that we should be working to innovate around.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if this is a Reed Hastings line or somewhere, but ideas are great, but until you kind of move them through the process and they actually start to add value, they're just ideas. We have thousands of ideas across TSA. It always surprises people that as a regulator operator, right, we have the checkpoint, which everybody is aware of and everybody kind of interacts with, but our regulatory scope extends into multimodal pipeline security, different parts of the aviation sector. So the idea is Canvas, a really large ecosystem of transportation security. What my team is doing now, and this is part of the innovation doctrine that we're rolling out, is building that pipeline of ideas and kind of centrally locating it so that we can identify what are ideas that are really going to be impactful that are getting underrepresented in the groups they're in right now. And then why are they getting underrepresented? Is it the structure of the organization?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always joke that Decoder is kind of fundamentally a podcast about Ore charts, and you're describing a problem that I think every large organization has, which is lots of decision makers, lots of priorities, and then lots of ideas that can improve things at every layer of the company that kind of just get lost in inertia or bureaucracy. How does that play out for you? Like, how is the TSA structured and then how do you navigate that to facilitate innovation, which is what you're describing.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And resources of my office. But what we really want to do is start to educate and empower our workforce all the way down to the officer, our international staff, our cargo screeners, and more to say, hey, if you guys have an innovation or you see something that you want to fix or you have a problem statement that's kind of dropped on your lap, we want to give you the tools to fix it because a lot of these things have been challenges for years. And now is kind of the time to emerge and say, what can creativity design and invention do to help solve that?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I do right for innovation at TSA does perplex a lot of people. There's always these conceptions that I am very tech focused. There's a lot of people that think we're very experience focused. A lot of government innovation groups have been really focused right now on emerging venture capital, emerging technology, and how to integrate them in. I would best describe my role as chief facilitation officer for innovation, right? At that 20 year mark, how do you take a step back and say, where do we want to purposely innovate? And then how do we build the culture, the capacity, the manpower, and the assessment tools to actually go let that innovation happen, either at the local airport level or based out of headquarters where we are now? But my job isn't necessarily to run every innovation project at TSA. There are some that we will obviously do because it needs the protection top.”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See, the experience is way different than listening. So we're in for a ride. Let's do it. It's a great time to talk to you. The founding of the TSA is connected to like a very pivotal moment in my life. It was founded right after September 11, 2001. I was my second year of college. TSA was formally made part of the Department of Homeland Security when that agency was created in 2003. So we're basically right at the 20 year mark of these agencies and the DHS and the TSA. It feels like a good time to step back and think about what it is they do, how they work, where they can go. Let's just start with your role specifically. I don't think most people know that TSA has a chief innovation officer. What does the chief innovation officer do at the TSA?”
2022-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · TSA’s chief innovation officer on surveillance, security lines, and surrendering to PreCheck · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT