Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art. — Peter Drucker
In a previous column, I outlined the parallels between Canada's and Australia's recent changes to defence acquisition. Both nations are seeing a considerable increase in defence spending. Australia has released a Defence Industry Development Strategy (DIDS); Canada has released a Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS). Australia created a new Defence Delivery Agency (DDA); Canada established the Defence Investment Agency (DIA).
That earlier piece also flagged risks to ethical behaviour, and asked why Canada isn't yet seeing clearer reform to how we deliver complex, unique weapons platforms, things like advanced risk management and culture change. This column looks at emerging methods for navigating complexity at speed, an opportunity both nations share, one Australia appears better positioned to seize.
What Australia is doing differently
For almost 20 years, the International Centre for Complex Project Management (ICCPM) has operated in Australia, building a body of knowledge on managing complex projects. As an ICCPM Fellow, I recently read two articles by the centre's CEO, Collin Smith, on Australia's Defence Industry Development Strategy and its new Defence Delivery Agency. Both are worth the DIA's attention as it takes on speeding up Canadian acquisition, including weapons platforms, while implementing the DIS:
Six enablers of speed
The first article argues that faster capability delivery, without matching structural reform, routinely fails. Smith identifies six enabling reforms. Four are already recognized to some degree in Canada: shifting from single projects to capability portfolios of evolving data, networks and ecosystems; adopting a minimum-viable-capability standard that can field quickly and improve later; delegating decision authority closer to the people actually delivering; and reforming contracting for flexibility, modular acquisition, rapid prototyping, spiral development, continuous delivery.
Two have not been as visible in Canada. The first is replacing compliance-based governance with risk-based governance, asking which uncertainties threaten capability delivery most, rather than tracking procedural compliance. During my time running a major projects portfolio (I left that role in 2017), contract managers sometimes over-focused on compliance while senior governance meetings amounted to briefing sessions.
That may have changed since.
The second is accepting informed risk, a cultural shift from avoiding risk to disciplined risk-taking for strategic advantage. Ottawa appears to be making riskier decisions to get into contract faster, but how that risk gets managed at the project-execution level remains an open question.
Leadership for complexity, not control
A line from Smith's second article applies equally to Canada: national capability is no longer delivered through isolated projects, it emerges from connected systems of systems, which makes the management challenge one of stewardship rather than control. That requires leaders who can work across organizational boundaries, adapt to changing circumstances, balance competing interests and steward outcomes that emerge across whole systems.
None of this is news to Canadian practitioners; it's been recognized since the National Shipbuilding Strategy launched in 2010, and the DIS itself calls for up-skilling the procurement workforce. National Defence has invested in relevant training through the University of Ottawa's Telfer School of Management for years.
What's missing is formal professionalization: a government leadership cadre certified to execute complex platform acquisitions. Both the U.K. and Australia are moving toward formal certification for these roles. ICCPM's own leadership standard for complex projects centres on ten attributes: systems thinking, complexity leadership, strategic sense-making, adaptive decision-making, outcomes stewardship, ecosystem leadership, adaptive governance, systemic risk leadership, collaborative influence, and learning and adaptation.
Canada largely fits the pattern Smith describes: project leaders with strong traditional project-management competencies, but real challenges navigating the uncertainty and emergence that define complex endeavours, particularly at the political level.
Three observations
These competencies apply at every level, section leads in project execution offices, project managers, and everyone in higher governance, government and industry alike. They amount to an advanced approach to identifying and treating complex acquisition risk, well beyond what Treasury Board policy currently offers, which too often leaves delivery teams in the dark. And there's no certainty in complex acquisition. The best case is that these competencies, grounded in lived experience and certification, meaningfully reduce damage to delivery outcomes.
The bottom line
Canada isn't starting from zero. There are professionals here with the right competencies already. But the need for this kind of leadership is growing faster than our capacity to supply it, and the work to close that gap has stayed localized and under-resourced. If we want the DIA and Canada's defence industry to deliver capability at speed, without sacrificing effectiveness, it's time to learn from other nations and do the right things the right way. The art of execution is the DIA's challenge to embrace.
