The event brought together top Navy installation leaders, including region commanders and base commanding officers, to learn effective strategies from one another on how to address common base challenges.

“At the end of the day, all of us here and the incredible teams at our 70 installations strive to deliver the best services and programs to the Navy’s fleet, our Sailors, and families,” said CNIC’s Force Master Chief Jason Dunn. “One way to continuously meet our mission and improve our processes is to discuss solutions and ideas. The past couple of days have been about collaborating and sharing knowledge.”

Capt. Johnetta Thomas, commanding officer of Naval Support Activity Mechanicsburg in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, said the event supported her views on positive leadership.

“They talked about everybody’s ideas and opinions mattering from bottom to top,” said Thomas. “Those are things I already believe in, but just hearing it helped to validate.”

The symposium focused on advancing Navy culture to develop teams that adapt, learn, and improve faster than any adversary. One problem-solving process that enables this type of culture is Performance-to-Plan (P2P), which provides a structured framework to clearly define performance gaps, identify high impact actions, remove execution barriers, and develop solutions that drive measurable performance improvement. At its core, P2P focuses leaders on the right challenges and using data to solve problems.

Commander, Navy Installations Command, Vice Adm. Yancy B. Lindsey, said these concepts are a positive change in the culture of the Navy, and compared problem-solving to extinguishing fires.

“If you can attack the root cause, you can fundamentally—permanently in most places—actually solve the problem, not just fix it temporarily,” said Lindsey.

The Navy has used P2P in many areas, which demonstrated performance improvements. As a result, the Navy decided to implement the P2P across the entire organization. Director of Fleet Readiness on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations, James Moser, said that the P2P tools have already been successfully used to evaluate the maintenance of F/A-18 Hornets.

“Over time, we added things to the maintenance card,” said Moser. “But nobody ever went back to say, ‘Hey, as we’ve added to this, did we create logical escapes in the system?’ So the team, aviators and fleet team together with engineers, logisticians, maintainers, and mechanics, went back through that entire system and were able to remove 30 percent of the annual maintenance actions that were required.”

Symposium attendees also participated in an “Industry Day”; visiting hosting Puget Sound-area businesses to learn methods of problem solving and business management from non-governmental enterprises.

Commander, Navy Installations Command is responsible for worldwide U.S. Navy shore installation management as the Navy's shore integrator, designing and developing integrated solutions for sustainment, development of Navy shore infrastructure, and execution and oversight of multiple quality of life programs and services. CNIC oversees 10 Navy regions, 70 bases, and more than 48,000 employees who sustain the Fleet, enable the Fighter and support the Family. Follow CNIC on Facebook at Facebook.com/NavyInstallations, Twitter @cnichq and Instagram @cnichq.