Joint Experimentation Directorate — Building the Experimentation Capability

Client: Australian Defence / Joint Experimentation Directorate (JED)
Period: 2018 – 2020
Focus: Joint experimentation, analytical design, decision support and capability development

In 2018, Defence was establishing a new Joint Experimentation Directorate (JED) to bring joint military experimentation into the Defence capability lifecycle. The new organisation was intended to provide a structured mechanism for testing future force concepts against strategic and budgetary guidance, using experimentation to generate evidence for senior decision-making.

The challenge was that the experimentation capability itself was still being established. Military personnel were being brought into a function that had previously operated in a different organisational form, and the newly assembled team had substantial operational experience but limited experience in designing and delivering formal experimentation. The organisation therefore needed to build the capability while simultaneously using it.

IGOR was brought in to provide the specialist experimentation expertise. Working with subject-matter experts supplied by Noetic and drawing on scientific support from Defence Science and Technology, IGOR established the analytical and experimental processes required to design, conduct and report joint experimentation.

IGOR developed the analytical plan and data collection master plan, established the constraints, limitations and assumptions framework, managed stakeholder engagement and issues, and led the facilitation of experimentation activities. A significant part of the work was also developing the newly assembled subject-matter experts into functional members of an experimentation community, enabling their operational knowledge to be used within a rigorous experimental process.

The experimentation itself addressed the future force as a system of interacting systems. It was not practical to test the entire joint force simultaneously, so individual experiments examined different slices of the overall system. Results from one experiment then informed subsequent experiments, allowing increasingly complex combinations of capabilities to be explored. This created an iterative process in which evidence accumulated across experiments rather than treating each activity as an isolated exercise.

IGOR therefore contributed both to building the experimentation capability and delivering the experimentation itself. The work established practical methods for moving from a question about the future force, through experimental design and evidence collection, to findings that could support decisions about future capability and force development.

The project demonstrated a distinctive IGOR capability: applying rigorous experimentation and analytical methods inside a newly established military decision-support environment, while simultaneously developing the people, processes and governance needed for the capability to operate.

IGOR’s contribution: IGOR provided the specialist experimentation expertise that enabled Defence to establish and operate a new joint experimentation capability, combining experimental design, systems thinking, analytical planning, stakeholder engagement and the development of an inexperienced subject-matter expert community to support better decisions about the future force.