Community News
Project Mercury fosters innovation on Kadena AB
By
18th Wing Public Affairs August 20, 2024
Senior Airman Luis E. Rios Calderon
18th Wing Public Affairs August 20, 2024
U.S. service members discuss their ideas at a Project Mercury Innovator Workshop at Kadena Air Base, Japan, Aug. 5, 2024. The Project Mercury innovator workshop is a course aimed at creating leaders who are fully equipped to tackle crisis situations with new tools and innovative thinking. (Photo by Senior Airman Luis E. Rios Calderon)
KADENA AIR BASE, Japan -- With continued steps towards force modernization and adaptability, the U.S. Air Force is developing innovative solutions to tackle rising challenges; that is where Project Mercury comes in.
Starting as a joint venture in 2019 between Air University and the University of Michigan, Project Mercury began as a 13 week course and now operates as an independent military consultancy aimed at providing detailed, long lasting solutions instead of short-term ‘band-aid’ fixes.
Members across Kadena Air Base participated in the Project Mercury Innovator Workshop over several days, which is aimed at fostering group leaders to handle rising issues with new ways of problem-solving.
“The classes provide a foundation on teamwork, creativity, collaboration and the usage of digital tools for ideation and project management,” said Dr. Ethan Eagle, Project Mercury head coach. “With that, teams find, diagnose and develop creative strategies for a problem and pitch those ideas to group leaders.”
Each innovator workshop is customizable to meet the needs of units that participate in it. The workshops go by the base’s innovation cells, and tailor their workshop’s program to tackle unique, basic specific issues.
“It’s rewiring of the way military members usually think,” said U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. John Reeves, 18th Medical Group diagnostics and therapeutics flight chief, one of the coaches going through the workshop. “In the innovation space, we have to pace ourselves and observe different environments, and then use that information to craft creative, long lasting solutions to persistent problems, instilling innovative mindsets at the lowest level possible and fostering ‘radical thinkers’.”
These workshops are designed to include various levels of experience and rank from both the enlisted and officer sides, providing a platform for different ideas and experiences to come together.
“A lot of people go straight to just putting senior leaders in these programs for innovation, but the people identifying the problems and coming up with these ideas aren’t people like me,” said Reeves. “They are the junior enlisted, fresh non-commissioned officers who say ‘Why are we doing it this way’ or ‘I have this problem’ and these front end users are the ones coming up with these amazing ideas.”
Project Mercury pushes this type of decision making to the middle and lower ranks, developing them and fostering leadership capabilities early on, providing Airmen with an environment to practice self determination, group decision making strategies and adaptational skills that they can then apply to their real world projects.
“I don’t consider myself as an innovator, but a lot of the things I learned during my time in Project Mercury directly helped me in my real world project,” Reeves said. “It helped me build my team, find out who could come up with those out of the box solutions, and then tailor those insane ideas into something we can apply. Not listening to those radical thinkers is a loss of opportunity, and it’s our job as senior leaders to encourage and build them up. It’s how we stay ahead in innovation.”