Equitable empowerment and cross-functional collaboration in military procurement

Have you ever had a task where you perceive – or you actually have – no control? How does it affect what you would normally consider an appropriate and ethical response from you and others on any team?

This note could be taken to suggest that what is described below occurred in every case. The truth is far from it. However, it occurred often enough to be a major concern from my perspective, if (I stress ‘if’) it is still the case. 

For over a decade, my work as a Public Service Executive in the Canadian government – one with a portfolio of a handful of billion dollar weapons system platform projects – left me concerned about the severe inequality in influence of those involved in acquiring these complex platforms. When billions of dollars are on the line and an important capability for the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) is at stake, one such serious issue was one too many – and there were more than one within my portfolio of projects.

Although the client was the CAF within the Department of National Defence (DND), what mattered in the end was the contract to be awarded to the private sector. And those who routinely exhibited total control and influence over all other stakeholders were the contract managers in Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) who were governed by the Supply Manual, Internal-to-Canada trade policies and Treasury Board Government Contract Directives – and often themselves driven by the seconded contract lawyers from the Department of Justice. Based on my observations, the primary goal of all such agents was largely to minimize risk to the government as their top priority, with the delivery of what the CAF had defined as required (what and when) a distant second.

Interestingly, a contracting magazine recently published an article on the importance of cross-functional collaboration (Future of Sourcing, Managing Cross-Functional Collaboration for Organizational Success, Deanna Vanston, 1 July 2025)

Given my observations, the potential for contract management to be seen as the ultimate authority could be understood. As I mentioned earlier and no matter what good work is done by the client, it is the contract that drives the outcome in procurement. Furthermore when things go awry, the government typically holds PSPC accountable, and the blame game was too often in play. Behaviours follow practice and culture.

During the forensic evaluation of a terminated multi-billion dollar procurement process in 2008, I also witnessed a significant amount of confusion. This was abundantly clear when the DND Project Manager repeatedly spoke to his concerns regarding the Request for Proposals as ‘not in his lane to question’, even as the contract manager from PSPC stated that the client could indeed have insisted on changes. Such a misunderstanding was quite an eye-opener to me, indicating deference to the contract manager in all things contractual. But subsequent years in the job indicated to me that other contract managers would routinely dismiss concerns raised by the client with little effort to explain the reasoning.

What was clear was that there was a significant perceived and often real imbalance in power – total control by some, such that other key stakeholders felt that they had no control or influence. Again I stress that this was not always the case.

I also witnessed more than a few occasions when senior PSPC personnel wished to direct changes, eliciting responses from assigned contract managers that they would no longer be responsible for the ensuing contracts, and that their seniors would now be the de facto contract managers if they insisted on changes not supported by the bespoke contract managers. As a result and depending on the contract manager, such intransigence was most frustrating.

Early in my tenure, I created a simplistic stool to demonstrate the key stakeholders involved. I pointed out that if any stakeholder – as depicted as one leg of my overly simplified four-legged stool – was more powerful than other stakeholders, the stool grew in leg length and became unstable as a platform for industry to deliver the desired product.

A recent article highlighted research at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (How the Inequality Around Us Shapes Our Perceptions of Morality, by Christopher To, Dylan Wiwad and Maryam Kouchaki, 1 May 2024). It reminded of a longstanding reality more broadly, that “the link between the controls we feel over our lives and how we judge various ethical lapses has been known for decades”.

In hindsight this was very much in play, as many dedicated personnel in DND became frustrated and some stopped exerting their best effort when faced with refusal to consider and to adjust based on differing opinions. I also noted that this could also generate a perverse effect when contract managers raised valid requirements concerns, such that the requirements managers would likewise refuse to be swayed.

This lack of cross-functional collaboration was not restricted to the current multi-department structural involvement in weapon system platform acquisitions. As a more junior uniformed naval officer in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I witnessed similar imbalances in influence between the Chief of Supply and the Chief of Engineering and Maintenance within the Materiel Group in DND. And the two-star and equivalents rarely took issues to the Assistant Deputy Minister level or beyond for resolution.

This dynamic of course is not unique to government. Many large and hierarchical organizations suffer from such power imbalances and the lack of equitable empowerment – if any. The common retort is ‘follow the yellow brick road because deviations will only lead to wasted time and effort’. Given the reported state of the CAF today and the accepted geopolitical storm clouds threatening the prosperity of Canada and the international rule of law, time today is of the essence and wasted schedule must be avoided. As Benjamin Franklin so poignantly said, “lost time is never found again”.  

Of course, we are talking about a complex set of behaviours, with overtones of imbalances in institutional and personal power dynamics, the intent being to avoid all potential risk rather what the founder of World Commerce and Contracting Tim Cummins calls ‘a focus on mutual value creation’. There was also little equitable empowerment. The result was a lack of trust and thus collaboration, and the profound potential for a loss of interest by key stakeholders characterized by the statement “I no longer give a damn”.

Why do I raise this short note?

Assuming that a new Defence Procurement Agency (DPA) will soon take shape and that what I have described continues to exist, a different culture must work to avoid these significant inequities in influence. I have often opined that the right approach going forward must be founded on a joint working model of operationalized and sustainable collaboration based on trust in cross-functional relationships. The risk aversion so apparent in such complex and expensive projects must be attacked from the very top if speed of delivery is the priority. And not only must concerns arising from unethical coercion or intransigence not be enabled; the future occurrence of such incidents must be exposed for potential damage to project outcomes.

And as a peripheral concern, which agency is placed in charge of shaping the DPA is critical. The involvement of a neutral group of external experts is the best guard against recreating any perception or real imbalance of power.

We must not change the name and structure of the organization assigned to advance weapon system platform procurement projects solely to address accountability, without also fixing many of the practices that have created the popular lament that ‘military procurement is broken’. This is one more of the challenges that the new government faces as it sets out to ‘fix’ military procurement, and the future of the CAF is at risk if tangible and significant change is not achieved.