Leading With Perspective
Bridging Military, Industry and Academia through Student Mentorship
Signals & Strategy
A former Brigadier in the Royal Signals with 30 years of experience, Sara Sharkey CBE left the Army in 2021 to pursue a career in digital transformation. Initially joining Deloitte as a Director, Sara is currently Strategy Director at Prolinx, a secure sovereign cloud company. Sara’s career is deeply entrenched in technical transformation, working with cloud and identity services, application development, and encouraging agile methodology adoption in Defence. This combination of technical acumen and natural leadership honed through military capability provides a welcome expertise to mentorship on the Hacking for Ministry of Defence (H4MOD) programme.
Sara’s initial introduction to H4MOD was through her Defence background, and she was invited to join the Common Mission Project’s Advisory Board to help guide the charity through industry hurdles. She additionally became a Mentor to stay connected to the programme in a more hands-on way. Sara is inspired to support younger generations she wouldn’t normally interact with in her day-to-day working life, and so H4MOD seemed like the perfect fit.
Reigniting a Passion for the Lean Methodology
Sara finds that mentoring is a great opportunity to refresh her understanding of the Lean Startup methodology, something which she aims to use in everyday business. “I think the Lean Methodology has a fascinating application, and I love learning how others approach it.” For Sara, the way in which the Lean Startup methodology can be applied allows for a varied and creative approach to problem discovery.
Appreciating the initial difficulties student teams face when being confronted with challenging public sector problems, Sara notes how the methodology helps teams resist jumping to solutions too quickly, “I always give the same advice: don’t close down your options until you’ve really understood the problem.” In her experience, students quickly realise that stakeholders would instinctively suggest their own solutions, and it was up to the team to take a step back and look at the problem more broadly.
Applying Lessons to Real-World Defence Challenges
During her time as an Industry Mentor, Sara has assisted students in a variety of problems affecting different branches of the Armed Forces. These included streamlining communications onboard warships for Ship’s Commanding Officers, unifying STEM youth outreach activity across Defence, and improving drone shipping containers for future delivery methods to enhance interoperability. Her past experience and tech-focused future provides meaningful guidance for teams looking to help innovate within Defence.
A Lean methodology tenet teaches the value of breaking down problems to their root causes and focusing effort on where there can be measurable impact. Sara describes this as the epiphany moment, when students recognise their original problem is ‘too big’ and instead begin to narrow it down to focus solely on the value of what they can achieve. This is an important life lesson;
“Picking off a bit of the problem, rather than trying to confront the entirety at once, helps us all move forwards and look to create value rather than getting stuck in the details.”
Honesty & Integrity
Sara’s additional benefit to her students is helping bolster their research through introductions to senior military contacts, providing the teams with accelerated access and insight. She coaches her teams for these interviews, revealing that their unfamiliarity with Defence can be a strength and allow for honest, insightful questioning.
Finally, H4MOD’s fresh perspective built on rapid discovery is the gift that keeps on giving; “It’s very impressive that they learn so much about a problem in very little time, particularly as many of them are unfamiliar with Defence.” For Sara, an outstanding student team brings a mixture of genuine curiosity and relentless drive to interrogate the problem, resulting in mission success.
Why Mentoring Matters
For anyone interested in taking the next steps with mentorship, Sara has this to say: “Not only are you able to engage directly with an inspiring generation, but when you bring your experience to bear with you, you’ll take away learning and growth from the experience as much as you provide it.” Mentoring provides her the feeling of “giving back or paying it forward”, but with a twist. H4MOD mentorship evolves beyond the traditional mentor/mentee relationship and allows the mentor to take the problem-solving journey alongside the student team.
One of the key values of the Common Mission Project is to be ‘mission-driven’. For Sara, this means working to achieve direct and meaningful impact by doing something that “affects the lives of soldiers, sailors and aviators." What drives her in mentorship is to improve the lives and work of those directly engaged with H4MOD problems, and very simply, make people’s lives easier.
If you’re interested in supporting the ‘Hacking for’ courses as an Industry Mentor,
visit us at commonmission.uk or email info@commonmission.uk for more information.