Jeff Graley is the President and co-founder of Mile 2, a Human Machine Teaming company operating at the intersection of people, technology, and work. Proudly based in Dayton, Ohio, Mile 2 builds custom software for a range of diverse clients, including startups, Fortune 500 companies, and the US government.
A former Air Force audiologist turned entrepreneur, Jeff leads with humility and collaboration. Hear more about his fascinating journey and Mile 2’s people-first approach to creating the future through cutting-edge tech.
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Episode Transcript:
David Bowman: Welcome to Creating the Future. I’m David Bowman,
Evelyn Ritzi: and I’m Evelyn Ritzi,
David: And today we’re joined by Jeff Graley, a veteran, serial entrepreneur, and the president and co-founder of Mile 2. Jeff, welcome.
Jeff Graley: Hey, thanks for having me on.
David: So, Jeff, tell us a bit about your background, what brought you to Dayton and what has kept you here
Jeff: Yeah, so coming out of college, I went in the Air Force, and the Air Force sent me to Texas for three years, and then as an audiologist. So I did patient care. It made sense to be at the big hospital, and then they said, you’re moving to Dayton, to AFRL. I was like, what’s that? Is that a hospital? And they were like, No, it’s a research lab. And I was like, okay, why is an audiologist going there? Well, they have hearing-related human performance programs in a directory. So I ended up being there. I think technically, there’s one slot for an audiologist at all of AFRL, and I was on that, so that’s what brought me here. I think what kept me here was a lot of different things. One, we started a family two Dayton’s a great place to raise a family, the parks, the schools, just the traffic, the pace of life, close to home, originally from West Virginia, so is my wife, different parts of the state, but it still was three and a half, four hours from family. And then I think the mission, right? So I actually got out of the Air Force and became a civilian for the Air Force, so I could stay at AFRL and not have to move and could focus on that R and D mission.
Evelyn: That’s great. And MIle 2 is the company that you founded, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, congratulations.
Jeff: Thank you.
Evelyn: Huge deal. Let’s talk about founding a company, and what was your original vision, maybe, how it’s evolved now that we’re celebrating a decade of Mile 2.
Jeff: Yeah, so like a lot of all good stories that seem like there’s a little bit of chance and luck in there too, right? So I was at a point in my career with the Air Force where I wasn’t sure what to do next within that career path, and the Air Force, Air Force decided to look at entrepreneurship as a way to better commercialize technologies and do tech transfer make the fence more permeable, and I volunteered to help them figure that out. Whatever that meant, what it ended up meaning is going to different startup communities, including Dayton’s, the Entrepreneur Center, other places Startup Grind that Greg Meredith was running at the time, and kind of seeing what it looked like if someone left the Air Force and landed on the other side. Who’s there to catch you? What are those resources? Ended up at Silicon Valley, at Uber and a couple other places, just trying to get those perspectives from the bigger scale of this is what startups look like. And the thing that struck me while I was out there, is one of the problems they were solving or trying to solve was something we’d already solved in the Air Force. So you get this reinforcement of the work that we do is really good. It is cutting edge. It is valuable. Because a lot of times the government gets poked in the eye about being inefficient and ineffective, or what are you really delivering from a value perspective? Well, Uber was trying to solve a problem that we solved for the war fire, like two years before. So I looked at that and went, Okay, we’re on to something here. And I was having dinner that night with a mentor out there, and he was like, it’s, it’s time for you to go, right? He goes, but you’re not exceptionally technical. You’re not a software developer or anything. You’re You’re a you’d kind of have to be a consultant, right? And I was like, yeah, that’s not good. He goes, You should partner up with a couple of the software guys that you work with, and then you have folks that can actually develop stuff, have leave behinds, yeah? Beyond paper copy stuff. And I was like, That’s a great idea. So we came back from Silicon Valley, sent him a note. We ended up meeting at the pub, down at the green. And I said, What do you guys think? And they said, Yes.
David: Yeah, that’s phenomenal. And so from that beginning, then you launched Mile 2. Tell us about the name. Yeah.
Jeff: So ironically, the LLC existed before me with that name, okay, but once I came on board, I looked at that and said, Wow, there’s some advantages this, right one, I bet that logo is public use, because government generated I’m like, I think we could use that without paying somebody to do a logo. And you know, our motto from the beginning of time has been to do cool shit with cool people. Yeah. So when you think of that, we’re like, okay, when you get a bunch of cool people. Together. You’re not starting at Ground Zero or Mile Zero. You’re the work that we’ve done, the experiences that we’ve had, what our perspectives are bringing to the table. You’re starting two miles down the road, right? You’re not You’re never starting from scratch with Mile 2. Oh,
Evelyn: Oh, I love that. I love what you said. And you know, Mile 2 operates at the cutting edge of technology. We think of Mile 2, we think of tech, but for those that are maybe less technically inclined, aka me, how would you really describe the work that you do in a way that folks like me could understand?
Jeff: So, we make technology, technology useful and usable, right? So the world, no matter how great your technology is, it bumps up into people, right? So we’re a human machine teaming company at our core. And to do that, you’re thinking about systems engineering. You’re thinking about systems of systems. So the way we break it down is we work at the intersection of people, technology and work. So what you do with a spreadsheet and what our CFO does with a spreadsheet, both probably phenomenal, but completely different things. So how you employing the technology that context, the outcomes you’re trying to drive matter? So we have a group of people that are sensitive to that we can go out into the world get a better understanding of what are you trying to accomplish? Okay, here’s how the technology could be modified to be able to and implemented in a way that it’ll work within your systems, right? Because, by definition, it’s not just the tech system. It’s people technology and work. So it’s systems assistance, yeah.
David. So something that fascinates me about what you guys do is around that word systems, right? And so when I was in the MBA program at UD, a big hunk of the curriculum there was about systems thinking in different contexts, et cetera, lots of study of Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. Then one of my favorite books is ‘Thinking in Systems’ by Donella Meadows. And I’ve literally hit you up. One of your employees, a while back mentioned a book, I emailed you last week like, hey, what was the name of that book? But for those who are unfamiliar with the notion of systems thinking, I’ll give you the easy task of bottle that down to its essence. What is, what is systems thinking?
Jeff: So, I’m going to take that maybe a little different direction and go back to some of our foundations. Yeah. So human factors, traditionally, is more about like, psychology, psychological based phenomenon, where cognitive systems engineering is more about that system right? So then you start to talk about system boundaries. So that’s where things start to get interesting from breakdowns or opportunities, right? When things start to bump into each other, that’s where we start to get that’s where we look first? Yeah, right. So when you talk about those systems thinking, the other thing that we like to do is, whatever you think the boundary is, you know, draw me the boundary of your system. What happens if we go one level higher, make it a little bit bigger, what’s captured there? Then you start to see these new interactions, back to that systems of systems. So it’s a lot about being able to define your boundaries, and then start to explore around those boundaries or interesting things or surprises, etc,
David: I think what’s what I find so interesting, many things with systems thinking. But right? So we live in an age where we want to point at something and go, Well, that’s broken, and then we make a bunch of memes about it, and, you know, whatever, we do, right? But that’s not necessarily always the case, right? It might be, well, this is broken, but the reason is way over here, it’s something you’re not even looking at, that’s upstream, downstream, and how that it’s the interactions, right, that create the brokenness.
Jeff: You’re absolutely correct. So one of the things you know, if true, engineering, you can get down to root cause analysis, right? Yeah, but in the world, complexity comes in there, right? And it’s hard to untangle that, right? There’s so many different forces, so many different reasons, something could happen or a weird interaction, so you’re absolutely right. So that cognitive systems engineering base that we bring to that is coming at it from that perspective right away. We know this is complexity. We know there’s weird interactions or surprises. How do you deal with that, right? So there, Dave Woods is one of the godfathers of the work that we’ve done, and he talks a lot about, you know, how resiliency works, right? So resilience is, how do you recover from surprise? Yeah, what happens to your plan? How do you re-plan, right? So starting to think in ways beyond kind of the first principles of, well, we need to plan, and then we need to execute. Then, okay, what happened? Plans never work, as you know, originally generated. How do you re-plan? So thinking about how to support those functions in people and their work is really where I think we stand out.
David: Yeah, yeah, you guys are brilliant at it’s not necessarily the most obvious answer, but taking that complexity and then simplifying it in a way that is understandable
Jeff: Yep, and then taking it to other directions, yes, expanding on that, right? So I think one of the other things that makes us stand out is our ability to support envisioning, right? So what could the world look like someone brought us a problem once, where they’re like, Okay, you. These users don’t actually exist, but here’s how they do their work. Now, if we introduce this technology, what would that look like? Right? Because technology, one of the things that we believe is technology doesn’t eliminate work, it just redistributes it. Yeah, right. So if you’re reallocating the work, what’s the human’s role in that now, and being able to envision that, what those roles, what roles need to be supported, what functions need to be supported? If I’m a suit, instead of being an analyst, I’m a supervisor of analytics, well, that changes not maybe I’m an auditor, or maybe I’m somebody who has to be a fact checker of what it’s producing. Yeah. So it changes the nature of that we like we have the skill set to allow us to be able to do that, envisioning and support what the future could look like. And a lot of times that prevents a lot of bad ideas from going forward, frankly, or at least allows you to anticipate in ways that you can start to resource appropriately, yeah, which a lot of times, is what gets technology ends up being the barrier of it really transitioning and being adopted is, well, we didn’t, we didn’t plan for that. Yeah, right. So we’ll again, taking those system boundaries and broaden them out. Allows you to discover some of those. Ooh, we didn’t think about that. How might we either address that risk, supplement that opportunity? Because sometimes it’s not just risk, it’s a hadn’t really thought about that opportunity. Now what?
David: Yeah, so you gave me a great segue when you said technology isn’t isn’t necessarily about replacing work, right? It’s the work changes. So when we think about AI, when we think about automation, they are rapidly transforming pretty much every part of the business world, the I mean the world at large, right? So how are you leveraging those technologies to enhance human decision making, as opposed to replacing it, right? How is that changing things?
Jeff: Yeah, so I think there’s a couple sides of that coin. Right. From a technology standpoint, the breakthroughs that we’ve had allow data and decisions to be made at scales and speeds that are faster than people can wrap their heads, yeah. So, you know, we used to make decisions with the best information we had. Now we have it all, and that can lead to paralysis as well. So how do you start to communicate that information to a decision maker so that they’re feel confident that they can move forward with a good decision. So, you know, automation, for me is, is different than AI machine learning, yeah. Automation, to me is, is reducing the toil in a lot of ways. So to credit Alexis Bo now she She used that term a lot at AFRL, how do we reduce the toil? Make the routine routine and not make that human centric? Yeah, so make that support the human then let’s move on to how do we make decisions using all the information that’s available, the best information that’s available. So that’s where AI and some of those other technologies can help you kind of boil the ocean, right? And it’s still all technologies fraught with novel ways of breaking so again, supporting humans, being able to make sure that you have the ability, whatever your tools or workflows are, to support a human, to pick out when things aren’t right and get them back on track, kind of back to that planning, replanning, right? So how do you recognize that you’re off plan, and then what are the steps to get it back on plan? Yeah,
David: Yeah, and there’s like that people have a false belief. Least, I think it’s false that. Well, if I had all of the information, I would be better off. Yeah, it’s kind of true. But really, you need the right information, not all the information. How do you get from A to B, right?
Jeff: Yeah, and there’s information paralysis too, right? So I think there’s been many studies on 401, case, if you have all the options, people just don’t even opt in. Yeah? Like something that’s no no-brainer from a money standpoint. You know you should opt in to get the employer match. They’re like too many choices, paradox choice. Yeah, right. I’m not, I’m not even going to make a choice. So how do you boil these things down? Because, again, it’s well-founded that if you give people too many choices, they lock up. So what’s the right amount? Yeah, right. And that’s back to understanding the work. What’s the consequences? Right? Do you value to us? Speed and thoroughness are in a continuum. Do you want it fast or you don’t want to absolutely correct? And how do you navigate that continuum? Yeah. And you kind of got to pick a place, right? So that’s where understanding the work the consequences of decisions. I mean, we do a lot of defense work, some defense. Some decisions are highly critical, and the consequences are massive, right? Lives are on the line, yeah. And some are business automation, things or business decisions that maybe not as critical will take an 80% solution faster. Yeah, right.
Evelyn: You know, you think about the human factor. Makes me think about the culture of your company. And you know, a company doesn’t stick around for 10 plus years without a great culture. So, you know, as an entrepreneur, can you tell me a bit about the culture at Mile 2, and maybe a little bit about your leadership philosophy as a founder?
Jeff: Yeah, so early. On, we locked in on our values, and they haven’t shifted much over the years. So things like supported autonomy, right? And you’ll see there’s two words in each of these. It’s not because you can’t get in these absolutes. Again, there’s trade spaces in there. You need these modifiers to make sure that you know it. I want you to have the autonomy. I want to bring in cool people, and you have the autonomy to do your great work, but also have the support so that you’re not alone and afraid or feeling too much pressure that this, I’m the only one that can solve this. We’re there for you things like tangible results, though, right? It’s not a hobby shop, it’s not a university, it’s a business, right? So we need to have for our customers and for our business, tangible results, humble expertise. It’s kind of the no jerks rule, right? Yeah? Because in the circles we run it, there’s a lot of really, really, truly brilliant people, but I don’t want to work with you if you’re a jerk, yeah. And people do exist that are brilliant and not jerks, thankfully. And that’s how Miletus thrived, right? And then teamwork is a success is a team effort. Right back to how we don’t want to reward individualism. We want team success. Yeah, and I think all of that, we latched on really early, and then in the last three years, one of our board members recommend, recommended conscious capitalism as a concept, and he’s like, go check out the book, let me know what I think. Right? So it took all these things that we were expressing and gave us a lexicon to consistently communicate it and execute it again. So we’ve been engaged with that for the last three years, and it’s really changed the way we think about our decisions. So one of the big things is about stakeholders, not just shareholders, yeah, you know. And from our training, and I think it also lines up with Conscious Capitalism, how do you think in trade spaces, not trade offs right? It’s not or there’s always room to maneuver. So how do we balance those things? And over the years, we got in situations where we were out of balance, and you said, Okay, we gotta, we gotta reset, yeah, but knowing that, having the lexicon, having the frameworks, to be able to navigate, it was super helpful for us.
David: One of the things, you know, I’ve been a fair amount of meetings with you, whether that’s, you know, client stuff, or involved in various causes or things around town, right? You’re a great listener, and you all, anytime I’m in a meeting with you, you invite other people from various disciplines, right? And it is there a connection back to the beginning of your career, when you were in audiology, right, working with people struggling to hear at all, let alone listen, right? Did that inform your leadership style?
Jeff: It’s absolutely a connection there. I think there’s two things there. Growing up, I was never the best athlete on my team, right? And going to places like Afro or the Air Force, I’ve never been the smartest person in the room either, right? So you got to figure that out really quickly, or you become the jerk, right? So you want to be a part of a team, you want to move that forward. And I started to figure out where my strengths were. Strengths were in building and creating, right? I wanted to build teams, create teams and opportunities and move that forward. And as a part of that, being an audiologist, you absolutely are taught to listen right? You’re dealing a lot of times with an elderly population. And honestly, there were a lot of men that were in because their wife told them to come, not because they wanted to be there. So a family married, so there was that resistance to it. So you had to hear that out to meet them where they were, so you could actually move them into a space that was better for everybody. Yeah, right. And then there’s also a lot of there’s technology involved. There was a fair amount of explaining in my job. So you had to read the room. Be like, did they get that? Should I follow back up on that? How are we doing here? And it was a lot of coaching, yeah, in a lot of ways that you don’t really think of it from a healthcare provider’s perspective. But turns out that was a lot of the job, and that job I learned, I think, to do fairly well. The thing I didn’t like about it, and I think that drove my career change, was with hearing loss. It’s not like vision loss, right? So you can’t get classes and be 2020 right? You’ve lost hearing sales. So if you get a new hearing aid, you get something technology wise, the sensors are still not there, right, so the communication pathways are still a little funky. And I always felt like I was building people up and then disappointing them, and I couldn’t deal with that disappointment on a regular basis in that way. I disappoint people every day. Just ask anyone who’s around me much. But that was a different kind of like, that was more professional, yeah, what I saw in the technology world is we can make these really cool breakthroughs if we could build the right teams. Yeah?
David: So Dayton has an unbelievable history of game-changing innovation. How is Mile 2 carrying that legacy forward? And what do you think it is about this city that makes it a hub for innovation? Because it’s not just like, well, there was this short little period of time where. Stuff happened. It’s sort of been throughout the history of the city. Yeah, I think it’s,
Jeff: It’s like these decisions we try to support. It’s complex, right? Yeah. So I think you have a lot of great universities around here. Yep, you have a world-class research facility at AFRL. So you got smart people that are constantly coming through here, bringing new ideas, doing new research and then leaving in many cases, and other people pick that up and run with it. You have some strong industries, historically, like the automotive industry, that drove a ton of innovation for decades so and then I think you have kind of that, that Midwest humbleness and work ethic of I’m just going to put my nose to grindstone, and I’m going to make this happen, right? And when you combine those smarts, that work ethic and that generation of ideas on a regular basis, you’re gonna have those kind of breakthroughs, right? So innovation is actually something I’ve studied quite a bit, and I think we can a lot of people confound invention with innovation, right? So for MIle 2, we’re in the innovation business that is almost always taking somebody else’s invention and applying it in a new and novel way. So that’s the definition of innovation, right? So when we look at that, that’s where a lot of our customers come to us and go, I saw this cool technology, right? Invented this cool technology, and those folks that invented are very rarely the people who also look out into the world and go and this is how the world’s going to use it. In fact, they usually have one idea of how the world’s going to use it. It’s really hard to push them off of that. So MIle 2 is very much about like, Whoa, that’s a cool technology. What’s its strengths and weaknesses? Given what we know about people, given what we know about work, where would this fit? How could this fit? So we’ve been taking advantage of things like generative AI and rag models and a lot of the different AI shreds. So not just one, whether it’s decision support and big data situations, and being able to apply those in some really cool applications like CCA. Like you know, how do you work with a manned, unmanned system? What’s that system going to do? The things that people have in common, right? So if we both went into the Navy, and we both became Navy SEALs, we can at least say, even if we’ve been in different units, different times, all that stuff, we can at least say, Well, you went through buds, you went through this training, we have common, yeah, common, yeah, right. And that’s a word we use when we talk about joint systems, when we talk about human machine teaming. How do you build and sustain common ground? Yeah, right. So those are the kind of cool things that we’ve been able to do with black box automation, like cutting edge AI isn’t explainable. You know, you kind of launch it into the world. It’s constantly evolving, changing, but you can understand the strengths, the weaknesses, the drift, and then be able to represent that back to people so they can take advantage of it in a ethical way, in a way that is truly impactful and not just something that you want to turn off.
David: It’s about you guys. Whenever I think of you guys, I’m always reminded of a great quote about the Wright Brothers by it’s in the book called orbiting the giant hairball by a guy named Gordon McKenzie, and the entire chapter is the Wright brothers didn’t have a pilot’s license. I always think of when I think of that quote. You guys are one of the companies I always think of, because you’re always just given this challenge, like, here’s kind of what we’re wrestling with, go and there’s not a manual or a map, or you just figure it out. Like, I’m fascinated by that.
Jeff: Yeah, and that’s to me, that’s what drives me every day, is the figure it out. I think that was part of my upbringing. My parents were really supportive, but the same time figure it out, right? You know, that’s for you to figure out. Yeah, and I just the Air Force gives you that too. Every three years you move and you get to the job that you’re told that you’re going to get to, and it’s never quite the job they told you. So you got to figure it out, and you got to figure it out fast, because you only going to be there for three years, right? So you kind of got the joke we always had was you got a year to figure it out, a year to implement it and a year to make it sustainable that’ll last beyond your legacy there. So when you start to think of the world that way and interact with the world that way, that’s what you start to come to know. And for me, that’s exciting. I’m very comfortable in the gray, yeah, right. And it’s just like, No, we’re good people that make good choices, that are doing the best that we can, everybody’s working hard. You’re going to make mistakes. Things aren’t going to work out, but in the end, it should cumulatively lead to good outcomes. So it’s kind of like, trust the process, yeah, and the outcomes will come.
Evelyn: That’s where creativity, like, comes to play. You have to be comfortable in that gray area of like, there’s maybe not a yes or no right or wrong answer, but how can we figure it out? That’s your creativity?
Jeff: Yeah, I think it’s putting those teams together. Honestly, I don’t think anyone would describe me as creative, but one of the things that found is kind of, my superpower is connecting dots that people don’t see, right? And it ends up being scrawls and scratches on why? Boards and notes that nobody can read. But once it gets a chance to be distilled by people who are really talented, right? Who are actually truly creative use, there’s some there, there. And being that, I don’t know, Sherpa of sorts, or that person who’s out there, being the scout, yeah, in many ways, and saying, Oh, here’s where I think the opportunity lies. We do these things, but I can’t make that happen. I need all those folks to really make that come true. You’re
David: You’re George Martin, and you got the Beatles.
Jeff: Yes. I mean, that’s one of you talked about the beginnings of Mile 2 is, how do we attract and retain great talent? Yeah, right. And that’s something that I think we’ve done really, really well. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a passion in its own right. That’s not just business-related or profit-related. It’s about what you want to show up to every day and who you want to show up with every day.
Evelyn: Yeah, I guess that brings us to our last question, which is, what’s the feature you want to create, whether with Mile 2 or the future of Dayton?
Jeff: For me, I want to go back, I think, to the conscious capitalism, right back to stakeholders. So what I want to do is have an impact in that impact should be across those stakeholders. So one of the things that we introduced this year, key purpose indicators to go with our key performance indicators. I love that, right? So you can be nerdy with your scorecard on all your parameters and your things you want to measure and but what about your impact? What about your purpose? So we built those out as well and made that a part of our goals, equal to our KPIs, our original KPIs, but what you have to have is performance to be able to fulfill those things. So you can align them, you can talk about them, but you still have to perform, right? And I’ll destroy the quote, but I just saw it the other day. It was some philosopher, I think. But he said, you know, the human body generates red cells, but it does not exist solely to generate red cells, right? And that’s that’s the way I see business and profit, right? And conscious capitalism, it’s not just to generate profit, but it has to survive, to accomplish those other things that you want to do, but it’s not your sole and only purpose.
David: I love that. Yeah. Thank you so much for spending a little time with us today. Jeff.
Jeff: Appreciate the opportunity.
