Making planning more effective, part 3
Contemporary emergency response agencies pose what, on first blush, might seem to be an intriguing organizational conundrum. Fire and EMS organizations, for example, are enterprises that are strongly and very visibly accountable for preparedness respecting the big, the bad and the ugly, those major incidents that can subject a community and its leadership to truly undesirable variations on Andy Warhol’s famed 15 minutes.
On the other hand, their daily operations are driven by “bread and butter” encounters that typically occur between one citizen and one responding company: putting ice on ankles and Band-Aids on boo-boos, putting Aunt Tilly back into her trundle, or helping Chester into his chair. Even where fires or rescues are involved, they’re still most likely to be room-and-contents fires or extrications involving a car or two on the highway.
Flat — or like a pyramid?
The paradox is that these distinct types of encounters require different and distinct structures for preparation and management. Those daily encounters are the types that get their best results where organizations are flatter, communications horizontal and decisions are driven to the “proximal provider” level (to the person closest to the customer).
But those same folks, when we take on the mega-incident, must fold instantly, seamlessly and effectively into an efficient, tight, pyramidal hierarchy and function just as flawlessly in an entirely different conceptual model. Even more importantly, they have to be able to move back and forth between circles and pyramids in ways that allow consistent performance and continuous quality improvement over time.
We have at least one aspect pretty well covered these days. Part of the beauty of contemporary Incident Management System (IMS) adoption has been the emergence of a standard template for moving quickly, systematically and effectively into a standardized hierarchical template for managing significant events.
The model is fundamentally simple, easily adaptable and readily expandable so that it can grow and shrink as needed to match the dynamics of the event. The roles it prescribes are based on function rather than rank. In principle, a deputy chief can report to a captain in the hierarchy of a particular incident without compromising the rank and relationships operating in the organization’s day-to-day management.
The presence of a fundamental model for temporarily reforming at least a portion of the organization to meet the objectives of a specific mission allows the players responsible for its outcome to concentrate on those features of the evolving event that make it unique and to turn their decisions into effective actions quickly, reliably and efficiently.
Local learning, agencywide
But how do we move from the hierarchical back to the lateral without leaving critical learning opportunities at the incident scene? How do we ensure that what we did in that relatively infrequent, high-demand event can have a positive influence on the routine stuff we do every day? Conversely, how can we ensure that the stuff we’re doing day in and day out is keeping us prepared for “the big one”?
The military’s system of After Action Review (AAR) may be the best model yet for helping emergency response agencies resolve this basic conundrum. Like IMS, it provides a template that’s devilishly simple and easily adaptable. Like IMS, it can expand and contract to meet the needs of any event.
Like IMS, it’s useful for any encounter, large or small, exceptional or routine. And like IMS, its value for the Big One is built on its daily use throughout the organization.
AAR is grounded in the basic premise that organizational progress is largely driven by individual learning and improvement that can then be transferred throughout the organization.
According to that premise, development takes root best where assessment and learning are grounded in what the military calls “local value,” its direct impact for the individual doing the learning and what he or she is engaged in doing right here, right now. Organizational progress comes from aggregating, validating and disseminating local lessons from all levels of the organization regarding all aspects of its missions.
Implementation of AAR
A good operating summary of the AAR can be found in just a few basic questions to be asked in any operating unit, whether a soldier or two handling a logistics function or a recon group coming back from patrol, whether it’s a mission that has been completed or a component evolution that will executed with many more times to follow.
1. What was the intent? What were we trying to accomplish by whatever it is we just did? Objectives should be simple and clear, stated in measurable behavioral terms. After all, if you can’t tell me precisely what it was you were trying to do, how can you tell me whether you actually got it done?
2. What happened when we took to the objective? What exactly transpired? Who did what, with which, to whom, for what reasons? What results did we achieve? Were they consistent with our objectives? Memories fade, and more importantly, memories change shape with time and discussion, so it’s critical to ask these questions as immediately as possible.
3. What did we learn from this? What do we know about the situation, its demands and our objectives that we didn’t know before? If we achieved our objectives, what did we do that was critical to our success? If we didn’t fulfill our total objective, what was left undone? What got in the way of our objectives? What would we have needed to know to have done better? Which of the things we learned could improve our outcomes going forward?
4. What should we do now? If we have to turn around and do this all again, how would we do it differently to improve our result? If someone else has to do this same thing, what advice would we have for them? If there are aspects left unaccomplished, what needs to be done about that? The driving consideration here is to put the learning to work now.
5. Whom should we tell about this? Who else needs to know about what we’ve done and learned? What are the critical things we need to tell them? How are we going to get that information into the pipeline? How can what we’ve learned here improve overall organizational performance? Even the smallest lessons can have valuable effects, so how do we use the organization’s overall AAR system to ensure that no lesson is lost?
The concepts for aggregating the information are pretty straightforward, too. There’s the unit-level “hot wash” in which these questions are sometimes run through even as the action is still going on.
There are, of course, larger and more structured formal reviews to accommodate more expansive missions with more “moving parts,” and these follow more formal patterns for aggregating, analyzing and disseminating findings and recommendations.
But the crux of it all is the consistency with which those short, straightforward reviews are conducted where the rubber is meeting the road: in large incidents and small encounters, day in and day out, everywhere in the organization.
Even quality management gurus like Peter Senge have described it as “arguably one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet developed.”
So why isn’t everybody doing this? It’s made headway in places you might not expect.
Harley-Davidson, for example, used the approach to prepare for new product launches in its Kansas City manufacturing facility. Shell uses such an approach in its oil exploration business. Wine retailer Geerlings and Wade reportedly uses it in their warehouse operations. It seems that it would be an ideal match for how we do things in our business, too.
If the truth be known, the best company officers and battalion chiefs use something pretty much like it every day and have been doing so for years. They come back from a call, even a routine one, pour a cup of coffee at the kitchen table and ask questions that sound a lot like those in an AAR.
Where we fall down, as we do in so many areas, is in making the process expected, consistent and reliable throughout our organizations, and in ensuring that the communications channels are in place and working to gather those “local value” lessons together, glean important information from them and regularly feed it back to the places where our rubber meets our roads.
We’ll talk about that aspect in our next installment.