"Nobody knows much but together we may know enough."
- Jolt
Happy Wednesday...
Weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003 I had the opportunity to be part of a team that piloted a new collaboration concept using a best effort, Monday-Friday, 8-hours-a-day schedule. It was one of the most challenging yet enjoyable initiatives that I had been a part of up to that point in my career. Additionally, I was fortunate to partner with a close friend and the concept, built around a light-weight chat tool (with additional capabilities), got its start on a whiteboard in a conference room. We waved our arms, marked up the board with the concept, talked to the possibilities of connecting people scattered around the globe and with every drop of passion we could muster - asked for and received approval to prototype a crazy, potentially disruptive collaboration idea.
The concept would quickly get fully resourced, trained and moved to 24x7 watch operations just days before hostilities commenced in Iraq. We had no idea how effective it would be and how it would open the door for follow-on innovation in the years to come. Most of all, we were somewhat surprised by the development of online collaboration tradecraft, principles and best practices that were born out of a "learn by doing" approach.
Why the look back at what happened 16+ years ago?
These past two weeks I have been researching and evaluating the various collaboration technologies that are in use by the emergency management community supporting multiple mission areas. Many of today's tools are focused on providing a real-time information sharing environment (enabled by chat, shared files, video, audio, etc.) to facilitate operational and tactical collaboration for emergency responders to connect with the local, tribal, state and federal organizations responding to the incident. Many of you may be familiar with these missions under the umbrella commonly referred to as Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR).
As I began the research, which aligned nicely with the approach of Hurricane Dorian, I was struck by the limited use of some very capable collaboration tools. Now, it is possible that the workspaces supporting Hurricane Dorian were locked down in the various tools and not visible. That would be a topic for another blog.
The two tools where I expected to see vibrant, rich collaboration and information sharing for Dorian were DAART and/or APAN. Unfortunately, that's not what I observed. Yes, DAART had a number of workspaces carrying the Hurricane Dorian name but only one was "active" and it carried infrequent, minimal collaboration from a handful of users. APAN showed no reflection it was being used for this beast of a storm.
All of this reminded me of the statement I heard/read multiple times from a talented, skilled, innovative and really smart guy who was hand-picked to be part of the initial small cadre of individuals that staffed the 2003 collaboration concept I referenced above. I nicknamed it the McDonald Doctrine in his honor and it became a common reference for me (and others) during the many collaboration boot camps taught in the following years. This was our early challenge in 2003 with collaboration and information sharing in the Department of Defense world of operations and Mr. McDonald addressed it clearly and concisely (as he did with many other challenges).
McDonald Doctrine: "Show up, get in the fight and contribute!"
Yes, it was that simple but it clearly spoke to the human challenge we were confronted with in the day.
- Show up: The collaboration tool available at that time (Information WorkSpace - IWS) was mandated and available all across our community. However, we struggled to get people to login and give it a go. Email and phone calls, which were the comfort and channel apps (i.e., if you were lucky enough to be addressed on an email or were included on the phone call, you were in the channel) of the day, remained the dominant tools of choice and were being held on to by many with white-knuckles.
- Get in the fight: For those who did launch and log in to the IWS tool, they quickly became lurkers and rarely engaged in public chat. 10% of the crowd in a chat space carried 90% (or more) of the work load. Yet, the lurkers had value-added and in many cases, mission-critical information that they continued to receive/share in email/phone channels.
- Contribute: Jolt (my partner in crime at the time) would frequently comment that "...we may not know much but together we may know enough." In those early days we struggled with getting folks who were logged in to share value-added information and be part of the team of team's dialog to make sense of what it meant, what might happen next...in time to make a difference.
I wonder if today's community working emergency response operations might be struggling a little with what I call the McDonald Doctrine?
If not, where is everyone collaborating in the online world for HA/DR missions like Hurricane Dorian?
For those who have shown up in the online tool, what collaboration tradecraft and best practices training have they been provided? Or is it limited to tool training?
How is all of the tactical and operational information being shared for an HA/DR incident and...is it being seen by everyone who needs it?
More questions than answers...
Humbly,
Collabman
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