‘Creativity’, ‘innovation’, ‘independent thinking’ etc. is often at odds with the needs of a team or organization. However much we aspire to see improvement across our operations, we are constantly up against our own capabilities to implement that change.
I recently articulated my perspective on the matter to some colleagues and thought I’d share it more broadly. Have a great day!
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I don’t think I got a full three REM cycles in, but I made it to 3:30 and that was enough time to create an answer to your question that was more than ‘No’, which I think was the intent behind your “sleep on it” rule.
The question posed yesterday, to my recollection, was, “Why don’t we make everyone an expert?”
The simple answer is: “We hope they want to be!“
Of course, the comprehensive answer is more nuanced. We need to differentiate individual capability so we can effectively manage search to successfully locate and rescue missing persons. In order to do this we employ a wide variety of methods and techniques to simultaneously train new skills and identify individual strengths.
The nature of a volunteer team is diversity and we work within the constraints of our evolving and diverse team to understand the capability and use it to successfully complete the mission. Bla-bla-bla… You know all this. The real meat of my 3 AM response focuses on managing capability.
Capability is a ratio between creativity and validation.
As the time it takes to creatively solve a problem increases the time it takes to validate the solution will naturally increase. We are a capable team when that ratio is greater than or equal to 1. (For the exercise, I use 1 as the baseline ratio, however each team will need to define the minimum acceptable curve.) A higher ratio, where less validation is required for each minute of a creative solution, indicates a higher capability to perform the task. As the curve flattens below 1, that is with every new idea it takes more time to decide if the creative solution is appropriate than it took to create the solution, the team is considered incapable.
Setting a capability factor is important for any team and we’ve done this with a list of core-skills that every member is expected to be capable of performing. Generally we constrain the amount of creativity required to perform the skill, ensuring we effectively manage capability through education since we observe that creative solutions are directly tied to the level of education of our team within specific disciplines. All together, the product of each individual capability yields our total team capability. Deficiencies in one respect, by the power of multiplication, can have a dramatic effect on the over all capability. Examples abound.
Management & Leadership
We have been working, and continue to work, to manage the team to meet and conform to expectations. It’s been successful.
We’ve been managing our parent-agency to better understand and utilize the volunteers. It’s been successful.
We’ve been managing training schedules and plans to create reliable and practical expectations. It’s been working.
We now have a strong foundation for the flexibility and subjective decisioning of creative leadership.
Our capability factor should still drive our leadership decisions, just as it drives our management decisions, but the flexibility of leadership allows us to exercise and stress different creativity and validation aspects of the capability curve.
In some instances we ask members to spend extra time validating a not-so creative solution, generally to build understanding. In other instances, we can ask members to think creatively without any validation backstops; or we constrain the total time leaving the creativity:validation balance up to the members. Each of these practices allows the team to grow in some aspect of their capability and it provides opportunities for leaders to experience the costs and benefits of that balance. The envelope in training is very wide, sometimes too wide.. but we’ve all agreed to show up at training, so suck it up and learn from it.
However, during operations, this envelope shrinks and should be as small as possible. In the field, team leaders need to be able to predict the cost of decisions based on the capability of their team. Plans and tactics should include enough creativity to address the scenario. Validation should be rapid and reliable. Field team-leads should be empowered to be decisive.
This ultimately results in the coordinators looking to quantify capabilities across the team. We do this with any position that is responsible for tasks beyond the core-skills and where the cost of delayed decisioning is high. Fundamentally this quality defines a team lead. As we identify tasks that relay on everyone being a team lead, like overhead, we tend to project a need of even higher capability.
I find technical rescue requires independently capable participants. We want the team to be familiar with the components of technical rescue, including the risks, so there is a shared understanding of what is feasible and where each member’s personal limits lie. However, in order to function as a team with reliable technical assets, we need to set a capability level that exceeds our core-skills and drives the capability factor to a standard that becomes a useful tool in deploying assets to support SAR in our county.
Ultimately there is a reason everyone has a helmet name-decal, my hope is everyone can build the capability to be proud of their contribution and participate at a high level of capability. Alas, some names just don’t care to be on a helmet.
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