The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Apply the 5 Special Operations Forces Truths to Incident Management Team Members | PPP #47

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Sharing parallels of the 5 SOF Truths from the program "Special Forces - The Fight Against Terror" to the All-Hazards Incident Management world.

This is People Process Progress Podcast, episode 47, Project Managers, Incident Management, and the Five SOF Truths. So lately I've been reaching back into the Wayback Machine to some articles that I wrote on LinkedIn. This episode 47 is no different. This is from an article I wrote on May 17th, 2017. And it has to do with a Amazon Prime video i was watching called special forces the fight

against terror so not from my perspective as a special operations forces person because i was not that i was a corpsman in the navy i i was down a dive medtech program brushed up against some of these folks but i just was watching something on amazon prime And this thing they talked about these five SOF truths really stuck out to me at the time more so focused on incident management, but can also apply to project managers. So I want to go through some of these and these are how they relate to good, you know, competent special operations forces and my two cents on, you know, we'll kind of go back to my incident management team days, how these apply to incident management team members. So let's get into the first one. The first one is SOF truth one, humans are more important than hardware. So it all has an

incident management team world. This, this equates to, you know, value valuing those personal and professional relationships over getting stuck on the forms and the wall charts, right? So the gadgets and the stuff and the things that you have are cool. But first, we need to focus on our people, just like in a project, all the tech we use all the software, all the whatever is really neat, but do the people understand it? Are people okay? Are people communicating? That's what we got to to focus on. So, you know, incident management, again, we must always promote process over document creation, right? If we can work an efficient process and we never get document one done but we've accounted for people safely or we've gotten them food or whatever, that's critical, right? And, you know, document is a thing. The process is the core that keeps us all safe and efficient.

SOF Truth 1, humans are more important than hardware, applies straight across the board for incident management and project management. SOF Truth 2, quality is better than quantity. We want stuff that's really good more than we want a lot of things. Sometimes young incident management teams or even their members have challenges when they're trying to build capacity, right? We have grant funds, budgets, we wanna get a lot of members,

but do we jump to giving people and making them chiefs right away as opposed to having them actually learn the jobs? And I've talked about this before at the ground level, the unit level, the section level. I went to the section level first and then went backwards. So lesson learned from me, if I would have come up as a, you know, in the planning section, a check-in recorder, then a resource unit leader, and then a plans chief, I would have had a broader knowledge base and practical application. I kind of worked backwards.

Fortunately, I had great partners and mentors. And so we worked through that. But you know, the value of experience on an incident manager team far outweighs just jumping into positions because you want to wear the title or you got to do the process. You've got to go through it. It's really ground up, can't be overstated. And that's true for any job, right? Whether you're in a fire station, in a police vehicle, you're in a boardroom. If you've come up at kind of the boots on the ground level,

you're going to have a much better perspective. And if we put our time into those folks and build them up, we are going to have both quality and quantity. So that SOF truth two, quality is better than quantity. Think about that whether you're on an incident management team or a project team and really focus on the quality of what you're doing and your people srf true three special operations forces cannot be mass produced indeed is noted above right you know building capacity is one thing but building a strong core of competent and confident incident

manager team professionals professionals is another. And that's one thing I found across all the different teams I met, ones I was on, ones I helped train, ones I partnered with. There's typically the same core folks that become really, really good. And they're the same folks that show up for the same stuff all the time. Now, does that give you a super well-oiled machine so you can show up and just do things? Absolutely. Does it build tons of capacity? It doesn't. So in your incident management teams, think about both.

You can't just spit people out and expect them to be really good, meaning, hey, you've done plan chief a couple times. We're going to sign your book off. Good to go. Uh-uh. That doesn't work that way. Same thing for project managers. You can't work a couple projects and then just think you're good at it and go out there and do high level stuff. So, you know,

in the aspect of special operations forces, those folks are, their training pipelines are, you know, one, two, three years, depending on what you're in. And not, you know, the small percentage of folks make it just like I dare say a smaller percentage of folks make it, just like I dare say, a smaller percentage of folks join incident manager teams that actually stick with it, that get credentialed, that stay with the team, that deploy, that are consistent. And so that's something if you're on an incident manager team, realize you're not going to mass produce quality people. So look at the people you have and try and build them up.

And it really behooves teams to focus on building up committed individuals instead of just blanket opportunities where you might get one off. Someone might participate one time and they get to do some cool thing well think about the folks that are there all the time if that person's going to take their place meaning the person that never shows up gets an opportunity just because of who they know that's not cool so srf truth three special operations forces cannot be mass produced. Neither can good incident management team members, neither can good project managers. SOF Truth 4, competent special operations forces cannot be created after emergencies occur. Pretty much a straightforward incident management, emergency management, project management. But if we're trying to build people up after something's happened, we didn't prep, right?

So, very much along the lines of this concept, you know, response partners should not be meeting for the first time after something happens or, you know, outside the collapsed building, right? Incident management teams should way before have good local, regional, state, federal partnerships, right? They should have processes. So if the balloon goes up, as they say, we know how we're going to ask, we know who's going to show up, we know who's going to be there, who's going to do what, or at least work some of that stuff out. And you just got to include your partners in training and exercises and bring them to observers, show them what you can do. I was very fortunate on the Central Virginia team I was on, the folks that built that team up to be a part of that as

it grew, to have great mentorship, to be part of good kind of showing what we can do opportunities through planned events and then through incidents, missing people, big presidential debates, all that kind of stuff. And that's the thing is you got to do it ahead of time. You got to have those relationships so that when stuff does happen, you can show up and you already kind of know each other, at least know of each other. Number five, SOF truth five, most special operations required non-SOF assistance, right? So all the cool high speed, you know, to me, this is, this goes directly to public safety, right? There's sexy stuff in public safety, driving the fire engine with the lights and sirens on or police car or

the ambulance or doing the CPR or this or that. But you know, none of that happens without the logistics people, without the vehicle maintenance people, without the people who pay the bills to pay for the vehicles, like none of it. So same exact thing, for instance, management teams, public safety can't fill every role or should not fill every role with just public safety people, right? A truly all hazards approach is going to have a bunch of different disciplines on it, finance people in finance, you know, and, you know, we're kind of saturated with folks in the incident management team world with people who can put out fires, do mass casualty incidents, make arrests, all that kind of stuff. But what we need to do is, you know, to be more effective is do training, deployment, development opportunities for all disciplines, general

government, public health, healthcare, public utilities, whoever, right? And you have a very integrated team. Logistics is huge, right? Logistics doesn't have to be done by public safety folks. We had logistics, public health folks that I work with that were awesome at logistics that could have done logistics for any team I was on, right? Because it's the core skill set. And again, the non-SOF assistants and special operations forces recognize that. The tip of the spear folks and the night vision that are out there taking out bad guys

or snatching them up, they can't do what they do without the whole machine that's behind them, right? And they recognize it. And so for instance, management teams, same thing. You can't deploy, you can't be operations, you know, tactical with all your stuff without all the people that are getting you the stuff, that are doing the paperwork, that are driving the vehicles. So teams need to remember that.

While we want to do the high-speed stuff, we've got to really take care of the people who are making it happen. So I hope this was a little insightful. Check out that video. If it's still up, I haven't checked for a while. Special Forces, the fight Against Terror on Amazon Prime. Again, just think about these truths in the thought of what you do. For me, I wrote this originally for incident management teams.

It can certainly apply to project management. Think about this. So the first one, again, humans are more important than hardware. People, right? Like people process progress. People at srf truth 2 quality is better than quantity we need to have really good processes really good relationships really good investment in our people more than we have need to have a lot of stuff or a lot of people or a lot of visibility right srf three, special operations forces cannot be mass produced.

Just like you cannot mass produce good project managers, you cannot mass produce good incident management team members if you want them to be effective without having to look over their shoulder all the time. You just can't do it. As you have truth four, competent special operations forces cannot be created after emergencies occur. If we wait, is it a tenant management teams or emergency management or project managers to develop

relationships? You know, when something bad has already happened, when that risk became an issue, when we're not contingency plan, when we're showing up at the missing person, whatever it is, then we're already too late, right? We should have relationships in the region we respond in. We should have relationships in the organization we work in. We just have to do that. As you have truth five, most special operations require non SOF assistance, right? All the high speed, sexy stuff, lights and sirens, night vision, people, whatever that none of that happens without all the people that make it happen. So quick summary, quick episode. I hope you all are doing well. I hope you're all healthy, safe.

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Wash those hands. And Godspeed.