Rules and Guidelines
Want to participate in the discussions? Please read our Community Rules and Guidelines. Need some help? Visit Support and Answers.

  • State Not Answered
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 28 replies
  • Subscribers 14 subscribers
  • Views 2316 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
You may also be interested in
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Are there lessons we could all learn from how the modern military copes with unexpected situations?

Andy Millar
Hi,


A couple of serious issues I was involved with this weekend made me think of this. One was in the engineering world to do with the day job, I was reviewing a very serious incident report (fortunately no fatalities but very close) involving a mixture of everyone trying to do the best they could, but perhaps over reliant on structured checklists which had completely missed an entire piece of equipment in a fairly unique situation. The other was a medical issue in the family, once again all the individual hospital staff were doing their best, but there was a bit of the process that just didn't cope with a particular situation.


Which made me think of something that's long been at the back of my mind: I've never worked in a military environment, but my impression of the modern military from the contacts I have had is that there is still a very structured hierarchy, chain of command, and focus on process, but equally it appears that somehow there is also the ability for small units to have the skills and freedom to evaluate and make their own decisions when challenging circumstances arise - exactly the key skills that were missing in the two examples above. 


So really two questions I'd really like to know other people's views on (particularly those who have worked across both the military and civilian worlds): firstly are my impressions above correct? And if so (or even if a bit wrong but on the right lines) are there lessons we can learn from how this works that we can apply to the management of engineering activities in the wider world - particularly in safety critical issues where we need structure but also need the ability to rapidly and effectively cope with new problems when they come up?   


Thanks,


Andy
Parents
  • 0
    This thread got promoted on LinkedIn so I thought I’d make my first contribution on here and spotted Roy’s comment about the quality and extent of training!


    There’s a lot of debate in certain circles about Safety-I (stopping things going wrong) and Safety-II (making sure things go right) which I think ties in with this.  Safety-II is promoted as being much better at dealing with uncertainty than Safety-I for the sorts of reasons I think have already been touched on, although it does depend on those doing the work having a much higher level of competence than just following a checklist or list of instructions so I wouldn’t like to say how much of it is down to the Safety-II approach in and of itself, and how much is down to the higher level of training required to implement a Safety-II approach within an organisation!


    While I was only ever in the TA Signals, the training I received - largely under the wing of my Det Commander as far as my specialist role went - is a bit like how apprentices used to be trained in industry.  While it meant that the two of us could be relied on to do a job on our Radio Relay wagon having been given only a grid reference and a bunch of bearings and frequencies, it probably involved a lot more time and effort in (and presumably therefore money) in getting to that position than I reckon a lot of businesses would be happy spending these days...
Reply
  • 0
    This thread got promoted on LinkedIn so I thought I’d make my first contribution on here and spotted Roy’s comment about the quality and extent of training!


    There’s a lot of debate in certain circles about Safety-I (stopping things going wrong) and Safety-II (making sure things go right) which I think ties in with this.  Safety-II is promoted as being much better at dealing with uncertainty than Safety-I for the sorts of reasons I think have already been touched on, although it does depend on those doing the work having a much higher level of competence than just following a checklist or list of instructions so I wouldn’t like to say how much of it is down to the Safety-II approach in and of itself, and how much is down to the higher level of training required to implement a Safety-II approach within an organisation!


    While I was only ever in the TA Signals, the training I received - largely under the wing of my Det Commander as far as my specialist role went - is a bit like how apprentices used to be trained in industry.  While it meant that the two of us could be relied on to do a job on our Radio Relay wagon having been given only a grid reference and a bunch of bearings and frequencies, it probably involved a lot more time and effort in (and presumably therefore money) in getting to that position than I reckon a lot of businesses would be happy spending these days...
Children
No Data

Community Rules & Guidelines