We Need Better Intel
I’m starting to understand something really important about this moment.
We’re not talking about the stuff that really matters for us here, in the moment, for us to make better decisions. Individually. In communities. Probably in workplaces. Certainly in schools. Definitely in governments.
We’re not getting the big picture. We’re not getting decent perspective. From analysts. From news. From social media. From probably many of our conversations with the people around us.
Intel, or intelligence, is information we use to make decisions. Any of us.
In this new current era we’re living in these United States, we’re not getting good intelligence. We’re not getting good information. How then can we make good decisions to navigate the fast-evolving risk landscape we’re living in?
We’re not stepping back far enough.
We’re not stepping back far enough to get better perspective and intelligence on what’s actually happening in this country where we live.
It’s hard to do; especially when hundreds of thousands of things are changing fast.
But that’s part of it: seeing that hundreds of thousands of things are changing fast. Recognizing that. Seeing the complexity. Knowing that we’re in a world full of highly interrelated, interwoven, and interdependent systems… and that changes to any or to many of those systems will have a myriad of cascading effects.
We don’t have to go all in on trying to understand systems, though, to step back and get more, better, and different perspective that can help us get better intel to navigate the era we’re in.
For an example, think about one incident: 9/11. There are things we can learn from that that we can apply to now — and to how we’re getting intel to make decisions.
A Hard Situational Awareness Lesson From The First Responder World
Hardly anyone talks about 9/11 anymore, and that is just fine. It seems to be sort of overcome by events (OBE). But there’s some stuff to be learned — or remembered — from 9/11.
One of the big, big, big lessons for many on 9/11 was: don’t put your incident or emergency command and response center right in the middle of or just below the actual incident.
In incident management, that place is called the “incident command post,” or “ICP.”
So, yeah. Don’t put the ICP in the base of a building that’s on fire because a plane ran into it. It won’t go well.
That sounds casual. It’s not. It was a big huge issue and a lot of people talked about it at the time. It was super uncomfortable, though, because nobody wants to pass judgment on people who made decisions that led to their deaths or the deaths of others. But on the other hand, we would all be remiss to not learn, as others have in other incidents, don’t put your incident command post too close to or in the middle of the incident.
One of the key reasons why that’s important is because when you’re that close-in, you don’t have a good view of the whole landscape. The whole risk landscape. You don’t have good situational awareness, or good methods to get situational awareness, if you’re too close in.
In wildland firefighting, “lookouts, communication, escape routes, and safety zones (LCES)” have been a key to doing safe operations… as a result of lots of injury and death as is often the case with policies, rules, and approaches. Rules and policies are often derived from mistakes, oversights, missing pieces, missing strategy, and so on that can contribute to death and injury. Part of why our complex society has so many rules and policies is because we’ve been learning and evolving and creating bureaucracies to help us live safer lives and run safer businesses, infrastructure, governments, etc. Or at least that’s something we were doing as a society before this current era of deregulation. But I digress. Back to wildland fire’s LCES framework and 9/11.
When you look at the World Trade Center (WTC) incident command post location on 9/11… well it didn’t include several of those LCES features at a reasonable level… including escape routes, safety zones, and lookouts. Communication was a bit more robust than those other things, but arguably wasn’t as robust as it could have been for the incident.
Nobody thought the WTC buildings were going to come down; so everyone assumed that inside the WTC was a safe ICP spot, that they wouldn’t need additional escape routes other than the people escaping from higher-up-in-the-building locations (the perceived actual incident), and that communications would be effective (communications weren’t effective once the towers fell; a major comms tower had been on the WTC, and the ICP comms were obliterated).
I don’t need to give a rundown of what happened next, because it was, amazingly, 25 years ago. It did not go well. And there is extensive, painstaking documentation about 9/11 in the 9/11 Commission Report and in countless other documents in the first responder community and elsewhere. There’s ample opportunity to see some of the take-aways.
Yet people sometimes still do put incident command posts too close to the incidents they are created to support. First responders still make this mistake, because we can’t and don’t all learn all the things to be learned, and because society is super complex and complicated. But it happens less and less that people put the ICP too close-in to the incident.
Perhaps it also happens less and less because people who manage more complex incidents have been able to get better intel and info when they are not right up super close to the incident, so they see value in having a more stepped-back perspective.
The point is that it helps to be able to set situational awareness about what might be happening not from in the middle of the emergency right up close to what’s happening… but from a perspective set back a ways… where you can see way more factors that may well be contributing to the incident.
We can all learn from this specific example. It’s also just a basic point. You need to back off from the incident to have a better sense for what in the heck is happening on it.
We. Are. Not. Backed. Off. Enough.
We Don’t Need 9,000 Details
Right now, in this moment… we’re in the weeds. We’re in the details. We’re watching every single little thing crumble. We’re spending hours watching little fights and battles. We’re putting incredible hopes in individuals and institutions here and there even as people make decisions hourly that determine little bits of future.
But not a single one of those little tiny details — even though they are often actually kind of huge — is helpful for telling us how to handle this overall really huge issue which is that the whole world is changing right now right in front of us, and fast.
Plus, everyone’s telling us where to look… and what they’re telling us to look at are more details. Ack! Look at this thing! Pay attention to this! We should be worried about this thing! We need to be talking about this thing!
Yes, yes we do… to a point. We do need to See what’s happening. We do need to talk about it. We do need to call it out. We do need to document. Yes. To a point.
We also need to get way the heck more strategic and realistic about what is happening and what it’s going to mean for our society, our communities, and our daily lives.
WAY. MORE. STRATEGIC.
Think Like It’s A Disaster
Unless you’re an emergency management professional, you don’t usually need 9,000 details in a disaster.
Let’s say a river is rising and your ground-floor apartment is in the evacuation zone. You don’t need details on exactly how many houses and buildings are in the evac zone. You don’t need details on the state of flood insurance in the United States. You don’t need to know right now if FEMA’s current management or your state will help you if your place gets destroyed.
What you do need in the moment is to know basic operational things that can help you make decisions in a timely way so that the decisions do some good.
Like for example… How much time to we have to get critical stuff and get out of the flood zone? Will there be traffic jams getting in or out? Are people panicking? When is the flood water expected in my ‘hood? Where do we evacuate to? How will we get updates? Do we have ways to communicate? Do we have maps? Is there shelter? How do I find my kids?
And et cetera.
Perspective Helps
We’re in this era of rising instability, increasing crises, disruption, and so on. I won’t list all the things. The point is that we’re likely to be having more and more emergencies, crises, and disasters as things intensify.
We might navigate all that better if we can shift our perspective to a more disaster-oriented or big-picture perspective.
What does that mean?
It means to back up out of all the thousands of details of this program being cut or can you believe what this guy said or this court case or this icon damage or this agency getting gutted or whatever messes and instability and big changes are happening.
We’ll never be able to keep track of it all, and we also won’t personally be in the effects of all of it. We are absolutely likely to feel the effects of at least some of it.
Yet trying to track and react to all of it doesn’t help. Some of it’s going to happen whether or not we’re trying to watch every detail, and some of it may or may not ever get rectified or addressed for many years if ever. Some stuff is going to just fall away and evaporate and maybe later we’ll put things into place that relate to those pieces of society that we used to have some bureaucracy for.
But for right now… we have to let some of all that go.
Trying to figure out the overall trends, directions, and risks can help.
Figuring out what information we need in any given moment for the decisions we need to make can help. Decisions for our families, our businesses, our organizations, our friends, our relatives, our neighbors, and so on.
Starting with a perspective change is a good place to begin. This stuff isn’t going to happen overnight — the risk landscape. But any one of us can start now to think about things differently.
We’ll navigate what’s coming better if we can shift some of our thinking around.
Anyhoo. Food for thought.
Practice Exercise Homework Idea: The Country’s Big Birthday Party
If you’re looking for a way to practice this newfound perspective change, practice it on the stuff that’s happening both nationally and locally where you live for the July 4th weekend.
What matters for decisions you need to make? What doesn’t?
What’s a bunch of detail that’s distracting or angering or just noise? Do you need it?
What info or intel do you need to navigate a huge holiday weekend for a 250-year birthday party in a country with rising tension, lots-o-guns, extra exploding things for the weekend, and the high heat of summer?
What kinds of decisions do you need to make related to all that?
What kinds of risks might come up that you need to make decisions about?
Who do you need to talk to about making some of these decisions together?
You Get The Idea
You get the idea.
Anyway, give some of this a try. No time like the present. We’re not headed toward fairyland and daisies. We’ve got some tough stuff ahead. We’ll be better able to handle it if we start thinking about it all a bit differently.
Take care, be safe, and try not to get dead this weekend. And good luck keeping all of your digits and staying out of the emergency department. Those are always good goals but so much more so on a big holiday and fireworks weekend.
Onward and forward. Let’s went.
-Vanessa Burnett
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Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community, a nonprofit that is currently rearranging to better help people and communities in a fast-changing world. She is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er with a systems-oriented perspective to help people, groups, and communities navigate change, risk, crises, and disruption together. Vanessa has over 25 years experience in fostering connection, growing community, volunteer engagement, resilience-building, coalition-building, consensus-building, critical infrastructure, systems thinking, big disasters, catastrophes, wildland fire, emergency management, incident management, land management, park rangering, homeland security, continuity of operations (COOP), continuity of government (COG), technology innovation, public communication, disaster information sharing, and evolving processes/systems. This Substack channel does not knowingly use AI.
Vanessa, you are spot on. We are inundated day after day--sometimes hour after hour--with things that enrage us. That's all part of "the plan." And we should be enraged. But if we dwell on the specifics of each despicable thing, we get caught up; we fail to see context and lose the ability to develop a way to address them strategically. So, yes, let's pull back. Let's focus on the details that *matter,* and let's stop being caught up in each and every outrage so we can develop the strategy we need to carry us through the barrage.
The firemen fighting the Cottonwood fire in western ne had trouble communicating. When into the canyons, no cell service. Had to drive up and continuously to keep in touch.