Improving Incident Coordination within Your Organization
My son is a 26-year-old Mechanical Engineering PhD. candidate at Stony Brook University on Long Island, NY. Though, I fondly remember 20 years ago, taking him to the practice field, as he began to play soccer. Look at him now! But then, Saturday mornings were the best time of my week back then; coffee house and a quick game of checkers, onto practice, then after-practice playtime, then lunch, and whatever else a Saturday would bring. Who knew that Saturday mornings would serve as the training I needed to become an incident coordinator for a Regional bank 20 years later, not to mention tapped to lead through a pandemic!
As an assistant coach, I spent hours with the team helping coordinate drills that were designed to help these players learn personal control of the ball. It was demanding work for the first few years of my son’s soccer career. The six-year-old games mostly consisted of a gaggle of children swarming around a soccer ball like little bees, all wanting to control the ball. Wherever the ball went, the swarm followed. If the swarm got near enough to a goal, someone would yell, “get it in the net!” and if luck was with us, there would be a score on the chart. Tedious to watch, but the players loved it, and that is what counted most.
It would be a couple of years before the players would mature enough to collectively pursue a new objective — to work as a team to move the ball into the goal. Drills went from controlling the ball to passing and receiving the ball. More advanced drills introduced a competitor that would attempt t steal the ball and the reason to pass it to another team member was realized. The games over those years got more exciting each year. Teamwork grew, the roles of each position were more understood, and the unit acted as one with a common mission. The concepts of offense and defense came into play. The winning spirit was shared, and trust was formed among the team players. We really had something now, after years of practice.
It is no different evolution for a small company that has a growth spurt, especially so for a small community bank that more than doubles in size over 5 years of merger and acquisition activity. The players were all willing and didn’t know the new teammates very well. The old concept of “rush in and fix it when it happens” becomes top-heavy, with more players trying to “help”, exhausting for the coordinators to keep up with all of the questions, and unsustainable, as most of the team piles on to accomplish the same tasks and inadvertently get in each other’s way. Teaching them to pass the ball takes time and energy, much like the six-year-olds.
But over time, as things occur and are resolved, albeit using an inefficient process, the players start to feel fatigued and lost for structure. They say that failure is good if you learn from it. That is the time to intervene. They are hungry for change and simplicity. The swarm of ideas swirling around is noisy and counterproductive. They need to trust each other and learn to pass the ball.
The incident coordinator becomes the organizational therapist. He must hear them all and synthesize all of the competing feedback into a coherent plan. Lessons learned and pain points abound. They are inconsistent, sometimes, incoherent, and usually based upon their old experiences and fears. Step one is to let them get it all out; the feedback is all pieces to two puzzles: some pieces go to a puzzle of “what once was”, others to a puzzle that depicts “what will be”. But surprisingly, some fit in both puzzles. It is the incident commander’s job to fit the “what will be” puzzle together and disregard the leftover pieces into the recycle bin.
How and where to start?
Write it all down on a “pain points” list, leaving a column to capture strategy for how to address each one in the new response plan. Alongside the pain point list, put together a simplified workflow with essential steps. Armed with these two documents, hold a group session and do the following:
1) Get to an agreement on the objectives and essential steps within the new workflow.
2) Attach people to these roles and responsibilities within the new workflow (process).
3) Pull out the “pain points list” — acknowledge each item — the rules are to assign one of the following dispositions to each item:
a) we have it covered in the new workflow
b) we no longer need to do it and it can be discarded
c) we need a new way to do it in the workflow
4) For each item that has been assigned to “c” above, add steps and assignments into the workflow.
5) Convert the workflow into a plan document with assignments. Pass it around for review.
6) Test the new plan by inviting back the smaller team of players — then role-play through a few scenarios, adjust the plan and publish.
This gets you to a stable place, probably now the plan is akin to the 9-year-old soccer team as far a maturity is concerned; the new team members now know their place, when to step in and when to pass or simply support.
Annually, test this plan with different scenarios to continually improve it. This practice also is important to rehearse the players, who hopefully aren’t responding to events very often.
It has been said that all management is change management, and all change management is management. When building an incident coordination team and shepherding a company through the improvement process, you will need to overcome the noise, the trust issue, the misunderstandings, the old concepts, and, frankly, the politics.
Be brave and stand true. Be repetitive. Be available. Be a leader. Award successes and coach through failures. While you bring the company through a very logical business process improvement task, be human and acknowledge the shock, the grief, and the opposition to change. When you have arrived, you will fondly remember the war stories and be able to take pride in the growth.
