Football or Frisbee - Competition, Cooperation, and Management Style!

Football or Frisbee - Competition, Cooperation and Management Exercises
By Frish 2007 (and prior, as this was published in SURVIVE! Magazine several years ago, the BC/DRM group, not the Scientologists!)
Competition is a healthy thing. In nature, competition is the driving force behind continued existence. In everyday life it keeps things interesting. It provides healthy stress that keeps people interested in getting up in the morning to strive in the workplace. For organizations, competition also keeps things lively.

American football is one game that relies on competition at its core. It is actually an analogy for war. Two “platoons” battle over territory. There is an offense and a defense. Football’s jargon comes straight from the military - linebackers “blitz,” the game was won “in the trenches,” they threw “the bomb” etc. It’s purely an “Us” versus “Them” philosophy.

Frisbee is a game of catch, where players succeed through cooperation. Players must respond to the wind direction and speed, obstacles, the other players’ skill in catching and running, the location of the sun and other distractions. One measure of success is consecutive number of catches without the Frisbee touching the ground. To achieve success requires both good throwing and good catching with players being totally aware of the environmental conditions. Furthermore, while players may “compete” by displaying graceful skill in their catches and throws, if the goal is consecutive catches then cooperation between players is crucial.

Much management practice from the 1950's through the 1980's was based on a competitive, football type of philosophy. It was Our “smoke filled rooms” vs. Theirs. Competitors were considered threats to be crushed. Bigger was considered better. There was a bunker mentality, with “Not Invented Here” a good enough reason to decline the use of a new technique. Companies tried to be all things to all customers. Vertical integration, in development, production, marketing and service, was the norm, indeed the standard by which organizations were judged.

Government, especially the Federal government, also had this warlike management philosophy. The “War on Drugs”, the “War on Poverty”, not to mention the “Cold War”, are dramatic indications that “football” was being played. There was an attitude within government that nothing was out of reach (the moon, for example) given enough resource and the proper attitude.

Beginning in the early 80's, and accelerating since then, this author maintains that football has given way to Frisbee as management philosophy. Today organizations are downsizing and outsourcing personnel while re-engineering processes to take advantage of synergy within and outside an organization. Competitors still exist, but they also frequently act as a distributor or supplier as well. Team building, matrix management, and out-sourcing are recognition that no one organization can be all things to all customers (or citizens, in the case of government) and that cooperation within the organization is also a requirement for success.

Emergency management may be unique among management disciplines in the degree of dependence it has on others to get the job accomplished. The emergency management plan must respond, cooperatively, to threats in the environment. One could say there are no competitors in an emergency. Banks share check sorting services, cities have mutual aid pacts, brewers move their production to another’s facility etc.

Emergency managers most readily recognize the “Frisbee” management style. When disaster strikes they must “play Frisbee” rather than football. No agency can be self-sufficient when it comes to disaster recovery. Even the Incident Command System, the management system of choice for fire departments, is more Frisbee than football, as new participants arrive they (optimally) are inserted into the most appropriate part of the operation. The emergency services required by customers (or the public) are simply too vast for any single organization to supply.

Something else distinguishes emergency plans (safety, environmental, security, info-systems recovery, military, medical and many others) from other, everyday management plans. That is the concept of a management plan exercise. These plans must be exercised; otherwise there is no way to know they will work when they are (infrequently) called upon. There are lots of regulatory reasons to practice these plans through exercising, but one cannot assure an emergency plan’s operational readiness without exercising.

Management exercises can take several forms, from simply talking about what could happen and the appropriate response, to actually simulating the “outside” world and seeing how the management team reacts. Management exercises occur at all levels in an organization: from the shop floor (safety) to the computer room; for building evacuations; weather related threats (to transportation plans, for example); process control (chemical spill response practice); to the board room (product allegedly causes cancer in rats, what response to the media?).

Since emergency management plans are special cases of ordinary management plans whatever works to improve them should work for ordinary management plans as well! It has been discovered that the process whereby “emergency” exercises are produced can be used with equal success to build exercises for ANY MANAGEMENT PLAN!

Since they get used all the time, what “everyday” management plans could benefit from exercising? Exercises are used to train employees in a plan’s procedures. Therefore, new employees may benefit from exercising. Exercises can reveal gaps in personnel and equipment resources. As more management plans rely on outside parties for their fulfillment (i.e. outsourcing, off-shore manufacturing etc.) the more these outside relationships must be tested to ensure hi-quality performance is achieved. Also, the entire realm of Total Quality Management demands that “ordinary” plans get formally tested (ISO 9000, ISO 14000). Exercises also point out a plan’s deficiencies and therefore have been characterized simply as “good business practice!”

Cliffside Software has spent two years researching, designing and developing a product that automates management exercise development tasks. We recognized many needs expressed by “emergency” exercise planners in a variety of public and private organizations and provide libraries of discipline specific knowledge to meet those needs. However, as a result of meeting the needs of emergency management, a general management plan testing tool has been achieved! plan AHEAD - All Hazard Exercise Administration and Development is the product’s name, and there is no other product like it in the world!

Cliffside kept the Frisbee analogy in mind and so provided features that allow sharing of exercise development tasks. Instead of a Frisbee, plan AHEAD lets exercise developers “throw” a diskette, (an electronic file), to others who will “catch” this file and use it for a design or evaluation task, returning the “Frisbee” to the “thrower.” Various organizations in both the private and public sectors can share exercise components, and exercise development workload, without all of them having to own the product! New and existing exercise design team members can work together efficiently and easily using this Frisbee-like approach.

Already in use in Federal, state, and local government agencies, and in industries such as banking, petrochemical, telecommunications, insurance, securities, health care, manufacturing and more, plan AHEAD is quickly becoming the de-facto exercise development standard. Exercises developed with plan AHEAD are being used to evaluate chemical spill plans, rental security officer performance, end-user software application acceptance tests, bomb threat/building evacuation, computer back-up and recovery scenarios, utility outage and recovery, business continuity, crisis management and much more.

If your organization ought to be playing more Frisbee than football, then it is also ready to perform more and better management exercises. Get ready for the toss, the wind’s just right!

Author Bio:
Michael W. Frishberg, President, Cliffside Software, Inc. Michael’s interest in Frisbee is longstanding, but his interest in emergency management plan exercises is purely selfish. He firmly believes better exercises will lead to better trained responders, so he’ll be safer during and after “The Big One!” Contact Cliffside at 1-(888)-PLAN-IT-X or via email: