In some recent discussions, I’ve been thinking about the nature of the way our organisation deploys communications. I shall use an example of the issues we have.
Last week I had an email, which had been forwarded relentlessly down the CoC from the Army down, army to TG5, to Corps, to Region, to Wing, to everyone. Concerning an urgent safety issue with the L85 Change Lever. Why did we all have to have this thrust upon us instantly, on a week day, off camp season? Almost none of our weapons have change levers, we don’t fire during weekdays and yet we all have to hear about it instantly. (To add insult to injury I received another email a few days later to confirm that the L98A2 doesn’t have a change lever…)
I was then speaking to another officer who used to be an OC before email went big. He told me how he would receive wing post once a week, read it all, then split it down to the in-trays of who needed to see it. One pile for him, one for the Adj, one for the TO etc. To me this sounded like a much more effective way of handling information to be distributed to staff and squadrons, instead of it being sent piecemeal, where it is actually easier to miss something.
I think the following quote from an article I read recently sums up my point.
[quote=The Young Officer and Staff Duties By Michael M. O’Leary, Captain, The RCR]In this age of e-mail and instantaneous passage of information and queries, it is hard to develop a concrete understanding that good staff duties are as important as ever. Let me set forth one example:
In the days of hand-written drafts, and clerk-typed correspondence, a staff officer might take a day or two to mull over the perfect wording for a set of four or five questions to another unit or headquarters. Passing this to a clerk, it might be a day or two before the typed version of the draft was returned. By then, the staff officer had time to consider the issue, and then to view the content, structure and tone of the letter with fresh eyes. Amendments might be in order, to either remove or insert points, or even to completely alter the tone or format of the letter. Extra work for the clerk perhaps, but it did ensure that the final product was as good as the staff officer could produce - in this case the staff officer’s contribution was the intellectual effort to create and revise the document, the clerk’s was to prepare it in the requested format.
With external correspondence, most units had a very limited number of appointments who could sign letters leaving the unit lines. And this limitation in itself ensured due focus on the preparation of correspondence because senior eyes would see the product before it was signed and dispatched.
That letter was then sealed in an envelope and mailed. A week, or so, in transit, time for the recipient to absorb its content, a week or so to staff a response. Perhaps a month might go by before the sender bothered to call looking for confirmation that a response was on its way (excepting of course emergency requests or imposed deadlines).
Contrast this to today’s methods. The staff officer sitting at his desk, able to immediately dispatch a question by e-mail to any other staff or line officer with instantaneous delivery. Now the officer, on conjuring his first (of the four or so) questions, sends an e-mail to his lateral counterpart. Perhaps he adds an info addressee or two to ensure they are aware of the request. Later he derives his second question, and another e-mail follows in the wake of the first. Shortly, there’s another. The next day, sober second thought wants to revise or combine questions already sent, perhaps already answered or rejected for the very reason an amendment is desired. Responses may have their own alternate info addressees. It’s not hard to imagine the information morass that can quickly be created by a too hasty approach in using available technology with what is literally a lower degree of applied intellectual effort than the pace of the predecessor staff process allowed.
The point here is not so much the imbalance between effective execution and advancing technology, but in the loss of focus on the importance of credible staff processes and good staff work. Imagine the difficulty in sorting out the ensuing problems if this contrived information morass is dealing with a pay or leave problem for one of your soldiers, or an exercise ration plan. Use the technology to streamline delivery and development processes, don’t permit it’s sense of immediacy to overrule common sense deliberation in the creation of staff work.[/quote]
Anyway, back to the example, surely a better way of handling the issue would have been for someone in that chain to have read the original email, then instead of simply blindly hitting forward, so that the person at the end has to scroll though all the previous forwards, someone think about it and issue a simple statement which could have been added to one weekly update email, or CROs. (Which could be pushed and advertised more effectively than they are currently.) To the effect that there is an issue which largely doesn’t affect us. If you need to know more, please read the attachment. As a friend of mine has just said to me ‘if communications can be made too easily then people don’t think about what they say’ (Actually, that could apply to here too 
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Thoughts?