How to deal with bad stuff in real time

Couple of non-obvious things about tanks (that’s armoured vehicles, not water holding devices).

1. Unlike the movies, the most likely people you will run into in a tank, are other people in  tanks, who don’t like you.  So you don’t have minor problems, only really bad ones.
2. Your tanks and the bad guys tanks move very fast, so unexpected things happen really   quickly, and your plans unravel almost faster than you can think.
3. Despite the fact that they are very noisy environments, communications in a tank are excellent, due to a very robust radio and intercom system.

By now of course you are saying, interesting but so what?

For me the extension to “so what” is “what can business learn from tanks about dealing with bad situations in real time?”

Well the army knows that bad situations are stressful and difficult to understand sometimes, so it has developed a set report that’s used by everyone to cover verbal reporting on bad things.  Its called a Contact Report (because its about being in contact with the enemy!).  In a set sequence you let everyone know what’s happening:  including the exact time of the problem, the location, what the problem is and what you are doing about it. Eg.  “Contact, at 12:00  hours, At grid 123 456, Contacted 3 enemy T72 tanks, Engaged and destroyed, Over”

There’s a number of advantages of this.

• People further up the line get all the necessary information required to plug into their big picture model
• They also have then enough information to decide whether they should intervene or let you resolve things yourself.
• If there is corruption of the message, anybody in the communications chain knows exactly which bits are missing.

Of course though there is a fair bit of information to relay, which wouldn’t be much fun if you are really in the poo. Consequently there is a short form of this which just covers the bad thing eg.   “Contact, T72 tanks, Wait Out”.  The person receiving the message writes down the time because he knows that its happening right now.  When you send in the full contact report later – it can then be appended to the message from you with the same time.  This short form of the Contact Report is useful because you are letting everyone know that you have a problem.  Everyone then clears the airwaves because you have priority and if they don’t hear from you again they know why, and have a rough idea of where you were.  In theory help is already on its way.

But back to the business lessons.  I love the cross pollination of ideas from one industry to another and this is how the defence industry deals with real time issues.  Communication with clarity.

In my case I have had system operators (people running big computers)  working at banks around the clock.  And on occasion bad things happened.  But in every case the operators were trained to give a quick verbal report that a problem had occurred, before writing up their full notes later.  We were never, ever surprised by a client ringing up to find out “what the hell is going on?”.  We always looked like we were in control.

I think its a nice little lesson for businesses that want to keep on top their operations, courtesy of the Royal Australian Armoured Corps.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.