[ST] [SA] Debrief Meeting Agenda

[Chris Amshey]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 12:09:23PM -0500, David D'Antonio wrote:
> On Jan 30, 2007, at 11:55 AM, Chris Amshey wrote:
> >Identifying problems cannot really be done just as easily by
> >e-mail. With many of the staff there you can quickly follow a chain of
> >events through where each person knows part of what happened, and
> >determine what were the actual problems that contributed to a
> >particular crisis. You can get a better sense of the scale and shape
> >of problems that affected many staff. It is much easier to understand
> >what happened when you are talking in person.
> 
> I can tell you right now that some of my staff won't be there because  
> they see no value in this meeting format; it should be clear from  
> other people's comments that they feel the same. In the Gripe, what  
> you describe wasn't allowed and since will follow the same format, I  
> don't see how it will be allowed here, either.

At the Gripe Session only attendees are supposed to be speaking, so it
would not be possible for them to do what I'm talking about. To be
slightly more concrete, say an attendee came to a staffer with a
problem that was promised to be fixed but never was. The staffer or
his head can say yes, and we called ops, and they promised to get the
correct person on it. With ops and other staff there, you can identify
quickly if it was a communications breakdown and where it was, or if
it was a resources problem - the responsible head may have gotten the
message but not had what was needed to solve the problem. This kind of
thing has been done and been very valuable in past debriefs, and is
still all oriented around understanding the problem and getting all the
facts. (Depending on who is running the meeting and exactly how they
choose the next to speak can make a large difference in how smooth
and effective that kind of thing is, of course.)

At the gripe session, the attendees don't have these relevant facts,
they don't know what happened behind the scenes, and staff aren't
supposed to be commenting during the gripe session so this sort of
thing can't be followed up.

So, even if the 'rules' are the same (or similar, anyway), the things
people know is very different, and that completely changes the flow
of the meeting.

--Chris