Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Learning by Doing--Military and FEMA

One of this blog's themes is learning. Here's another example, from today's Times:
Millions Are Still Without Power and in Need of Basic Supplies - New York Times: "Across the state in Naples, just north of where the hurricane made landfall early Monday, ice and water distribution appeared to be going more smoothly. At one station, members of several National Guard units were operating with assembly line precision. By 9 a.m., hundreds of cars, from Mercedes Benzes to jalopies, had lined up on a road leading into the parking lot of Barron Collier High School.

A National Guardsman in camouflage fatigues waved cars forward, and as each rolled up to a squad of soldiers, one sang out, 'Pop the trunk.' Other soldiers stepped forward with cartons of bottled water and plastic bags of ice, putting them in the car, tapping the trunk shut and motioning the driver on. Each delivery was over in seconds.

'We've done this so much over the last two or three years that we're getting pretty good at it,' said Sgt. First Class Tim Harper of the 265th Air Defense Artillery of Sarasota."


Simple but a product of learning. My point here is that you need the bureaucracy to incorporate such lessons. As long as the Guard in Florida is called out regularly, they'll have the institutional memory of how best to organize water/ice deliveries (assuming people have cars and gas). But if there's a gap of years, it will be lost because, I strongly suspect, there's no bureaucracy in place to capture "lessons learned" and put them into circulation and no training mechanism in place to spread experience to other places.

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