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Stories from the field that show doctrine colliding with reality
Field notes are how I document what actually happened when systems, people, and missions intersected under pressure. Some went well. Some went sideways. All of them taught me something about how resilient systems really work.
Stop Presenting, Start Guiding: How To Use Story Patterns To Drive Behavior Change When I started doing more video and training work inside government, I realized something important. The hardest part was not cameras.It was not editing.It was not even nervous talent. It was this: I could give people accurate information and they still would…
Why Amateurs Need A Safe Container To Perform Under Pressure, aka Psychological Safety Is A Production Asset. Before AI clipping tools, before everyone had a 4K camera in their pocket, the hardest part of government video was not gear. It was people. Executives were worried about looking foolish.Staff were worried about saying the wrong thing.Both…
How Agents And Generative UI Help Federation Finally Work The pixel is whatever the human can see and click at a given moment. The substrate is everything underneath the screen. Stick with me to see why your long-standing skillset is more important than ever. You have been building serious systems for years. You know integration…
Most organizations are very good at delivering projects. They are much less good at deciding which projects should exist in the first place. You can hit the holy trinity of project managementon time, on budget, in scopeand still ship something that does not move the needle for your customers or your mission. In medicine, prescribing…
Context:I wrote the original version of this right after coming back from Hurricane Florence, working inside a very mixed group of agencies, contractors, and mission partners. On the org chart, everyone lived in neat vertical silos.In the room, we were a temporary coalition that had to act like a single team under time pressure. That…
Fair To Who: How Panel Interviews Miss The People You Need Most (Field note context) Field note context When I say ‘best operators,’ I mean people whose value shows up once they are inside complex, stakeholder-heavy systems, not people who are necessarily the best talkers in a one-way audition. Panels are quite good at finding…
What Hurricane Florence Taught Me About The Cost Of “Can-Do” Culture Field note context This story sits alongside two other pieces about how systems really behave under pressure, not how they look in a slide deck. This one adds a third angle. It is about what happens when a system depends on heroics, what it…
When people picture wildland fire, they usually see flames, aircraft, and line gear. What they do not see is the invisible network that moves people and aircraft to the right place at the right time. In the United States, that network is a three-tier dispatch and coordination system: If you work in tech or national…
Doctrine Claim: Technical work creates value – narrative work defends it. This field note explains why “doing the job” is not enough if you cannot explain the job to the people who sign the checks. The “Katrina Book” was not a souvenir – it was narrative infrastructure designed to protect the team from political decay….
How a self funded 26 foot mobile GIS and RF lab changed my understanding of forward deployed systems during Hurricane Katrina.
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