…me, knowing you…it’s the best we can do…

Thanks, ABBA….it’s all about knowing when to do something and more importantly sometimes, when not too…

This idea for this post came from observing so many of the comments made in the immediate aftermatch of the February 22 earthquake and that we’re starting to hear again from Japan…it was reinforced again by the Daily Post question last week When is it better to be sorry that safe? As posts go, I’d rate it as less than average – if all you have to do to meet a Daily Post obligation is ask a question, I’d be in like Flynn but I think that any post worth its electrons needs to be a little more substantive than that…

Knowing… in her blog piece Three Times You Have To Speak Nilofer Merchant argues that there are three times (in bold print) when we ought to speak up:

When it will improve the results of the group.

When it gives others permission to speak their truth.

When the costs of silence are too high.

But her key point is hidden away in her summary text “…knowing when to speak is an art, and like any art, requires skill….” Conversely, knowing when to shut the hell up is equally as much a skill that requires practice…

Yeah, whatever, Mike...

A more pertinent observation from a more professional organisation...

Not really picking on Mike Yon this time…it’s just that he happened to launching off when I first started to draft this…what actually got me going on the subject was rather vocal comments from a number of sources regarding the Civil Defence effort in Christchurch in the immediate aftermath of the Feb 22 quake…calling for reviews and investigations and labelling staff as incompetent is simply not productive when responding to the most major natural disaster ever to hit the nation. There is a time for all hands to the pump to just get things done and another for later introspection and review…

In a similar vein, are all those second-guessers and self-appointed experts who, possibly with the best of intentions, promulgate such guff as the discredited Triangle of Life technique to save oneself during an earthquake or those who, like at Pike River, state it would have better to rush into collapsed buildings to try to rescue trapped and injured people. The harsh truth is that there is bugger-all to support such ideas and plenty to prove that they are more likely to hinder than help. Like we say it the doctrine world, it’s all about ‘applying with judgement’ and not just charging in – or applying by rote…thinking thinking thinking….

No doubt there are some major issues appearing in, not just Civil Defence, but most agencies involved in the recovery effort as they adjust from the initial response to the long haul of recovery and clean up…now is the time to start collecting the raw OIL (observations, issues and lessons) across the entire response force to identify what we did that we shouldn’t have done and what we didn’t do that we should have done…it’ll be interesting to see how a government-level lessons learned project might emerge from this…

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As you can see this was a post that was started and never quite polished off…I’m still a bit behind the 8 ball on this one as well but completing ‘Knowing’ also meets another WordPress Daily Post challenge – even if it was from last Friday – Go to your drafts folder and finish an old post…I have to say that the Daily/Weekly Post challenges are great motivators to keep up the momentum…I get an idea and launch into a draft but then either get distracted or want to polish just a little bit more before publishing that it never really gets done…as it says in today’s daily challenge, “…Writing is therapeutic…” Yes, it is and although I now have more writing tools, I don’t write as much…ten years ago I had a good half dozen scripts bubbling away, was prolific in a number of online forums and was writing reviews and papers on a range of subjects. Today, the ideas are still there but the delivery mechanism seems to be jammed on ‘Start’ and locked out of ‘Develop’ and ‘Complete’…all I can say is that I’m working on it…