First up, big cheers to Phil for organising sport this arvo: no one lost a limb and the woodshed is now looking way healthier…

I’m pretty much over Tosser-Nissan-pickup Guy from this morning so taking up from then, I now know what pingbacks do – found out when I revisited the COIN Blog entry on metrics that I linked to below and found that through the magic of pingbacks this blog is now listed in that blog…and I was just talking to Josh re six degrees of separation, global networking etc. He also brought out a good point re blogs and stuff in that maybe we should be looking at using them for adult (no, not that kind of adult stuff – out of the gutter, all of you!!!)   show and tell a couple of mornings each week to stimulate discussion and perhaps feedback that discussion back into the blog (maybe more on this on The Strategist). I really do get the impression that many people are quite shy about commenting on a blog…whereas I’ve always been a bit short on shame (or so I’m told)…

Anyway…metrics…I hate them…balanced scorecards…I hate them too…I’m not anti trying to do things smarter, not at all, but I am totally anti any attempt to try to beancountise things that can not be easily quantified, more so when, IMHO, what this is really doing is saying to those professionals who are involved that “…we don’t really trust (understand) you unless you can convert what you do (or say you do) into a nice little spreadsheet preferably with good use of colour…” Sometimes you just have to and should trust to the experience of others – which then  implies that what we should be doing is whatever needs to be done to make sure that that experience contributes to an accurate (as possible) SUBJECTIVE assessment.

If you look across the staff branches (or one variation on the theme anyway) from 0-9, (0=comd/coord and includes legal probably because no one else will have them; 2 = intel; 3 = ops; 4 = log; 5 = plans or civ-mil affairs, works either way for this argument; 6 = comms/CIS; 7 = training; 8 = conepts and evaluation; 9 = finance/resources),  some lend themselves to quantifiablity (1, 4, 6, 9 perhaps) and others (0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8?) to qualifiable judgements (based on training and experience). In the end it all comes down to the professional opinion of the guy in charge, and that’s something the beancounting/BI community need to get their heads around.

That now out of my system for now, on lighter note, partly due to crap TV programming at the moment, we are rerunning Band of Brothers at home again – Carmen’s idea and I’d just like to say how cool it is to have a wife who is interested in such things; and a daughter as well: I was some proud and impressed when Tash watched Blackhawk Down, asked a few questions and then disappeared with the book to read up on it herself – and then did the same for Pearl Harbor after the lame-as 2001 movie…so off to watch Masterchef (love some of the food ideas they have), followed after the news by Fair Go, the child psych guy and then it’s off to Normandy for a couple more episodes….

I ran across Peter Hodge’s The Strategist a month or so ago while doing some research on CIA/CIT. His entry over the weekend opens up a whole can of worms regarding command and control concepts, trusting subordinates (and superiors) and also making sure that they have the tools including the training and experience to actually do the damn job!! It is so easy these days to talk the talk and be found wanting when it is time to actually get out there and walk the walk.

The Procarta web meeting I had last week really drilled into this issue and the question about whether you want nice safe validation and verification processes or whether actually getting the good OIL rippled across the system now now now is more important. The trouble with this approach is that people in charge need to accept risk and all players need to be able to accept responsibility for their actions – applying doctrine with judgement comes at a price, you know…