From the Field
Over the past few years really, but the last few months in particular, my team and I have spent an incredible amount of time with, what I can now confidently name them as colleagues, across fire and rescue services, airport fire and rescue and police forces. Time is a funny thing – it tends to fly by so fast and leaves behind so much.
I started this note by wanting to say that the conversations have covered training, competency, workforce planning, technology, procurement but in reality everything converges to one core point – operational delivery.
On the surface, the conversations were all different.
In reality, every conversation came back to the same challenge.
How do I know I can make this operational decision with confidence?
Whether it’s assigning someone to a role, confirming they’re safe to perform a critical task, deploying them to a particular incident, approving specialist capability or responding to an audit, all layers of the service, be they leaders, managers, or the firefighter or the police officers in the teams, are constantly making decisions that carry operational risk.
Those decisions need more than good intentions.
They need assurance.
I should be clear about where I sit in this. I’m not a firefighter, I’m not a police officer and I’ve never worn the uniform with the exception of the Soimii Patriei and Pionieri uniforms in my childhood, but that’s a different story!
My team and I build software. That’s precisely why I went and listened, because you cannot build something useful for a problem you have only read about.
What I heard was consistent enough to be worth writing down.
Those observations became the catalyst for this first edition of Field Notes
The Problem
And here’s the thing… most organisations, regardless of their field of work, don’t lack information. There is so much information that is recorded, checked, re-checked and stored!
But… what I can see they lack is confidence (or capability) in bringing it together.
People information sits in one system, training in another, competency somewhere else. Assets, qualifications, operational records and evidence all live independently, each managed perfectly well in isolation.
Collectively, the jigsaw might tell the complete story, but only if someone has the time to assemble it. And usually, nobody does…unless something (usually bad) happens…
Operational leaders don’t make decisions about systems. They make decisions about people.
They need to know whether someone is ready to perform a role safely, effectively and compliantly today, right now.
When that picture is fragmented, how easy is it for confidence to become assumption?
That is where operational risk begins.
Introducing the Operational Confidence Model™
The Operational Confidence Model (OCM) is a simple way of thinking about operational assurance.
It doesn’t start with software.
It doesn’t start with competency.
It starts with one question.
What information do we need to make operational decisions with confidence?
Our view is that every confident operational decision depends on five essential elements.
People
Do we have the right individual performing the role?
And we need to care passionately about this because when this is wrong, everything downstream is being assured against the wrong person.
Capability
Do they have the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to perform it?
Because attendance on a course is not the same as capability in the role. Because unless the knowledge, the skills and the behaviours are applied in all circumstances there is no way to assess competency assurance.
Currency
Are those capabilities current, maintained and still valid today?
I’ve spoken about this millions of times – skills are not competencies; skills are not capabilities. Skills never decay. Capability does…quietly…constantly. Nothing announces the day it expires.
Readiness
Are they operationally ready right now, considering equipment, availability, operational requirements and any other factors that could affect safe performance?
Because… someone can be qualified, current and still not deployable today, right now, when the need is high.
Evidence
Can every decision be supported by objective, auditable evidence?
If the answer only exists in someone’s head, on a piece of paper stuck in a register, it isn’t there when the person who knows is off shift.
These five elements work together to create one outcome.
Assurance
Assurance is not a sixth thing to be bought or bolted on. It’s what you have when all five elements hold true for the same person, in the role they’re actually being asked to do, at the moment you need to know.
Remove or weaken any one element and confidence starts to diminish. The decision still gets made, because operationally it has to be, but it is now being made on assumption rather than evidence.
That is the risk. Not the decision that may be wrong, but the one that looks perfectly sound right up until somebody asks how it was reached, and whether there’s evidence to prove it.
Assurance is only as strong as its weakest element.
Why This Matters
Too often, organisations focus on improving individual systems: a better learning or training platform, a new competency framework, improved asset management, more reporting.
Each initiative has value.
But operational assurance isn’t created by any single system or process.
It’s created by bringing together the information leaders need to make informed operational decisions.
The Operational Confidence Model provides a simple way to think about that challenge.
It creates a common language that applies regardless of organisation, technology or operational environment.
Technology then becomes an enabler rather than the objective.
The role of software is to strengthen each of the five elements and provide the evidence needed to support confident decisions.
There is a test worth applying to any system that claims to deliver assurance: who does the work? If confidence at the top is bought with more forms, more uploads and more administration at watch and shift level, the burden has simply been moved rather than solved.
The people who most need assurance to work are the ones with the least time to feed it. If a system can’t respect that, it isn’t delivering assurance. It’s just moving the paperwork around.
Closing Thought
Operational assurance isn’t created by one system.
It isn’t created by one assessment.
It most certainly isn’t created by one spreadsheet.
It comes from understanding five essential elements and ensuring they work together.
People. Capability. Currency. Readiness. Evidence.
Because every operational decision deserves confidence.
And because assurance is only as strong as its weakest element.
