Understanding Service Assessments as Enterprise Learning Tools: Reflections from the Road Well Traveled

Understanding Service Assessments as Enterprise learning tools: Reflections from the road well traveled:

Susan A Jasko, Ph.D.

Center for Advanced Public Safety

University of Alabama

NWS Service Assessments highlight several key organizational strengths as well as a few organizational weaknesses. The inclusion of social scientists and social and behavioral perspectives in both team design and assessment practices has added nuance and depth to the learning outcomes of assessment as a tool of organizational improvement and development. Service assessments can also be understood as a kind of microcosm of the NWS and even, perhaps, of NOAA itself in terms of task focus, multi-unit involvement, a range of expertise and exerts, looming deadlines, and chain of command. At the same time, assessments (and the team members) occupy a time and space anthropologists call “liminal”*. As the result, the interaction and discussion among team members tend to highlight organizational strengths such as dedication to mission, improvisational or flexible response to the unexpected, and the complimentary interplay of by-the-books decision-making with out-of-the-box thinking.

Similarly, organizational weakness are brought into relief, including burdensome layers of bureaucratic policy and procedure, a fuzziness around the intention of initiatives, and a lack of understanding about how to effect even small scale organizational change. And yet, the limited period of liminality, the highlighting of strengths and weaknesses results in greater understanding about the nexus of humans, society, and the weather enterprise. This has produced many (organizational/social/behavioral scientific) research questions which has, in turn, produced a growing body of evidence being (slowly) transformed into application in forms that have triggered, enabled, inspired, and directed not only changes in practice but also changes in how NWS personnel understand themselves and their jobs. It seems self-evident that a transformation is underway.

Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, much remains to be done to reshape, retool, and reimagine how social scientific efforts can be utilized to support, sustain, and improve the science and scientists of the NWS and the across the weather enterprise. This author has served as a social scientist on two service assessments and will utilize that experience as well as ongoing observations and interactions with the NWS/NOAA to discuss three themes/lessons from the liminality of service assessments:

1. Temporary suspension of hierarchy helps experts understand concepts and principles from other areas of expertise. (Can we create liminal moments to better enable physical and social scientists to better understand each other and envision methods of common use?)
2. The ambiguity of identity and role that characterizes liminality enhances lateral thinking and can foster new and different ways of ordering knowledge and work. (How can we identify powerful re-conceptualizations arising from liminal experiences and harness those – apply them?)
3. Because liminality calls presumptions and conclusions into question, it offers a means to identify what to keep as well as what to change. (Are Assessment Reports structured in the best way to capture the dialectical tension between aspects of the status quo and the possibility of truly productive change?)

Finally, possible ways to leverage the power of the assessment experience in order to tackle the complexities of integrating the social and behaviors sciences and their insights across the weather enterprise will be suggested.

*From Wikipedia: “In anthropology,liminality(from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"^[1]) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.^[2]During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold"^[3]between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which completing the rite establishes.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality