2.07: Get Your Battle Captain Back
I found OneNote pretty much on accident. I wasn’t looking for the easiest-to-use collaboration tool I have found on DoD networks, the one tool I have setup at every assignment since. I was just being lazy and didn’t want to have to retype all my notes anymore.
In graduate school I’d leveraged the app Evernote to organize everything from routine class notes to my final dissertation. I think most people in the Army write their notes by hand, typically in green notebooks. Those who do type them up after often use Word. This can quickly lead to a desktop so cluttered with icons just a glance causes a large vein on my temple to start bulging. Evernote was a free and simple way for me to keep everything organized without my desktop looking like it was designed by Jackson Pollock. But Evernote was not on the list of approved DoD software, so for work I had to find something else.
Which is how I ended up stumbling across OneNote during my time as the Group Operations Officer (S3). Almost all Microsoft Office tools are available on DoD networks, which included Microsoft’s notetaking app. While there were differences from Evernote, they weren’t insurmountable and OneNote was on every computer in the headquarters, including SIPR.1 The app saved me the time of transcribing handwritten notes, since I could bring my laptop to a meeting, type the notes as it went, and then it would all synch automatically when I reconnected back at my desk2. Once I was back online, I could simply email my notes to the other battalion S3s within minutes.
Until I learned one day I didn’t need to email them at all. If I created the OneNote on our SharePoint, then everyone got all my meeting notes the instant my computer plugged back into the network, no email necessary. Just that simple shortcut alone would have been worth it in my eyes. Even today our headquarters are drowning in superfluous emails, a poor medium for collaboration. Having to send just one less email a day would have been all it took to sell me on using OneNote.
Then one evening Ben, Nick, and I found ourselves trying to group edit a Word document. I was tired of emailing the file back and forth, so on a whim we just pasted all the text into a OneNote, and we started editing it simultaneously. There is a minor trick to it: OneNote use HTML, so you have to stay outside of the paragraph someone else is editing or you’ll get an error. But even this isn’t that bad. The app will flag it for you and then merging the differences is pretty simple. OneNote allows you to see everyone’s edits as they make them, and vice versa, all without anyone having to save and share a file. It’s all merged in near-real-time.
OneNote wasn’t designed for the large-scale real-time collaboration we ended up using it for, so it’s a little wonky at first. But it works. OneNote also shares the standard MS Office interface, so it’s familiar enough to most users that I’ve never seen it take much time to learn. I’ve managed to quickly teach a spectrum of people from a brand-new Gen-Z lieutenants to a boomer retired colonel how to leverage it.
Another key feature of OneNote was it kept a local copy of all the notes on your computer. One of the shortcomings of SharePoint is its cloud storage, so if you’re not online, you can’t access the files stored on it. This was one of the critical failings with CPOF.3 But OneNote keep a local backup, allowing you to have disconnected access. This is a critical requirement for any Army system, but somehow not an actual requirement in most of our PoR software.4 All Army systems need this because we operate in disaggregated formations across a contested battlefield. In a world of EM jamming, there is little use for software that can’t work unless it has a live connection to the database.5
Armed with our new simple-to-use collaboration tool, one of the first projects we set upon was updating the headquarters SOP, the JOC’s operating instructions.6 These documents are usually PDFs, stored on a hard drive somewhere and often forgotten, and they are almost always out of date. They get this way principally because they are hard to update, which makes the information in them stale, which leads to people ignoring them.
OneNote gave us an opportunity to try something new. The SOP was now live and could be updated at any moment by any user.7 A live SOP means it can always be adapted, which also means there’s more incentive to keep innovating your systems and processes. It also changed a fossilized PDF into a living workspace. Instead of the SOP being something you read, it was where you worked.
Instead of just housing the ‘how to’ guide, our OneNote held templates for staff running estimates. Each section just copied a fresh one out into the shared folder and filled them out. Every other section could see what the other sections were tracking, without anyone actively sharing anything.
We did the same with battle drills, which became template check lists with embedded flow chart diagrams. Whenever we had a TIC drill, the battle NCO would export a copy of the battle drill into the log and start filling in the details.8 As each section completed their tasks, they could check off boxes, add text, or even embed files. Every other member of the staff could see the drill progress from wherever they worked. There was no need to crowd the JOC to find out what was going on.
And no one had to send an email. It all happened without anyone even hitting send or making a PowerPoint slide. It moved fast and flat across the entire headquarters. There are better tools out there than OneNote, and I doubt anyone at Microsoft ever thought of this when they were coding a notetaking app.9 But it worked. It wasn’t using the best tool, but it was using the tool that was available in the best way we could.
It also bought the staff a lot of time, in particular the battle captain, who is typically the senior captain on the JOC floor and in charge of running it, keeping everyone on task. At least that’s in theory. However, in most Army units battle captains spend too many of their waking hours compiling the PowerPoint slides for meetings. Despite regular reminders to ‘get your slide updates in’, we have all been in meetings where they inevitably aren’t. It’s almost routine to see a field grade haranguing the poor captain just as the meeting is about to start, trying to get their updates to upload.
When we switched to OneNote, the brief was live. If your section wasn’t updated, that was your fault, not the battle captain’s. It also meant updates could be injected in the middle of the brief. A commander’s RFI could be addressed on the spot by other members of the staff directorates who were listening in.10 It sped up the response time, which fueled faster and better decisions.
And it meant the battle captain was no longer in the slide compiling business but could get back to business of running the JOC. You can do a lot with a senior captain. You can empower them to accelerate real time communication and maximize lateral thinking. You can spread that spread and information reach to your subordinate and higher headquarters, filling up your bowl full of OODA loops. Or you can just make them spend all day trying to compile PowerPoint slides. It’s your call.
Secret Internet Protocol Router Network is the DoD’s network for sharing classified information. Colored Red. NIPR (Non-classified Internet Protocol (IP) Router Network) is for unclassified up to CUI. Colored Green. CUI (Controlled Unclassified Information) is information that while unclass, still requires stewarding. Formerly FOUO (For Official Use Only).
These were the before times when we didn’t have wifi networks in the headquarters.
Command Post of the Future. This program of record suffered from a slew of Ux problems. One of the worst was every time the system lost connectivity with the cloud, a subtle red outline appeared on your screen which meant everything you were doing was a waste of time, because once the system reconnected, all your edits were erased.
Program of Record. Generally it means the software is a PoS.
Electro-magnetic Spectrum. The wireless spectrum used to communicate information
Standard Operating Procedure. A manual that lays out the processes for how the staff functions.
This inevitably leads to questions of ‘What if someone messes it up or deletes it?’. This happens significantly less often than the fear mongering warrants, and besides, OneNote has version history and a recycling bin built in.
For regular occurring events, Army staffs have battle drills that help orchestrate all the complicated steps each disparate staff section needs to complete. In this example, a ‘Troops In Contact’ is when a unit in the field is engaging the enemy in a firefight. It requires the staff to both track the events as they happen and ensuring any additional support the unit under fire requires are quickly coordinated and sent to them.
Request For Information. In just two syllables, a question, but the Army needs its three-letter initialism.
Did you mastermind all this stuff or did you guys use a KM?
Why throw it up on sharepoint rather than the shared drive? Love onenote by the way, every unit I've seen that uses it benefits big time