humanitarian.info

Did you know that in the 1950s Sweden had the fourth-largest air force in the world? That was just one of the nuggets that I picked up last week in Sando, where the Swedish Rescue Services Agency has their training facility. I spent most of the day with a small group from NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme – they were on a training course for Information Management in Emergency Operations, and I was telling them about how things work at the international level.

We covered quite a lot of ground, and it was interesting to hear their stories, their experiences – some from places like Bosnia or Afghanistan, but more from their home countries. They were all from a military or government background, so very much from the command and control model, and I tried to get everybody talking about how to build more flexibility into those systems. What they really wanted was practical ways they could improve information management in their organisations, which is difficult to do when you don’t really know their organisations…

In the end, I decided to focus on resilient networks as the best approach they could develop, creating multiple linkages within their organisation on the basis of trust relationships. This approach has proven itself time and again, and is probably the only reason that the international community manages to do anything – the same people keep showing up in different places, bringing new people into their networks each time. Our problem is really that we don’t institutionalise these networks – for example, in the form of communities of practice – but for me there’s always the question of whether institutionalisation would actually hinder those processes.

That’s a question for another day. I hope I’ll get the chance to work with SRSA again on this course, but even if I don’t, one of the participants gave me a Kalpak to wear on the flight home. Super!