11-14-15 Learning & Innovation Workgroup FY 16 Focus Areas

NIMO’s are asked a lot about what we DO when we are not on fires, so we plan to begin sharing that information on both this site and on this blog. (The blog is a project of our workgroup as a platform for sharing ideas,  but is still a work in progress so please be patient!)   

NIMO’s are employees of the Forest Service Washington Office (in D.C.) and we answer to AD for Operations Steve Gage and up the chain to Fire Director Tom Harbour, so we take our direction from them. Each year we are given Leader’s Intent regarding what we will be working on over the next year. A couple of years ago, we began to change how we do business a bit. We are now more of an organization, rather than individual teams. We still function as teams on some occasions like wildfires, but the rest of the year we work in workgroups. There are four workgroups: Risk Management, Cohesive Strategy, Workforce Development, and Learning and Innovation and each is given specific direction.

Today, we’re sharing the work of the Learning and Innovation Workgroup. Having just met and defined the “focus areas” for FY16, we thought we’d share our plan. These are not all specific “tasks” but rather general areas where we are free to figure out how to accomplish a measureable end state. Please feel free to give us some feedback, other ideas or any connections you might have to help us accomplish our work.

1. Write a concept paper to develop an International Wildland Fire Coordinating Group that has representatives from across the world and can work on International ICS accreditation and access for resources internationally.
2. Solicit new concepts and ideas from the wildland fire community and work preseason with selected, current IMTs (including NIMO), to get commitments to act as “hosts” for these new concepts and approaches. This will be an ongoing project for development of new processes for IMT’s.
3. Create incentives to push NIMO’s to pursue challenges that push them out of their comfort zone and lead to new ideas and processes that leave the customers they serve better than when they arrived.
4. It is the program’s duty not only to try and implement the above new ideas, but to share the results, successful and unsuccessful, with the greater wildland fire community. Each new concept, approach, technology that’s written and approved by the NIMO Executive Council. is published on NIMO web platforms and the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned site. These platforms will also be used to engage the larger wildland fire community in conversation about projects and ideas still in development.