Part I Chapter 2

• This chapter is on the seven principles of mission command and their importance for administrators.
• The principles help to cultivate shared understanding across organizations, especially during natural and manmade disasters.
• The seven principles are competence, mutual trust, shared understanding, commander's intent, mission command orders, disciplined initiative, and accepting risk.

Key Points of the 7 Principles

• Competence: Building competence at all levels to foster mutual trust and shared understanding.
• Mutual Trust: Developing mutual trust within the organization and with partners.
• Shared Understanding: Creating shared understanding to align everyone on the operational environment and approaches.
• Commander's Intent: Articulating the commander's vision for success to empower subordinates to use disciplined initiative.
• Mission Orders: Issuing mission orders that direct results without prescribing methods.
• Disciplined Initiative: Using disciplined initiative within the commander's intent, enabling subordinates to weigh gain against risk.
• Risk Acceptance: Recognizing the importance of prudent risk-taking in critical situations.

Understanding Mission Command Principles

• Competence involves building competence across the organization to facilitate mutual trust and shared understanding.
• Develop and demonstrate competence in roles, ensuring necessary knowledge, judgment, and skills.
• Mutual Trust involves building trust within the organization and with partners, fostering confidence.
• Shared Understanding equips individuals to create shared understanding across the organization and with external partners.
• It ensures everyone aligns on the operational environment, purpose, and problem-solving approaches.
• Commander's Intent involves understanding how to articulate and implement the commander's intent, providing clear expressions of the operation's purpose and desired end state.
• Mission Orders enables the issuance of orders that direct subordinates on the results to achieve, without prescribing how.
• Disciplined Initiative involves learning to exercise initiative within the constraints of the commander's intent to achieve the desired end state.
• Risk Acceptance involves understanding the importance of recognizing that prudent risk-taking is essential for effective response in critical situations.

Mission Command Principles

• Mission command is a way of leading in complex situations and a binding leadership doctrine.
• It ensures compatibility and interoperability between institutions in joint endeavors.
• The principles of mission command build a leadership environment where administrators, leaders, and staff explain these principles.
• The principles aim to build all members of the organization into leaders and enable collaboration in managing disasters.

Competence

• Competence has the quality of having sufficient knowledge, judgment, skill, or strength.
• Personal competence imprints a lasting impression on peers and leaders both within and without the organization.
• Competence breeds trust that the individual, leader, group, or organization can perform their duties.
• Competence enables an atmosphere of mutual trust.

Echelons of Competence within ASHER

• It is essential that competence within the Active Shooter/Hostile Event Response (ASHER) is defined in the context of echelon responsibilities.
• It outlines duties and responsibilities within the echelons of organizations and the relationships of partnering organizations.
• This process enables mutual trust, which, in turn, breeds an environment of mission command.

Mutual Trust

• Mutual Trust is shared confidence between commanders, subordinates, and partners that they can be relied on and are competent in performing their assigned tasks.
• In context to the individual and small group means trusting that peers can perform critical tasks to respond to an active shooter incident.
• Teachers/nurses trust leaders to provide guidance in linking tasks with mission goals.
• They trust administrators to provide equipment and training and place faith in their skills, allowing latitude in decentralized decision-making.
• In context to leaders and administrators means trusting that subordinate leaders, staff, and teachers are well-versed in their skill sets.
• It also means that leaders build and entrust subordinates with leadership skills to act decisively in critical moments.
• Mutual trust means trusting the many organizations that comprise institutions in ASHER and Emergency Management.
• The trust that each partner is capable and dedicated to regional cooperation.
• Mutual trust flows up and down within an organization between administrators, leaders, individuals.
• Mutual trust flows between partnering organizations across diverse institutions within the ASHER response partnership.

Shared Understanding

• Shared understanding is a critical challenge for commanders, staffs, and unified action partners in creating an understanding of an operational environment and its purpose.
• Involves shared understanding across a Regional ASHER cooperative where organizational heads and staff establish a common approach including a professional language and common understanding of command.
• Through joint planning, each organization understands its mission tasks, partners, support, and role in the ASHER operation.
• Shared understanding includes identifying subordinate element's tasks in support of their tactical mission.
• This understanding in planning, preparation, execution, and assessment is vital for a cohesive ASHER regional response.
• Shared understanding occurs down and up an organization and exists when administrators share critical tasks.
• At subordinate levels, shared understanding exists when they understand the relationship between their tasks, the vision, and the impact on other organizations.
• Collaboration is multiple people working toward a common goal by sharing knowledge and requires dialogue and candid exchange of ideas.
• Throughout operations, commanders, staff, and partners collaborate by sharing information, perceptions, and ideas.
• Shared understanding requires regional collaboration between partnered organizations from diverse disciplines, uniting behind operational plans to prevent attacks, save lives, and restore the community.

Commanders Intent

• Commander's intent is a clear expression of the operation's purpose and desired end state.
• It supports mission command, provides focus to the staff, and helps commanders achieve results without further orders, even when the operation does not unfold as planned.
• In ASHER, the administrator publishes their intent by describing what success looks like, allowing understanding of the overall goal and exercise decentralized decision-making.
• The commander's intent describes what constitutes success, including the operation's purpose, key tasks, and conditions that define the end state.
• The end state promotes unity in the ASHER effort within the organization and among partners.
• Commander's intent describes the boundaries within which subordinates may exercise initiative.

Mission Orders

• Mission Orders should not trespass upon the province of a subordinate.
• Mission Orders must contain everything that the subordinate must know to carry out his mission and adapt to the circumstances under which it will be received and executed.
• Mission orders are a type of communication that conveys instructions from superiors to subordinates.
• Mission orders are a requirement of mission command and direct subordinates on what results to be achieved.
• Mission orders state who, what, when, where, and why.
• The creation of mission orders and intent paragraphs vary depending on the size of the region and start with the regional partners.
• Institutional groups that may be represented at the regional level are wide ranging, examples include law enforcement, fire, EMT, schools, hospitals, government, national guard, and private businesses.
• In ASHER planning, mission orders are a collaboration up and down the echelons of an institution across many disciplines.

Disciplined Initiative

• Disciplined initiative means to exercise initiative within the constraints of the commander's intent to achieve the desired end state.
• It is when subordinates follow orders until they realize the plan is no longer suitable, which causes them to adjust to the new situation and achieve their commander's intent.
• Every administration must instill disciplined initiative up and down their organization through cultural environments and key values.
• Utilizing mission orders and intent is required to establish shared understanding.
• Administrators, leaders, and subordinates must exercise disciplined initiative to seize and maintain the initiative during an ASHER.
• A culture of disciplined initiative partnership facilitates seizing the initiative from the threat and capitalizing on it.
• Operational initiative is setting the tempo and terms of action and is realized when the collective effect of multiple subordinates' disciplined initiative sets conditions for friendly forces to seize the operational initiative in chaotic situations.
• Disciplined initiative is not an independent act but a supporting command decision by a subordinate at a decisive point.
• Two factors to consider in a subordinate's decision to exercise initiative are:
  • Whether the benefits of the action outweigh the risk of desynchronizing the overall operation.
  • Whether the action will further the higher commander's intent.
• The main consideration is the urgency of the situation and whether time permits subordinates to communicate changes and recommend actions.
• Cultivating an organizational culture that encourages initiative requires administrators to accept risk and underwrite mistakes in training.

Risk Acceptance

• Risk acceptance involves all involved in the attack, victims, responders, and leaders.
• There is not only physical risk but also the risk of failure.
• Failure in a prudent risk is not fatal it can be overcome.
• Risk-taking is an opportunity to make a difference by confronting a violent threat.
• A competent response to an armed threat involves risk acceptance, where the amount of risk increases as the potential for loss of life rises.
• Saving innocent lives is the measuring stick for risk acceptance.
• A risk-averse culture within an organization is a recipe for inaction, therefore, risk acceptance must be command-driven and reinforced in training.