Information Archives - understand-culture

Crew Resource Management

After the 1977 Tenerife collision, in which a captain began his takeoff roll despite warnings from his first officer and flight engineer, NASA psychologist John Lauber coined the term at a 1979 workshop. United Airlines ran the first airline programme in 1981, and the FAA later made it mandatory.

CRM keeps the command hierarchy and changes what may cross it. Junior crew are trained to question the captain, and — in the phrase used in the training — to advocate for critical information until it is acted upon.

An American industry concluded that its aircraft were failing because information was not moving, and rebuilt its training around the flow rather than around the flying.

The sterile cockpit rule

Below ten thousand feet, FAA regulation bars conversation not essential to the operation of the aircraft. The same regulator that requires crews to speak up also specifies when they must not. Both rules treat the channel as the thing being managed.

SBAR

Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation. A four-part script for handing a patient from one American clinician to another, taught in nursing schools and used in hospitals nationwide. Borrowed from the US Navy, where it standardized reporting to a commanding officer, and adopted in medicine because unstructured handoffs were losing information at every shift change.

The open API

American software culture builds systems that expose their data to other systems by default, and a platform that does not is criticized as closed. The architecture encodes the assumption: a component that cannot be queried by its neighbours is treated as defective rather than secure.

The Incident Command System

Developed after the California wildfires of the 1970s, when agencies arriving at the same fire could not talk to each other, and now the national standard for every kind of US emergency response. Its core is a defined communications structure: who reports to whom, on what channel, in what format, before anyone arrives.

Mission control

American spaceflight puts every flight controller on continuous voice loops, each one listening to several conversations at once and able to speak into any of them. The room is designed so that nobody has to ask. The information arrives whether or not you knew to want it.

The huddle

American football stops play so that eleven people can be told the next move, and the sport built the pause into its own structure to allow it. The word crossed into American business intact — a huddle is a short unscheduled meeting whose only purpose is to get everyone holding the same picture.

The situation report

American military practice produces the SITREP on a schedule — what has changed, what is known, what is expected — and pushes it up and sideways whether or not anything has happened. The report goes out on time even when the content is that nothing occurred, because a gap in the stream is itself information.

The status update

American organizations run a rhythm of them: weekly team updates, monthly reports, quarterly reviews, daily notes. The cadence is the point rather than the content. The system assumes that information will stop moving unless something scheduled makes it move.

Cybersecurity incident disclosure

Since 2023, American public companies have had four business days to report a material cybersecurity incident to the SEC, and every US state requires notification of individuals whose personal data is breached. Even the failure of information systems is itself subject to a disclosure requirement.