Acting under time pressure
The Response Framework
A design for the first pass of the work — routing, prioritising, drafting the dispatch — with the human decision built in where it counts.
The situation it's designed for
A regional coordinator gets word of flooding at eleven at night. The first two hours go to work that is necessary and entirely mechanical: which facilities are inside the affected area, which roads are cut, which crews are within reach, who needs to be called and in what order.
The same two hours happen after a substation failure, a wildfire start, a pipeline break. The judgement calls come later. The first pass is assembly.
This framework designs for that first pass to be already done when the coordinator opens it — and for the point where a person takes over to be a designed part of it, not a message someone remembers to send.
What it hands your team
- A design for the first-pass packet: affected area, exposed assets, reachable crews, a drafted dispatch that a person edits rather than writes.
- A stated decision point — the exact moment control passes to a named human role.
- A degraded-mode design, because the connectivity you have on a normal day is not what you will have on the day it matters.
- A stop procedure that works under pressure, from a phone, by someone who is not the person who set it up.
What stays a human decision
- Every commitment of people or equipment. Without exception.
- Any communication to the public or to an affected community.
- The call to stand down.
What it's not for
- Autonomous dispatch. We will not design a system that sends crews on its own, and we have declined work on that basis.
- Organisations without a settled command structure. This framework hands work to a role; the role has to exist first.
- Life-safety determinations. The first pass can assemble facts, and that is where its authority ends.