Another meeting that has nothing to do with me.

 

Through-out my professional career in the military and in the civilian world I have participated in very few meetings that were of relevance. Every time I would sit down the first thing that was on my mind was all the other things I could be accomplishing with that time. That’s not to say all gatherings were a waste of time for myself, however, majority of the time they were. I have made it my mission as a leader and a manager to ensure any presentation I wanted to give was relevant to the participants of the meeting. I also wanted to make sure the audience was relevant to the topic. Most importantly, if there wasn’t an action to be taken following the meeting, I would have to question the information that was being presented.

It wasn’t until this class that the DIKA model was presented to me. I really like the concept because it helps make sure any presentation is relevant to the audience. Data and information are useless if they cannot be turned into knowledge, knowledge is useless if it’s not actionable or if an action plan is not developed following the presentation. The individual time of members of the audience is valuable, anytime that is taken away from their respective task or responsibility is time that needs to be considered. Is that time utilized as an investment in the individual or is that time being wasted?

As a staff officer I was exposed to this concept during a Brigade military decision making process exercise. During this process each individual war fighting section was responsible for briefing the commander. One of our instructors gave us the admonition to “be brief, be brilliant, be gone.” At the Brigade level each specialty has thousands of pieces of data and information. The commander did not need that level of intricacy, what he needed was a 5-minute brief on how your specialty was going to accomplish its mission, what your capabilities and limitations were, what threats existed to prevent you from succeeding, and what would you need from him to accomplish the objective. The commander needs the knowledge necessary to determine what type of action he wants the unit to take. Our job was to sift thru the data and information and develop a presentation on the knowledge the commander needs to consider in determining what action to take.

I really appreciate this model now that I have been exposed to it, especially after reading about and hearing about the different applications it has. Not only is the model relevant to presenting information, but it also has applications in developing an action plan. My peers helped me see that the model is something that is not necessarily restricted by time, for example, the model could be employed as a process that could be accomplished in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years.