Posted by Rear Admiral Sarah Hemenway (Second Assistant Personnel Director) in Discussion Topic: Ship Speeds and all that

Posted by Russell Watt in Discussion Topic: Ship Speeds and all that

Posted by Joe P in Discussion Topic: Ship Speeds and all that
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Discussion Topic: Ship Speeds and all that

SNIP

-does the current link between requested speed and placement speed make sense? Should we be changing the categories on the application form?

SNIP

Daniel Lerner
Personnel Director

I don’t know the answer to the second question, but the answer to the first one is definitely “No.”

This concept of “Standardized Ship Speeds” was one that we adopted in 2011 specifically to make the Personnel Department’s job of placing people easier. It was said at the time we couldn’t allow ship COs to independently select the AWOL limits for their own ships (which, several ships at that point were actually doing), specifically because it made things too complicated for the Personnel Department to do placements. It was said that this was a return to a previously understood reality, even though that was not actually written down or formalized anywhere where anyone could read it, even though several senior members were opposed to the entire idea and claimed that this oral tradition didn’t actually exist. I was not one of these senior members; I only remember it because it was one of the very first Command discussions where I actually opined on something, and I don’t think I was even an XO yet. At the time, I was opposed to the idea because I thought it was completely backwards to ask the entire club to change how they run their ships to help the Personnel Department, when the point of having a Personnel Department is to help the club staff up ships. But, that’s the viewpoint that lost that particular argument at that particular time with that particular administration.

With that bit of backstory established, and given that the entire point of standardizing the “ship speed” is to make placements easy for the PDept, doesn’t the existence of an apparent mismatch between those speeds and what the PDept needs essentially demonstrate that the standardized speed policy has been a complete and absolute failure for almost a decade? I don’t have data handy on what other PDepts did, but I’m inclined to say the answer is “Yes” just because this is still an issue now.

If the answer is “Yes, standardized ship speeds are a failure at the exact thing they were supposed to do for the club”, then why do we continue to have them?

It seems to me that instead of trying to change the form to match ship speeds, or trying to create new measures of activity in order to match ship speeds, we ought to be doing something else that allows the Commanding Officer to establish what the expectations for people on their ship in some clear way, and then have the rest of the organization aligned to support that vision, rather than discuss how to map people off of the street onto some centralized, normative definition of things that nobody actually fits into well.

Joe

Joe makes sense here - let’s make the CO’s run their ships and set the guidelines for their ships, within reason. “I want my ship to have a 30 day posting limit” is probably not within reason. “After speaking with my crew, we have all agreed that everyone will post a minimum of 5 days, a personal reminder after 10 days and removal after 15 days” is probably within reason.

I know you said you were a newer member at the time, but maybe one of the other people who were around then can answer this. What led to COs having all of these different ship speeds? Frankly, I’m surprised to hear about this since the ship speeds we have today are the ones that were here the day I left (I think “fast” may have been faster, but I don’t recall precisely).

Sarah

From memory, it was simply that COs decided speeds that best suited them and their ships, and were allowed to do so by FComms. Then the administration of the day stepped in and said no, standardise it to help the PDept.

2011 coincides with the Brisbane floods, my discovery that teaching wasn’t a good fit for me and my personality and that I began an almost decade long association with a Psychologist who diagnosed me with social anxiety, depression and somewhere on the autism spectrum through studies that found my brain was wired differently to 95% of the population. So, I had other things on my mind at the time to ship speeds here, or even if I was active around here anyway.

Russell