“#CGHowTo” – “Help Right Now” for Coast Guardsmen in the Field

Sharing expertise from the Coast Guard’s Force Readiness Center’s to the field is hampered by limited infrastructure, lack of focus on “point of performance” support, and confusing direction in multiple policies. This paper will discuss our effort to leverage a commercial unsecure video service (YouTube) to develop and distribute short “how to” videos to the fleet under the auspices of the Coast Guard’s Innovation Program.

We started with a simple premise that we turned into an officially sanctioned ‘Innovation Challenge.” We asked, what if every time a School House got two questions from the fleet on the same topic, it triggered them to create a short “How To” video? The initiative was at first widely resisted from the generation that was most expected to embrace such a performance support opportunity.

Information the organization provides to performers is the number one influence on performance (see “Where the Performance Issues Are and Are Not” Performance Improvement Quarterly, 29 (1) PP. 35 – 49). This innovation challenge uncovered barriers to sharing information including communication, technological, cultural, societal, and policy. This paper will discuss the results of the initial innovation challenge with 35 entries, and the strategies to reach the entire Coast Guard through a second round. Finally, up-to-date quantitative and qualitative data will be included.