Rocks

Hey team. Happy Monday. We’re coming together again, and it’s already September. We’re finishing up Quarter Three, and we’re going to move into next month, Quarter Four. So, I thought it was a good time to discuss and talk a little bit about how we handle tasks, big tasks here in Northwest Enforcement. Something that we do in each division and each area is we take a very large task and then divide it up among different parts, sections, and individual team members. We call that quarterly rocks. So, every quarter, every 90 days, we have things that we break up and work on.

It’s also fitting that this summer, I removed the deck and pulled up about 12 separate concrete footings. Each of those footings weighed anywhere from 150 to, in some cases, up to about 300 pounds. I ended up hurting myself a little bit trying to move one of them, so I got a bit smarter. It’s harder in some respects, takes a minute, and it’s heavy. But I took a big giant hammer and started beating on a rock. I broke big rocks into smaller rocks. Put them in a wheelbarrow, and then moved them to another location and got rid of them. It took a while, but by breaking it up into small chunks, it saved me a lot of pain and suffering and surgery.

We do the same thing in a lot of different ways. We have wildfires going on all over the place. I have a wildfire that’s within just a few miles of many of my family friends. I’ve got friends that have lost their homes this year. When a wildfire happens, the incident command system is brought into play, and they have multiple divisions. When I worked for the City of Portland, I was the operational liaison that worked on the operations side dealing with that. Again, it’s taking a very big task like fighting a wildfire or dealing with a natural disaster and breaking it down into individual parts for individual sections, teams, and team members. Everybody has a part.

When I was in the Marine Corps, we did the same thing. Even with a big mission, it’s breaking things down to the individual team member and what needs to be done. You can get a lot done quickly by putting together a process like that. It’s breaking those things down into small individual parts. You can do the same thing even if you’re just an officer at a site. We break things down for each officer that fits within their KRAs.

Things can seem daunting, whether it’s a large four-story parking garage with a six-story building or an eight-acre property with nine buildings on it, lots of equipment, and things like that, or a big construction site. It can seem tough to accomplish all of those different things when you look at it as a whole. But when you break it down into small sections and tackle each one, then repeat those tasks throughout the night, at the end of the night, you will notice that you have set yourself up for success. You’ve covered a wide area of ground on multiple time scales throughout the entire night, throughout the entire week, and you’ve provided excellence to the client at the same time.

So when you’re thinking of any task, whether it’s cleaning your house, something on patrol, or working on a particular on-site client’s property, break it down from the big, huge monster task into smaller tasks and work on those things. As our leadership team gets ready to roll into Quarter Four, we’re going to tackle and create some more rocks for each individual team member and for each individual leadership team as we go forward.

Here we’re moving through on Monday. It fits with our core values. Always remember to be valuable because nothing less will do. I’ll see you next Monday. Bye, see ya.