FAC Teams

This forum is focused on the development of FAC Teams. A key goal in the complex, stressed environments, explored in the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008, is to achieve “unity of effort” in circumstances where “unity of command” is not feasible or desirable. Traditional, hierarchical approaches to “command and control” will not fully address the complex emerging 21st Century challenges, where disparate organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, bring varied traditions, loyalties and procedures into the health, security, ecosystem, humanitarian, and disaster management environments. Accordingly, the Department of Defense has been experimenting with a new, paradigm-shifting approach termed “Focus, Agility, and Convergence” (FAC). In simulations that were run during the U.S. Resilience Summit 2008, the FAC-enabled health, humanitarian assistance and disaster management teams from all sectors of society in the U.S. and abroad were able to respond in a manner that mitigated -- using soft power approaches – potential violent conflict and catastrophic loss of life. As a result of engaging the U.S.-led Resilience System, a local crisis was prevented from growing to regional levels, and potentially catastrophic large-scale social crises and war were avoided. For an introduction to FAC: See David S. Alberts, “Agility, Focus, and Convergence: The Future of Command and Control” in Vol 1, No. 1 of the Journal of C2. Dr. Alberts’ powerful concept has evolved to be expressed as: “Focus, Agility, and Convergence” (FAC). It is built on ideas that emphasize the use of networks to share information which, in turn, allows participants to develop a shared awareness of the situation (“shared situational awareness”). When coupled with an understanding of the overall objectives (feed the people, rebuild the bridge), this allows the participants to Focus on solving problems collaboratively. The organization must be Agile enough to respond to the rapidly evolving challenges it is likely to face, and there must be mechanisms to Converge the resources needed to solve the problems. For the purposes of this paper, teams that have these characteristics are said to be “FAC-enabled.” Inherently non-hierarchical, and “self-synchronizing,” they can handle complex, adaptive challenges more rapidly and effectively than traditional bureaucratic approaches.