Time to read: 3 minutes
Article at a glance:
- In crises like Hurricane Katrina, communities thrived through self-organization, shared mission, free-flowing information, and collective responsibility.
- Redmond mirrors this approach with five responsibilities: understanding, alignment, collaboration, coordination, and reflection.
- These responsibilities are habits practiced together, like ingredients in a recipe, creating synergy and resilience.
- When woven into daily work, they empower teams to act with purpose, adapt quickly, and elevate the human experience without bureaucracy.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast.
While this was already an incredible disaster, it was made so much worse by the bureaucracy that crippled formal aid groups like FEMA and the Red Cross.
While supplies sat idle and organizations froze in indecision, devastated communities self-organized to help themselves. Ham radio operators relayed critical information, neighbors shared boats, food, and shelter, and people acted without waiting for permission.
So how did this work without a formal chain of command?
Their success came from shared mission, free-flowing information, and collective responsibility.
How the 5 Responsibilities Empower Us to Act
At Redmond, we strive to mirror this nimbleness through the 5 Responsibilities: understanding, alignment, collaboration, coordination, and reflection.
By taking ownership and acting with purpose, we create synergy and elevate the human experience, not by waiting, but by showing up.
The 5 Responsibilities:
The 5 Responsibilities are habits teams practice simultaneously. They’re like ingredients in a cookie recipe. Without each ingredient, you end up with a mess instead of delicious cookies.
So what are the 5 responsibilities?
Understanding means seeing the bigger picture and asking good questions.
Alignment keeps work tied to the shared mission, vision, and values through constant course correction.
Collaboration is sharing perspectives, speaking up, and testing ideas together.
Coordination ensures information flows freely so the right people act at the right time.
Reflection allows continuous learning and improvement. When woven into daily work, these responsibilities create self-organizing, high-functioning teams that optimize for the whole rather than just individual tasks.
How does this look in action, not during a natural disaster, but in our everyday work?
Understanding
We don’t want you to ask for permission to be helpful, but you do need context so you actually know what’s helpful.
After all, it’s not helpful to make one person’s day a little easier if it slows down the entire process or creates a lot more work for someone else.
So where do you get that context? We also call this process “plugging in” to the information flow around the company. This can look different in different roles, but it can look like going to meetings, talking to people upstream and downstream from you, and generally working to understand the ripple effects of your work on other associates and our customers. This is an ongoing process, not a one time thing.
Alignment
If the communities did one thing well in the aftermath of Katrina, it was alignment with a singular, central mission: to help people impacted by the storm. At Redmond, we align with our mission to elevate the human experience, and with our core values. Everything we do leads back to those.
Collaboration
Collaboration is a way of working. It means utilizing everyone’s strengths, everyone taking ownership of the final result (and not just “their” part), and gathering lots of relevant perspectives from those upstream and downstream in the process. It’s not handoffs, it’s not wearing a hat or just doing your part, it’s committing to doing great work together.
Coordination
Coordination is keeping the information flowing around the company. This means making sure the right people are in the right conversations, communicating with your team and other teams, being aware of what other teams are working on so we can join forces instead of duplicating efforts, etc.
Reflection
This might sound like something we do at the end of the process, but since there is no end, we reflect constantly.
Continuously ask (on your own and as a team) What’s working? What’s not? What could it mean? What’s a next right answer? And of course, that good ol’ standby: WHY.
This is how we improve our processes and do great work.
This is a Process
This might feel like a lot because many of us aren’t used to working this way. This isn’t the way most organizations work because they prioritize hierarchy and rules over results. (Just look at the orgs that dropped the ball after Katrina).
Yes, it’s messy. It’s hard to define. But this is how we move mountains together the way those communities rebuilt themselves and helped their neighbors after Katrina, when the typical communication systems failed, and when their neighborhoods were under water.
This is how we make good choices instead of having to submit a small mountain of paperwork and wait five months for approval and the correct number of signatures.
It’s different, but it can create incredible results!
