Pa. National Guard's field grade officer forum offers professional development

Photo By Lt. Col. Angela King-Sweigart | The Pennsylvania National Guard’s joint staff hosted retired Lt. Gen. Reynold Hoover, formerly Deputy Commander of U.S. Northern Command and Vice Commander of U.S. Element, North American Aerospace Defense Command, now an adjutant professor at the U.S. Army War College, for a field grade officer forum Dec. 6 at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Lt. Col. Angela King-Sweigart)  

FORT INDIANTOWN GAP, PA, UNITED STATES

03.08.2020

Courtesy Story

Joint Force Headquarters - Pennsylvania National Guard

By Maj. Paolo Sica, Pennsylvania National Guard Joint Staff Future Plans Officer

"What's the point of having this great personal network you're always talking about, if you don’t use it?" The answer to this provocative yet hypothetical question is: not much.

A group of Pennsylvania National Guard members have combined their personal and professional networks to bring a quarterly seminar to life. Approaching its tenth iteration, and in its second year, the “Director of the Pennsylvania National Guard Joint Staff’s Field Grade Forum” facilitates an intersection of invited speakers’ passions and military practitioners’ thirst for intellectual engagement. Challenging read-aheads and non-attributable discussions narrow the civil-military divide, and broaden participants’ understanding of inter-disciplinary topics.

Pennsylvania National Guard Director of the Joint Staff, Brigadier General Dave Wood, credits similar events, in his experience as a student at the US Army War College, with the advent of this series.

The model for the Field Grade Forum is simple: a negotiated number of full-time equivalent (Active Guard Reserve, Technicians, and individuals on Active Duty Operational Support Orders) and traditional (M-Day) Guard members RSVP to spend their lunch hour with an invited speaker. The speaker begins with prepared comments on the read-ahead, before opening up the forum for questions and facilitated discussion. The small group can bring a brownbag lunch or not, and the hosting unit provides hard copies of the speaker’s read-ahead, as a courtesy. PowerPoint is discouraged and the Chatham House Rule applies, which states that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

The Forum is non-doctrinal and attendance is optional. One challenge presented by the growing popularity of the series is audience size. The original event was a section-sized event, whereas the most recent event exceeded 50 attendees. As audience sizes grow amid a static format, the opportunity for individual audience members to engage with guest speakers may diminish. Fortunately, most speakers are happy to adjourn to a local meeting place for a lively continuation of the discussion.

The Field Grade Forum model can be easily duplicated across the National Guard because the organization is a part of nearly every local community. Those communities include leaders in education, business, and government eager to engage with military professionals. By leveraging existing social networks and the ample meeting space afforded by National Guard readiness centers, Guard units of any size can facilitate an emergent opportunity for military practitioners to discuss aspects of their profession through new theoretical lenses and grow their own professional networks – an essential task for an engaged force.

• Date Taken: 03.08.2020
• Date Posted: 03.08.2020 10:03
• Story ID: 364718
• Location: FORT INDIANTOWN GAP, PA, US