KLE Reporting Formats

[Misterhawk]

Heading over with a Civil Affairs Company and wanted to ask the community for what their best practice is for KLE reporting formats. We've put one together for our team leaders but are looking for what others are using or have used to see if we can improve it.

Have a done a few searches and come up empty, which surprised me.

Thanks for any help/advice you can offer.

Hawkeye

[RedRaven]

I am unfortunately not surprised that you couldn't find anything It seems that every team makes up their own.

One format that I have seen that seems to make sense to me is a report based on PMESII. Basically each paragraph is one of the pieces of PMESII. The issue with this is that it requires some clarity and standardization. For example if the team discusses building up a market area. Is this "Economic" or "Infrastructure"?

However, this problem can be solved either by some sort of SOP in your company. Or, it might be possible to use the CA assessment. So for example the team conducts a KLE about agriculture (Section VIII. FOOD AND AGRICULTURE in the assessment) you could decide that anything about farming goes into the Infrastructure section of the report. This also lets the teams keep a running update of their assessment by constantly updating it after every KLE (if they choose to do one).

That's just my two cents though....

Red

[davidbfpo]

Have you tried the COIN Center? This was commended by a SWC member who has now left there. Secondly, are there not reach-back options?

Just an outsider asking after both options have popped up before.

Have you absorbed the lessons learnt on the KLE thread, which in a quick scan does not have a pro-forma - reflecting that the "real work" took place outside the formal meeting. Link:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=12057

[Sullivoss]

Send me a .mil email address in a private message and I can send you the one that we have been using in 91st CA BN. In theory this has been pushed out to all of 95th, but it would not surprise me if a lot of folks have not seen it yet.

[jcustis]

I have a format and an SOP that my battalion used with mixed success (it requires discipline to follow the script and demand the outbriefs/AARs), but if you have a .mil addy, send it to me via a PM. There is a KLE report at the end of the SOP that you might find useful. Nothing in it is earth-shattering, but it is a compilation of various lists, issues for consideration, and such that I found around the web and came into possession from other sources (like a SOCOM checklist/pamphlet).

[Misterhawk]

Have you tried the COIN Center? This was commended by a SWC member who has now left there. Secondly, are there not reach-back options?

Just an outsider asking after both options have popped up before.

Have you absorbed the lessons learnt on the KLE thread, which in a quick scan does not have a pro-forma - reflecting that the "real work" took place outside the formal meeting. Link:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=12057

Haven't looked at COIN Center but will. Thanks.

We haven't left yet and, as far as reach back ... I'm pretty sure anyone we didn't bring with us knows less than we do in our little world,

I have rarely posted on SWJ, but the question came up and I thought I would test the waters. We're pulling something together but it made sense to see if someone already had something great that we could refine for us. The immediate question for us is for a reporting format, not the KLE's themselves. That is a good thread, though and it's great to get different perspectives. I've been teaching KLEs for most of the time since my last deployment, but for the Interagency side of things. One thing I've noticed is that someone can give you their best, most thoughtful perspective on "how to" and you still have to weigh that perspective against where they worked, who they worked for and when they were there. May have worked brilliantly for them and will cause you nothing but drama.

[qp4]

One of the more pointless things we do in Afghanistan is try to come up with some sort of format for these things. It's even less helpful that every single unit comes up with their own, poisoning the process at all levels. It eventually just becomes an exercise in filling out macro'd word docs and doesn't accomplish anything. Junior leaders will end up renaming the KLE to something else (in one BCT it become SLE or Street Level Engagement) so they don't have to fill the things out.

The best method we eventually worked to was naming things by yearmonthday - name and just writing a narrative.

[Jason Port]

So here is a nerd's perspective on this - The reality is that in most Civil Military data, we can track on numbers and relatively standard data. For instance, we can count hospital beds by gender, and see if we can remedy imbalances in light of the populace. However, for many of the softer skills, like the KLE, we saw that units were trying to track on the less important with more emphasis on what was important - For example, we saw units trying to analyze the number of meetings where the local shura had armed guards, instead of figuring out who the Key Leader was and what were his motivators. However, when they did try this, a lot of the motivators were guesses (Was he agitated? Like all people talking through translators don't look agitated.)

What we saw were blown out forms with many irrelevant details, and an open text field which is usually where you saw all of the data - with all of the details ignored. My recommendation, in turn, is what I always recommend - Answer this question first - "Why are you collecting the data?"

If you have some smart analysts, then you can really do wonders, but you have to be willing to break out the details - Blobs of text generally require people to read them, but pick lists and multiple choice questions help reviewers get to the meat of the issue. The idea of a date-centric title and a narrative means that at the end of a rotation, your follow on replacement gets to read all of the files and then hope he captures the relevant info, and can ignore the stuff that was extraneous at the time.

Here is my suggested short list of key info -
- Date, Time, Location
- Purpose (Original)
- Purpose (Actual (in case the subject changes gears on you)
- Subject - Who were you talking to (Spelled as best you can of course)
- Key Points - This is mostly narrative
- Promises made with dates by who?
- Dates for follow up.

This is just a short list having found this at 10p on a Saturday night (I believe that most of this stuff was what the 82nd was using in their CJ-9 in OEF a couple of year back); I am sure I could go on. I would then find a smart guy in your unit and have them shack this up in InfoPath from Microsoft, so you can ultimately dump in to a database or even SharePoint where others can see the information and so after a rotation, you can leave it with your counterpart.

You can see from this brief list that by breaking out stuff like dates even a novice nerd can sort stuff like dates, so you can follow up without pissing the subject off. It also ensures that the next guy who is going to meet with Subject X can search for Subject X, and know that you promised him something, so when X asks for something else, you can be well informed.

You can search for my in AKO by my name and find me if you have more thoughts on this. Truth in lending - I currently work for Microsoft, but the solution I described above, I built for the 82nd before I came to work here. My comments above are not designed to sell these, but rather demonstrate a low cost solution - I can sell you a higher cost one later