Following up on my post from last week — wherein I suggested we needed a more systematic, comprehensive approach to involving more brains in the search for solutions to the Gulf oil spill disaster — I’d like to first offer an apology.

I pointed to this article and suggested that more than the following was needed …

The Unified Command overseeing the Deepwater Horizon disaster features a “suggestions” button on its official Web site and more than 7,800 people have already responded, according to the site.

If I had only read a few paragraphs further in that article, I would have been compelled to acknowledge that more is, in fact, being done …

Along with the kibbitzers, the government has also brought in experts from around the world — including scores of scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and other government labs — to assist in the effort to cap the well.

Fair enough. But now I have to ask: Why aren’t these efforts being better communicated?

This weekend, I (and presumably a few million other people) received an email from Organizing for America, over the President’s name, outlining all that the administration is doing to address the crisis. The key paragraph:

… from the beginning, we have worked to deploy every tool at our disposal to respond to this crisis. Today, there are more than 20,000 people working around the clock to contain and clean up this spill. I have authorized 17,500 National Guard troops to participate in the response. More than 1,900 vessels are aiding in the containment and cleanup effort. We have convened hundreds of top scientists and engineers from around the world. This is the largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country.

There it is: A single sentence on convening “top scientists and engineers from around the world.” Maybe it’s just me, but I’d like to see additional detail. Why hundreds? Why not thousands? In what type of specific work are these experts engaged? Into how many teams have they been subdivided? How are their ideas being shared, reviewed, vetted? What about the over-the-transom (but still potentially helpful) ideas? Could one of them hold the key? Are they being given due consideration? How are they being handled, so that they’re not lost but also not distracting?

Some will argue that we don’t need to understand such details. It’s sufficient to know that many experts are engaged. I disagree. I think it is the process — its substance, its scope — and the sharing of the same that would provide greater confidence to the American people that everything conceivable is being done.

I know. I’m now arguing not about the effort but about the communications surrounding the effort. And at this stage of the game, communicating is arguably less important than actually doing something. Still, I’m not sure it has to be (or should be) one or the other. A little more of both could go a very long way. A little more of both could put stories like this one in context, avoiding the subsequent (and understandable) guffaws.

It’s one of the age-old rules of communication: In the absence of details — without a defining narrative — everyone is left to fill in the blanks on their own, to create their own narrative. [continued]