Chick-Chat Staff Ride - Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in Georgia and Tennessee

​LOGISTICS:

​Travel:  Recommended travel days on Monday and Friday.

​Lodging:  SpringHill Suites by Marriott in Downtown Chattanoga

Schedule:  Preparation time on Tuesday with icebreaker in the evening.  Staff ride on Wednesday and Thursday, with integration dinner Thursday night.  If you prefer, you can just do either Chickamauga or Chattanooga as one-day events, but we recommend doing them back-to-back as a single two-day event.

Group size:  Minimum 8 people per conference group; maximum of 14 people per conference group.  Maximum of 6 groups at a time.  OMNA will provide one retired senior leader either a U.S. Marine or a Firefighter to facilitate learning for each conference group.

Transportation:  Groups provide their own transportation around the battlefield (usually rented 15 passenger vans).  Walking options available for Chickamauga only (10 miles in one day).

Price and payment:  Contact OMNA for scheduling, pricing, and payment options.  

​

In this staff ride, we discuss how leaders recognize operational and strategic opportunities and create conditions to exploit them. This includes the dynamic interaction of both command direction and control response in determining and weighting main effort, as well as the persistence of inspirational leadership necessary to conduct coordinated operations. We also introduce a new leadership watch-out term: “commanders in tents.” This staff ride is used by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group's L-580 senior level leadership course, as well as by USFS R-8 hotshot crews 

​LEARNING OUTCOMES: 

+ Leaders introspectively evaluate their past decision-making and share their lessons "earned" with their colleagues, all with a view toward building up better leaders for the future.

+ Participants learn more about how their colleagues feel, think, frame problems, and communicate their decisions into action.

+ Teams build cohesion and a common shared experience in evaluating leaders from the past, while broadening their vocabulary and level of organizational maturity.