Forty per cent of the United States population lives and works in coastal counties, on shorelines being reshaped by sea level rise, intensifying storms, harmful algal blooms and warming water. NOAA's job is to help those communities, habitats and economies withstand it. NESDIS — the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service — is the 700-person line office that owns the observing half of that mission: the satellites, the archives, and the products built from them. Ninety-five per cent of the data used in weather forecasting models comes from satellites, and NESDIS operates the nation's around the clock.
By the summer of 2022, NESDIS was a year into a deliberate attempt to change what it was for. A 2021 Mind Meeting had produced an 18-recommendation strategy, endorsed by NESDIS leadership that fall, for moving the organization from making widgets to being a user-centric partner to the rest of NOAA. Assistant Administrator Steve Volz then asked his leaders to run three more sessions that would take one of those three strategy pillars — the one about how the agency works — and drive it into specific mission areas. The first was fire. The second was coastal.
Sponsor Mike Ford, Chief of the OSGS Portfolio Management Branch, set a plain test for the coastal session. He wanted Volz to be able to name, for each of his peers running the other line offices, what their top coastal priorities were and what NESDIS was doing about them — the equivalent of an index card in his pocket. Nobody at NESDIS could produce those cards.
Inside NOAA, NESDIS sells to peers. The National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Ocean Service and NOAA Research are sibling line offices with their own mandates, their own budgets, their own planning calendars and their own freedom to get data somewhere else. NESDIS could not direct any of them to adopt a process, and by 2022 a number of them had quietly stopped waiting. Commercial imagery was being used more than NESDIS imagery for some coastal work. European sources were preferred for some products. One line office was building its own platform to share its data. A Fisheries participant summarized the position without diplomacy: NOAA is not providing the products I need, and when I do find something it is confusing or less useful than the international equivalent.
None of that was a science failure. It was a failure of the machinery between the science and the people who need it, and that machinery was genuinely hard to see from outside. NESDIS ran three separate prioritization schemes at once. Line office staff could not identify where the coastal priority list lived or who owned it — and internal NESDIS staff often could not either. There were formal channels for submitting user needs, and there was the real, personality-driven, who-you-know network that everyone actually used, and the two were not connected. Needs were collected and then went quiet. As one participant put it, the squeaky wheel gets the grease rather than the high-value product.
Two further constraints made the problem resistant to any single fix. Planning horizons across the four line offices are wildly mismatched — a new NESDIS satellite is a ten-year-plus commitment, while Fisheries works five-year strategic cycles with annual guidance memos and regional labs plan against their own stakeholders. And the people being asked to collaborate were already saturated. Collaboration fatigue was named directly in the room: the same people are asked for the same things, nothing visible comes back, and eventually the answer is that you have to make it worth my while.
Delivering high-impact coastal products across four line offices was not one obstacle but six interlocking ones, each owned by a different part of the enterprise and none of them resolvable by NESDIS alone. Those six dimensions, identified through sponsor discussions and interviews with NESDIS staff during discovery, became the six topics the room was built around.
| Dimension | Why it could not be solved alone |
|---|---|
| Prioritization | NESDIS ran three separate internal prioritization schemes, and neither its partners nor much of its own staff could say where the coastal priority list lived or who owned it. A consolidated list is worthless unless the line offices whose priorities it claims to represent have validated it — and most of them were not doing satellite prioritization on their own at all. |
| Collaborative planning | Planning cycles were mismatched by an order of magnitude: a decade or more for a satellite, five years for a Fisheries strategic plan, annual for operating plans, lab by lab for research. Collaboration happened by proximity and personal relationship rather than by design. Only the line offices themselves could open their planning processes to each other. |
| Workforce connectivity | Enterprise forums existed but had been built to stand up satellite missions, not to solve product delivery problems, and the ocean and coastal mission was not connected through them. Staff in one line office could not name a point of contact in another. Fixing that required each line office to commit its own people, not just endorse the idea. |
| Impact | NESDIS had no shared definition of impact or value with its partners, and the room's own conclusion was that users, not NESDIS, should determine value. That makes the definition unwriteable inside NESDIS by construction — it has to be negotiated with the line offices who sit between the satellite and the public. |
| Products and services | Access was the binding constraint, not capability: download processes were clunky, documentation thin, and users could not tell which of several similar products suited their purpose. Some had migrated to commercial and non-NOAA sources. Only the users who had left could say what would bring them back. |
| Communication | NESDIS was speaking to the next link in the chain rather than to the people acting on the data, had no segmentation of its audiences, and had no mechanism for saying clearly when a need could not be met — some capabilities are more than a decade away. A credible communication approach required the audiences themselves to define what would actually reach them. |
MMG convened 27 participants over three days via Zoom and MURAL on June 22–24, 2022 — oceanographers, fisheries biologists, ecologists, physical scientists, portfolio and planning staff and division chiefs, drawn deliberately from four NOAA line offices rather than from NESDIS alone. Roughly half the room did not work for the organization convening it. Each group held a piece of the problem the others could not solve without them.
| Stakeholder | Role in the problem | Why their absence would have stalled the solution |
|---|---|---|
| NOAA Fisheries (NMFS) | A principal consumer of coastal satellite data — habitat science, protected species, fish population and distribution — and the line office furthest along in going elsewhere for it. | The sharpest evidence that the system was failing came from Fisheries: products judged less useful than international equivalents, a home-grown data platform under construction, and a three-month wait that sent a team to other vendors. Without them, NESDIS would have redesigned its process around users who were still politely waiting. |
| National Ocean Service (NOS) | Owns operational oceanography, coastal inundation, marine spatial ecology and the direct relationship with coastal communities and decision-makers. | NOS holds the last mile between a satellite observation and a coastal management decision. Any definition of impact written without them would have stopped at the data product rather than reaching the outcome that justifies it. |
| NOAA Research (OAR) | Runs the laboratories — Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological, Pacific Marine Environmental — that turn observations into models and understanding. | OAR named the gap most directly: no understanding of the range of NESDIS products available, and no idea who to ask. A plan to improve access built without the research community would have optimized for people who already knew the way in. |
| NESDIS portfolio, planning and product leadership | Control the prioritization schemes, the product portfolio process, the five-year plan and the annual operating plan — the machinery every recommendation would have to pass through. | Recommendations that cannot enter the portfolio and budget cycle expire as good intentions. Opening the product portfolio process to line office representatives is a concession only the people who run it can make. |
| NESDIS operations, ground services and data stewardship | Own the satellite products and operations division, the ground services and cloud migration, and the national environmental archives. | A storefront, a help desk, digital object identifiers and programmatic access are operational commitments, not aspirations. The people who would have to build and staff them had to be the ones proposing them. |
| Programs at the NESDIS–user boundary | Run the training courses, regional nodes and distribution channels through which most NOAA staff actually encounter satellite data. | These programs are where the enterprise's coastal reputation is actually made, and their visibility and funding fragility was a live constraint. Left out, they would have been designed around rather than built on. |
| NESDIS senior science leadership | Holds the scientific standing to say what is technically possible and what is a decade away. | Several recommendations turned on distinguishing needs from requirements from programs. Without someone able to rule on feasibility in the room, the room would have committed to work that could not be delivered. |
NOAA had not neglected this. There was a Weather, Water and Climate Board, and an ocean and coasts team being stood up beneath it. There was a Satellite Needs Working Group. There were regional collaboration teams producing cross-line-office efforts every year, communities of practice, an information exchange for ocean acidification, fellowship and detail programs for moving staff between offices, and a decade of prior analytical work on valuing observing systems. Participants were clear that much of it worked and that the instinct to build something new was usually wrong.
What none of it produced was convergence. Cross-line-office connectivity in planning and prioritization had become disjointed as the earlier processes faded and nothing replaced their function. Most enterprise forums had been created to stand up satellite missions, not to solve delivery problems, and the coastal mission was not well represented in any of them. Meanwhile the informal network — the scientist who knows a scientist — carried the real traffic, and the formal channels collected requirements that then disappeared from view. Feedback given during development was not incorporated. Work that got started and stalled was rarely communicated, and there was no clear point at which anything was stopped.
Coordination formats fail here for a structural reason rather than a lack of effort. They can produce shared understanding, and these did. What they cannot produce is a resolved trade-off, because nobody in them is required to give anything up — to stop a product, to open a planning process, to concede that another line office decides what counts as valuable. That is what the three days were built to force.
Discovery ran for weeks before anyone met: interviews with NESDIS staff, and sessions with the sponsor and an internal steering group spanning both NESDIS and the line offices. That work produced one question, deliberately time-boxed and deliberately end-to-end:
Every clause was doing work. Starting now, and over the next 6 months set urgency while conceding that some payoffs land later. Prioritize, plan, and deliver refused to let the room stop at the satisfying part — the chain had to be taken end to end, because the breakdowns were at the joints. High-impact and coastal resilience were left undefined on purpose: both terms meant different things to the four line offices, and settling them was part of the work rather than a precondition for it.
Six topics were the instrument — Prioritization, Collaborative Planning, Workforce Connectivity, Impact, Products & Services, and Communication — designed during discovery so the coastal challenge would be opened along every seam at once. Six teams worked those seams in parallel rather than in sequence, which is what made thirteen working hours across three days sufficient.
Participants ranked the six topics by their own expertise, and an algorithm assigned each person to three of them — balancing every individual's preferences against the other twenty-six, and deliberately distributing NESDIS and non-NESDIS staff across every team so that no topic could be worked by one line office's view of it. Each team was then split by role. Members owned the topic and were accountable for producing three recommendations answering the workshop question through its lens. Critics sat in the same session with a standing mandate to observe and challenge. Because everyone sat on three teams in two different roles, the reasoning behind each recommendation travelled across topics instead of staying with the group that produced it.
Each topic ran the same three-stage discipline. In Analyze, teams surfaced the real constraints. In Diverge, they generated options widely before committing to any. In Converge, each team built the recommendations it would own, and the full room allocated ten votes each across the resulting 18 recommendations to prioritize them. What follows is how that played out, topic by topic. The mechanics were identical; the content differed.
Analyze. This team went after the lack of clarity on what NESDIS and its partners actually consider important, and found the problem was structural rather than analytical. Three separate prioritization schemes ran inside NESDIS; from outside looking in, one participant said, it was a head scratcher. Neither the line offices nor much of NESDIS could say where the coastal priority list lived or who owned it. The line offices largely were not doing their own satellite prioritization, because nothing obliged them to. And value was being determined by persistence — the squeaky wheel — rather than by impact.
Diverge. Options ranged from prioritizing regionally rather than agency-wide, to organizing around topical threads like fire and coastal resilience that run down to real end-user needs, to reviving the quantitative valuation methodology from a decade earlier, to standing external review panels on the model the Federal Aviation Administration uses, to embedding NESDIS staff at regional nodes so priorities are learned rather than solicited.
Converge. The team committed to: create a clear mechanism to understand and consolidate — explicitly not re-invent — priorities, building from existing reference documents and the new NOAA board strategic plan, and putting a consolidated NESDIS list in front of the line offices for comment; assess impacts against resources to determine return on investment, including determining what needs to be stopped; and engage external coastal-focused user communities on observation priorities, from Digital Coast and Sea Grant to international bodies, with NESDIS people embedded at regional nodes and disaster response centres. The consolidation mechanism drew seven per cent of the room's votes, fifth of eighteen.
Analyze. This team started from why — why collaborative planning is needed at all, at what level, and with whom — and framed the goal as moving from serendipity to systematic. The constraints were mismatched planning timelines across the line offices, collaboration that was real but personal and therefore fragile, and an absence of it at exactly the level where the work happens. Trust was named as the actual currency, built over years of relationships and not transferable by memo. Underneath sat a process failure: development efforts that started, stalled, and were never communicated or formally stopped.
Diverge. Options included pulling staff from every level into planning rather than leaders only, adopting agile programme-increment planning so collaboration is a cadence rather than an event, incentive programmes for collaborating, demonstrating that working with NESDIS lets a line office do more with fewer resources, NESDIS-hosted working sessions to map each line office's priorities against current NESDIS capability, a survey of all line offices for their top satellite needs, and speed-dating across offices using NOAA's research and development database.
Converge. The team committed to: evaluate and optimize existing collaboration activities by mapping the full ecosystem of stakeholders, roles and resources and learning from what already works — the offshore wind team, with dedicated representatives from every line office, was the model; include the other line offices in the Annual Operating Plan process; and establish an ocean and coast working group under the Satellite Needs Working Group to analyse and vocalize ranked priorities. Evaluating existing collaboration took five per cent of the vote.
Analyze. This team's subject was connecting the right people, forums and organizations for efficient solving, and its analysis produced the sharpest diagnosis of the three days. The enterprise forums that exist were built to stand up satellite missions, not to solve product delivery problems, and the ocean and coastal mission is not fully connected through any of them. There is a disconnect between the formal channels for collecting needs and the ad hoc, personality-based traffic that carries the real work. NESDIS often approaches partners by asking them to fill out a spreadsheet, which is not a relatable approach to anyone outside NESDIS. And the honest summary from OAR: no understanding of the range of NESDIS products available, and no idea where to go or who to ask.
Diverge. Options included dedicated NESDIS staff embedded in regions, rotations that would put a Fisheries or Ocean Service scientist inside a NESDIS science centre to co-develop a product, talking about products rather than missions because asking a non-satellite person what they want from a given satellite loses them, arming NOAA's international affairs staff with line office wish lists before they negotiate satellite agreements, automatically pushing satellite data to NOAA ships without waiting to be asked, and putting satellite training into the standard federal learning platform the way the Weather Service already does.
Converge. The team committed to: inventory and optimize the line-office-to-line-office engagement points, assessing what already exists, filling the gaps, and inviting line office representatives into the NESDIS product portfolio process; implement the concept of a coastal and ocean test bed connecting the two workforces through the proving ground model the Weather Service uses well; and elevate workforce exchange capability through a NESDIS 101 for partners, training at every coastal connective point, and bringing line office staff into the agile development process. The test bed was the single highest-ranked recommendation of all eighteen, taking twelve per cent of the room's votes.
Analyze. This team worked on the user-based worth of NESDIS products, services and forecasts, and its first finding was that the vocabulary did not exist. There was no common definition of impact or value, no agreed way to track either, and no targets. Value and impact were being used interchangeably when they are not the same thing. Products were being prioritized on perceived impact communicated before the product existed. And the team reached a conclusion with real consequences for the convening organization: value should be determined by users and the line offices, not by NESDIS.
Diverge. Options included expressing value in user language through end-user stories rather than only in numbers, an omnibus document capturing every societal benefit the agency has ever claimed, sector-by-sector impact analysis across climate and the blue economy, categorizing users thematically and regionally, borrowing the value assessment model built for the air quality mission, and using value assessments to inform the looming decisions on the next generation of satellite programmes.
Converge. The team committed to: leverage the NESDIS Service Delivery Framework continuously to assess and increase impact, with co-development alongside users and line offices built into every product launch; identify the most valuable ocean and coastal products underpinning cross-line-office efforts by asking the partners how they actually use and model them, and by asking what happens if we turn it off; and launch three valuation studies for coastal resilience solutions involving NESDIS data. The two identification and valuation recommendations placed third and fourth overall at eight per cent each.
Analyze. This team looked at how user needs surface and how products are accessed and used, and found the pain concentrated at access rather than capability. Downloading was clunky when it should have been programmatic. Documentation was thin, and users could not distinguish between similar products or find the caveats. Casual users were going to superusers rather than to NESDIS. Some had gone to commercial imagery or international sources entirely. Surveys of users had been run before, but the crux was receiving and responding to requests and then managing expectations — the breakdown was in the response, not the collection.
Diverge. Options included a coastal product and service catalogue with locations and download instructions, published documentation aimed at the casual user, formal usability and customer experience testing, a feedback button on the website, machine learning and batch programmatic access, integrating non-satellite observations from moorings and ships, and identifying and connecting the superusers in each office so casual users have a named human to ask.
Converge. The team committed to: capture and store line office user needs in a central, accessible repository where anyone can enter a request and see what others have asked for, feeding directly into prioritization — including the acknowledgement that some things will have to be retired; establish and socialize a storefront for line offices to access coastal products and services, cloud-based, with a help desk ticket system, digital object identifiers on every product and subscription notifications; and work with federal, international and private sector partners to enhance the quality and access of coastal products, including consolidating coastal satellite efforts above the NOAA level with agencies such as NASA, the Navy and USGS. The partnership recommendation and the storefront took seven and six per cent, sixth and seventh of eighteen.
Analyze. This team examined communication both between NESDIS and the line offices and outward to Congress and the public, and treated them as one problem. It opened with a participant's line that became the workshop's refrain: if NOAA only knew what NOAA knows. The constraints were that partners had shared their needs and did not feel heard; that NESDIS had no mechanism for saying clearly when it cannot meet a need, even when the honest answer is that a capability is more than a decade away; that audiences had never been segmented, so superusers and casual users received the same thing; and that the coastal programmes closest to users were fighting for visibility and funding rather than doing the work.
Diverge. Options included outer-space-to-user case studies on the farm-to-table model, communications organized around a NOAA mission area such as aquaculture rather than around satellites, roadshows and lunch-and-learns and the NOAA seminar series, joining other federal agencies' forums rather than starting new ones, partnering with the new NOAA artificial intelligence centre and NASA's collaborative innovation centre, and an ocean-focused call within the proving ground programme.
Converge. The team committed to: expand the frequency and variety of cross-line-office engagement, with workshops no less than annual plus follow-up meetings pitched at user level, and NESDIS presence inside the large cross-office initiatives already running; create one primary online portal as the face of NESDIS products and services, building on existing portals and adding a searchable forum, a decision-tree tool and a help desk; and inventory and optimize communication activities by user segmentation, distinguishing superusers from casual users and Congress from the public. Expanding cross-office engagement was the second-highest-ranked recommendation of the eighteen at nine per cent.
Across the six topics the room produced one coherent strategy rather than six wish-lists. The eighteen recommendations clustered into three themes, and when the room allocated its votes the weight fell decisively on redesigning how coastal products are developed, tested and valued (44 per cent) and on inventorying and optimizing how NESDIS engages, prioritizes and plans with the line offices (40 per cent), with communication and delivery mechanisms third (16 per cent). The room's judgment, in other words, was that the access problems were symptoms — and that the engagement machinery and the definition of value had to be fixed first.
NESDIS leadership left with eighteen prioritized recommendations, co-authored and ranked by twenty-seven people from four line offices, organized into a three-part strategy:
Three cross-cutting themes ran through all of it. Leverage what already works rather than reinventing it, and look both inside and outside NESDIS for the model — the Weather Service, NASA, and other partners. Accept that implementation needs new resources — while recognizing that disciplined prioritization is what reveals which activities can stop to free them. And use design thinking: user empathy, simplicity, one-stop shopping, and a standing challenge to the assumption that communication is getting through.
In an anonymous post-workshop survey, ninety-three per cent of respondents agreed the workshop was a safe place to share their ideas and that they better understood the challenges facing their NOAA colleagues, with no respondent disagreeing with either. Eighty-six per cent agreed the format helped the group make significant progress in a relatively short time. Seventy-nine per cent supported the recommendations from the teams they had sat on as Members, and seventy-nine per cent took away ideas for solving and collaboration they could use in their own work. Fourteen of the twenty-six surveyed participants responded.
The clearest evidence of what the three days changed is in what participants said they were taking away. From the National Ocean Service: NESDIS is serious about coastal issues. From Fisheries: NESDIS could improve visibility with us, and there are a lot of opportunities to improve how we communicate around and use satellite products. From NOAA Research: the opportunity to interact with the other line offices. From inside NESDIS, an unusually candid one — despite strong efforts from the satellite programmes, users are still having problems knowing the products and how to get to them. A NESDIS branch chief added the observation that reframed the mandate: coastal satellite needs are diverse enough that no full solution could ever be provided by NESDIS alone, but NESDIS people can facilitate solutions by helping the other line offices work with external agencies. That is a different job description than the one the agency had walked in with.
The eighteen recommendations went to an action planning session in July with additional members of the sponsor's team, and from there into the annual Fall Strategy Meeting of senior NESDIS leadership — the forum where the agency sets what it will fund and do. This was NESDIS's third Mind Meeting in nine months, following the Evolution and Fire workshops, and the second of the three mission-area sessions the Assistant Administrator had commissioned.
Because inside NOAA, NESDIS is a supplier to peers it does not control. Fisheries, the National Ocean Service and NOAA Research each set their own priorities, run their own planning cycles and choose their own data sources — including non-NOAA ones. NESDIS could not direct any of them to adopt a process. Talking was never the problem; there were already boards, working groups and forums, and participants were emphatic that many of them worked. What did not exist was a setting where the four line offices resolved a trade-off together and left with named owners.
The process, which then showed up as products. NESDIS ran three separate prioritization schemes internally, and one participant described the view from outside as a head scratcher. Line office staff could not find which NESDIS products existed or who owned them, so some had begun going to commercial and European sources instead, and one line office was building its own data-sharing platform. None of that is a science failure. It is what happens when a supplier's intake, prioritization and communication mechanisms are invisible to the people they exist to serve.
By not asking them to agree in plenary. The question was divided into six topics, and an algorithm assigned each of the twenty-seven participants to three of them, balancing their own expertise rankings against everyone else's and deliberately mixing NESDIS and non-NESDIS staff on every team. Each team held two roles: Members owned the topic and built the recommendations, Critics sat in the same session with a standing mandate to attack them. Challenge became structural rather than a matter of who felt confident enough to object — which is also why ninety-three per cent of survey respondents called it a safe place to share ideas, with none disagreeing.
It makes the first day harder and the third day possible. The constraints that mattered here — whether Fisheries would route its needs through a NESDIS process, whether the National Ocean Service would accept a shared definition of value, whether NOAA Research could find a product without knowing whom to ask — were all held outside the convening organization. A NESDIS-only session could have produced a better internal process and would have had no way of knowing whether anyone would use it. The discomfort of hearing a partner say your products are less useful than the international equivalent, in the room, on day one, is the price of a recommendation that holds.
Worked, not avoided. CoastWatch was the one coastal programme many NOAA staff could name, which made it both an asset and a distortion — a room left to its own devices would have converged on a single programme as the answer to a six-dimensional problem. The topic structure kept it in scope as a real constraint: its visibility and funding fragility surfaced in the Communication team's analysis, its satellite data training courses were built into the workforce exchange recommendation, and its portals were named as one input to the proposed single access point. The programme stayed in the strategy without becoming the strategy.
It acquires enough to design the session and deliberately not enough to hold a view. Discovery runs for weeks before anyone meets: interviews across the programmes, work with an internal steering group spanning the convening organization and its partners, and a topic design process that converts what we learn into the six variables the challenge actually turns on. By the time the room opens we understand the fault lines well enough to frame the question and staff each team with the people who own the relevant constraints. We do not understand the algorithms, and we should not. Every piece of coastal and satellite knowledge needed was already in the room; the problem was that it sat in fragments across four line offices with no mechanism to reconcile them. A facilitator who holds domain expertise also holds opinions, and opinions make it harder to treat disagreement as data rather than as something to settle from the chair.
By what exists at the end. NOAA already ran the Weather, Water and Climate Board, the Satellite Needs Working Group, regional collaboration teams and annual planning cycles, and they worked — they produced shared understanding and documented priorities. Formats built to move knowledge across a fragmented field do that job well, and they are the precondition for everything else. What they are not built to produce is a resolved trade-off with a named owner and a date, because no one in those formats is required to give anything up. A Mind Meeting is designed backwards from that output. It is not a better version of a working group; it is a different instrument — and it is the wrong one if the network has not been built yet, or if the people who own the binding constraints will not be in the room.
That is the more common case, not the exception. NESDIS could not require Fisheries or the National Ocean Service to route their satellite needs through a NESDIS process. A convener with a real stake but incomplete authority is the normal starting condition, and it is workable as long as the people who hold the missing authority are willing to be in the room. What the convener supplies is the occasion, the discipline, and the question. What the room supplies is the standing to answer it.
If you are supplying something the rest of your system needs and cannot easily reach — where the capability is real, the partners are willing, and the machinery between them has never been designed — that is the conversation worth having. Book a call.