Situation
NESDIS operates the nation's most sophisticated weather satellites — including the GOES-R series and the Joint Polar Satellite System — uniquely capable of detecting and characterizing wildfires from ignition through smoke dispersal. Congress and the White House had taken notice: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act committed an extra $100 million to NOAA for fire capabilities, and the FY22 Disaster Relief Supplemental Act added another $20 million. The 2021 fire season had been one of the most destructive in US history. Inside the agency, fire had become the top priority, and the direction from the White House and Congress was to move on it immediately. Responsibility for that mandate sat with NESDIS Fire Program Manager Mike Pavolonis.
Complication
NESDIS wasn't ready to just do it. The workshop took place in late March 2022 — weeks before the 2022 fire season was set to begin. Fire detection products from GOES-R and JPSS had been developed through entirely separate acquisition programs, using different algorithms developed by different science leads, with requirements written a decade before satellite launch and no mechanism to update them based on user feedback. The result was product inconsistency, duplication, and — in some cases — algorithms that generated so many false positives that frontline fire managers had stopped using them. $120 million in new federal money was now sitting on the table, with the fire season approaching, and no integrated system or accountable team to spend it well.
Solving it would require a different kind of process. Dr. Mitch Goldberg, a senior NESDIS scientist with three decades in the field, would later describe what set this one apart:
What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough
The fire product problem was not new, and NESDIS had not ignored it. Program managers had attempted to coordinate between the GOES-R and JPSS science teams. There had been internal working groups, planning meetings, and strategy documents. But the agency's siloed acquisition structure worked against every attempt at integration: each satellite program had its own funding line, its own science leads, and its own incentives — none of which pointed toward collaboration. What was missing was 26 of the agency's best fire-domain minds — including the external users whose frustrations had never been heard inside a NESDIS meeting room — working the problem together with a shared mandate.
Question
NESDIS had $120 million in new federal funding, a fast-approaching fire season, and satellite capabilities that no other agency could match — but no integrated system, no accountable team, and a siloed culture that had repeatedly agreed on priorities and then failed to act on them.
Answer
MMG convened 26 participants over three days via Zoom and MURAL on March 29–31, 2022: scientists, engineers, program managers, and policy staff from across NESDIS, two National Weather Service physical scientists, an NOAA research director, an EPA director, an IT specialist from NOAA's Office of the Chief Information Officer, and a senior lead from The Aerospace Corporation. Six topics — Impact Mindset, Whole Customer View, Transformation, How We Work, Communication, and Governance — were designed so that the fire challenge would be solved from every angle simultaneously.
Those six teams are not small working groups. Each one carries half the room, so every topic was worked by roughly thirteen of the twenty-six rather than by a handful — and each team is split by role. Members hold the deepest knowledge of that particular topic and build the recommendation. Critics sit in the same session with a standing mandate to attack it. Challenge is therefore structural rather than a matter of who feels safe speaking up, and because every participant sits on more than one team, the reasoning behind each recommendation travels across topics instead of staying with the group that produced it. By the third day, no recommendation had survived without being tested by people who came at it from a different program.
Output
NESDIS leadership left with unanimous support from all 26 participants and three things the $120 million in new federal funding had not automatically provided:
- A unified fire system playbook — anchored by the empowerment of Mike Pavolonis as Fire Program Manager with a dedicated tiger team, clarified roles and responsibilities across the NOAA enterprise, and a plan to integrate the fire information system into the NESDIS cloud and project portfolio management framework.
- A community of practice and co-development model — bringing fire-domain power users, including NWS field forecasters, EPA partners, and commercial operators, into the product development cycle as co-developers, closing the feedback loop that had allowed ineffective algorithms to persist for years.
- A test-and-learn execution strategy — a DevOps campaign to rapidly deploy improved capabilities for the 2022 fire season and a proving ground model for fire and smoke innovation. Ninety per cent of the National Weather Service’s 122 Weather Forecast Offices had subscribed to the Next Generation Fire System feed within months of its February 2025 release, drawn by detection down to a quarter-acre and alerts in as little as one minute. During the March 2025 Oklahoma grassfire outbreak, early detection was credited with roughly $850 million in property damage avoided — about 250 times the cost of developing the system.
For the participants who had spent years watching coordination fail, the shift in momentum was tangible. As Steve Marley, who had diagnosed the coordination problem as clearly as anyone, put it at the close of the workshop:
The mandate the three days produced was to be bold, agile, and impactful — and, for the first time, it had somewhere to land. Mike Pavolonis was now formally empowered as Fire Program Manager with a dedicated team behind him and the authority to spend the new funding against an integrated plan rather than two parallel ones.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did $120 million in new federal funding fail to solve a problem that had existed for years?
Money creates capacity; it doesn't create alignment. NESDIS had two parallel satellite programs — GOES-R and JPSS — each with its own science leads, funding lines, and incentive structures, none of which pointed toward integration. New funding made the dysfunction more visible and more urgent, but it didn't change the underlying structure. What was missing was a shared mandate built by the people who would have to execute it — including the external users whose frustrations had never been heard inside a NESDIS planning meeting.
Why were external users — NWS forecasters and EPA partners — included in an internal product strategy session?
Because they were the ones who knew which products weren't working. Algorithms that generated so many false positives that frontline fire managers had stopped using them had persisted for years precisely because there was no feedback loop between the people building the products and the people using them. Including external users in the session wasn't a courtesy — it was a structural design choice to close that loop and prevent the same problem from recurring in the products the new funding would build.
What made forecast offices adopt the Next Generation Fire System voluntarily when previous products struggled?
Voluntary adoption at that scale is the result of two things: products that actually work for the people using them, and those users having had a hand in defining what "works" means. The community of practice and co-development model that came out of the MMG session brought NWS forecasters, EPA partners, and commercial operators into the product development cycle as co-developers — not as end-users briefed after the fact. That's a different kind of buy-in than training rollout produces.
How do you get unanimous support from 26 scientists and engineers on anything?
By designing the session so that the output reflects what participants actually concluded rather than what leadership wanted to hear. Unanimous support doesn't mean everyone agreed on every detail — it means the process surfaced disagreement, worked through it, and produced recommendations that everyone could endorse. The governance structure that came out of the session — empowering a single Fire Program Manager with a dedicated team and clarified roles across the NOAA enterprise — resolved the accountability ambiguity that had allowed the previous fragmentation to persist.
How does an outside firm acquire enough subject-matter expertise to run a workshop on satellite fire detection?
It acquires enough to design the session and deliberately not enough to hold a view. Discovery runs for weeks before anyone meets: interviews with people across the programs, a written briefing document every participant reads, 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 system's 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 fire-domain knowledge needed at NESDIS was already in the room; the problem was that it sat in fragments across programs with no incentive to reconcile. 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. A facilitator drawn from inside a community also has relationships to protect, which is precisely what makes it hard to ask a named party, in front of their peers, to give something up. The domain experts supply the content. We supply the structure that makes their content converge.
How is this different from the workshops, working groups and gatherings an organization already runs?
By what exists at the end. NESDIS had already run coordination attempts, working groups and planning processes, 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.