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.
The problem was not scientific. NESDIS held world-class fire science, the satellites were already in orbit, and the money had arrived. What the agency did not have was a single integrated fire system, an accountable team empowered to build one, or any mechanism for the people who depend on the output — forecasters, other agencies, commercial operators — to shape what got built. The capability was real and the authority to converge it was missing.
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.
The structural problem ran deeper than any single product. Fire team members sat under separate funding lines and answered to the program directors who controlled them, and no one above the program level had the standing to reorder their priorities. Requirements changes escalated to NOAA-level governance to be approved. Between NESDIS and the National Weather Service, no office would say it owned fire. And the money itself had a deadline attached: the supplemental funds had to be obligated in-year, did not cover the transition of research into operations, and carried no authorization beyond FY24.
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:
An integrated fire product suite was not one obstacle but six interlocking ones, each owned by a different part of the enterprise. None could be resolved by the Fire Program Manager, or by any single office, alone. These six dimensions became the six topics the room was built around.
| Dimension | Why it could not be solved alone |
|---|---|
| Impact mindset | NESDIS could not say what “impact” meant, who all of its users were, or where its own responsibility ended — products were being built without use cases fleshed out. Impact is realized at the end of a value chain NESDIS does not control: the forecasters, agencies and operators who convert satellite data into a decision would have to define it with them. |
| Whole customer view | What the agency knew about its users sat in fragments across NESDIS and NOAA, requirements were routinely confused with needs, and the agency largely spoke only to the next link in the chain rather than to the people acting on the data. Assembling one picture of the user required the forecasters, partner agencies and commercial operators who held the other fragments. |
| Transformation | Moving to an integrated cloud system was blocked less by technology than by an inability to stop anything — management backed down at the first objection, so obsolete products consumed the capacity new ones needed — and by an operational definition that obliged 24/7 support for everything. Changing that required science, operations, security and risk assurance to jointly accept a different risk posture; none could declare it alone. |
| How we work | Budgets and the requirements feeding them were so tightly coupled that agility meant changing requirement mandates themselves, most funding lines went to satellites rather than to the products built from them, and the supplemental money had to be obligated in-year with no authorization past FY24. Aligning budgets and projects sat with budget integration, portfolio management and NOAA-level planning, not with the fire program. |
| Communication | Expertise was siloed to the point that most staff could not name three fire products and no one could speak across the suite, while external communication assumed an audience of professionals who already knew what to do with the data. Speaking with one voice required every program, plus NWS and partner agencies, to accept a shared message none of them had authored alone. |
| Governance | Fire team members answered to the program directors who controlled their funding lines, nobody above the program level could orchestrate across them, and between NESDIS and the National Weather Service no office would say it owned fire. Creating a real owner required NESDIS leadership, NWS and NOAA research each to concede a measure of control. |
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, together with the National Weather Service, NOAA research, the Environmental Protection Agency, NOAA's Office of the Chief Information Officer, and The Aerospace Corporation. Each 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 |
|---|---|---|
| GOES-R and JPSS fire science leads | Own the competing detection algorithms and the science behind each product line. | Integration decided over the heads of the people who wrote the algorithms would have been technically naive and would have had no chance of adoption inside the programs that had to implement it. |
| The Fire Program Manager (Mike Pavolonis) | Carries the mandate and the accountability, without the team or authority to act on it. | The room's highest-ranked recommendation was to resource and empower this office. That is not a conclusion a group can reach credibly, or a burden it can hand to someone, in their absence. |
| NWS field forecasters | The in-house users who decide, day to day, whether a fire product is used at all. | The false-positive problem was invisible from inside the development programs. Without the forecasters who had quietly stopped using the products, the new funding would have rebuilt the same products faster. |
| NOAA research leadership (OAR) | Controls the modelling and smoke-forecasting half of the fire value chain. | Detection without modelling is not a fire system. Any plan to coordinate the supplemental funding across NOAA would have been written by one party and ignored by the other. |
| Environmental Protection Agency | Holds the air-quality and smoke mandate that NESDIS data feeds, outside NOAA entirely. | Smoke was half the congressional mandate and none of NESDIS's authority. Without an external agency user in the room, the smoke half of the strategy would have been written blind. |
| Portfolio, budget, and policy staff | Control funding lines, requirements processes, and the route into forward-year budgets. | Recommendations that cannot enter the portfolio management and budget cycle expire with the supplemental funding. The second-ranked recommendation in the room was precisely that integration — and only these people could make it real. |
| Commercial and cloud partners (The Aerospace Corporation, NOAA OCIO) | Hold the systems-engineering, cloud, and dissemination layer — and the industry view of how end users actually reach data. | The recommendations to open data to third-party value-add developers and to recruit power users as co-developers came from this part of the room. An internal-only session would have optimized the products and left the delivery path, and the commercial ecosystem built on it, untouched. |
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.
Those formats failed for a structural reason rather than a lack of effort. Coordination meetings 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. Participants described the pattern precisely: management had no mechanism to retire a product, so the first objection stopped the conversation; nobody could reliably say what other offices were working on; and consultation itself had become its own problem — the same people asked for the same things, with no visible consequence, until fatigue set in. Convening was not the missing ingredient. Convergence was.
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, under a structure that forced each recommendation to be tested by people who would bear its cost, with a shared mandate at the end.
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. The three days convened around a single, deliberately time-boxed question:
The second clause was the one that mattered. Asking for an integrated product suite invites a technical answer; asking what barriers are making integration hard right now forces the room onto governance, funding, requirements, and authority — the things a product roadmap cannot fix.
Six topics were the instrument — Impact Mindset, Whole Customer View, Transformation, How We Work, Communication, and Governance — designed during discovery so the fire challenge would be opened along every seam at once: what impact even means, who the users are, how the system gets rebuilt, how budgets and projects align, how the agency speaks with one voice, and who has the authority to decide. Six teams worked those seams in parallel rather than in sequence, which is what made thirteen working hours across three days sufficient.
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.
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's job was to define the systems-level fire value proposition NESDIS could offer users. The binding constraint was that impact had never been defined. Products were being developed without use cases fleshed out; the team could not initially say who all its users were or what they wanted; and the fundamental question users cared about — where fires are and how they are evolving — was underserved while attention went to process. One participant put the boundary problem plainly: for a weather forecast, people don't go to the Weather Service, they open a commercial app.
Diverge. Options ranged from a tightly coupled joint plan with NWS and NOAA research, to fire behaviour models that convert a detection into a probability of spread, to a help desk and clearinghouse so users could stop guessing which satellite held the right data at the right time, to descoping activities that were minimally impactful in order to fund those that weren't.
Converge. The team committed to three recommendations: increase granular coordination with NWS and OAR for efficient execution of the supplemental funds; improve data access and compatibility with user systems, including a commitment to GIS-ready formats; and document user and stakeholder feedback on capabilities launched in the 2022 season as a continuous input to off-season development. Improving data access and compatibility ranked second of all 18 recommendations in the room's vote.
Analyze. This team worked on assembling one picture of the user from fragments scattered across NESDIS and NOAA, and on creating shared responsibility for understanding them. The constraint was that no such picture existed: requirements were confused with needs, so solutions began before the value being created was understood, and the agency largely spoke only to the next link in the communication chain rather than to the people acting on the data.
Diverge. Options included a policy of not starting development until the value and its use were understood, an internal shadowing program putting developers alongside users to watch where products break down, leveraging NASA's approach of bringing user data back to inform services, and a legal path to capturing analytics across federal boundaries so user behaviour could be measured at all.
Converge. The team committed to: document the fire and smoke ecosystem across the NOAA enterprise, other federal agencies, state, academia, Tribal, and the commercial sector, clarifying users and roles; effectively engage fire and smoke users through proving grounds, test beds, and a developer shadowing program; and conduct user tracing — analytics, historical archive data, and an engagement dashboard — to inform engagement and measure impact. User tracing tied for third in the vote.
Analyze. This team focused on transitioning to an integrated system in the cloud. The constraints were an inability to retire anything — management backed down at the first objection, so obsolete products consumed the capacity that new ones needed — an operational definition requiring 24/7 support for everything, and a data exploitation gap: the agency was not extracting the best product it could make from what it already held.
Diverge. Options included treating products as beta until metrics justified promotion, a DARPA-style evaluation model for grading the fire portfolio, deliberately turning products off to see who complained, API-driven interfaces so others could build on NESDIS data, war-gaming with the responder community to see how products are really used in the field, and innovative acquisition routes to partner directly with industry — on the reasoning that industry already holds the user base.
Converge. The team committed to: execute a DevOps campaign for the 2022 fire season, delivering a minimum viable capability through an agile sandbox with users engaged early; improve data access to facilitate innovation by the third-party value-add community, on the explicit recognition that NESDIS does not have all the ideas but can enable others'; and recruit power users as pathfinders and co-developers, engaging the commercial satellite data sector and letting user priority rather than product inventory drive the queue. The DevOps campaign tied for third in the vote.
Analyze. This team's mandate was aligning budgets and projects going forward, and it ran straight into the funding cliff. The supplemental money had to be spent in-year, did not cover research-to-operations transition, and had no authorization beyond FY24 — so demonstrated utility alone would leave nothing standing. Requirements and budgets were so tightly coupled that agility required changing the requirement mandates themselves, and most funding lines went to satellites rather than to the products and services built from them.
Diverge. Options included redefining development as algorithms plus interfaces plus dissemination rather than algorithms alone, using fire to demonstrate an enterprise project paradigm to both NOAA and Congress, standing up a small agile release train integrated with cloud operations, leaning on cooperative institutes to host near-real-time demonstration systems until the cloud framework could, and marketing the work as a cross-service program to improve its budget standing.
Converge. The team committed to: integrate the fire information system into the NESDIS cloud plan and Project Portfolio Management budget plans beyond FY22, preserving the system's cohesion rather than fragmenting it back into projects; develop an enterprise innovation and proving-ground plan for fire and smoke, including funded pilots and baseline measurement; and leverage academia and industry to accelerate demonstration activity for the 2022 season. The PPM integration recommendation tied for second overall — the room's judgment that a system with no place in the forward budget is a system with an expiry date.
Analyze. This team examined internal and external communication and found them to be one problem. Internally, expertise was so siloed that most staff could not name three fire products, and no one could speak across the suite — a participant likened it to needing a different salesperson for every computer in the store. Externally, communication assumed a professional audience that already knew what to do with the data. And underneath both sat the ownership vacuum: between NESDIS and NWS, no one said they owned fire, and without ownership there was no accountability.
Diverge. Options included a communication pathway modelled on an EPA tool that captures what a user asked for and what was delivered, joining exercises the responder community already runs rather than staging a NESDIS product pitch, agency-wide social media protocols, conference presence, and providing APIs to commercial services that already have the platforms and the public relationships to distribute the data.
Converge. The team committed to: establish an internal cross-disciplinary fire weather community of practice, potentially extending to other federal agencies; establish a NOAA communications plan on fire, including the expectation that anyone speaking externally represents NOAA rather than their own product; and initiate a “wildfires.gov” one-stop site for fire specialists and intermediaries, with a rapid response team led by an applications lead rather than a product lead. The communications plan tied for fourth in the vote.
Analyze. This team built a common understanding of who sets the rules, who owns them, and how they are enforced — then named the structural flaw. Fire team members worked under separate funding lines and did what their program directors told them, and nobody above the program level could orchestrate across them. Metrics compounded it: meeting the metric counted as success even when delivery was late or the product had failed, and lateness carried no accountability.
Diverge. Options included creating a fire program office with defined authority and funded support staff, a rule that no new committee could be created without dismantling a dormant one, using the Weather Act of 2017 as an explicit directive, redefining what “operational” obliges the agency to do, and fixing the currently broken basics — nearly all users were reaching fire detection data through other agencies' interfaces because they were easier to use.
Converge. The team committed to: create, resource, and empower a NESDIS fire program and team — communicating Mike Pavolonis's authority, giving him a tiger team, and granting cloud access for a full DevOps model; clarify fire team roles, responsibilities, and product ownership, internally and for interagency coordination; and define fire team success metrics and milestones at six months and beyond, including what NESDIS would deprioritize to give fire the room it needed. Empowering the fire program was the single highest-ranked recommendation across all six topics.
Across the six topics the room produced one coherent strategy rather than six wish-lists. The 18 recommendations clustered into three themes and, when the room allocated its votes, the priority was unambiguous: align internally around a fire system playbook and call to action (37% of votes), organize a fire community of practice including power users to design solutions (35%), and use a test-and-learn approach to deploy and optimize the system rapidly (28%). Governance and ownership came first, users came second, and technology came third — the reverse of how the problem had been approached until then.
NESDIS leadership left with 18 prioritized recommendations, unanimous support from all 26 participants, and three things the $120 million in new federal funding had not automatically provided:
In an anonymous post-workshop survey, every respondent agreed that the format helped the group make significant progress in a short time, that they supported the recommendations from the teams they sat on, and that they hoped NESDIS would move forward with them.
For the participants who had spent years watching coordination fail, the shift in momentum was tangible. As the commercial systems partner 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.
What that authority produced is measurable. 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. Adoption at that scale was voluntary — no office was directed to use it — which is what happens when the people who decide whether to use a product helped define what it had to do. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is the more common case, not the exception. Eisai Canada could not build MRI capacity; NESDIS could not direct the National Weather Service to use its products. 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 holding a capability the system has not converged on — where the technology works, the funding exists, and the decision has no owner — that is the conversation worth having. Book a call.