“Five frogs are sitting on a log.
Four decide to jump off.
How many are left?
Answer: five.
Why? Because there’s a difference between deciding and doing.”
People who don’t know think that complex events just kind of “come together”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
People who don’t know think that complex events just kind of “come together”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
And the only people who really understand this are the unsung heroes who actually bring these complex events together. These are those unique people who plan, organize and execute; who “own” the events. They who take the headaches, herd the cats, deal with the thousands of little crises and do whatever it takes before, during and after the big day. Other than the bride (and a few wedding planners) few know these headaches, the long hours over late nights and just gritty hard work it takes to execute a seamless complex event.
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Now stick with me because, believe it or not, I’m now going to draw a comparison between a wedding and a disaster (because, after all, some disasters are just big fat Greek weddings on steroids).
Awareness
Lets start with the EOC. The biggest tool in the emergency managers toolbox, the emergency operations center is a multi-agency coordination center, or MACC, that is established at the operational, or agency, level of the response and provides situational awareness to decision-makers at the strategic level as well as information and logistics support to tactical assets in the field. It is an extraordinarily powerful tool that can manage every type of disaster.
But people who don’t know think that all you need to do when a disaster happens is turn it on.
But people who don’t know think that all you need to do when a disaster happens is turn it on. Simply activate the EOC (the thinking goes) and get the right people in the right seats. And good things will happen… organically, like magic. Sadly, with EOCs – as with weddings – nothing could be further from the truth.
And the only people who really understand this are those unique people who plan, organize and execute; who “own” the EOC. These are the people who herd the cats, deal with the thousands of little crises and do the gritty hard work over the long hours and late nights of the disaster to get it done. These people are the Emergency Managers. Emergency managers have one job: to coordinate. But that’s ok because that one job is everything.
The source of all failure during disasters is either lack of situational awareness or failure to act.
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Boring…
If you got all the way through the wedding story to this point you are probably ready to quit this article. Why? Because of that word. It’s one of those words like insurance or paradigm or variable annuity that is just… boring.
It is our job to make sure everybody knows what is happening along with the piece of the job that they own so that they have no excuse for failure to act.
The word, of course, is coordination. Now, we emergency managers know about coordination and we know that it’s kind of a big deal but at the same time it’s so boring that we don’t like to talk about it. So we don’t. When emergency managers talk they sit around carpeted conference rooms talking about what we do. But rarely do we talk about how we do it. Instead we tell ourselves: “Why spend a lot of time talking about it? We know how to do it.”
Now, I work in healthcare, and where I work the doctors spend a lot of time sitting around carpeted conference rooms talking about how they do what they do. Why? Because they know that the how is the key. To performance, to proficiency, to professionalism. How they do what they do is everything.
Even though we don’t talk about it, emergency managers, like wedding planners, know through hard experience that groups of people only accomplish things when we put energy into a chaotic system. It is our job to create a path forward in everybody’s head. It is our job to make sure everybody knows what is happening along with the piece of the job that they own so that they have no excuse for failure to act.
That is coordination. Coordination is the ‘how’ of emergency management. But because it is so boring we don’t talk about it. As if it was a secret. The emergency manager’s secret is that we make magic happen through coordination.
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Coordination is everything
During disasters thousands, even millions, of people are impacted in the same way at the same time. Their feelings of comfort and sense of order are destroyed. They have so many questions to which nobody has any answers. Fear seeps in to replace the destroyed rhythm of daily life. They get a strange sensation that feels like the fabric of society unraveling. Many will do what they always do when faced with big decisions: they will freeze. They will hunker down and try to distract themselves until help comes along and someone tells them what to do, trapped in a parallel universe of suboptimal outcomes.
During disasters, coordination means putting the right people in the right conversations to answer every question. To do this, we create a real-time decision infrastructure – an instant bureaucracy – across the range of operations. That this the incident organization, and it is centered in the EOC.
The incident organization is a team of teams. It is composed of people and resources coming together to work a process—fast, flat, and flexible, combining transparent communication with decentralized decision-making.
Different aspects of the disaster
Some disasters require dozens of teams focused on different aspects of the disaster—search and rescue, damage assessment, evacuation, sheltering, logistics, debris removal, disaster assistance, fatality management, feeding, and on and on.
For new problems for which there is no plan, it gets more people in and creates new teams
Even though every team is empowered to feed and care for itself, for the days and weeks of a big response, the job of coordination is to get them whatever they can’t get for themselves. If a team needs leadership, it assigns it. It solves the problems they can’t solve and moves the obstacles they can’t overcome. It gets them the stuff—from industry experts to specialized vehicles or equipment—they need to do their job. If there is information or orders or approvals they can’t get, it will get them. For new problems for which there is no plan, it gets more people in and creates new teams.
Coordination creates trust—trust in the plan and confidence that we will not fail.
It doesn’t wait; it anticipates. It creates a collective dynamic that empowers teams to run at, not away from, problems. Coordination force them to think: “What is happening? What are we doing? What do we intend to do? What can we do now to get ahead of the curve?” Finally, coordination tells everybody what is going on: field teams to agency headquarters to city hall to the children and families trapped within the parallel universe. It tells them what life is like within the parallel universe, what we are doing about it, what we are not yet doing, and why.
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Thanks for your work Kelly, I find your comments on “commanders intent” telling in my environment as we haven’t progressed past the SOP’s and organisational protocols stage. Acting in a timely manner is extremely difficult. It seems to me that having spent thousands of dollars and invested years of training and experience into the people we entrust to manage catastrophes we could surely entrust them to make decisions and expend resources for the common good.
Having worked these issues with colleagues around the world, I am always struck by how difficult they are to penetrate.
Thus the risky wedding analogy
The intention is not to (in any way) trivialize the negative impacts of disasters, but merely to illustrate an unfamiliar concept using a familiar event
Would be interested in the reader’s thoughts…