Reading Time: 3 minutes  Each week since the start of lockdown the Emergency Planning Society has been hosting ‘Resilience Huddles’ on Zoom. An opportunity for members to come together to decompress during these unusual times but also to share ideas and learn from each other. In the most recent of these events I was (and I cannot stress this enough) enraged when somebody suggested Emergency Management isn’t a profession. Take a look at this image. Can you guess the professions? Which one is the emergency manager? Sure, unlike ‘doctor’ or ‘engineer’ the title Emergency Manager is less well-defined. But a profession, to me, is the application of specialist knowledge and skills in the interest of others. I see colleagues around me doing that every day. A profession should not be reduced to being identifiable in clip art. To suggest we are not a profession implies we are unprofessional. That makes me angry because I work with unquestionably professional people. Our days are spent building relationships, translating between professional backgrounds, navigating organisational cultures, and referencing broad bodies of research and learning. We are ‘specialist generalists’. Inspired by a list of 250 things an architect should know from a recent 99 Percent Invisible podcast, I’ve had a stab at 81 things (in no order of priority) that I think an emergency manager should to know:

1. The capacity of wetlands to attenuate flood waters.
2. How to guard a house from floods.
3. How to correctly describe wind directions.
4. The difference between radius and diameter.
5. Henry Quarantelli.
6. How to use the photocopier.
7. Germ theory.
8. How to give directions.
9. Why Chernobyl was like that.
10. And why Hurricane Katrina was like that.
11. And why 9/11 was like that.
12. And why Grenfell was like that.
13. The NATO phonetic alphabet.
14. A bit about genealogy and taxonomy.
15. Wren’s rebuilding after the Great Fire of London.
16. The history of the fire brigade.
17. The history of the police service.
18. Where to get good late night food near where you work.
19. What makes you happy.
20. Recognising burnout in yourself and others.
21. Geography.
22. Some geology.
23. A bit of chemistry and physics.
24. Capability Brown.
25. Burial practices in a wide range of cultures.
26. Serious doesn’t have to equal boring.
27. What to refuse to do, even for the money.
28. Three good lunch spots within walking distance.
29. The proper proportions of your favourite cocktail.
30. How to listen.
31. How to behave with junior members of staff.
32. How to manage upwards.
33. Seismic magnitude scales.
34. Wind speed scales.
35. Air quality indicators.
36. A bit about imperialism.
37. The wages of construction workers and nurses.
38. How to get lost.
39. How to (politely) tell somebody to get lost.
40. The meaninglessness of borders.
41. Normal accident theory.
42. How maps lie.
43. A bit about IT disaster recovery.
44. What went wrong with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
45. John Hersey’s Hiroshima article.
46. Tuckman’s stages of team development. 
47. What your boss thinks they wants.
48. What your boss actually wants.
49. What your boss needs.
50. The airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.
51. The rate at which the seas are rising.
52. How children experience disaster.
53. How disability affects disaster experience.
54. Why women and girls experience disaster differently.
55. How to quickly synthesise and draw meaning from multiple sources.
56. How to corroborate information.
57. Who you can turn to for help.
58. How to respect what has come before.
59. How to give a METHANE message.
60. Kubler-Ross stage of grief model.
61. The difference between complicated and complex.
62. How to create an Ishikawa diagram.
63. A bit about crowd dynamics.
64. Which respected disaster researchers resonate with you and why.
65. How to think critically about the status quo.
66. How to perform CPR.
67. Advanced google search techniques.
68. Local emergency management and adjacent legislation.
69. The seven principles of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement.
70. The difference between the Hyogo and Sendai Frameworks.
71. The link between John Snow and modern epidemiology.
72. Lord Justice Clarke’s four principles for disaster victim identification.
73. How failures of imagination have had consequences.
74. How to foster reciprocity.
75. How to challenge disaster myths and Hollywood disaster tropes.
76. Gestalt theory.
77. Kahneman’s decision making heuristics.
78. Swiss cheese model of safety.
79. ‘No ELBOW’ contemporaneous record keeping.
80. How to use conditional formatting in Excel.
81. Murphy’s Law.

Undoubtedly this list is incomplete. It’s what I came up with over an hour or so and fueled by a considerable amount of rage. Maybe I’ll come back to later. If you’ve got thoughts on what else should be on the list send suggestions on Twitter @mtthwhgn.