Browsed by
Tag: Emergency Management

Decoding the Professional Language of Emergency Management

Decoding the Professional Language of Emergency Management

Reading Time: 5 minutes

 

A week ago my team organised an event which walked participants through an extreme heat scenario. It had taken around 6 months of planning and become known to us as Exercise Helios.

At the very start of the process a new colleague with little previous experience of the UK emergency management structures asked a very sensible question…

“why do we give scenario events like this names?”

I had to admit that I wasn’t really sure. I suspect that it has to do with the origins of the profession having military and uniformed service roots, but I can’t say with certainty that there aren’t other reasons.

Despite their initial opposition to a name, over time my colleague started to called it ‘Exercise Helios’. In the final weeks before the event, I started to notice senior staff in the organisation enquiring about ‘Operation Helios’, a term which was reflected in the media coverage. Those two aspects got me thinking about the theme for this post – the terms that we use, how we use them, and how other people might interpret that – the role of professional language. In reflecting on the language of emergency management I also wonder whether language might actually be the purest essence of resilience?

Side note: please can somebody commission a semantic review of the civil protection lexcion?!

What’s in a name?

As in other fields, the landscape of emergency management is a thicket of technical terminology. We’re as guilty as the next field in developing our own professional language and applying it inconsistently.

The world of emergency management is full of terminology that serves that purpose. In a UK context for instance, there are various terms which refer to a multi agency meeting; it could be a Strategic Coordinating Group, a Recovery Coordinating Group, a Mass Fatality Coordination Group or many other things. In this case, the use of jargon which might not be explicitly understood outside a fairly narrow profession is helpful. It clearly expresses what is being referred to and avoids the misunderstanding of a more vague description.

In those cases, training is really important because it socialises and reinforces the meaning that those terms have, and ensures a shared approach and understanding. Many years ago I completed a MIMMS course and over the course of 3 days had used and explained ‘METHANE‘ so many times that it was almost unconscious.

Clear and effective communication is the cornerstone of a successful emergency response. In a 2013 review of persistent lessons identified from emergencies, Dr Kevin Pollock found that of 32 events reviewed, ineffective communications was a key contributing factor in the common causes of failure.

Precision is important and the ability to convey critical information clearly and concisely to multiple stakeholders is paramount. Yet the ever increasing labyrinth of jargon, acronyms and terminology can bamboozle, and that’s before considering other types of communication.

A colleague recently shared an article about a recent military exercise, which is liberal in it’s use of abbreviations. I’m not suggesting that everything has to be written for a general public audience, nor that you can’t make some assumptions about what your audience knows. But one sentence in the article reads ‘As SMEs in CQB, K Coy was invited to act as the assaulting force for the serials’ which requires a reasonably high level of domain knowledge to parse.

Ever evolving language of Emergency Management

Where both parties understand each other, professional language serves as a shortcut, but what about where there isn’t an agreed understanding of a term?

Who is a victim? Where is a community? Who are stakeholders? What does it mean to have recovered? These are hotly debated matters with many intersecting interpretations. How we understand language varies based on geography, the cultural norms and our own experiences.

General understanding of the term ‘casualty’ might be a person who has sustained an injury. But in the maritime sector a vessel in distress can also be known as a casualty. Knowing that is really important to avoid searching for a missing person who is actually a boat!

Things become more challenging for new entrants to the field, or where we are trying to work with other sectors who don’t have the same shared language. It can be alienating in both directions to listen to people saying things you don’t understand.

There is a possibility that the use of jargon, unexplained acronyms and convoluted speech is some kind of power play. I don’t think most people intentionally set out to make things hard to understand, but we have to be aware of the possibility of power dynamics.

I wrote recently that ‘emergency planning is dead‘. Perhaps one of the reasons that we need to think differently about emergency management is that how we speak about emergency management has got us to this point. To engage wider we need to adjust the language we use to make it more inclusive, accessible and relatable. It’s partly why I’m not a huge fan of grab bag initiatives, the language of which seems tone deaf to the pressures many people face on a daily basis.

We should also check and confirm understanding. I’ve been on internal courses which espouse the importance of active listening. The trainer will tell you that ‘nodding indicates that you are engaged and attentive’. But to the person doing the communicating, that nod signals agreement or comprehension to the speaker. I remember one occasion in a meeting with an eloquent Government colleague who kept referring to people as ‘recalcitrant’. I nodded along in absolute agreement but googling the definition on my phone under the table! (Recalcitrant: having an obstinately uncooperative attitude towards authority, which incidentally has turned out to be one of my favourite words!).

The best advice that I have been given relating to this this came from a member of a community group. They challenged me after a meeting and said “just be real”. It’s feedback which I took to heart and have tried to reflect on since, making my own communication style more accessible and trying to cut through some of the opacity that language can create.

Language: the purest form of resilience

Language provides access to information, employment, and education. Language builds cohesion and increases access to social and economic resources. Language helps individuals and communities understand and help each other. And language helps us tell stories and share experiences.

Those are all aspects of ‘resilience’ and in the course of writing this I feel like I’ve inadvertently stumbled upon something I hadn’t realised before; that language might be the purest form of resilience.

Your favourite jargon?

I invite you to share your favourite emergency management term? A phrase that in any other context would be hard to understand correctly, or perhaps just one that entertains you.

In itself, the professional language of emergency management isn’t good or bad. It has it’s uses and limitations. We shouldn’t remove jargon, but we should think just as critically about how we communicate as what we communicate.

 

The image at the top of this post is taken from ‘Words Are All We Have’ by Jean-Michel Basquiat, who’s works often referenced the resilience and defiance of individuals.

81 more things emergency managers should know

81 more things emergency managers should know

Reading Time: 5 minutes

 

The debate about professionalisation of emergency management continues , including this through-provoking blog by Jeff Donaldson.

I recently described emergency management as a ‘proto-profession’; it entertains ambitions of professionalisation and expends (a lot) of energy in the development of professional standards and there are bodies which govern entry to the club. However, a significant proportion of the debate feel that without an agreed corpus of knowledge it can’t truly be a profession and that there should be greater role for the bodies in determining entry (whilst not wanting to risk being excluded themselves).

The argument typically follows that medicine and law have self-regulated education, training, and standards, underpinned by collective knowledge and ethical principles. My perspective is that there whilst there needs to be agreement on some core knowledge, both medicine and law which are held as shining beacons are professions which seek to change and learn. Their knowledge isn’t fixed and has evolved considerably over time (I’m looking at you trepanning the skull!).

In my view it’s better to do something and make some progress than it is to debate over the finer detail at the detriment to the field and it’s people. We are entering a new dawn for emergency management and should be approaching it head-on.

So what is the body of knowledge for emergency management?

Several years ago (in a rage-fuelled post) I attempted to set out my thoughts on what I would include.

The original list of 81 things and emergency manager should know was all mine. I knew then that it was incomplete. The beauty of emergency management is that everybody brings something to the table (as I said similarly in this recent post for National Careers Week).

Therefore I’ve revisited and supplemented the original list with the wonderful and brilliant suggestions of friends and colleagues, some of whom I know well, and others I’ve yet to met but who felt compelled enough to add their thoughts to the list as it has been shared online.

  1. The key languages spoken in your relevant communities (and ideally a greeting and thank you in each).
  2. How to use Resilience Direct/other platforms to share documents and maps.
  3. How to provide and take information in a clear structure way (eg. METHANE or IMARCH).
  4. How to say no politely (at first) to things that aren’t your remit.
  5. A sense of humour.
  6. The best snacks to keep you going at 2am.
  7. How to ‘lower your hand’ on teams/zoom etc (see also: how to use mute/unmute).
  8. The key roles and ranks indicated in emergency service and military uniforms (tabards, rank markings, what that gold string means etc).
  9. Key acronyms, when to use them and when to avoid them.
  10. That senior management likely won’t be interested until the wheels are starting to fall off.
  11. How to think outside the box and capture the rationale for doing so.
  12. Who you can call when you don’t know who else to call. And what number to call them on.
  13. Know your local significant infrastructure and the risks presented by its failure.
  14. Limits of any delegated decision authority.
  15. Understand the direction of the wind (both literally and figuratively).
  16. Water (and blame) flows downhill.
  17. The sticky bun that nobody else has eaten will come back to haunt you 2 hours later.
  18. You are not an island.
  19. Requirements of the COMAH and Pipeline Safety Regulations.
  20. Turner’s Disaster Incubation Theory.
  21. Who the FEMA Administrator is.
  22. How to make use of ‘screenshot’ to share information without having to wait for it to be circulated by the originator (and when not to do this too).
  23. How to turn a document in to a PDF, and how to reverse it if needed.
  24. ‘You can’t fix stupid’.
  25. Something (anything!) about bioterrorism.
  26. The importance of infant feeding in emergencies.
  27. The difference between personal safety and process safety.
  28. The most dangerous place is between the fire service and the catering van.
  29. A brief history of civil protection and the formative events in it’s evolution.
  30. How to recognise signs of trauma (and vicarious trauma) in yourself and others.
  31. At least 4 different routes to your place of work, using different means of transport.
  32. That COBR doesn’t have an A.
  33. Key response operation names and what they mean.
  34. 1917-1920 flu epidemic.
  35. Basics of crowd psychology.
  36. A rough idea of what different 999 service specialists/vehicles do.
  37. A rough idea of what happens behind the scenes when you call 999.
  38. Where to find the keys.
  39. Read old Inquiry/Inquest/prevention of future death reports like they’re your favourite genre.
  40. How to spot and counter a microaggression.
  41. Respect the news images, they have different access to information to you.
  42. The importance of searching out lived experiences.
  43. Vital importance of effective communication.
  44. Something about structural stability and the technical terms for standard building components.
  45. Something about asbestos.
  46. Know what you don’t know.
  47. Know that there is no accounting for politicians.
  48. Remember that saying it once is usually not enough, repeating it frequently helps.
  49. Know the history of your profession in your country (and elsewhere).
  50. Find ways to cope (or thrive) in the messiness of trans-disciplinary working.
  51. Take time to reflect, and understand your own ethics and the ethics of the organisation(s) you work with.
  52. How to be open to challenge and constructive criticism.
  53. How to defend yourself against criticism which is just mean.
  54. Decision makers won’t always follow your advice – figure out how you deal with that.
  55. There is always something you won’t know so you should always be looking to learn.
  56. What spolia is.
  57. A bit about the insurance industry.
  58. How to forward your phone.
  59. How to block your number from coming up if you have a suspicion somebody is screening your calls.
  60. A little about the ‘chain of custody’ and steps to preserve evidence if required.
  61. How to communicate when normal methods fail.
  62. Grounding techniques that work for you.
  63. Tips to keep your typing speed at a minimum of 60 words per minute.
  64. An understanding of the difference between prudent business continuity and panic buying.
  65. The maturity of language to talk about crowd incidents whilst being aware of the myth of panic.
  66. What the Sphere standards are.
  67. Signs of organisational trauma.
  68. Lencioni’s 5 disfunctions of a team.
  69. The difference between important and urgent.
  70. A little about disaster capitalism.
  71. There isn’t always a single right answer, but there can be many wrong answers.
  72. Why it’s important to read the detail of the forecast, not just reach to the ‘colour’ of the warning.
  73. The difference between a lesson identified and a lesson learnt. 
  74. How to describe what your job is succinctly at social engagements.
  75. What happened in the Carrington Event and why it’d be different now.
  76. How El Nino and La Nina have global effects.
  77. The pros and cons of lean processes and efficiency.
  78. Know when a situation needs simplicity and when it needs detail. 
  79. Enough about your stakeholders to be able to manage the politics of seating plans
  80. How to connect the projector/printer/label making machine to your computer.
  81. Parkinson’s Law of public administration.

 

I expect this list could continue to grow, and will be refined as people make a case for what is in/out of the corpus. I wholeheartedly encourage that – help us define what an emergency manager needs to know.

Careers Week 2023: Emergency Management

Careers Week 2023: Emergency Management

Reading Time: 5 minutes

 

I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts for anyone who might be interested in a career in emergency management, during National Careers Week, taking place between 6-10 March.

How did I find emergency management?

When I was little I wanted to design rollercoasters.

There wasn’t much call for that in the UK, so my school work experience aged 14 was in a car factory! I realised there would be a huge requirement for engineering knowledge and recognised that my mathematics skills probably weren’t up to scratch, so it was back to the drawing board.

With wall-to-wall media coverage of the Millennium Bug, I spent a lot of time hearing about the apocalyptic events that would happen on 1 January 2000. I became interested in how to prepare and respond to those kinds of major disasters. I didn’t know it was a career option but knew it was an area of work that I wanted to be involved in. The terrorist attacks in America in 2001 were a significant and formative event for many in my generation of emergency management.

I suspect that there is a whole swathe of people, who, having lived through COVID are also considering how they might get involved to reduce the impact that these events can have on our lives.

Image of a person wearing a tabard which reads 'Emergency Manager'Emergency management has become more popular but remains a niche profession which doesn’t have much airtime. I hope this post gives a bit of a flavour of what emergency management is like as a job, as well as my tips on breaking into the field.

What do you enjoy about your job?

We generally like order and control. Disasters and emergencies are messy. Disasters are terrible events that affect many people in unimaginable ways. However, I have seen so many examples of the best in people and communities when they are going through the worst times.

I view my role through a lens of supporting and facilitating that natural human response to look after each other. A large part of being an emergency manager is about bringing some coordination to a chaotic situation. There is a lot of satisfaction which comes from being involved in making sense and supporting the management of a chaotic situation.

What is an emergency manager?

The good people at Prospects have a page on emergency management, which sets out that “you’ll play a role in protecting and maintaining public safety” by anticipating and planning for major incidents “in local or central government, or in a public body”.

But it is so much more than that!

During the pandemic, I wrote a list of 81 things an Emergency Manager needs to know. The breadth of things included on that list gives a flavour of the many different directions that emergency management can take you in, and in which you can come into emergency management.

Emergency management is risk management. It is health and safety. It is security. It is communication. It is about data. It is logistics. It is policy development. It is training. Depending on which sector you work in the balance between those things will be different, but fundamentally, emergency management is about people.

For a long time emergency management was the domain of retired military and firefighters. That experience still has incredible value, but there are more diverse pathways into the field than there used to be, which is brilliant, because with new people come new ideas and a more effective and inclusive response.

What does a typical day look like?

Gosh, that’s a tough one. The thing about emergencies is that they are inherently unpredictable (although some are more predictable than others). There tends to be a fair amount of variability day to day depending on what might be happening or risks that are the current concern.

A typical day also looks different depending on what organisation you work for. However, generally speaking, a typical day will involve lots of teamwork and communicating with different people both within your organisation and beyond. In my experience, there are a lot of meetings, but also frequent external site visits and equipment checks too. Obviously, there are incident response days too. Whatever plan you might have had for the day goes totally out of the window and it’s all about doing your bit to support the people impacted, and then the ongoing recovery and learning processes.

Where to seek out more advice?

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking there is just one route to your chosen career. Or that there is a factory which spits out carbon copies of emergency managers.

The beauty of emergency management is that it touches the edges of so many other functions. This is also it’s Achilles heel – it is hard to define and codify. Where possible, try to use that to your advantage. Everyone has something valuable they can bring to emergency management, what are you bringing?

If you’re interested in working in emergency management then here are my top 5 tips on steps I would take with hindsight:

  1. Talk to people working in the field. Be prepared that many people simply won’t respond to your emails or prospective emails. But somebody will somewhere. Find emergency managers on social media (there’s a small community of us on Twitter, but probably hold off on sending lots of LinkedIn requests until you’ve met people in person). Volunteer to attend scenario training events to meet potential new colleagues. Join a professional body, like the Emergency Planning Society, as an associate or student member and attend their events (which is a bit easier now with more online events).
  2. Take advantage of work experience placements and any training. Don’t worry too much about it being in a directly relevant field. You’re not going to become an emergency manager in your two-week placement, but you can start to learn about yourself, about workplaces and about what you are looking for. Whilst there may be restrictions based on age or location, try to take advantage of the free training by bodies such as Skills for Life. Simple things like having a first aid qualification, awareness of information handling principles or data analysis skills can set you apart from others.
  3. Research what potential future employers are looking for. Think about how you can demonstrate that you are a good candidate. Entry-level emergency management roles will generally be looking for people with great organisational skills, the capability to prioritise work, project management skills and effective communication. What examples can you use to so you can do that? What things could you do to build even more skills in those areas?
  4. Talk to a careers advisor. Whether you’re still at school or college, progressing through university, unemployed or looking for a change in career direction at a later stage, careers advisors can offer support and signpost to opportunities. They probably won’t know the ins-and-outs of emergency management, but can help you make high-quality applications and help you to identify skills you may be less aware of.
  5. Learn and reflect. Employers will want to see that you have some understanding of the field, but you don’t need to memorise Wikipedia articles, you won’t be tested on that. You might choose to read about things, or watch documentaries on Netflix, or listen to podcasts. Keep an eye out for the lessons from notable disasters and what the current risks might be and why. This can be referred to as ‘seeing the bigger picture’ and it’s a skill given how broad emergency management can be.

A bonus tip – follow the National Careers Service on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram.

Good luck!

Book Review: The Premonition by Michael Lewis

Book Review: The Premonition by Michael Lewis

Reading Time: 5 minutes

 

This is the first book review I’ve written since being in secondary school, which…well, was a while ago, so go easy on me. I was inspired by a tweet a few weeks ago…

There has been some chatter both online and offline recently about the ‘visibility of emergency management’. Professor David Alexander’s article last summer asked “where are the emergency planners?“. The Emergency Management Growth Initiative has been seeking to bring greater awareness. And there have been recent challenges to the narrative that ‘plans didn’t exist’ for the UK response to the COVID pandemic. 

Generally, there’s a view from within, that that emergency management needs to be more mainstream, especially in the minds of political leaders. 

Over the last 9 years I’ve also tried to use this blog as a way to bring greater visibility to emergency management issues; most directly in an early post about breaking out of the bunker, which is simultaneously the natural habitat of the Emergency Manager but can also be what holds us back as a profession.

It was with great excitement that I ordered Michael Lewis’ book The Premonition, about a group of like-minded (and like-frustrated!) individuals who know that something serious needs to be done about pandemic planning. The book tells how a small group initiated and then performed repeated course corrections to US pandemic planning in the face of indifferent, layered, and fragmented bureaucracies. Speaking about the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009 one of the cast notes “there was no one driving the bus” and that despite pockets of good work across the country, the formal bodies people looked to for leadership (the Centre for Disease Control gets an especially scathing review) were deeply dysfunctional.

The book repeatedly asks the question “What happens when the people in charge of managing the risks have no interest in them?”. Pretty much every time it circles back to passionate people fighting to be heard and finally breaking through (often to be un- or under-appreciated).

Like Love Actually, there are several intertwined stories at play. Initially, each of the main characters (they’re actually real people) are doing their own wonderful things in splendid isolation, solving local problems using local means. But characters are brought together through chance meetings, introductions or happenstance, and realise their collective power.

One observation is that for a Public Health Officer in the States, there is no defined career path. I’ve heard similar representations about Emergency Management. This is thought to represent a problem because it means such a diversity of approaches and backgrounds and therefore a lack of a common approach. However, I would argue that this allows multiple perspectives to be more easily readily and more organically, but agree that some standardisation could be beneficial.

Like in an emergency, rapid response is vital to control and reduce the impact of disease outbreaks. The response to outbreaks and emergencies often needs to be instinctive, Kahneman’s ‘System 1’ rather than the more considered ‘System 2’. As one of the protagonists remarks about a Hepatitis C outbreak “if we had waited for enough evidence to be published in journals then we would have already lost,” and similarly, later in the book talking about wildfire response, someone remarks “you cannot wait for the smoke to clear – once you can see things clearly it’s already too late.”

Active vs passive choice seems to be another recurring theme throughout The Premonition, reminiscent of the Trolley Problem:

In particular, there is a chapter that considers a response to potential health issues following a Californian mudslide and one of the stars of the book is described as “She processes information quickly and spits out a decision fast, that makes people nervous. You don’t find people like that in government.”

Considering the profession, or at least the decision-makers background, there is an observation that the Homeland Security Council was “staffed by military types who spent their days considering attacks from hostile foreigners, not the flu” and that this had the effect of cognitive narrowing, choosing to not see the things which were unfamiliar. 

One of the characters talks about how they wanted to try to get the President, then George W Bush, to pay attention to the widespread impact that a serious pandemic could have across all society, not just healthcare. I was particularly amused that rather than formal submissions and briefings, actually what got the President interested was providing him with an annotated history book.

An intensivist doctor talking about touch clinical decisions remarks that “I felt like my best when shit hits the fan. I focus like a laser when everything is going to shit” and someone else mentions “You are going to make mistakes. The sin is making the same mistake twice and best is to learn from other people’s mistakes.”

The Premonition isn’t a popular science review of pandemic interventions and response strategies. Although, if there is a Hollywood adaptation (like Lewis’ Moneyball) then there would be parts for Selena Gomez to reprise her role in explaining dense public health theories and concepts. There’s an extended section which compares 1918 influenza pandemic interventions in Philadelphia and St Louis and supporting evidence which indicates “cities that intervened immediately experienced less disease and death” and further that cities which “caved to pressure from businesses to relax social distancing then experienced a more severe second wave.” 

Lewis also presents research that concludes that you “couldn’t design a better system for transmitting disease than the school system,” which got me thinking about perceptions, and why there is a persistent view that closing schools is a bad idea? Surely it’s only a bad idea if it is done badly?

The book notes how we are notoriously bad at understanding statistics and complex dynamics. Exponential growth is hard for us to visualise beyond the first few steps. Lewis provides an example of folding a piece of paper 50 times being able to reach a distance of 70 million miles. It just doesn’t seem right.

What comes through most clearly is that more often than not this doesn’t come down to expertise or evidence. Success often is the result of people who work around the system. Individuals with passion projects that compensate for the failings and deficiencies of their organisations.

My own passion project has been to try and better surface and understand interdependencies between different systems. It’s easy to become a specialist in your own field, but to see how that connects and relates to other areas is less common. My Anytown project started off as a way to try and convey the ‘whole society’ impact of various scenarios. The Premonition covers some of this in a short section that identifies the pressures on the production of nasal swabs which are only manufactured in three locations worldwide and are in extreme demand during a pandemic.

However, Lewis also makes the observation that decisions can no longer be made purely on the basis of technical evidence and draws the book to a conclusion noting that “greater attention needs to be paid to how decisions might appear to a cynical public.”

There are some wild claims throughout, such as “The US invented pandemic planning in 2005”, which I’m not sure would stand up to much scrutiny. And I’m sure that trying to tell a history of COVID whilst we are all still living through COVID means there is more to be uncovered. But overall, The Premonition is an easy to read yet insightful book which casts light on, more often than not, the failings of government-level risk management and the commitment and passion of public health and emergency management professionals, noting that some are “so committed it’s more of a mission than a job.” 

 

Next on my reading list: Catastrophe and Systemic Change by Gill Kernick

81 things an emergency manager should know

81 things an emergency manager should know

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.
COVID-19: an experiment in peer support

COVID-19: an experiment in peer support

Reading Time: 2 minutesJust what the world needs, another blog about COVID-19, except it’s not!

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT 

There are, by my very rough calculations, something like 7000 Emergency Managers in the UK. Or at least, there were until earlier this week.

Now I think it’s probably something like 40 million!

Supermarket shelves might be empty, but communities are overflowing with people who want to look out for each other. It’s really quite wonderful to see.

But those 7000 people are still there.

They’re working long days (and nights).

They’re supporting people who routinely respond to challenging situations (and people who have never done this before).

They’re being asked for lots of information and answers (and they are not being told lots of information or having their questions answered).

In addition to that, they are people. If we openly admit it or not, these are worrying times. We’ve got families and homes and lives; thinking about the potential impacts of COVID-19 now, and in the future, makes us anxious too.

All of our employing organisations offer support. Support is available through friends and family. Support is available through professional societies. But I get the sense that something else is required.

This week a community of Emergency Managers on Twitter™ have been sharing of official messages, but we’ve also been reacting on a personal basis too. I’ve seen lots of good humour, and mutual support. I’ve seen (and issued my own) cries for help. That culminated yesterday in a discussion about finding a way to ‘get together’ and chat.

So, as an experiment, a few of us have grasped the last roll of toilet paper by the horns (look, it’s a crisis, leave my mixed metaphors alone) and decided to experiment with having virtual work drinks. Like everyone else, we’re going to use Zoom, as it’s free and seems user friendly. Many of us haven’t used it before so I’m fully expecting a bit of a bumpy ride.

My suggested a format is ‘the best thing that has happened this week and the thing you’re most concerned about’. It’s not about sharing best practise (though that is important), it’s not about bitching (that is important too). It’s about talking through a highly unusual situation with like-minded colleagues, and an ability to decompress after what has been a very long week.

Will it work? That depends on how you measure success. My prediction is that we’ll realise it’s a great idea but needs some work! I’ll report back!

Times like these can be hard. Talk to someone and wash your hands.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Coronavirus Freestyle 🦠🙅🏾‍♀️🦠 #QuarantineSpeech #WashYourHands 😂

A post shared by Lady Leshurr (@imladyleshurr) on

 

COBRA: a multi-part blog-along

COBRA: a multi-part blog-along

Reading Time: 2 minutesMy career in emergency management started 15 years ago this year.

The London bombings had happened the previous year and one of (many) themes in the profession at the time was about ‘citizen journalism‘. People, actual real-life 3-dimensional members of the public, had taken pictures on their Nokia 3210’s and sent them to the BBC newsroom. It was a paradigm shift in how the media could report breaking news.

Flash forward to yesterday evening. Trains up the spout. I felt myself stressing about not being able to join a live tweet-along to a new series on Sky, COBRA. How times change, eh?!

Described as a “must-see thriller set at the heart of government during a major national crisis” this show is entirely up my street.

A selection of my incredible colleagues gave a great running commentary on Twitter.

So I was thinking about how I could take a different approach. So…strap in for a multi-part series of long-form blogs of each episode.

Like the rest of my work-related blogs, my aims are partly to demystify what the emergency management profession can sometimes over complicate, and to summarise how fiction compares to reality.

I want to hear your thoughts too! Agree/disagree with my ramblings? Let me know! @mtthwhgn.

And here’s a picture of me sat at the COBRA table…honest! 🤫

Now you’ve read the intro, get stuck into my thoughts, episode by glorious episode

Oh, and just a reminder for those at the back: let’s all remember that it’s an entertainment show, we expect (and encourage) a degree of artistic licence!

Some thoughts on professional societies

Some thoughts on professional societies

Reading Time: 3 minutesGetting into any career is tricky. Employers are looking for the perfect combination of both knowledge and experience. Fresh out of University you have to try extra hard to demonstrate that you can actually do the job, not just talk about it.

That was the position I found myself in almost 13 years ago. I spent countless days completing applications; labouring the point that “yes, I might have only ever worked in a shop, but you can definitely trust me not to screw this up”.

One way I could show employers that they could put their faith in me was to join a professional association. These bodies are designed to represent the interests of those in the field, so if I was a member it would enhance my legitimacy. Not one to do things by halves, I joined no less than 4 professional associations.

I did my research beforehand, of course.

Some of these organisations had a specific focus, others were more general. Some had active online communities, others were more traditional.

As a fledgeling emergency manager, I thought it was a good idea to try and learn from as much of this as possible. That way I could tell employers I not just only understood the job, but I also understood the profession and the direction it was travelling.

I’m no longer a member of any of those organisations that I joined.

Professional societies, at least those that I joined, had failed to move with the times. The challenges facing the profession now are not the same as those before critical UK legislation was introduced. The risk environment has changed, and the profession seems to be struggling to keep up.

Although, I think there were more fundamental issues holding those societies back

  1. Ego – None of these societies are sufficiently large in membership that they require the level of process that most of them have. Beacurcracy tends to override what could be helpful information exchange platforms.
  2. Identity crisis – There’s a shift towards a more holistic concept of resilience which is not reflected in the scope of the professional bodies. Emergency Planning, that’s too focused on ‘plans’. Civil Defence – that’s an outdated term from the 50’s. Business Continuity – that’s too defined by formal standards.
  3. Lack of value to members – having been associated with a range of bodies for at least the last 8 years I cannot honestly say that it has been worth the investment either financially or in terms of benefits gained.
  4. Unrepresentative leadership – those employed in emergency management when I first started my career often had military or security backgrounds. At the practitioner level that is changing, and new perspectives are being introduced, but the makeup of the decision makers in many of the professional organisations has not kept pace with the changing demographics of the field.

I don’t like to just sit on the fringes and criticise. If I see an issue I want to try and resolve it. For one of the bodies, I worked with similarly enthusiastic colleagues to solve some of these problems. However, after 18 months of trying different things and volunteering my own time, the same issues remained.

That organisation in particular alienated its members through sporadic, ill-conceived communication and disrespected its own volunteers. For a body designed to support members, it showed an extreme lack of empathy.

Contrast that with the sense of camaraderie and community I’ve seen online from my SMEMchat colleagues. This eclipses anything I have seen in over 10 years of being a member of a society.

There are, of course, many ways of doing things; I’m not simply suggesting that everything should move online. But if professionals are going to continue to support each other (and I really hope they do) then it might be time for a more radical rethink of how this is best achieved.

I feel no sense of loyalty to bodies which didn’t demonstrate any to me. However, I do feel a sense of loyalty to my colleagues, whether I work directly with them, or our paths haven’t crossed yet.

Everything that we do as a profession is a team effort. There are many ways that we can collaborate without the stuffiness of societies.

Video: The Emergency Manager

Video: The Emergency Manager

Reading Time: < 1 minutePeople often introduce me to others and say that I have a really interesting job. I’m not going to lie, I really do, and I’m passionate about it, but I’m not sure that people really know what a career in emergency management entails. Sometimes, I wonder myself!

Today I found this gem of a video via Eric at Emergency Management – in less than 5 minutes it does a really good job of summarising one part of my role – to respond to emergencies.

It’s great to see such a simple and engaging overview, although there are some differences, but I expect these are a product of different US concepts and terminology rather. Although, I’m not sure that the information on Improvised Nuclear Devices is absolutely correct.

But what the video doesn’t comment on, and indeed makes a less exciting cartoon, is the hours of work that go in to assessing and then managing the risk of emergencies, with activities that might include:

  • the procurement of specialist equipment
  • development of agreed response procedures between all organisations
  • design, organisation and facilitation of training and validation
  • providing communities and businesses with information or
  • ensuring that following any incident, we emerge from it better prepared for the next one.

It’s certainly not just about sitting around and waiting until emergencies happen!

Any budding animators fancy building on this cartoon to show the true life in the day of an emergency manager/yours truly? Get in touch!

 

Avid readers may recognise this as a repost…technical problems meant that the original was unavoidably deleted!

 

Mix’n’match Emergency Management

Mix’n’match Emergency Management

Reading Time: 2 minutesIn 2007 I did some work on Hospital Evacuation, which is a throughly complex problem. I won’t go into the detail here, suffice to say that it brings some real ethical issues and logistical challenges. I mention this, because way back in 2007 someone that I spoke to described their Hospital Evacuation Plan as “planned improvisation”.

mixnmatchI remember recoiling at this. Here I was trying to document every last detail of how wards should work together with central hospital functions to expedite a swift evacuation, yet over here was someone essentially saying “we make it up on the day”.

Today I was having an unrelated conversation with a colleague about Command and Control (for non experts, that’s the systems and structures by which an emergency is managed). We were talking about the need to planned arrangements to have sufficient felxibility as to be applicable to a variety of circumstances. Without the ability to accurately predict the future this felxibility is vitally important.

However, you also need to balance that flexibility, with having coherence and structure, to try to bring the emergency under control as quickly as possible. I was reminded of one of those mix’n’match childrens books.

I wonder if there might be something in this approach for emergency management? Could you have a variety of planned components which all fit togther ininfinite complementary combinations?

I’m a big fan of recognising the emergent behaviour of systems and communities when under stress, but do I bring that do the formal responder organisatiopns I work with? Probably not as much as I could. There is definately a degree of creativity involved in sucessful emergency response – how can we create an environment which nurtures this without abandoning the important act of planning?

I’m going to give this some more thought over the weekend and come back with some more well rounded thoughts and suggestions – until then, I’m off to read an article about Collaborative Adhocracies….fun!

Image source: Edward Gorey via goreyana.blogspot.co.uk