Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - November 2023

Download Emergency Management Solutions

Featured Articles

Looking Backwards to See Forward

    by Lucien Canton

Applying What We've Learned

    by Timothy Riecker

Crisis Communication Examples – The Good and the…Not So Good

    by Erik Bernstein

 

Looking Backwards to See Forward

Many years ago, I attended an employee training session in which I was introduced to the concept that people could be roughly divided into four different communications styles or value orientations. While I believe that people are too complex and individualistic to be conveniently placed in distinct boxes, over the years I have found this concept a useful tool in interacting with others and one that has some important lessons for emergency managers.

In his 1980 book Training for the Cross-Cultural Mind: A Handbook for Cross-Cultural Trainers and Consultants, Professor Pierre Casse identified the four communications styles as:

1. Action – oriented towards objectives, results, and accomplishments
2. Process - oriented towards facts, procedures, and planning
3. People – oriented towards social processes, communication, and teamwork
4. Idea – oriented towards concepts, theories, and innovations

Casse’s key point is that a person’s style has a tremendous impact on how they communicate. This suggests that identifying a person's communications style and adapting to it can lead to more persuasive communication. For example, opening a conversation with a deep dive into facts and figures might appeal to a process-oriented person but might be an immediate turn off to a people-oriented person. Similarly, the type of small-talk introduction that makes a people-oriented person comfortable would make an action-oriented person impatient.

As useful as this concept is, however, what really struck me about the speaker’s presentation was her thoughts on idea-oriented people. Idea-oriented people tend to be interested in the big picture, seeing what things could be rather than what they are. In essence, they live in the future rather than the present. The point that had the most resonance for me was this: living in the future carries the inherent implication that you are dissatisfied with the status quo. This tends to make people who are invested in the status quo uncomfortable and in some cases, hostile. This can be exacerbated by the tendency for some idea-oriented people to be unrealistic and to take on more tasks than they can accomplish.

One of Casse’s fundamental concepts is that the four communications styles can be found in any individual. I believe that the best emergency managers, although we may consider ourselves action-oriented, lean strongly towards idea-orientation. Our work is based on the assessment of risk and risk is a future concept. We anticipate and plan for what may occur, even as we deal with what is occurring. We are never satisfied with the status quo because we know we are nowhere near where we should be. In many ways, we are like Cassandra, the tragic Greek prophetess, doomed to see the future but not able to convince anyone to heed our warnings. This does not tend to make us popular, particularly when we point out problems that have the potential to embarrass senior officials.

I remember once hearing that when on a journey, the indigenous people of the Artic while from time to time turn around and look back at the way they have come. This not so much to see how far they have come but to be able to recognize landmarks for the journey home. I have no idea is this is true or not, but I think the concept is important. I think it is critical for emergency managers to periodically pause and look back. You might see that you have come further than you thought. It may also help you gather strength for the journey that still lies ahead.

Emergency Management Solutions - October 2023

Download Emergency Management Solutions

Featured Articles

Do We Really Assist Everyone?

    by Lucien Canton

Ready for Anything: The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Crisis-Proofing Your Enterprise

    by Tim Riecker

Brand Crisis Management: Protecting Your Reputation

    by Erik Bernstein

Do We Really Assist Everyone?

It is widely held that emergency managers provide services to anyone affected by a crisis. This belief carries with it the expectation that emergency managers will put aside their personal biases and prejudices and provide necessary aid regardless of the status of the victims. However, reality often falls short of this laudable goal and research suggests that our current system is skewed against those most in need. In a time when equity and diversity are receiving increased attention a re-examination of how we provide services is long overdue.

The fault does not actually lie with emergency managers but has its roots in society at large. Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber has coined the phrase "moral blamelessness” to describe the bias that affects the provision of disaster relief. The concept of moral blamelessness suggests that victims must prove themselves worthy of relief before they can receive it. The corollary to this is that there are victims who are not worthy of relief.

The concept of moral blamelessness is evident almost since the beginning of government disaster relief services in the United States. In the early colonial days people who chose to settle on the frontier were considered unworthy of government compensation for damage from attacks by hostile tribes as they had chosen to put themselves at risk. Following the American Civil War, the use of the Freedman’s Bureau to provide famine relief to Southern States was strongly resisted in Congress because it was held that their act of rebellion disqualified them from any government assistance.

The situation has not changed. During the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, there was considerable discussion as to what to do with the large number of undocumented people who were affected by the disaster, particularly in the Watsonville area. Many of these victims were Hispanic migrant agricultural workers. The problem was twofold. Being undocumented, the victims were often unwilling to seek contact with any government agency, fearing deportation. Secondly, there were many in government who felt that people in the United States illegally should not be eligible for assistance. To its credit FEMA opted to provide the needed assistance.

While decisions about undocumented victims is an obvious issue, moral blamelessness can be much more subtle. Research by Dr Junia Howell suggests that disasters do not just reveal wealth inequity but in fact create it and that government relief is skewed against low-income minorities who need it the most. One of the principal causes is the inequity in housing appraisal of similar homes in different neighborhoods. While the root causes of this inequity are historical, the result is that some neighborhoods are considered “less worthy” than others and the lower property value affects the amount of assistance provided to the victims. This creates a situation in which government assistance increases wealth inequity in the area affected by the disaster and fails to provide relief to lower income and minority communities.

In many ways an emergency manager’s hands are tied when addressing this problem of inequity in disaster relief. They seldom make policy but are instead responsible for implementing it. But this is cold comfort when community outrage is focused on us, or lawsuits are brought against our communities. This is no longer a problem that local emergency managers and government officials can ignore but rather one in which we must serve as a catalyst for change. We don’t make policy, but we can influence it if we engage our community’s political infrastructure, mobilize community support, and work through our professional organizations.

Emergency Management Solutions - September 2023

Download EM Solutions

Featured Articles

EM Qualifications: Who Needs a Degree?

    by Lucien Canton

Why Being Prepared for Natural Disasters Is More Important Than Ever

    by Tim Riecker

The Mechanics of Effective Crisis Management: Navigating Challenges with Precision

    by Erik Bernstein

EM Qualifications: Who Needs a Degree?

Want to start an argument among emergency managers? Just raise the question about whether an undergraduate degree should be one of the qualifications for the job and stand back and watch the sparks fly. The discussion usually degenerates into two categories. Those with degrees can’t see why it would be a problem and those without argue that they have had successful careers without ever needing one.

Get over it, people. It’s not about you, it’s about the future of emergency management. Stop thinking about yourself and your career experience and look at how things have changed and continue to change.

Last month I wrote about the problem of deciding what qualifies someone to be an emergency manager by focusing on the recent fires in Hawaii and the resignation of the local emergency manager following questions about his qualifications for his position. My point was that is hard to judge qualifications when you haven’t agreed on specific qualifications and have no way of measuring how well a candidate meets those them.

The problem with defining qualifications is that many current emergency managers take the view that imposing qualifications may affect their current jobs. Many of us came to our positions as a second career and offered considerable experience but limited knowledge of emergency management. We learned on the job and haven’t done too badly, all things considered. But times have changed.

One of the things I have noted over my long career has been the increasing complexity of our responsibilities as emergency managers. We came to our positions with skills that suited us extremely well for response planning and operations. But that skill set didn’t necessarily apply to the intricacies of mitigation and recovery planning that requires working with politicians and community groups with their own agendas rather than with hierarchical organizations like police and fire departments. We weren’t prepared for the new issues we’re now dealing with like diversity, equity in relief operations, and income inequality. We can handle local events, but are we prepared to deal with regional and national level crises such as climate change, political unrest, and immigration? Are we able to move beyond tactical operations to strategic thinking?

 One of the hallmarks of a profession is a specialized body of knowledge. For emergency managers, that is primarily the tremendous body of social science research that we’ve been accumulating since the 1950’s. The competitive advantage this offers is that instead of making assumptions about how people will act in crisis, we have research that indicates how they are most likely to act. Consider the many disaster myths that we encounter such as the assumption that looting will occur in a disaster versus the reality that crime actually decreases. Research also recognizes and highlights changing situations, for example the impact of social media on emergency warning.

If we accept that knowledge of emergency management research is an essential qualification for an emergency manager, then we must also accept that there must be some method for imparting that knowledge. While there is no question that this knowledge can be acquired without a formal education program, how do we determine if a candidate has met minimum requirements? Indeed, how do decide what that minimum requirement is? Do we require a standardized test or specific certifications such as the Certified Emergency Manager designation? A degree from an accredited emergency management program that teaches from a standardized curriculum would certainly simplify this process.

A degree program offers other opportunities besides just imparting knowledge; it can teach skills useful to an emergency manager. People are often surprised when they ask me what skills an emergency manager must master and I respond that they must be able to write effectively, speak persuasively, and facilitate a meeting. These skills are developed during most degree programs where students are expected to do research, write papers based on that research, and present the results in oral presentations. Yes, these skills can be acquired independently from a degree program, but a degree carries the inherent assumption that the student has mastered these skills by virtue of graduating from the program. This is our goal: to have an agreed upon indicator that a candidate has a minimum level of knowledge about the discipline of emergency management.

One argument I’ve encountered as I discuss professionalization is the charge that I’m limiting entry to our field. That’s precisely the point. Currently, one becomes an emergency manager simply by saying you are one. The result is that we have many examples of emergency managers who should never have been hired. The main purpose of any profession is to limit entry to the profession to those that have demonstrated that they meet the minimum requirements necessary for success in that field.

I’m not proposing that current emergency managers need to rush out and get a degree. What I am saying is that we need to establish minimum qualifications that ensure that emergency management candidates have the knowledge and skills to be successful in our discipline and that must include knowledge of emergency management research. This is best accomplished through a structured academic curriculum. This is not forcing current emergency managers to meet new standards; it’s about ensuring that the next generation of emergency managers are equipped for future challenges.

Emergency Management Solutions - August 2023

Download Emergency Management Solutions

Featured Articles

What Qualifies You to Be an Emergency Manager

    by Lucien Canton

The Texas Emergency Management Academy

    by Timothy Riecker

How Crisis Simulations Strengthen Crisis Management

    by Erik Bernstein

What Qualifies You to Be an Emergency Manager?

The recent fires in Maui, Hawaii, have highlighted a major problem with emergency management that we continue to ignore. It raises once again the basic question of what qualifies a person to be an emergency manager.

On the morning of August 8, a combination of high winds and downed power lines resulted in a series of fires on the islands of Maui and Hawaii, with the worst hitting the town of Lāhainā on Maui. Loss of power and the high rate of advance of the fires disrupted communications, making warning and evacuation extremely difficult. Before it was over the fires would claim over 115 lives, with 388 people confirmed missing as of this writing, making the third deadliest fire in US history.
One of the major controversies that have emerged from the disaster is the decision by the Maui emergency management administrator to not activate the island’s emergency warning sirens. His decision was based primarily on concerns that the sirens were used primarily for tsunami warnings and activation would cause people to move to higher ground, directly into the path of the fires. He also noted that sirens were primarily on the coast, and few were in the affected fire areas. His decision is being investigated by the state’s Attorney General and criticism over it contributed to his resignation citing health concerns.

Whether his decision not to activate the sirens was sound is not the issue, however. Instead, the question that has arisen is whether the administrator was qualified to make the decision. Note that the argument is not over his competence but about his qualifications. Prior to accepting the position, the administrator had never received any formal training in emergency management or held a position as an emergency manager. His position prior to appointment had been as the mayor’s chief of staff.
In response to this criticism, the administrator pointed out that he had been present for activations of the emergency operations center in his capacity as chief of staff, taken numerous online courses, and had been selected in a civil service process involving 40 other candidates, a civil service exam, and interviews by a panel of experts including seasoned emergency managers. At the time of the crisis, he had held his position as administrator since 2017.

So, was the Maui emergency management administrator qualified for the job or not?

I think the better question is by what standard are we qualified to judge him, given that we have never defined any qualifications for the position.For years now we have danced around the issue of a competency framework that defines the minimum qualifications for various positions in emergency management. We have developed academic curricula that may or not be adequate for our needs. We have a hodge podge of certifications, some respected, some not, but no single certification that can serve as a minimum qualification for employment. We have not developed entry level positions and career paths to develop future emergency managers. In short, we have not identified anything resembling a generally accepted set of minimum requirements for any emergency management position, let alone attempted to meet those needed to formally define what we do as a profession.

Traditionally, our focus has been on response and, indeed, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook continues to define the position of emergency management director solely in terms of response, ignoring the emphasis on comprehensive emergency management that dates to 1978. The problem is that competency in emergency response does not equate to competency in emergency management.

Emergency management has been growing more and more complex due to changes in our operating environment and evolving doctrine, placing more demands on emergency managers. Our role has shifted from the operational to the strategic, from being technicians to being managers. More and more the demand is for risk assessment and analysis and the anticipation of the unexpected. Our job is to build the framework for community resilience and that means having a working knowledge of the research that constitutes our specialized body of knowledge about how people and institutions react to disaster. It means understanding that response alone is not effective without mitigation, which defines our operational environment, and recovery which defines our desired end state. It means developing the ability to work with non-responders to develop long-term strategies.

The problem is that we are our own worst enemy. For example, although the Occupational Outlook Handbook suggests a typical entry level education requirement of a bachelor's degree for the position of emergency management director, but we have spent years arguing whether a degree should be required for certification. We have seen the emergence over the past fifty plus years of an academic discipline that has contributed immensely to our ability to deal with crisis, yet we continue to resist making an understanding of this specialized body of knowledge a requirement for entry to our field. Indeed, we have no mechanism for restricting someone from identifying themselves as an emergency manager because we have refused to take the steps to formal classify what we do as a profession.

Whether this resistance is the result of the attitude, “I couldn’t meet that requirement, so it’s a bad one,” or because of the need to preserve post-retirement jobs or for some other ill-defined reason is moot. The real issue is that so long as we do not define minimum qualifications for emergency management positions and do what is necessary to define ourselves as a profession that can restrict access to those who do not meet those qualifications, we will continue to see positions filled by people with little or no qualifications for the jobs they hold. And there will be absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Emergency Management Solutions - July 2023

Download Emergency Management Solutions

Featured Articles

Functional Annexes: The Backbone of Your Emergency Plan

    by Lucien Canton

 

Formalizing Emergency Management as a Profession

    by Tim Riecker

 

Aligning Crisis Management Strategies with Objectives

    by Erik Bernstein

Functional Annexes: The Backbone of Your Emergency Plan

In my last two articles I briefly discussed the basic plan and hazard-specific annexes and problems I have encountered in helping to develop emergency plans. Each is important and an essential element of a good emergency operations plan. However, I would argue that they would be ineffective without the support provided by functional annexes.

Why are functional annexes so essential? Where the basic plan contains the overall strategy and concept of operations of how the organization will respond to a crisis, functional annexes describe how that strategy will be implemented. The basic plan describes the “what” while the functional annexes provide the “how”. Where the hazard-specific annexes address agent generated needs, functional annexes form the basis of all-hazards planning by detailing how the organization will deal with the response generated needs common to most disasters.

Unfortunately, functional annexes are often overlooked. It’s been my experience that limited funding for emergency planning is more often applied to “updating” the basic plan than to refining functional annexes. While basic plans should be regularly reviewed and updated as needed, the rarely require substantial changes and an update usually results in some minor changes and reformatting. The money spent on going through the entire planning process and developing a “new and improved” basic plan would, in many cases, be better spent on developing a process to update functional annexes.

Part of the reason for this neglect is that each annex requires a major planning effort with input from multiple agencies and organizations. Since this planning is usually the responsibility of the lead agency, the level of effort and quality of output is dependent on the commitment of that lead agency. Further, functional annexes are dependent on the existence of departmental plans, standard operating procedures (SOP), and field operations guides to implement the tasks specified in the annex, something that also requires commitment on the part of the lead agency.

In preparing a functional annex, try to keep two things in mind. The first is that the annex is not a SOP. It does not provide the user a high level of detail but instead should incorporate by reference existing SOPs and operational guidelines. Consider, for example, a functional annex for something as complex as resource management. Including the process for ordering and distributing urgently needed supplies would expand the annex to the point where the EOP becomes a multi-volume set. Further this process may change in response to new procedures or changes in technology. The same could be said of tracking financial data such as overtime and equipment costs.
The second thing to keep in mind is the needs of the user. Write for the user, not the reviewer. Commonly used topics like scope and purpose may serve to satisfy a reviewer who is not familiar with the plan or the planning process, but they are meaningless to a user in a time of crisis. They will skip over this stuff to get to the information they need. Indeed, an early study by Thomas Drabek suggested that users rarely refer to plans in a time of crisis. Keep it simple and focus on essential information.

Your functional annexes should, at a minimum, answer the following questions:

• What are the main tasks I must accomplish? What do I need to do and why is this important? Who is dependent on my accomplishing my assigned tasks? You should distinguish between high priority and immediate tasks and those for which the user has responsibility but are not of immediate urgency.
• Who’s in charge? The basic plan identified a lead agency for this annex, but the user needs to know specifically who from that agency will be the principal coordinator.
  What authority do I have? Who can make decisions to commit resources? Is it the representative at the emergency operations center, the lead at the department operations center, or the department head? Certain functions, particularly those related to financial obligations, often require specific delegations of authority. Who has these or how to obtain them are critical to the user’s ability to perform their tasks.
• What resources do I have? The basic plan usually includes a list of support agencies but normally does not specify why they are in support. The annex should include this information and specific points of contact for the resource. Resources are not limited to just supporting agencies. Our EOC in San Francisco included a computer with specific software requested by the city attorney, two dispatch consoles to support police and fire departments, and a specialized radio system allowing communications with aerial assets provided through the sheriff’s department. Also be aware of resources that might be sensitive and not included in the annex. For example, on client I worked with maintained kidnap and ransom insurance that included provisions for a trained hostage negotiator. We need not include this in our kidnap annex for security reasons but did include it in training for coordinators assigned to implement the annex.
• On whom do I depend? This question is often overlooked. We do not operate in a vacuum and there are inherent expectations that everything will go as planned. This is often a forlorn hope in a disaster so it is critical that dependencies that can affect assigned tasks are known up front.

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that any component of the emergency plan is more important than the others. They are intended to work together and address the needs of a crisis. The basic plan provides the overall concept of operations, the functional annexes address the response generated needs likely to be encountered in most disasters, and the hazard-specific annexes fine tune the methodologies of the functional annexes to address the agent generated needs of a particular hazard. What I do suggest, however, is that we expend a lot of effort focusing on the basic plan but often neglect the other annexes. The result is that we can easily fall prey to what Dr Erik auf der Heide refers to as the “paper plan syndrome”, the belief that just because we have a good basic plan, we are ready for crisis.