During a recent visit to my brother-in-law in Ireland, I realized that I had left my book in the living room. It was late at night and the house was dark. As I entered the room I reached for where the light switch should have been. Nothing. I tried the other wall. Same result. Eventually, I gave up, stumbled around in the darkened room and found my book. It was only when I returned to my bedroom that I remembered that in many Irish and English houses light switches are outside the room entrance. (They also have switches on wall plugs, which add a whole new dimension to trying to recharge electronics.)
What's this got to do with ICS? We have an expectation that since we are all using the incident command system in the US that we should be able to seamlessly integrate mutual aid agencies. However, as Dr. Jessica Jensen has shown in her research on ICS, very few of us apply it in exacly the same way. However, we expect that everyone will respond in exactly the same way we do, just as I expected the light switch to be where it was supposed to be. We forget that different jurisdictions do things differently. It is these jurisdictional differences that can cause friction during a mutual aid response.
The answer to much of this is to do joint exercises. However, this is not always feasible, particularly if you're attempting to integrate Federal resources in a major disaster. In these events the role of the liaison officer becomes extremely important. Unfortunately, we do little training for liaison officers and focus mainly on using them as points of contact. Instead, give some thought to how the liaison officer can help identify and ease operational differences.
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