Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - October 2021

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Featured Articles

Why Your Emergency Plan Will Fail: Ignoring your target audience

    By Lucien Canton

EM Engagement with the Public

    By Timothy "Tim" Riecker

Is Time A Scarce Resource?

    By George Whitney

Neglecting reputation can be costly

    By Eric Bernstein

 

Why Your Emergency Plan Will Fail: Ignoring your target audience

Many years ago when I was a student, there was an apocryphal rumor making the rounds about a teacher who used the “fling method” to grade term papers. The method involved standing at the top of a staircase and flinging the papers towards the bottom. The theory was that those papers containing the most content (i.e., the most pages) would travel the farthest. Where your paper fell on the staircase determined your grade. I suspect that many emergency managers are using this method to determine the value of their emergency plans.

We all deride “doorstop plans,” plans that come in 4-inch binders or multiple volumes. Yet we continue to produce them. However, both anecdotal evidence and a small smattering of research suggest that during a crisis no one is going to read your emergency plan. This begs the question, for whom are we writing the emergency plan?

In my previous blog, I wrote about the three levels present in any response (strategic, operational, and tactical) and the need to distinguish among these when writing your plan. The easiest way to do this is to ask the question, “who is my target audience?”

Consider, for example, what happens when we apply this concept to the basic plan. The basic plan is a bit of an exception in that it delineates overall strategy and lays out the operational framework for response. But who is the target audience? If you’re honest, you’re probably writing it for anyone but the user (e.g., auditors, evaluators, politicians, the public) with the intent to demonstrate your level of preparedness. Plan users are most likely intimately familiar with the contents as it is the basis for more detailed planning. If this is indeed the case, why include extraneous material that is of no use to anyone?

Let me give an example of what I mean by extraneous material. Almost every basic plan I have reviewed over the years contains an extensive section on the Incident Command System. Given our requirements for ICS training, how likely is it that someone reporting to the emergency operations center in a crisis will be completely unfamiliar with ICS? Even assuming that they are, will they have any inclination to sit down and read several pages of ICS theory before starting work? Now consider the non-responder who is reading your plan for background; do they really need an in depth explanation of ICS? I suggest that in both cases, your audience might be better served by a single page fact sheet rather than five to ten pages of information.

We find a similar problem when we consider the supplementary annexes in the emergency plan. Here the problem is that we tend to mix operational and tactical information. Let me stress again that the target audience of the emergency plan is at the operational level. Annexes are about relationships, priorities, and specific assignments. They are not step by step instructions on how to perform a task. The emergency plan is a toolbox, not a bible; it should tell the reader what they are expected to do, what they will need to do it, and the resources that are available. It should not have to tell them how to do it.

Next time you’re reviewing your emergency plan, ask the question, “who’d my target audience?” Identify what they need to get their job done and cut out anything extraneous. The shorter the plan, the easier it will be for the user to find the information they need. Shorter is better; you’re not being graded by the “fling method.”