Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - November 2021

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Featured Articles

Why Your Emergency Plan Will Fail: Sequential Planning

    By Lucien Canton

Soft Skills Are Hard to Find

    By Timothy "Tim" Riecker

Sirens Ring, Are You Listening?

    By George Whitney

The 5 Top Crisis-Causing Mistakes in Customer Service

    By Jonathan Bernstein

Why Your Emergency Plan Will Fail: Sequential Planning

The development of the Comprehensive Emergency Management model by the National Governors’ Association in 1979 was a major step forward for modern emergency management. It was the first attempt to define emergency management in a holistic way that integrated the various functions related to disaster. It influenced the development of FEMA and forms the basis for much of our current emergency management practices.

Unfortunately, it has also created some problems for emergency planners. In using the term “phases” the framers of the CEM document were referring to clusters of  “emergency-related activities…that are related by time and function to all types of disasters.” This was an attempt to group categories of like activities to identify relationships among them. It was not an attempt to define how disasters unfold.

Why is this a problem?  Approaching a disaster with a preconceived idea of how it will progress can lead to poor decision making through cognitive biases such as confirmation or overconfidence biases. It can lead to confusion if phases are used as operational triggers that generate competition for resources and conflict over leadership roles.

Disasters do not operate in phases. Consider mitigation, for example. While the CEM model would suggest that mitigation is a phase between recovery and preparedness, there are immediate mitigation activities that take place in a disaster, such as reduction of immediate hazards or assessment of the performance of past mitigation projects. Similarly, decisions and activities conducted during the initial stages of response such as route restoration and debris clearance can have an impact on recovery operations, particularly in relation to insurance issues.

Perhaps the biggest problem I have seen in a commitment to a sequential approach to disasters is the tendency to develop separate plans for each phase. I’m not suggesting that separate plans are the problem. Quite the opposite is true as the planners, implementers, required skills, and strategies for each phase are quite different, as is the level of public involvement. The problem is that because each plan requires different working groups, they tend to be created in a vacuum with an underlying and often unspoken assumption that each plan will be implemented in sequence. The result of simultaneous implementation is invariable a competition for resources and confusion over leadership and priorities.

The solution is simple but complex in execution. You need to look at response to a crisis not in phases but as a series of activities that occur over the life cycle of the disaster. This includes particular attention to priorities for resources and transition of operational leadership. You can’t make a crisis fit into your preconceived notion of phases; you need to adapt to the unexpected. There’s a reason “Flexible” is one of the Principles of Emergency Management.