Now is the time of year when individuals are making New Year’s resolutions. The intent is to focus on something that is perceived as an area in need of improvement. Agencies, organizations and communities all have areas of improvement when it comes to preparedness.
Some suggestions I have in different areas of focus are:
- Planning – Forget the boiler plate 100 page document and come up with an Initial Incident Action Plan implementable by the available staff to get you through the first operational period. Pick any threat out of your latest Hazard Vulnerability Assessment.
- Training – Spend a little more time developing the specific objectives you want to accomplish. Is it a task performance, retention of knowledge or critical thing skills. Once you’re clear on objectives you can establish measurement standards. Not much sense practicing something if you can’t give students an objective review on their mastery of the skill.
- Exercises – Massive exercises are great if they have been well developed, facilitated and assessed. This includes an After Action Report – Plan of Improvement which clearly identifies who is responsible for improvements and a timeline. If the intent of an exercise is to pat yourself on the back or make your organization look good, it’s a fool’s errand in preparedness. This year instead focus on short exercises/drills (1-2 hours) and let folks do several evolutions of the same drill. This will let them key in on critical tasks and try several strategies to achieve their objectives. Reward innovation and rely less on the MSEL to control play.
I’d like to hear from readers what they are intending to do this coming year in the way of emergency preparedness efforts. What is the performance you’re trying to ensure and what creative ideas do you have?
Thank You for a great tips as a resolution to our organization
Jan, good topics for discussion. Here’s some reaction.
The planning point is good for businesses, especially for large and world wide companies with small dispersed groups of people doing office type knowledge work – engineers, trainers and consultants, but less so for a factory site which has/more likely to have a direct physical impact at the site. And comment is not so applicable for large population center governments that need to do lengthy complex response and coordination. The plan often contains (and should) appendicies with have lots of data and helpful pre-incident research. Maybe you can separate some of it out into a second doc but it’s still an appendix that you need for government.
The training point is a good reminder particularly when doing non-classroom delivery (web & print) training to a dispersed work force – particularly in the private sector when you only get so much time away from the primary employee priority – focused on client delivery/making money.
The exercise point is also very good for the private sector and less so for government who must lead and coordinate more.
Good food for thought but applies differently to each gov’t level (fed-state-local) and to the private sector. Joe
A good reminder that we should be focusing on lesson’s learned and identifying people responsible to address the issues….and to then re-exercise to look for more opportunities.
Thanks!