Written by Jerry Allen, Strategic Advisor
The extent to which one considers oneself ‘ready’ depends, to a large extent, on your appetite to risk or, less academically, personal paranoia.
Consider this: you are travelling tomorrow on your family holiday. It’s an international trip and quite expensive. The planner in the group (the most paranoid) has twice checked the list of essentials (documentation, passports, charging cables, international plugs, medicines, arrangements for transfers), those things that, if forgotten, would create real stress and uncertainty. ‘Ready’ to a planner is not the trivia of shirts and shoes, those things we have several of and can easily be acquired.
Now, let’s take that example and apply it to emergency planning. Look at your own plan. The ‘Plan’ must be immediately useful to those who must execute the plan in the most dire of circumstances, amid the shattering chaos of an emergency. They do not need to flick through 30 pages of document control, a statement from the CEO, the company policy, training schedules and lots of other theory; these belong in a training manual or policy document, not an emergency plan. They need the essentials: What do I need to do and in what order? Not on page 30, but on page 1.
The Emergency Plan is for emergencies. A good one gives confidence to response personnel that there are clear guidelines to help them through the confusion and dark hours. A good plan accepts that the response team are not professionals in emergency management, but from company departments drawn together in a crisis to steer the ship. Those personnel may be trained and exercised, but that might have been 18 months ago, and they can’t remember HOW to do things. A good plan explains not only what has to be done but also HOW to do it. Does yours? Is it immediately useful?
While I have your attention, let’s talk about formatting. I am the wrong side of middle aged and need spectacles to read most text, especially in low light. Give me a plan that follows the brand guidelines with size 10 font, in light grey, with blue headings, and my response will be delayed while I find a magnifying glass. Your response colleagues need clear, unambiguous text, with lots of headings and signposts to ‘how to’ annexes. If your plan is an electronic version, accessed on mobile phones in PDF, that’s my worst nightmare, for now I must navigate a PDF on a 6inch screen while squeezing the screen to make the text legible. When planning, think of those who must read it.
On the journey to being ready, once you have a useful and readable plan, the next step is your most valuable asset: the people. Do your homework and consider which people are most critical to the execution of your plan and the response to the emergency. Often, we allocate a disproportionate percentage of our training effort and budget to prepare those that have a relatively small part in any response. If your plan assumes that the emergency will occur away from your home, requiring deployed response teams, then those personnel deserve significant training resources. More than any other part of your emergency organisation, those deployed personnel have the hardest job: they are often public-facing, work extreme hours in demanding environments, and do not go home at the end of a shift.
Make your training realistic. Emergency response is hard. Training and certainly your exercises (it’s all training, just under different names) must reflect that hardship. As unpopular as it might be, organise an exercise at night or on a weekend; people must experience the additional pressures of ‘unwanted’ and ‘unexpected’ if they are to understand what ‘being ready’ truly means. A pre-notified response exercise at 1000hrs on a Tuesday in summer will produce predictable results. The real world, however, of 0200hrs on a Saturday in mid-winter has an entirely different set of challenges - be realistic.
Being ready, of course, comes at a price and in the commercial world the effort we spend on something that might not happen can be challenging to defend. But what if it does happen? And you are not ready? Is your Board prepared to defend your apathy when there is evidence all around of other companies that were exposed to the risks you chose to ignore?
I will always argue that good emergency management preparation is good general management preparation. It gives people confidence, inspires trust in teamwork and generates debate. Without debate we cannot truly be ready.
Jerry Allen is an emergency response manager with significant field and control room experience. He is now dedicated to support others in their quest to 'Be Ready'. Jerry is a Strategic Adviser to Kenyon, a trainer for the UK Government Resilience Academy, a university lecturer in crisis management, and a Board member of the UK Aviation Emergency Planning Group.
To learn how Kenyon can support your organisation create or refine your Emergency Response Plan (ERP) contact our team today.