May 22, 2023 • 37 mins
Hundreds of thousands of hours and millions of Euros are spent each year planning, executing and debriefing crisis exercises.
The return on this significant investment is rarely fully and honestly appraised. If it were, organisations would uncover an uncomfortable truth; many exercises probably fail to achieve their potential.
Dave Rouse, Crisis Management Services Lead at Oil Spill Response and Dr. El Parker, Specialist Crisis Management Consultant, discuss how you can maximise the value from exercises sharing lessons learned and a blueprint for better exercises.
Please give us ★★★★★, leave a review, and tell your friends about us as each share and like makes a difference.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello and welcome to the Response Force Multiplier, a
podcast that explores emergencyplanning and response.
On the Response ForceMultiplier, we bring together
compelling experts and thoughtleaders to provide a fresh take
on key issues and cutting edgetechniques.
In each episode, we'll diveinto one aspect of emergency
(00:26):
planning and response and we'lluse OSRL's unique pool of
experts and collaborators togain new insights and to distill
these down into actionabletools and techniques for better
preparedness and response tocrisis incidents and emergencies
.
My name is Paul Kelway, we areOSRL and this is the Response
(00:46):
Force Multiplier.
In today's episode, we look athow we train for emergency
incidents and test our abilityto respond through exercises.
These exercises are not just acheck in the box, but are
actually at the heart of beingresilient and prepared to
respond to emergencies.
But are actually at the heartof being resilient and prepared
to respond to emergencies.
But in speaking with mycolleague, Dave Rouse, the
(01:06):
Crisis Management Lead forOsprey Response, and Dr L Parker
, Associate Professor forDisaster and Emergency
Management at CoventryUniversity, we explore why they
are not always fit for purposeor value for money, and also how
we can make exercises a moremeaningful tool in improving
preparedness and creatingresilient response systems.
Hi, Dave, and welcome to theshow.
(01:27):
So you and Dr L Parker recentlywrote this paper called A
Blueprint for Better Exercisesthat examined the ways we relate
to exercises for emergencyplanning and asked the
provocative question of whetherthey are actually a waste of
time and money.
But before we get to that, canyou just firstly explain a bit
about what you mean when you sayexercises in terms of crisis
(01:49):
management preparedness?
What is an exercise in thiscontext and why are they so
important?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
The crux of it is we need to be ready to respond to
anything at any time.
So what we do is we developplans which are based on risk or
scenarios which are likely tohappen and we train people in
their roles with the hope that,if something happens, the plans
work and the people arecompetent.
But we need to not wait untilsomething happens to find that
(02:17):
out.
And this is where exercisescome in, because actually the
competence of the team and thecompetency of the people is far
more important than anydocumentation.
The documentation does capturearrangements which are made, so
we need to know that those willwork and we use an exercise to
practice that.
And we need to give peopleconfidence and we need to put
them under some pressure andtest that they can perform in
(02:39):
the sorts of scenarios that theymight have to if it was real.
So we do a walkthrough,discussion of some arrangements
and think about how would theywork.
What have we missed?
Talk through the steps.
We can do a tabletop simulationwhere we get into a room, we
put people into roles, we use ascenario that will play out in
real time and everything thenhappens in that room.
(03:02):
We don't have actual physicalactivity happening outside.
That's the next layer ofrealism and stress testing
things when we go to a fulldeployment of assets in the
field alongside simulatedcommand centers, so really
putting the whole system of aresponse into practice.
So exercises can operate on anumber of different levels and
(03:22):
we would choose to do adifferent type of exercise
depending on what we're tryingto achieve.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
So you wrote a blueprint which is focused on
creating greater impact fromexercises and giving them
greater value for money.
What was it that brought you toput this down on paper in the
first place, and what were youseeing in the industry that made
you think there were ways to bemore effective in how exercises
were developed and run?
Speaker 2 (03:44):
I guess the real catalyst for putting pen on
paper to develop the blueprintwith l was a particular exercise
that I attended which triggeredsomething.
It was a big exercise for themajor oil company.
There were around 300 people ina room for three days doing a
(04:06):
tabletop exercise, lots ofreally senior people.
Most had flown ininternationally to be there.
We'd taken over the whole hotel.
So a really nice hotel in anice part of town, everything
fully catered, everyone wasstaying in-house Just a really
expensive affair.
This was easily in the tens ofmillions of dollars and it kind
(04:29):
of went the same as most of themgo, and at the end of it
there's really high energy inthe room.
Everyone's really buzzing.
They feel like we've learned alot.
We've really connected witheach other.
This has been a great use of mytime and maybe I'm a little bit
cynical, having seen a lot ofthem.
You know, and reflecting backon, actually we don't always see
the performance in response,but I think I just felt a bit
flat and I felt that theexercise wasn't really giving
good bang for the buck.
(04:50):
It cost a lot of money, it hadtaken a lot of people's time,
but I think we'd lost track ofwhat the objectives were.
Some of them might have beenmet, but no one actually knew,
or we could have achieved a lotmore with this huge investment
of people's time.
And I didn't walk away feelingthis company is materially
better prepared for what it'sjust done.
There are better ways.
There are real lifeconsequences of not being
(05:11):
prepared, and that's why weexercise and that's why, when we
do it, we need to make sure wedo it well, because most
companies are not professionalresponders.
They don't have the time tospend exercising weekly and
every month.
So when you do it, you got toget it right, because there are
consequences if you don't havethe time to spend exercising
weekly and every month.
So when you do it, you got toget it right, because there are
consequences if you don't sothere was clearly some
frustration on dave's part abouthow exercises were being run in
(05:34):
.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Dave thinking about and exploring this question of
how to change that, he decidedto reach out to professor l
parker, associate professor atcoventry university, where where
Dave completed his degree inInternational Disaster
Engineering and Management.
So, elle, can you share a bitabout your connection to this
topic and what brought you andDave to imagining this new
(05:54):
approach to emergency exercises?
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Dave and I would periodically have a catch-up,
and he was often involved inexercising and I was often
involved in training andexercising and the mismatch
between that.
But it would turn into a littlebit of a moan shop about what we
were being asked to do and whatthe expected outcomes of that
exercising process were.
(06:17):
I'd been involved in proposinghow we would go about designing
an exercise to test strategicdecision-making in another
country and we were told in nouncertain terms that none of the
strategic decision-makers couldlook bad and therefore we were
going to have to very carefullymanage the nature of the
(06:41):
scenario.
So we actually ended up havingother people role-playing those
roles and those strategicdecision makers observing it,
talking about things like thatand the limitations of the
exercises that we were involvedwith, we both started saying but
it should be done like this, ifwe had a shift in culture, then
we could achieve that, and Ithink one of the most recent
(07:01):
conversations we had was how weknew whether or not exercises
were valued for money, and thatopened a big.
One of the most recentconversations we had was how we
knew whether or not exerciseswere valued for money, and that
opened a big can of worms sowhat are some of the major
issues or mistakes aboutexercises that prevent them from
being good value for money?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
so if I take it away from just that exercise and talk
about some of the bigger thingsthat we see fairly consistently
, we very often see exercisesthat are not difficult enough.
They play easy.
You're not really going to beprepared for a response where
you will work a 12 or a 15 hourday for maybe 20 days straight
(07:39):
and that time away from home innot very comfortable settings
with poor equipment to work with.
That's the reality of aresponse.
Exercises don't often simulatethat they start at 8, they break
lunch at 12, and at 1 o'clockwe come back and we'll be paid
all 5 o'clock and then we go andhave a nice meal somewhere, and
that doesn't prepare you for aresponse.
The number two thing we see alot of is that the scenario
(08:02):
either isn't realistic or itisn't testing enough.
So it doesn't stress theprocedures or the arrangements.
It doesn't put people underthat pressure that you need to
feel so that if it ever happens,you have some muscle memory.
On that unrealistic point, howhelpful is it really to simulate
for an oil company that havegot some offshore installations
(08:25):
and you might have a fire on aplatform, but how helpful is it
really to then simulate a zombieinvasion over the top.
So we often see not quite thatextreme, but that gives you an
idea.
The third thing we see we neverget into the real detail and in
a response we might have somegeneral arrangements and we know
that no plan will survivecontact.
But there are certain thingsthat you do need to get into the
(08:47):
detail to really know will thiswork?
How does an interface workbetween different agencies?
Do we have contracts with theright provisions to give us what
we think we might need and theability to get more?
Quite often exercises are overtoo quickly.
They skim across the surface,so the big picture blocks kind
of fit, but the details haven'tbeen gotten into and that's
where are over too quickly.
They skim across the surface,so the big picture blocks kind
of fit, but the details haven'tbeen gotten into and that's
(09:07):
where we see things fall down.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
So I know both of you talked about how preparedness
documents are in some waydivorced from reality and so not
fit for purpose.
What do you see as some of thekey issues that come up when
they don't prepare us properlyfor dealing with real
emergencies and how we can thinkdifferently about how we
prepare dealing with realemergencies and how we can think
differently?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
about how we prepare.
I came from a world whereemergency plans didn't really
exist.
So you work internationally inlocations where you're working
on disaster risk reduction inareas prone to disasters, but
quite often it was straight intoresponse.
(09:46):
That preparedness piece wasn'tfocused on and invested in.
That wasn't to say that localgroups didn't know what they
were doing because of thefrequency and scale of some of
those events.
That was more than perhaps wewould experience in the UK, and
(10:07):
so it meant that I viewed a moretechnocratic, bureaucratic
approach with different eyes.
If we don't understand enoughabout the nature of the risk,
what people know, what peoplecan do, the resources that we
have, and we make basicassumptions that the impacts
(10:30):
will be linear if A do B and ifB do C and if C do D, we're
giving ourselves a falseimpression of resilience.
And then, when we base anexercise on that, where the
objectives are being set,validating our arrangements that
always strikes me as really odd.
(10:51):
Why aren't you validating whatyou've got and what you can do
and I know that's kind ofimplicit, but the testing the
arrangements comes first before.
Did we actually achieve what weset out to achieve?
That got me thinking what wouldhappen if we didn't have all
(11:13):
those documents, but we couldstill achieve the outcome and
that came from my background hadbeen all about climate change
and uncertainty Before thisnotion of adaptive capacity
became much more universal inthe world of resilience, climate
(11:35):
change, right from thebeginning, was talking about
adaptive capacity what we can donaturally and instinctively and
intuitively because you can'tscript and write for everything-
that is so interesting andreally well said.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
So speaking to that, are there any examples you could
point to in the real world thatillustrate the disconnect
around preparedness and how wecan fall into that trap of
rehearsing the script for a playthat will very quickly unravel
into something very differentand infinitely more complex?
Speaker 3 (12:14):
digital learning online schools being closed.
We weren't ready for that.
We planned for influenzapandemic, as opposed to any
other kind of variation on acommunicable disease, so we
(12:36):
didn't have much in the way ofadaptive capacity and so we
didn't say, okay, we might lockdown.
What would the consequence oflockdown?
What would the consequence ofkids not going to school?
And so we didn't say, ok, wemight lock down.
What would the consequence oflockdown?
What would the consequence ofkids not going to school?
And so we didn't develop thatweb and therefore our exercise
was a very narrow part of ourpreparedness, functionality and
capabilities that were testedand lessons were learned about
(13:00):
A&E and scaling up within thatkind of emergency health service
, but it didn't mean we wereready for a pandemic.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
That's a great example and really pertinent,
and I think it really shows howthere are so many cascading and
unintended repercussions thatcan't always be rehearsed but
can have profound real worldconsequences.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
And it's absolutely fine to have an exercise that
tests a part of that.
But you have to be very openand very transparent and provide
the evidence for the bit ofyour risk ecosystem that you are
now confident about, and youabsolutely should not say to
your CEO or set of directors oh,we're ready, bring it on,
(13:44):
because we're not.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Right right, that's really interesting.
So if I think about anemergency incident as a whole
jigsaw puzzle, essentially it'sensuring that you don't just
focus on one or two pieces ofthat jigsaw and then think you
have the whole picture figuredout.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Jigsaw is a great analogy and I think that takes
us all the way back to how doyou know how many pieces and how
big your jigsaw actually is?
And that's where the investmentis perhaps most worthwhile.
The big showpiece exercise thatproves that you've got a bunch
(14:21):
of people who can wade throughenough paperwork, use enough
apps, open enough software, fillin enough forms in the
timeframe to be able to put inplace those linear procedures
that demonstrate you canimplement those arrangements.
But it's in a rather simplisticand expected emergency scenario
(14:43):
.
There's value in it, but itdoesn't mean you're prepared and
you're resilient.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
So now I want to back out a bit and talk about the
blueprint you created, whichfocused on developing effective
exercises and also highlightedthe importance of taking a
holistic, systems-wide approachto that process.
Can you talk a bit about whatyou were trying to address with
this?
Speaker 2 (15:05):
when exercises are not approached holistically,
when they're dealt with inisolation and you've got
objectives or lessons that mightbe learned in one that are not
carried forward to the next, orwe're lost or we repeat
ourselves.
That would be one of thesymptoms of it not being thought
about holistically, not beingpart of a big exercise program.
Competency being more importantthan the plans by far is built
(15:28):
in blocks, and so a big,three-day 300-person exercise
might be appropriate if we'vebuilt in blocks the competence
of the team to get there wherewe can really make the most of
that big event.
We don't often see that, and Ithink the last would probably be
you need competent people whounderstand how things should go
(15:49):
in order to do assessment well,and that's often overlooked.
To do assessment well, andthat's often overlooked.
So if you reverse all of thosethat I've just talked about,
then you would have the recipe,which we've encapsulated in the
blueprint, for how to do thingsbetter.
There's lots and lots ofdoctrine out there about the
steps you need to take in orderto get from a blank sheet of
paper to an exercise.
We're not trying to replicatethe recipes for doing it.
(16:11):
There are many of them outthere.
They all do a good job.
They're pretty consistent witheach other, but what the
blueprint is trying to do is howto apply the recipe in order to
get the best bang for the buck.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And I think there are a few things you referenced
around proactive versus reactive.
Could you speak more to thatand also touch on something that
the blueprint emphasizes and Ithink it's worth highlighting
here that there is often a focuson the exercise itself as being
the place to learn, but youargue that there is a wealth of
learning to be had in theplanning of the exercise as well
.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
It's about being deliberate.
There are many things that Imight say that are incorrect in
a particular circumstance, butyou have to know the rules in
order to know how to break them.
So when I talk about proactiveversus reactive, a reactive
exercise might be in response toa legislative change, something
(17:08):
that was unanticipated, or amajor event somewhere which
hasn't been thought about bythis organization.
So we need to go and make surethat we are prepared should that
happen to us.
So there will be circumstanceswhere reactive exercise is
correct and appropriate.
But generally speaking, we wantto see exercises as proactive.
(17:29):
They are planned, they arethought about, they are part of
a program and a sequence that isvery deliberate in its design,
with very clear objectives, witha carryover of lessons and a
development of competence forthe team over time.
So that's what we mean by aproactive exercise.
That's why we think it'simportant to have so that when
(17:50):
you do see that big 300 personexercise once every three years,
it's the culmination, it's theworld cup final and you're ready
for it because everything hasbeen leading up to that so one
of the terms you use is thegolden thread, or having a
golden thread that connects keyelements of the preparedness
(18:12):
planning, and that's not to saythat the procedures and
processes used aren't importantthey're actually vital.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
But the blueprint you put forward moves beyond that,
and I think what you'reproposing is developing
exercises in a way thatultimately reinforces and
supports the learning andresilience of the individuals
who, at the end of the day, arethe ones that have to perform
that role in an emergency, wouldyou say.
That's true.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Absolutely, because we become plan focused and then
exercise arrangements as ourobjective, the golden thread is
lost because it's a very shortthread between the plan and
demonstrating that everybody canfollow the plan, whereas my
idea of this golden threadstarts with the risk, the scale
(18:59):
of the hazard and the threat,the vulnerable things that might
be affected, the feedbackmechanisms in terms of
consequences.
How big is the scale of therisk scenario?
That I need to understand.
So it has to be within my remitas an organisation.
But we have to work withpartners to acknowledge if
(19:23):
there's a failure in a supplychain, if the consequences are
already affecting the localhospitals or the local
environmental protection teams,they won't be able to do what
they need to do as effectively.
So we need to acknowledge that.
So the joint working thenbecomes really important, and
(19:47):
the information sharing and thecoordination.
And then the plans, which needto be written in such a way that
they're principled and outcomefocused, but with a set of
suggestions, and then theexercises can build on the
(20:08):
training and the competencies ofthose involved and we have an
assurance process that thenlooks at the exercise debrief
what scale of risks and natureof scenario did it deal with?
Were we flexible enough?
Can we look at the competenciesthat we're expecting of our
(20:29):
people as well as thearrangement that we put in play?
It's always seemed very strangeto me that you might use a very
small team or outsource theexercise design and development
process, because what scenarioshould we use?
How should we stretch things?
(20:49):
What do you know?
What's been your experience?
What were challenges last time?
By outsourcing, you lose allthat discursive social learning,
organisational learning, richanalysis, different people's
views and opinions.
It's just such a massive lossbackground where participatory
(21:11):
approaches in very low resourcedcommunities in coastal Sri
Lanka to help developpreparedness tools, it was all
about bringing people togetherto talk about and plan and there
was very little point in thosebig showy exercises.
Resilience is all aboutlearning to learn and I know for
(21:36):
some people quality assurancesounds really boring and really
bureaucratic.
But for me I find it reallyexciting.
By turning into a systems-basedapproach and that golden thread
, I'm linking all of thosehearts together and it just
(21:56):
means that a good qualityassurance process forces us to
think about whether or not ourrisk management ecosystem is
supporting us to actuallyimprove.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
So both of you emphasize resilience and I guess
the key question is how tobuild that resilience and
develop responders with theright mindset for responding
well in a crisis.
What's the most effectiveapproach?
Not just around programs orexercises, but having responders
who are ready for real worldscenarios, with all of the
unknowns that that might bring.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
Priority one is often having a plan as an output, a
written set of actions toachieve a particular goal, and
then the desire to demonstratethat we're prepared through
using an exercise where we justtest those arrangements but we
don't come out of that knowingwhat our limits are on our
(22:56):
capabilities and our capacitiesSeems to me we should flip our
objectives, not to test ourarrangements but to see what
scale of emergency we arecurrently fit to deal with, so
that shifts the objectives ofour exercise.
If we think about preparednessas a set of interrelated
(23:22):
activities aiming to improve ourcapacity and capabilities, then
that is a resilience-basedapproach.
Resilience is about change andimprovement.
If we have a mindset wherewe're simply setting out to
(23:42):
prove that we are prepared,those changes often make our
arrangements fit for theexercise or the emergency that
we've just experienced, notimproving and increasing our
adaptability, our flexibilityand our ability to be able to
deal with uncertain situations.
(24:02):
And I get that.
That experience and confidenceto be able to adapt and innovate
comes from practice and you maynot have the opportunity to get
that breadth and diversity ofexperience, which means we need
to change the way we think aboutexercises and training.
(24:25):
We've seen a shift to smallerscale, bite-sized training,
emergency scenarios, tabletopworking, discursive-based
activities that allow people toconsider, think, reflect on.
Is this process or procedureflexible enough?
(24:47):
Are these resources likely tobe sufficient?
Have we thought about the factthat we might not start from
this start point in an emergency?
So it might be winter, it mightbe in the middle of a economic
crisis, there might have been aprevious fire and we're already
(25:08):
damaged or limited in some way?
And those short tabletopdiscursive exercises provide
more of a training andcollective working and
understanding field than the bigshowpiece exercise.
And again, training is neededfor that familiarisation with
(25:30):
the fundamental procedures thatmean you're not going to
overstep the mark with yourregulations and your health and
safety.
That's important.
That's really important.
You need to have all of that inyour toolkit as a responder, to
be able to test and validatewhether or not your capabilities
(25:50):
and your capacities areflexible enough to be able to
deal with an unusual crisis.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah, that's great.
I think what you're talkingabout here is the real value of
working on a plan is actuallythe way it's carried forward in
the people that put it together,that it's not so much a
document that just sits thereand is pulled off the shelf in
an emergency, but there's been aprocess that people have been
involved with.
That means that a plan isessentially alive and those
people are ultimately on ajourney themselves to becoming
(26:22):
more competent and embodyingthat plan more completely.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Exactly to the point where the plan, the document
itself, becomes immaterial,because what you've developed is
a team of people andindividuals who can perform as
they need to in any type ofsituation.
There's an interesting quotewhich encapsulates what we try
and do when we're teachingpeople to be in an incident
management team.
Your job as a responder is todo precision guesswork based on
(26:50):
unreliable data provided bythose of questionable knowledge,
and so, actually, the plandoesn't particularly help you
when you're up at that level.
You don't need it, becauseyou're able to work with
uncertainty, with volatility,with ambiguity and complexity.
You're able to perform asindividuals in a team with the
problem in front of you, withouthaving to get bogged down in
(27:12):
things like the process.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
So can you relate that to the idea of bite-sized
learning and hyper-realism andhow you incorporate that into
your trainings.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
We work with a client where, over a two and a half
day period, we run fivehyper-realistic scenarios for
them and each one has aprogression that builds the team
and builds the individuals upto that cruising altitude that
we want.
And each scenario might onlylast an hour and a half, but in
that time the hyper-realismcomes from the way that we
deliver the injects, the waythat something will happen in
(27:43):
the room.
Someone will say something.
We will role play a journalist,for example.
We will catch someone unawares.
They'll say something theymaybe shouldn't have said.
The next inject would be as itwould be in real life A news
story that's just quotingsomeone showing the picture from
their profile.
When we wire people up, whichwe sometimes do, to the heart
rate monitors to see how thelevel of stress is in the room,
(28:05):
you can see the spike.
That's real.
That feels hyper-realistic.
That person has just got agreat lesson from that example.
The other way that we would doit in scenario design is making
sure that you get all thedetails right so that it feels
like the operation.
We've got the names correct.
We know the operations insideout.
Everything would happen in theway that people would anticipate
would through.
So getting to that real levelof detail for a scenario is that
(28:29):
part of that hyper realism.
But you can compress it and itdoesn't have to be a three-day
300 person event.
It can be an hour with fivepeople, 10 people.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
And I think perhaps one of the other things in terms
of making this more efficientis if over the next five years
as an organisation, you developmore but smaller exercises or
less resource-intensive, sothey're more tabletop-y, virtual
discursive, you will kill twobirds with one stone.
(28:59):
You will come to understand andmap your risk ecosystem through
that more frequent discursiveprocess as you try and design
exercise scenarios and that canthen feed back into your risk
assessments.
So whichever comes firstwhether the risk assessment is
done discursively andparticipatory, whether the
(29:21):
planning is done with diverserange of stakeholders and by
table topic exercises, use thatprocess and that approach.
Don't put somebody in an officeon their own with a spreadsheet
to do it.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
That's really well said, although, because in my
day job I work in wildlifeemergency response.
Rather than kill two birds withone stone, I like to say catch
two birds with one net.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Okay, yes, that's much, much better.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
So ultimately, this approach really helps training
and test resilience in a realworld way, and that training
develops the right mindset forresponders to swim rather than
sink in a high intensitysituation.
And what's interesting in someof the ways that this is now
being applied are that they'reactually borrowed from sports
psychology and training.
Can you speak a bit more aboutthat?
Speaker 2 (30:11):
a lot of the research , the organizations that we've
worked with to get to this pointare around sport, psychology,
sport performance where youthink about you're taking the
penalty kick or the drop goal,high pressure situation.
The world is watching you.
There are consequences if youdon't get this right.
It's the same in a crisis.
So how do we give people thetools, how do we develop the
mindset so that they can performin that really stressful
(30:33):
situation?
You need the mindset to beright in a crisis team with the
individuals to be able toperform under pressure and for
the team to have that mindset ofsolving the problem and not
getting stuck in an analysis,paralysis or any of those
factors that hinder them.
So one of the ways that weillustrate that point is we've
(30:53):
got heart monitors that we'llput on people so at different
points in the course you canillustrate it for the room the
effect of stress that we canshow through heart rate
variability on the monitor, andthen that helps to position for
what we do.
Next is we give people somereally practical tools how they
can manage pressure so that itdoesn't manifest as stress on
(31:15):
them or totally natural foreveryone to go through that
initial fight, flight, freezeresponse.
We help people understand whatit is, that it doesn't manifest
as stress on them or totallynatural for everyone to go
through that initial fightflight freeze response.
We help people understand whatit is, how it works, how we can
work for them in a positive way,and so over a standard two and
a half or three day course, youcan see the application of those
tools and by the end you cansee people using what works for
(31:35):
them and performing much moreeffectively under pressure, much
more confidently, much morecompetently.
And then they can take itoutside of the scenarios and if
they ever need to use it in reallife, it's there.
They can bring it back.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
It's got the muscle with it so if you're an
emergency planner listening tothis and you're trying to
breathe new life into yourprogram, what would be some of
the first steps that you suggestthat they would take?
Making sure that their trainingand exercises are fit for
purpose and maybe, if they'reconsidering implementing the
kind of model you're talkingabout?
Speaker 2 (32:07):
first of all read the blueprint.
That's an easy one againstwhatever other doctrine that you
need to follow for theorganization that you're in.
About how to do it show you howto apply that.
But I guess if break it down,it's stand back and look at the
big picture.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Number one I think my first question would be what's
the unarguable evidence that youcan do what you say you can do
when you need to do it?
And then, if you say, well,it's from that exercise we did
last year, I would suggest goback and say, right, what were
(32:45):
the injects based on?
Why did we choose that location, that scenario?
Does that link back to our riskanalysis?
Let me look around the sectorand see whether or not there is
evidence that it could be bigger, it could be different, more
people could be involved.
(33:05):
The starting point could bedifferent.
I think the one thing that Iwould emphasise is involving as
many stakeholders as possible inthe exercise development and
that the exercise day is not theend point.
The exercise development is thebeneficial process.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
So we live in a very dynamic, fast-changing world,
and sometimes we're dealing notjust with the initial emergency,
but compounded issues that cansurface as a result of cascading
repercussions from the thingsthat are happening.
So when I think about exercisesin this ever-changing world
that we're in, I guess myquestion to both of you is do
you believe it is truly possibleto be prepared and resilient?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah, I think it is, and I think the organizations
that do it well are the ones whoare honest about where they are
, where they need to be, and areprepared to make the investment
to understand that having acompetent team and a simple
process to deal with any sort ofunusual circumstance is what
(34:14):
they need to be shooting for.
It doesn't have to be complex,but I think it's totally
possible and I would go as faras to say it's unreasonable.
If you don't do that, there arereal-life consequences on
whatever organisation you are.
If you're the emergencyservices, being unprepared means
(34:35):
people might die.
If you're in the energyindustry and you have operations
, you have real risk wherepeople might die.
In organizations with adifferent risk profile, you
still have the continuity of theorganization at risk if you
have a crisis that you areunprepared for.
So I think it's not onlypossible to be resilient, it's
(34:59):
absolutely critical that you'reresilient.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
I have found that I have recently made a lot of use
of the word acceptable.
So the culture change aboutshifting from knowing what will
happen to being uncertain aboutwhat will happen, to being
uncertain about what will happenand thinking about what would
be acceptable.
There are some things that itis not acceptable that should
(35:31):
happen.
It would not be acceptable toaccept any degree of loss of
life, although in some emergencyscenarios, scenarios it is
almost inevitable.
But I think setting ourselvesup to be prepared to be able to
prevent certain things and forthe rest of it we are winging it
(35:53):
.
We know we've got skilled peoplebecause we know that they can
innovate.
We've got good workingrelationships with partners who
can offer us mutual aid, all ofthose things.
That's resilience.
The formal procedures are madefor bending, the formal
(36:19):
procedures are made for bending.
So for me, resilient is notwhat you do, it's how you do it.
And preparedness is beingprepared to draw on more than
you've got, because in thecrisis and emergency that's the
very nature of it it's beyondyour capacity to be able to cope
(36:42):
with what you've got.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
So you have to think beyond that, thank you for
listening to the Response ForceMultiplier from OSRL.
Please like and subscribewherever you get your podcasts
and stay tuned for more episodesas we continue to explore key
(37:08):
issues in emergency response andcrisis management.
Next time on the Response ForceMultiplier.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
If we invite people to think about what mindset hat
do you put on when you're underpressure, we can learn to think
about pressure in a way that ishelpful.
We might not enjoy the feelingsand the discomfort, but to know
that pressure is necessary forus to give our best can help
people to start to look at itdifferently.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
For more information, head to osrlcom.
We'll see you soon.
Hello and welcome to the Response Force Multiplier, a
podcast that explores emergencyplanning and response.
On the Response ForceMultiplier, we bring together
compelling experts and thoughtleaders to provide a fresh take
on key issues and cutting edgetechniques.
In each episode, we'll diveinto one aspect of emergency
(00:26):
planning and response and we'lluse OSRL's unique pool of
experts and collaborators togain new insights and to distill
these down into actionabletools and techniques for better
preparedness and response tocrisis incidents and emergencies
.
My name is Paul Kelway, we areOSRL and this is the Response
(00:46):
Force Multiplier.
In today's episode, we look athow we train for emergency
incidents and test our abilityto respond through exercises.
These exercises are not just acheck in the box, but are
actually at the heart of beingresilient and prepared to
respond to emergencies.
But are actually at the heartof being resilient and prepared
to respond to emergencies.
But in speaking with mycolleague, Dave Rouse, the
(01:06):
Crisis Management Lead forOsprey Response, and Dr L Parker
, Associate Professor forDisaster and Emergency
Management at CoventryUniversity, we explore why they
are not always fit for purposeor value for money, and also how
we can make exercises a moremeaningful tool in improving
preparedness and creatingresilient response systems.
Hi, Dave, and welcome to theshow.
(01:27):
So you and Dr L Parker recentlywrote this paper called A
Blueprint for Better Exercisesthat examined the ways we relate
to exercises for emergencyplanning and asked the
provocative question of whetherthey are actually a waste of
time and money.
But before we get to that, canyou just firstly explain a bit
about what you mean when you sayexercises in terms of crisis
(01:49):
management preparedness?
What is an exercise in thiscontext and why are they so
important?
Speaker 2 (01:55):
The crux of it is we need to be ready to respond to
anything at any time.
So what we do is we developplans which are based on risk or
scenarios which are likely tohappen and we train people in
their roles with the hope that,if something happens, the plans
work and the people arecompetent.
But we need to not wait untilsomething happens to find that
(02:17):
out.
And this is where exercisescome in, because actually the
competence of the team and thecompetency of the people is far
more important than anydocumentation.
The documentation does capturearrangements which are made, so
we need to know that those willwork and we use an exercise to
practice that.
And we need to give peopleconfidence and we need to put
them under some pressure andtest that they can perform in
(02:39):
the sorts of scenarios that theymight have to if it was real.
So we do a walkthrough,discussion of some arrangements
and think about how would theywork.
What have we missed?
Talk through the steps.
We can do a tabletop simulationwhere we get into a room, we
put people into roles, we use ascenario that will play out in
real time and everything thenhappens in that room.
(03:02):
We don't have actual physicalactivity happening outside.
That's the next layer ofrealism and stress testing
things when we go to a fulldeployment of assets in the
field alongside simulatedcommand centers, so really
putting the whole system of aresponse into practice.
So exercises can operate on anumber of different levels and
(03:22):
we would choose to do adifferent type of exercise
depending on what we're tryingto achieve.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
So you wrote a blueprint which is focused on
creating greater impact fromexercises and giving them
greater value for money.
What was it that brought you toput this down on paper in the
first place, and what were youseeing in the industry that made
you think there were ways to bemore effective in how exercises
were developed and run?
Speaker 2 (03:44):
I guess the real catalyst for putting pen on
paper to develop the blueprintwith l was a particular exercise
that I attended which triggeredsomething.
It was a big exercise for themajor oil company.
There were around 300 people ina room for three days doing a
(04:06):
tabletop exercise, lots ofreally senior people.
Most had flown ininternationally to be there.
We'd taken over the whole hotel.
So a really nice hotel in anice part of town, everything
fully catered, everyone wasstaying in-house Just a really
expensive affair.
This was easily in the tens ofmillions of dollars and it kind
(04:29):
of went the same as most of themgo, and at the end of it
there's really high energy inthe room.
Everyone's really buzzing.
They feel like we've learned alot.
We've really connected witheach other.
This has been a great use of mytime and maybe I'm a little bit
cynical, having seen a lot ofthem.
You know, and reflecting backon, actually we don't always see
the performance in response,but I think I just felt a bit
flat and I felt that theexercise wasn't really giving
good bang for the buck.
(04:50):
It cost a lot of money, it hadtaken a lot of people's time,
but I think we'd lost track ofwhat the objectives were.
Some of them might have beenmet, but no one actually knew,
or we could have achieved a lotmore with this huge investment
of people's time.
And I didn't walk away feelingthis company is materially
better prepared for what it'sjust done.
There are better ways.
There are real lifeconsequences of not being
(05:11):
prepared, and that's why weexercise and that's why, when we
do it, we need to make sure wedo it well, because most
companies are not professionalresponders.
They don't have the time tospend exercising weekly and
every month.
So when you do it, you got toget it right, because there are
consequences if you don't havethe time to spend exercising
weekly and every month.
So when you do it, you got toget it right, because there are
consequences if you don't sothere was clearly some
frustration on dave's part abouthow exercises were being run in
(05:34):
.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Dave thinking about and exploring this question of
how to change that, he decidedto reach out to professor l
parker, associate professor atcoventry university, where where
Dave completed his degree inInternational Disaster
Engineering and Management.
So, elle, can you share a bitabout your connection to this
topic and what brought you andDave to imagining this new
(05:54):
approach to emergency exercises?
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Dave and I would periodically have a catch-up,
and he was often involved inexercising and I was often
involved in training andexercising and the mismatch
between that.
But it would turn into a littlebit of a moan shop about what we
were being asked to do and whatthe expected outcomes of that
exercising process were.
(06:17):
I'd been involved in proposinghow we would go about designing
an exercise to test strategicdecision-making in another
country and we were told in nouncertain terms that none of the
strategic decision-makers couldlook bad and therefore we were
going to have to very carefullymanage the nature of the
(06:41):
scenario.
So we actually ended up havingother people role-playing those
roles and those strategicdecision makers observing it,
talking about things like thatand the limitations of the
exercises that we were involvedwith, we both started saying but
it should be done like this, ifwe had a shift in culture, then
we could achieve that, and Ithink one of the most recent
(07:01):
conversations we had was how weknew whether or not exercises
were valued for money, and thatopened a big.
One of the most recentconversations we had was how we
knew whether or not exerciseswere valued for money, and that
opened a big can of worms sowhat are some of the major
issues or mistakes aboutexercises that prevent them from
being good value for money?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
so if I take it away from just that exercise and talk
about some of the bigger thingsthat we see fairly consistently
, we very often see exercisesthat are not difficult enough.
They play easy.
You're not really going to beprepared for a response where
you will work a 12 or a 15 hourday for maybe 20 days straight
(07:39):
and that time away from home innot very comfortable settings
with poor equipment to work with.
That's the reality of aresponse.
Exercises don't often simulatethat they start at 8, they break
lunch at 12, and at 1 o'clockwe come back and we'll be paid
all 5 o'clock and then we go andhave a nice meal somewhere, and
that doesn't prepare you for aresponse.
The number two thing we see alot of is that the scenario
(08:02):
either isn't realistic or itisn't testing enough.
So it doesn't stress theprocedures or the arrangements.
It doesn't put people underthat pressure that you need to
feel so that if it ever happens,you have some muscle memory.
On that unrealistic point, howhelpful is it really to simulate
for an oil company that havegot some offshore installations
(08:25):
and you might have a fire on aplatform, but how helpful is it
really to then simulate a zombieinvasion over the top.
So we often see not quite thatextreme, but that gives you an
idea.
The third thing we see we neverget into the real detail and in
a response we might have somegeneral arrangements and we know
that no plan will survivecontact.
But there are certain thingsthat you do need to get into the
(08:47):
detail to really know will thiswork?
How does an interface workbetween different agencies?
Do we have contracts with theright provisions to give us what
we think we might need and theability to get more?
Quite often exercises are overtoo quickly.
They skim across the surface,so the big picture blocks kind
of fit, but the details haven'tbeen gotten into and that's
where are over too quickly.
They skim across the surface,so the big picture blocks kind
of fit, but the details haven'tbeen gotten into and that's
(09:07):
where we see things fall down.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
So I know both of you talked about how preparedness
documents are in some waydivorced from reality and so not
fit for purpose.
What do you see as some of thekey issues that come up when
they don't prepare us properlyfor dealing with real
emergencies and how we can thinkdifferently about how we
prepare dealing with realemergencies and how we can think
differently?
Speaker 3 (09:25):
about how we prepare.
I came from a world whereemergency plans didn't really
exist.
So you work internationally inlocations where you're working
on disaster risk reduction inareas prone to disasters, but
quite often it was straight intoresponse.
(09:46):
That preparedness piece wasn'tfocused on and invested in.
That wasn't to say that localgroups didn't know what they
were doing because of thefrequency and scale of some of
those events.
That was more than perhaps wewould experience in the UK, and
(10:07):
so it meant that I viewed a moretechnocratic, bureaucratic
approach with different eyes.
If we don't understand enoughabout the nature of the risk,
what people know, what peoplecan do, the resources that we
have, and we make basicassumptions that the impacts
(10:30):
will be linear if A do B and ifB do C and if C do D, we're
giving ourselves a falseimpression of resilience.
And then, when we base anexercise on that, where the
objectives are being set,validating our arrangements that
always strikes me as really odd.
(10:51):
Why aren't you validating whatyou've got and what you can do
and I know that's kind ofimplicit, but the testing the
arrangements comes first before.
Did we actually achieve what weset out to achieve?
That got me thinking what wouldhappen if we didn't have all
(11:13):
those documents, but we couldstill achieve the outcome and
that came from my background hadbeen all about climate change
and uncertainty Before thisnotion of adaptive capacity
became much more universal inthe world of resilience, climate
(11:35):
change, right from thebeginning, was talking about
adaptive capacity what we can donaturally and instinctively and
intuitively because you can'tscript and write for everything-
that is so interesting andreally well said.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
So speaking to that, are there any examples you could
point to in the real world thatillustrate the disconnect
around preparedness and how wecan fall into that trap of
rehearsing the script for a playthat will very quickly unravel
into something very differentand infinitely more complex?
Speaker 3 (12:14):
digital learning online schools being closed.
We weren't ready for that.
We planned for influenzapandemic, as opposed to any
other kind of variation on acommunicable disease, so we
(12:36):
didn't have much in the way ofadaptive capacity and so we
didn't say, okay, we might lockdown.
What would the consequence oflockdown?
What would the consequence ofkids not going to school?
And so we didn't say, ok, wemight lock down.
What would the consequence oflockdown?
What would the consequence ofkids not going to school?
And so we didn't develop thatweb and therefore our exercise
was a very narrow part of ourpreparedness, functionality and
capabilities that were testedand lessons were learned about
(13:00):
A&E and scaling up within thatkind of emergency health service
, but it didn't mean we wereready for a pandemic.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
That's a great example and really pertinent,
and I think it really shows howthere are so many cascading and
unintended repercussions thatcan't always be rehearsed but
can have profound real worldconsequences.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
And it's absolutely fine to have an exercise that
tests a part of that.
But you have to be very openand very transparent and provide
the evidence for the bit ofyour risk ecosystem that you are
now confident about, and youabsolutely should not say to
your CEO or set of directors oh,we're ready, bring it on,
(13:44):
because we're not.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Right right, that's really interesting.
So if I think about anemergency incident as a whole
jigsaw puzzle, essentially it'sensuring that you don't just
focus on one or two pieces ofthat jigsaw and then think you
have the whole picture figuredout.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Jigsaw is a great analogy and I think that takes
us all the way back to how doyou know how many pieces and how
big your jigsaw actually is?
And that's where the investmentis perhaps most worthwhile.
The big showpiece exercise thatproves that you've got a bunch
(14:21):
of people who can wade throughenough paperwork, use enough
apps, open enough software, fillin enough forms in the
timeframe to be able to put inplace those linear procedures
that demonstrate you canimplement those arrangements.
But it's in a rather simplisticand expected emergency scenario
(14:43):
.
There's value in it, but itdoesn't mean you're prepared and
you're resilient.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
So now I want to back out a bit and talk about the
blueprint you created, whichfocused on developing effective
exercises and also highlightedthe importance of taking a
holistic, systems-wide approachto that process.
Can you talk a bit about whatyou were trying to address with
this?
Speaker 2 (15:05):
when exercises are not approached holistically,
when they're dealt with inisolation and you've got
objectives or lessons that mightbe learned in one that are not
carried forward to the next, orwe're lost or we repeat
ourselves.
That would be one of thesymptoms of it not being thought
about holistically, not beingpart of a big exercise program.
Competency being more importantthan the plans by far is built
(15:28):
in blocks, and so a big,three-day 300-person exercise
might be appropriate if we'vebuilt in blocks the competence
of the team to get there wherewe can really make the most of
that big event.
We don't often see that, and Ithink the last would probably be
you need competent people whounderstand how things should go
(15:49):
in order to do assessment well,and that's often overlooked.
To do assessment well, andthat's often overlooked.
So if you reverse all of thosethat I've just talked about,
then you would have the recipe,which we've encapsulated in the
blueprint, for how to do thingsbetter.
There's lots and lots ofdoctrine out there about the
steps you need to take in orderto get from a blank sheet of
paper to an exercise.
We're not trying to replicatethe recipes for doing it.
(16:11):
There are many of them outthere.
They all do a good job.
They're pretty consistent witheach other, but what the
blueprint is trying to do is howto apply the recipe in order to
get the best bang for the buck.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And I think there are a few things you referenced
around proactive versus reactive.
Could you speak more to thatand also touch on something that
the blueprint emphasizes and Ithink it's worth highlighting
here that there is often a focuson the exercise itself as being
the place to learn, but youargue that there is a wealth of
learning to be had in theplanning of the exercise as well
.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
It's about being deliberate.
There are many things that Imight say that are incorrect in
a particular circumstance, butyou have to know the rules in
order to know how to break them.
So when I talk about proactiveversus reactive, a reactive
exercise might be in response toa legislative change, something
(17:08):
that was unanticipated, or amajor event somewhere which
hasn't been thought about bythis organization.
So we need to go and make surethat we are prepared should that
happen to us.
So there will be circumstanceswhere reactive exercise is
correct and appropriate.
But generally speaking, we wantto see exercises as proactive.
(17:29):
They are planned, they arethought about, they are part of
a program and a sequence that isvery deliberate in its design,
with very clear objectives, witha carryover of lessons and a
development of competence forthe team over time.
So that's what we mean by aproactive exercise.
That's why we think it'simportant to have so that when
(17:50):
you do see that big 300 personexercise once every three years,
it's the culmination, it's theworld cup final and you're ready
for it because everything hasbeen leading up to that so one
of the terms you use is thegolden thread, or having a
golden thread that connects keyelements of the preparedness
(18:12):
planning, and that's not to saythat the procedures and
processes used aren't importantthey're actually vital.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
But the blueprint you put forward moves beyond that,
and I think what you'reproposing is developing
exercises in a way thatultimately reinforces and
supports the learning andresilience of the individuals
who, at the end of the day, arethe ones that have to perform
that role in an emergency, wouldyou say.
That's true.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Absolutely, because we become plan focused and then
exercise arrangements as ourobjective, the golden thread is
lost because it's a very shortthread between the plan and
demonstrating that everybody canfollow the plan, whereas my
idea of this golden threadstarts with the risk, the scale
(18:59):
of the hazard and the threat,the vulnerable things that might
be affected, the feedbackmechanisms in terms of
consequences.
How big is the scale of therisk scenario?
That I need to understand.
So it has to be within my remitas an organisation.
But we have to work withpartners to acknowledge if
(19:23):
there's a failure in a supplychain, if the consequences are
already affecting the localhospitals or the local
environmental protection teams,they won't be able to do what
they need to do as effectively.
So we need to acknowledge that.
So the joint working thenbecomes really important, and
(19:47):
the information sharing and thecoordination.
And then the plans, which needto be written in such a way that
they're principled and outcomefocused, but with a set of
suggestions, and then theexercises can build on the
(20:08):
training and the competencies ofthose involved and we have an
assurance process that thenlooks at the exercise debrief
what scale of risks and natureof scenario did it deal with?
Were we flexible enough?
Can we look at the competenciesthat we're expecting of our
(20:29):
people as well as thearrangement that we put in play?
It's always seemed very strangeto me that you might use a very
small team or outsource theexercise design and development
process, because what scenarioshould we use?
How should we stretch things?
(20:49):
What do you know?
What's been your experience?
What were challenges last time?
By outsourcing, you lose allthat discursive social learning,
organisational learning, richanalysis, different people's
views and opinions.
It's just such a massive lossbackground where participatory
(21:11):
approaches in very low resourcedcommunities in coastal Sri
Lanka to help developpreparedness tools, it was all
about bringing people togetherto talk about and plan and there
was very little point in thosebig showy exercises.
Resilience is all aboutlearning to learn and I know for
(21:36):
some people quality assurancesounds really boring and really
bureaucratic.
But for me I find it reallyexciting.
By turning into a systems-basedapproach and that golden thread
, I'm linking all of thosehearts together and it just
(21:56):
means that a good qualityassurance process forces us to
think about whether or not ourrisk management ecosystem is
supporting us to actuallyimprove.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
So both of you emphasize resilience and I guess
the key question is how tobuild that resilience and
develop responders with theright mindset for responding
well in a crisis.
What's the most effectiveapproach?
Not just around programs orexercises, but having responders
who are ready for real worldscenarios, with all of the
unknowns that that might bring.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
Priority one is often having a plan as an output, a
written set of actions toachieve a particular goal, and
then the desire to demonstratethat we're prepared through
using an exercise where we justtest those arrangements but we
don't come out of that knowingwhat our limits are on our
(22:56):
capabilities and our capacitiesSeems to me we should flip our
objectives, not to test ourarrangements but to see what
scale of emergency we arecurrently fit to deal with, so
that shifts the objectives ofour exercise.
If we think about preparednessas a set of interrelated
(23:22):
activities aiming to improve ourcapacity and capabilities, then
that is a resilience-basedapproach.
Resilience is about change andimprovement.
If we have a mindset wherewe're simply setting out to
(23:42):
prove that we are prepared,those changes often make our
arrangements fit for theexercise or the emergency that
we've just experienced, notimproving and increasing our
adaptability, our flexibilityand our ability to be able to
deal with uncertain situations.
(24:02):
And I get that.
That experience and confidenceto be able to adapt and innovate
comes from practice and you maynot have the opportunity to get
that breadth and diversity ofexperience, which means we need
to change the way we think aboutexercises and training.
(24:25):
We've seen a shift to smallerscale, bite-sized training,
emergency scenarios, tabletopworking, discursive-based
activities that allow people toconsider, think, reflect on.
Is this process or procedureflexible enough?
(24:47):
Are these resources likely tobe sufficient?
Have we thought about the factthat we might not start from
this start point in an emergency?
So it might be winter, it mightbe in the middle of a economic
crisis, there might have been aprevious fire and we're already
(25:08):
damaged or limited in some way?
And those short tabletopdiscursive exercises provide
more of a training andcollective working and
understanding field than the bigshowpiece exercise.
And again, training is neededfor that familiarisation with
(25:30):
the fundamental procedures thatmean you're not going to
overstep the mark with yourregulations and your health and
safety.
That's important.
That's really important.
You need to have all of that inyour toolkit as a responder, to
be able to test and validatewhether or not your capabilities
(25:50):
and your capacities areflexible enough to be able to
deal with an unusual crisis.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah, that's great.
I think what you're talkingabout here is the real value of
working on a plan is actuallythe way it's carried forward in
the people that put it together,that it's not so much a
document that just sits thereand is pulled off the shelf in
an emergency, but there's been aprocess that people have been
involved with.
That means that a plan isessentially alive and those
people are ultimately on ajourney themselves to becoming
(26:22):
more competent and embodyingthat plan more completely.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Exactly to the point where the plan, the document
itself, becomes immaterial,because what you've developed is
a team of people andindividuals who can perform as
they need to in any type ofsituation.
There's an interesting quotewhich encapsulates what we try
and do when we're teachingpeople to be in an incident
management team.
Your job as a responder is todo precision guesswork based on
(26:50):
unreliable data provided bythose of questionable knowledge,
and so, actually, the plandoesn't particularly help you
when you're up at that level.
You don't need it, becauseyou're able to work with
uncertainty, with volatility,with ambiguity and complexity.
You're able to perform asindividuals in a team with the
problem in front of you, withouthaving to get bogged down in
(27:12):
things like the process.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
So can you relate that to the idea of bite-sized
learning and hyper-realism andhow you incorporate that into
your trainings.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
We work with a client where, over a two and a half
day period, we run fivehyper-realistic scenarios for
them and each one has aprogression that builds the team
and builds the individuals upto that cruising altitude that
we want.
And each scenario might onlylast an hour and a half, but in
that time the hyper-realismcomes from the way that we
deliver the injects, the waythat something will happen in
(27:43):
the room.
Someone will say something.
We will role play a journalist,for example.
We will catch someone unawares.
They'll say something theymaybe shouldn't have said.
The next inject would be as itwould be in real life A news
story that's just quotingsomeone showing the picture from
their profile.
When we wire people up, whichwe sometimes do, to the heart
rate monitors to see how thelevel of stress is in the room,
(28:05):
you can see the spike.
That's real.
That feels hyper-realistic.
That person has just got agreat lesson from that example.
The other way that we would doit in scenario design is making
sure that you get all thedetails right so that it feels
like the operation.
We've got the names correct.
We know the operations insideout.
Everything would happen in theway that people would anticipate
would through.
So getting to that real levelof detail for a scenario is that
(28:29):
part of that hyper realism.
But you can compress it and itdoesn't have to be a three-day
300 person event.
It can be an hour with fivepeople, 10 people.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
And I think perhaps one of the other things in terms
of making this more efficientis if over the next five years
as an organisation, you developmore but smaller exercises or
less resource-intensive, sothey're more tabletop-y, virtual
discursive, you will kill twobirds with one stone.
(28:59):
You will come to understand andmap your risk ecosystem through
that more frequent discursiveprocess as you try and design
exercise scenarios and that canthen feed back into your risk
assessments.
So whichever comes firstwhether the risk assessment is
done discursively andparticipatory, whether the
(29:21):
planning is done with diverserange of stakeholders and by
table topic exercises, use thatprocess and that approach.
Don't put somebody in an officeon their own with a spreadsheet
to do it.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
That's really well said, although, because in my
day job I work in wildlifeemergency response.
Rather than kill two birds withone stone, I like to say catch
two birds with one net.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Okay, yes, that's much, much better.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
So ultimately, this approach really helps training
and test resilience in a realworld way, and that training
develops the right mindset forresponders to swim rather than
sink in a high intensitysituation.
And what's interesting in someof the ways that this is now
being applied are that they'reactually borrowed from sports
psychology and training.
Can you speak a bit more aboutthat?
Speaker 2 (30:11):
a lot of the research , the organizations that we've
worked with to get to this pointare around sport, psychology,
sport performance where youthink about you're taking the
penalty kick or the drop goal,high pressure situation.
The world is watching you.
There are consequences if youdon't get this right.
It's the same in a crisis.
So how do we give people thetools, how do we develop the
mindset so that they can performin that really stressful
(30:33):
situation?
You need the mindset to beright in a crisis team with the
individuals to be able toperform under pressure and for
the team to have that mindset ofsolving the problem and not
getting stuck in an analysis,paralysis or any of those
factors that hinder them.
So one of the ways that weillustrate that point is we've
(30:53):
got heart monitors that we'llput on people so at different
points in the course you canillustrate it for the room the
effect of stress that we canshow through heart rate
variability on the monitor, andthen that helps to position for
what we do.
Next is we give people somereally practical tools how they
can manage pressure so that itdoesn't manifest as stress on
(31:15):
them or totally natural foreveryone to go through that
initial fight, flight, freezeresponse.
We help people understand whatit is, that it doesn't manifest
as stress on them or totallynatural for everyone to go
through that initial fightflight freeze response.
We help people understand whatit is, how it works, how we can
work for them in a positive way,and so over a standard two and
a half or three day course, youcan see the application of those
tools and by the end you cansee people using what works for
(31:35):
them and performing much moreeffectively under pressure, much
more confidently, much morecompetently.
And then they can take itoutside of the scenarios and if
they ever need to use it in reallife, it's there.
They can bring it back.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
It's got the muscle with it so if you're an
emergency planner listening tothis and you're trying to
breathe new life into yourprogram, what would be some of
the first steps that you suggestthat they would take?
Making sure that their trainingand exercises are fit for
purpose and maybe, if they'reconsidering implementing the
kind of model you're talkingabout?
Speaker 2 (32:07):
first of all read the blueprint.
That's an easy one againstwhatever other doctrine that you
need to follow for theorganization that you're in.
About how to do it show you howto apply that.
But I guess if break it down,it's stand back and look at the
big picture.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Number one I think my first question would be what's
the unarguable evidence that youcan do what you say you can do
when you need to do it?
And then, if you say, well,it's from that exercise we did
last year, I would suggest goback and say, right, what were
(32:45):
the injects based on?
Why did we choose that location, that scenario?
Does that link back to our riskanalysis?
Let me look around the sectorand see whether or not there is
evidence that it could be bigger, it could be different, more
people could be involved.
(33:05):
The starting point could bedifferent.
I think the one thing that Iwould emphasise is involving as
many stakeholders as possible inthe exercise development and
that the exercise day is not theend point.
The exercise development is thebeneficial process.
Speaker 1 (33:26):
So we live in a very dynamic, fast-changing world,
and sometimes we're dealing notjust with the initial emergency,
but compounded issues that cansurface as a result of cascading
repercussions from the thingsthat are happening.
So when I think about exercisesin this ever-changing world
that we're in, I guess myquestion to both of you is do
you believe it is truly possibleto be prepared and resilient?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah, I think it is, and I think the organizations
that do it well are the ones whoare honest about where they are
, where they need to be, and areprepared to make the investment
to understand that having acompetent team and a simple
process to deal with any sort ofunusual circumstance is what
(34:14):
they need to be shooting for.
It doesn't have to be complex,but I think it's totally
possible and I would go as faras to say it's unreasonable.
If you don't do that, there arereal-life consequences on
whatever organisation you are.
If you're the emergencyservices, being unprepared means
(34:35):
people might die.
If you're in the energyindustry and you have operations
, you have real risk wherepeople might die.
In organizations with adifferent risk profile, you
still have the continuity of theorganization at risk if you
have a crisis that you areunprepared for.
So I think it's not onlypossible to be resilient, it's
(34:59):
absolutely critical that you'reresilient.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
I have found that I have recently made a lot of use
of the word acceptable.
So the culture change aboutshifting from knowing what will
happen to being uncertain aboutwhat will happen, to being
uncertain about what will happenand thinking about what would
be acceptable.
There are some things that itis not acceptable that should
(35:31):
happen.
It would not be acceptable toaccept any degree of loss of
life, although in some emergencyscenarios, scenarios it is
almost inevitable.
But I think setting ourselvesup to be prepared to be able to
prevent certain things and forthe rest of it we are winging it
(35:53):
.
We know we've got skilled peoplebecause we know that they can
innovate.
We've got good workingrelationships with partners who
can offer us mutual aid, all ofthose things.
That's resilience.
The formal procedures are madefor bending, the formal
(36:19):
procedures are made for bending.
So for me, resilient is notwhat you do, it's how you do it.
And preparedness is beingprepared to draw on more than
you've got, because in thecrisis and emergency that's the
very nature of it it's beyondyour capacity to be able to cope
(36:42):
with what you've got.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
So you have to think beyond that, thank you for
listening to the Response ForceMultiplier from OSRL.
Please like and subscribewherever you get your podcasts
and stay tuned for more episodesas we continue to explore key
(37:08):
issues in emergency response andcrisis management.
Next time on the Response ForceMultiplier.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
If we invite people to think about what mindset hat
do you put on when you're underpressure, we can learn to think
about pressure in a way that ishelpful.
We might not enjoy the feelingsand the discomfort, but to know
that pressure is necessary forus to give our best can help
people to start to look at itdifferently.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
For more information, head to osrlcom.
We'll see you soon.
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