Field of Dreams

“If you build it, they will come.”

An oft quoted line from a movie that came out before I was born. That’s right, I am a millennial. But I grew up loving baseball so of course I had the VHS (again millennial, not Gen-Z, I know the pain of having to rewind a VHS before sending it back to Blockbuster). When I was looking for the obligatory outdated pop culture reference to slap at the top of my blog post (I 100% wrote this paragraph last by the way), I figured this one made a lot of sense. Allow me to twist myself into a knot to make it fit what I am about to say.  

When it comes to emergency management, we drive our entire planning process around the idea that we’re going to go through this workflow: build assumptions, talk to stakeholders, hold a few planning meetings, and in the end, we will come out of it with “the plan”. The Mass-Care Plan. The Pandemic Plan. The Business Continuity Plan. And once we have that plan, we’ll run a yearly tabletop or exercise with the selected stakeholders (and the people we need to keep happy by including) and by doing that, we’ve got them locked in. Complete buy-in with the plan by leadership and managers alike. But then the gray clouds roll in. The disruption we planned for occurs and the first thing that happens? “The plan” goes out the window. It turns out the managers who participated in the tabletop never brought it back to their staff, so the person IT sent to do a 2-hour shift in the EOC has no idea what is going on. Sure, he took the IC 100 and 700 course. They could draw an ICS chart that would make you weep. But what he is struck by is the fact that “IT Person” doesn’t seem to be a position on the org chart in the IAP. The VOAD director attended every planning meeting, how come these volunteer agencies seem lost? Slowly the realization sets in that despite our best efforts, we’re once again building the plane as we are flying it. But how could this be? We followed FEMAs Comprehensive Planning Guide 101 to a tee. We even used their template! 

This is a fundamental problem in how modern emergency planning is being executed across the country. We keep trying to develop “the plan”. Keep in mind, I say “in how it is executed” not because the problem is with the concept, the people, or the field, but rather how it is being applied. You see, EM is a big team. Sure, you have your EM department within your business or municipality (well let’s be honest, it’s an additional role of your fire department in the latter), but the reality is that when facing a wide-spread disaster, everyone ends up involved. COVID showed us just how wide a response structure can spread out, how many stakeholders are truly out there. Many more than you can fit in a conference room on a Wednesday afternoon or can speak up during a 90-minute Zoom call. 

The outcome of emergency planning should be capacity, not “the plan”. When faced with a problem, it is natural for us to want to provide a tangible outcome, proof that we accomplished something. To that end, those who are facing a challenge within the realm of emergency preparedness often start on a journey to build a solution that will ready us to face those hazards in the future. We determine our assumptions for the process, we lay out a project timeline, stakeholders, and schedule planning meetings. And in the end, we pump out a 30 – 60-page document, with echoes of the format of a FEMA.gov template with some of our own spice thrown in to make it “different”. We might add additional context, throw in values such as “whole community” or “all-hazards” (we can tackle those buzz words a different day). In the end, we have a written plan for business continuity that we email to our higher-ups and look for buy-in to run a tabletop exercise. 

But when the disruption comes along that calls for plan activation, very quickly that document goes out the window. Suddenly we need to engage with divisions in our business that we didn't expect, that didn’t show up to the tabletop because they had an important meeting that day. Leadership requests us to take actions that weren’t “planned” for: they seem to not remember what they agreed to in those planning meetings as to what is “essential” and what is not. And the rest of the employees that are called on to step up quickly start asking when they can get back to their regular day-to-day job and normal hours. We can get away with pushing through these in smaller scale disruptions – a snowstorm shuts down a branch office for a day or two and we have to push around workflow – but in a three year long pandemic? We saw all of those assumptions we built into the plan go right out the window, and we quickly realized that those IC 100 and 700 courses we had all the employees take didn’t exactly get committed to memory. And why would they? They aren’t part of their job when the sky is blue. That’s all just “EM jargon” and they’ll be told what they need to do when the time comes, right? 

Given this, is it wrong to write and develop plans? Of course not. They can act as a great reference. Many municipalities dusted off their pandemic plans during COVID, sharpened by preparing for influenza or Ebola outbreaks, that helped get their response off the ground. But that’s what they are- references. As soon as you hit save on the Word 2016 document (don’t worry, your town will upgrade to Office 365 by year 3 of the 5-year plan), they’re outdated. What truly mattered was the planning process. How did we engage those stakeholders? Who did we select? How involved should they be? Was it more important that the department head be involved in the planning, or the employees who themselves would be taking on additional responsibilities? We spend a lot of time in emergency preparedness thinking about how best to operationalize these planning documents, when in reality, we should be spending that time considering how we are shaping the planning process in the first place. The value in planning is the journey itself: the engagement and buy-in you build with your stakeholders as they discuss hazards, challenge assumptions, and build solutions. The document you print out at the end of that process is just the scorecard that 10-year-old Andy reads on the sports page the following morning because the Sox were playing on the west coast, and he couldn’t stay up late enough.

Andy Platt is Founder/COO of Blue Sky Planning Partners, a consulting firm that supports emergency preparedness and continuity planning for organizations and municipalities. If you’d like to reach out to Andy to discuss how Blue Sky Planning Partners can support your business/organization/municipality, you can reach him at aplatt@blueskyplanningpartners.com.