Removing a Critical Program Roadblock

Many years ago, I worked for a person in emergency management who, more than any other person I have met since, believed she should keep the details of her work and knowledge secret. Much like intelligence and investigative officials protect sources and methods by not discussing them, this emergency manager left almost everyone guessing what she did and how she did it. She reasoned that by doing so, she would be seen as invaluable. And for a while, she was correct. But then she got lazy, abrasive, isolated, and started making mistakes. No one stepped forward to help her. She quietly retired, took most of her knowledge with her and now few at the agency where she worked almost 20 years knows about her. 

Few things have changed more in emergency management over the past 30 years than appreciation for the collaborative nature inherent in truly getting prepared. Once the domain of retired military officers, civil defense programs have evolved from helping populations survive nuclear war and natural hazards to consider civil unrest, hazardous materials, homeland security, climate change, pandemic and, most recently the effects of uncontrolled immigration. What were largely instructive tasks for EMs (i.e., teaching people how to duck and cover or survive radiological fallout), are now mostly facilitation tasks (i.e., developing, testing, revising and maintaining joint CONOPs and requisite capabilities). More than ever before, EMs are now needed to bring people together, socialize risk, seek shared solutions, gain consensus, facilitate practice, and keep collaboration continuously productive.

We’re not quite there yet, but we’ll soon reach a point in emergency management when the program is more valuable than the program coordinator, when the ability to effectively adapt, using collaborative work models to changing conditions will become more important than being a repository of knowledge and maybe even experience. One thing an emergency manager can do to better ensure this desirable outcome is to develop a program administrative manual. More than just a COOP for an EM program, it’s a policy and procedure document that guides the current EM and future EMs to conduct work most effectively and efficiently. And if a program doesn’t have detailed EOP annexes or EOC SOPs, an admin manual can be a job-saver, say if someone else needs to launch a WEA message while an EM is on vacation. The same EM admin manual can also be used to explain your program to partners, sponsors and other stakeholders. I’d definitely show it to a boss and anyone wondering what an EM does. The mere task of writing and, if necessary, rewriting a manual can serve to really clarify what one does and what one should do when faced with competing priorities.

What my former EM supervisor thought and did back in the 1990s was, admittedly, a part of human nature and probably once served a greater purpose. However, too many citizens, businesses, NGOs, partner agencies, and leaders now rely on EMs, such that what we used to do for *ss protection and turf maintenance is becoming less understandable and more contemptable. Frankly, it’s one of the things about so much reliance on NIMS that scares me. When EMs come to be seen as mostly keepers of a secret system, language and form set, our jobs will become exponentially more difficult.

If you haven’t yet tried to write down what you do for a living as an effective EM and how you do it, I’d recommend giving it a try. You’ll become a better EM and help more people along the way. 

George Whitney is a former local, state and federal emergency manager who founded Complete EM, a Software as a Service (SaaS) and consultancy helping emergency managers achieve program success. Click here to join Complete EM's email list where you'll receive free emergency management program tips. You may also feel free to join him as a connection on LinkedIn.