Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

They say that the devil is in the details. They also say that God is in the details. Whichever one is true, the main gist is cor­rect: you’ve got to pay atten­tion to the details if you want your emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre (EOC) to oper­ate smoothly and effec­tively. You need to pay atten­tion to details regarding:

• com­mu­ni­ca­tion within the EOC
• shared sit­u­a­tion awareness
• record­keep­ing & doc­u­men­ta­tion within the EOC
• com­mu­ni­ca­tion with exter­nal agencies
• shift changes

An emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre is, by nature, a com­mu­ni­ca­tion and coor­di­na­tion hub. That’s why it exists. Yet, I ask you how well peo­ple within your emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre really com­mu­ni­cate with one another. Really, how well do they com­mu­ni­cate? Do you know? Have you run exer­cises with peo­ple actu­ally play­ing through sce­nar­ios in the EOC? If not, then you don’t really know how peo­ple will react and perform.

When I ran an exer­cise in the our EOC last month, we found that there needed to be more and bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion between our var­i­ous sec­tions: Oper­a­tions, Plan­ning, Logis­tics and Finance & Admin. We also needed bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the Inci­dent Com­man­der through to all the sec­tions. In the debrief­ing that we con­ducted imme­di­ately after the exer­cise, par­tic­i­pants brought forth sev­eral rec­om­men­da­tions. We imple­mented a few of them, and to great effect.

The first is the use of a dash­board pro­jected on the wall at the front of the EOC. Dur­ing the exer­cise, we had used a Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion that kept cycling through mul­ti­ple slides. There was an area map, there was a background/context slide, there was a Cur­rent Sit­u­a­tion slide. How­ever, it was wordy, repet­i­tive, didn’t draw atten­tion to new con­tent, and some found it annoy­ing to be cycling all day. We replaced it with a solu­tion designed in-house (by yours truly!) using a data­base back­end to col­lect and process infor­ma­tion sub­mit­ted by any and all sta­tions in the EOC and using Excel to for­mat and present at the front of the room.  This solu­tion made updates instan­ta­neous and did not require one cen­tral per­son to mod­ify the Pow­er­point slides. It visu­ally high­lighted new con­tent, and allowed infor­ma­tion seg­men­ta­tion by sec­tor and chrono­log­i­cal organization.

Dur­ing the exer­cise, infor­ma­tion was shared pretty well within each sec­tion — pri­mar­ily by bounc­ing emails through shared email accounts for each sec­tion — but there was lit­tle com­mu­ni­ca­tion that enabled the entire EOC to remain aware of new devel­op­ments and main­tain a shared sit­u­a­tion aware­ness.  The intro­duc­tion and adop­tion of this dis­trib­uted dash­board sys­tem changed things. Now, when any sec­tion saw some­thing new hap­pen­ing, within sec­onds every­one in the room could see it. If some­one stepped away for a few min­utes or had been pre­oc­cu­pied with a task for a few min­utes, all they had to do was look up at the dash­board and see what had devel­oped since they last checked. Instant, effi­cient, and effective.

We also insti­tuted regularly-scheduled EOC brief­ings from the Inci­dent Com­man­der or the Oper­a­tions Chief. Many of the peo­ple in our EOC are office work­ers who are used to work­ing qui­etly. They’re not accus­tomed to actu­ally talk­ing to share infor­ma­tion across desks or between sec­tions. Yet, even with the dash­board on the wall, lead­ers need to ensure that every­one has a shared under­stand­ing of what’s hap­pen­ing, and what our plan is.  An inci­dent action plan is use­less unless the peo­ple who have to carry it out in a coor­di­nated fash­ion know what’s going on and what they need to do. By includ­ing sched­uled ver­bal brief­ings by lead­ers to the entire EOC, sit­u­a­tion aware­ness and coor­di­na­tion was improved in a vis­i­ble and obvi­ous manner.

Dur­ing the exer­cise, we had also failed to prop­erly doc­u­ment our actions. We did not main­tain action logs at each sta­tion, so it would have been impos­si­ble to piece together what each sta­tion had done dur­ing the evo­lu­tion of each sce­nario. That can be a minor hin­drance in an exer­cise, but it can mean seri­ous con­se­quences if there is an inves­ti­ga­tion fol­low­ing an actual acti­va­tion & response, whether that inves­ti­ga­tion is purely inter­nal or con­ducted by exter­nal agen­cies. Along the same lines as the dis­trib­uted dash­board, we imple­mented another Access data­base solu­tion that enabled each sta­tion to quickly type in action or deci­sion updates. The Access form would auto­mat­i­cally time­stamp each entry and add tags indi­cat­ing which sta­tion and indi­vid­ual had made the entry. It was far faster than a hand­writ­ten log and far eas­ier for the Finance & Admin sec­tion to pull out reports on the back-end than hav­ing each sta­tion use indi­vid­ual Excel or Word documents.

“Every­thing in war is sim­ple, but the sim­plest thing is dif­fi­cult. The dif­fi­cul­ties accu­mu­late and end by pro­duc­ing a kind of fric­tion that is incon­ceiv­able unless one has expe­ri­enced war.”
–Karl von Clausewitz

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion with exter­nal agen­cies is always thorny thanks to what can only be called “fric­tion”. The notable Ger­man strate­gist von Clause­witz is remem­bered well for his state­ment that even the sim­plest things are dif­fi­cult in war because lit­tle dif­fi­cul­ties accu­mu­late to pro­duce maddeningly-disruptive fric­tion that grinds one’s efforts to a halt. Sim­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion with exter­nal agen­cies can be fraught with such fric­tion. In our case, dur­ing our EOC acti­va­tion, our reg­u­larly sched­uled coor­di­na­tion tele­con­fer­ences expe­ri­enced the fol­low­ing issues:

• exter­nal agen­cies unsure which day the sched­uled calls would begin, even though they had received infor­ma­tion about the start date mul­ti­ple times in advance
• a typo in dis­trib­uted doc­u­ment, lead­ing half of the peo­ple to call the wrong num­ber on the first day
• tele­con­fer­ence sys­tem mal­func­tion which resulted in mul­ti­ple, inde­pen­dent tele­con­fer­ences being merged into one free-for-all com­mu­ni­ca­tion melee
• unau­tho­rized access to one of the tele­con­fer­ences, lead­ing to a num­ber of sub­se­quent changes in access num­bers and even tele­con­fer­ence services

Plan for con­tin­gen­cies. Check and double-check. It’s tedious, it’s annoy­ing, but it’s nec­es­sary. Yet, I’m will­ing to bet you still won’t catch all the lit­tle grem­lins that lurk in the details when it comes to com­mu­ni­ca­tion — even when it’s some­thing as basic as tele­con­fer­ences (albeit in our case it involved over 2 dozen exter­nal agen­cies and ourselves).

No sin­gle shift can remain oper­a­tional for mul­ti­ple 24-hour peri­ods. No decision-maker can remain sharp for mul­ti­ple 24-hour peri­ods, either. In fact, for sus­tained oper­a­tions, you must have mul­ti­ple shifts of per­son­nel and lead­er­ship. We’re all human. Yet, change of shift intro­duces small chal­lenges related to pass­ing on suf­fi­cient infor­ma­tion and con­text to sub­se­quent shifts.

A sin­gle busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity or emer­gency man­age­ment exer­cise likely will not require shift changes unless you design them in because exer­cises sel­dom run for more than a day, and often for much less than a full day.  Yet, this oft-ignored ele­ment of EOC oper­a­tions is crit­i­cal to ensur­ing a smooth, effec­tive response to what­ever the sit­u­a­tion hap­pens to be. In our case, we ensured time over­lap between shifts, devel­oped infor­ma­tion teplates to cap­ture the infor­ma­tion that sub­se­quent shifts would require, and we had the dash­board at the front of the EOC show­ing the next shift recent infor­ma­tion updates and currently-developing situations.

Run­ning an emer­gency oper­a­tions cen­tre is not an easy thing. You need to ensure that you have the right peo­ple, the right tools, the right struc­ture and processes, but you also need to pay atten­tion to the lit­tle details that enable all of those resources to func­tion the way you envi­sion.  Pay atten­tion to the details. Pay atten­tion to the details. Pay atten­tion to the details.

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