Babe Ruth once said, “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”
That is a great quote which sticks in the mind long after you initially hear it.
Today, almost every organization depends heavily on people outside of their traditional framework. Organizations must reply on a network of suppliers, partners, consultants, and others to succeed. That network, in times of emergency, becomes even more valuable for a variety of reasons. What can people do to enhance the effectiveness of these networks for today and for tomorrow’s emergencies? To paraphrase Ruth, how can your network “play together” today to prepare for tomorrow’s emergency?
I have a solution which might help everyone, whether you are a manager in a large organization like Exxon or the owner of a small pet shop. You must train your people today to build networks to use for tomorrow. You must create a reason for network building today with current and future partners.
I personally saw how the tactic of regular networking created huge benefits for all parties involved. After 9/11, regional federal leaders in Kansas City and other nearby cities like Denver and Dallas sought ways to enhance their readiness for the feared next attack. The local Federal Executive Boards (FEB) started a committee where all agency emergency and continuity personnel met monthly for training, emotional support, and anything else which might come up. This experiment helped enhance organizational readiness, train personnel, and build networks across organizational lines all at the same time. My point of view is on what occurred in the Kansas City area.
I know few people ever heard about the Federal Executive Boards. The FEB were set up by President Kennedy back in 1961. Their mission is to foster communication, coordination, and collaboration across federal agencies in various cities outside of Washington, D.C. They provide and facilitate for a wide range of services. Then this new ad-hoc emergency committee was chaired both by FEMA and GSA. The committee tried to provide timely and relevant information on emergencies to member agencies. Unforeseen things grew from that information call. The committee became an organizational structure which seemed to significantly shape the individual organizational environment and better enhance their readiness posture for emergencies.
This experiment within the bureaucracy, which by itself is rare, almost overnight radically changed the communications operating environment. The emergency committee set up a sub-committee focused on continuity. The meetings by themselves provided a mechanism which changed everyone’s frame of mind. The process of going to the meetings, attending training, and learning about lessons learned from recent emergencies affected committee members. They started to view old issues with new eyes. New solutions for old problems came to mind. Some people realized they had new problems they didn’t even know about.
Each continuity committee meeting had some time allotted for training on some issue. As the committee started to meet regularly, committee members individually started to attend more in-depth training. This became possible because the committee provided economy of scale to make it easier for FEMA to bring in Emergency Management Institute (EMI) training to town for everyone. Also, the networking done through the meetings made it easier for mutual work on training. Often one agency would bring in a class on a continuity subject just for their employees. They would fall short on meeting minimum student numbers. However, through contacts made in the committee they could acquire new students to fill up the class from other agencies. This education effort which started through the committee slowly built a foundation of standardized knowledge across the community.
The committee became a forum where members often learned about lessons learned from recent disasters. Since FEMA led the committee, they easily had access to speakers or presentations about lessons learned from disasters across the world. One time we learned about the U.S. response in Haiti from personnel who had been there. Common disaster issues like logistics and communications came alive through those stories. At another time the topic became the Joplin tornado response. Everyone could learn about what worked or didn’t from the practitioners themselves who had just returned from working in the disaster. That first hand account made the lessons learned about logistics, safety, communications, and other topics come across much stronger than it would have normally.
Halfway through the first year of the committee almost all federal agencies in the Kansas City area decided to stage a continuity exercise. The exercise was called Regional Interagency Coop Exercise (RICE). Initially the exercise would be one giant tabletop involving more than 600 people from just about every agency in town. After proficiency grew across the community, the exercise grew to be one big operational deployment exercise spread out all over the city. It even grew to cover the St. Louis area agencies. The scenarios always varied, but the continuity process almost always stayed the same.
The exercises performed dual functions. First, the exercise tested their plan to see if it accomplishes the desired goals. A second benefit emerged. The exercise served as a training vehicle for everyone involved. The exercises served as a catalyst for learning. The joint process made the adult experiential learning concept come alive. The stimulation from the exercise helps participants create a mental model about the concepts of emergency response and continuity principles. It helped the person experience the concepts for themselves. These were people who were not emergency responders but continuity specialists within their agency. So, the material did not come naturally. It helped people assimilate the new information quickly with their existing knowledge base. That step accelerated capacity growth for each agency. Once the basics were learned, more complex issues were easily addressed.
The collective experience of the exercise pooled minds about problems and status. Everyone in the agency could see collectively where they stood on the basics such as communications. Shortfalls across the board stood out on the operational side. The open airing of these shortfalls started a brainstorming process to find solutions. I saw the agency which I worked for at the time leap into telework much faster than normal, all from lessons learned in continuity exercises. These procurements and changes then would start after the exercise in preparation for next year’s exercise.
The committee meetings generated a new surprising benefit. Each member agency would send personnel to attend a monthly meeting. Committee members formed social bonds and developed a high degree of trust with each other through meetings and classes. These bonds helped grow lateral communications across agency lines. So, one person’s problem would bring in a wide range of solutions across committee membership to help out on the problem. I know of one case where one agency entered into a deal with another agency to use their spare space as an alternate emergency facility. This action would not have occurred without the prior groundwork which started in earlier committee work.
That networking helped people deal with the future. No one knows what the future holds, but the one constant change is people. Different organizations work together to fix problems. A great example lies in any emergency over the past 15 years or so.
Right now, emergency response resembles a marble cake because it blends multiple cake flavors to create a unique taste at the end. A collective effort from federal, state, county, city, and others come together to respond to disaster survivors. Their collective effort blends strengths to do something individually which each entity could not do themselves.
A good example of this “cake collaborative” management response lies in the Miami, Fla., area, according to researchers Naim Kapucu from the University of Central Florida and Vener Garayev from Gediz University. The Miami metro area has three counties in their Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) including Miami Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. Twenty-one different cities make up the Miami metro MSA. Each county collaborates in emergencies with 60 to 90 different companies or non-profit charities. Each entity in that “cake” needs the other in some way. All of those organizations must collaborate with others in the emergency which brought them together. Most of the time the large ad-hoc team involved parties that do not usually interact with each other. The same situation we see in Miami exists in many other cities across the country. The key to efficiently operating within the same cake during a disaster lies in networking with others.
Obtaining information creates the key to success for many organizations. That key to success lies in having the network, or forming it quickly, and having that base knowledge of the operating environment to guide operations and actions. Often, an organization only has a sliver of information about what is going on. Critical information can escape organizations, sometimes for days on end. As you would expect, this lack of information makes operations and coordination across organizational lines difficult.
Joint research by Nitesh Bharosa and Marijn Janssen from Delft University in the Netherlands, and JinKyu Lee of Oklahoma State University, found out that poor information sharing across organizations and activity coordination had a negative influence on actions. According to Yung-Fan Chen and Edward Borodzicz of the University of Portsmouth, the problem of not having the information you need becomes a key factor in a system failure or system breakdown.
Activities like the FEB emergency and continuity sub-committee helps prepare people to succeed in those disasters. It gives people a base of knowledge which helps them operate in the confusion. That base knowledge tells people where to start looking for answers. Relationships formed in training events and exercises might help them in future problems. Often people find they work in very small communities. They bump into the same people over and over. The committee work trains people in how to interact and communicate with others not like them. It also helps people learn how to build networks with people they don’t know. The process of working through the committee and different agency cultures, personnel, experience, and operating practices teaches people how to come together in spite of the differences. Many scholars refer to the success of the U.S. Coast Guard actions rescuing people during Hurricane Katrina to their proper understanding of hierarchies and networks. They used the networks to find the information they needed.
Now these committees are common procedure for all FEB across the country. Overall, these joint committees with like organizations can create huge advantages. These committees provide a mechanism to allow “teams,” like Ruth said, to play together. They provide a means to educate people faster than they will achieve by themselves. Then the collective experience from meetings, classes, or exercises creates social networks. These networks become methods to help people through future disasters. It becomes a way to play how you practice for the next disaster. It helps one create an organization worth much more than a dime.
