What is situational awareness?

What is situational awareness? It as been the catch phrase in many of  the discussions but what is it? How do you achieve it after a disaster? How do you retain it during the operational phase?

In the chaos of a disaster. What specific steps should be taken to gain situational awareness for yourself and your team? There has to be a formal set of procedures to gain a complete picture of a disaster. You cannot simply say you need to have it without a structured set of policies and procedures you implement to attain it and retain it. What do you and your organization use to sort and prioritize the flood of information that will be generated after a disaster into an accurate and understandable shared situational awareness for yourself and your team.

In my book Disaster Operations and Decision Making I lay out a specific set of steps to gain the type of situational awareness needed during a disaster. It is a structure for the information to sorted, prioritized and shared so the whole team understands not only their own specific challenges but the situational as a whole. The following is an outline of that set of procedures.

Essential Element of Information (EEI)- what specific resources, and critical infrastructure in your community or organization is vital to your response and to make decisions on how to use those resources. What  specific facilities i.e. hospitals, schools, nursing homes and the myriad of other high priority life hazards have been affected. This can be as long and as complex as needed then divided ESF’s  specific responsibilities. 

Visualization- turning the Essential Elements of Information into a actual picture of resources, damage and operations.

Common Operating Picture (COP)- once a picture of the entire disaster has begun to emerge then the EOC team can begin to have a COP of the disaster. A COP is created by a common visualization showing the whole picture not just the narrow view of a single ESF.

Shared Situational Awareness- once a COP has been obtained then a shared situational awareness for the EOC team has been achieved. Now informed decisions can be made but a disaster is a moving target. The ground truth will continue to change, continue to evolve so the previous steps must be continuously updated so the COP is always changing. As your information changes then priorities and decisions can change to meet the new challenges based the best and most important information available. 

Is emergency management dead?

Someone in one of the discussion group asked if emergency management is dying. His point really was “is it changing into something we will not recognize in the future”. Emergency Management is not dying but it is changing. As always in a rapidly changing environment their are growing pains.  One of my favorite gripes is there is no recognized professional ladder for these recent college gradates to leave school and begin their careers. There are a myriad of ways to eventually get in but it is difficult for them to crack the field. Other professionals in those discussion groups suggest everything from getting CERT trained to volunteering at the local office. We do need a recognized and accepted path into the field for new graduates or we are going to loose them.

In the public sector, my experience, the jobs are few and far between and many times they are still a political appointment that can change from election to election. The easiest example is at the national level. When President Bush came into office he replaced James Lee Witt with his campaign manager. This happens at the state and local levels everyday. Add to that the lack of staff for these local and state offices In my county alone due to the present climate the county the staff has been cut in half. I live in Florida where we should have learned the lessons of not having emergency management infrastructure. Yet we are not seen as part of the community's public safety team. While the fact is we are  the leader of that team during an disaster.

Now lets something clear I do thing that the private sector is opening up for these graduates. This is a comment from the outside I have no experience in private sector emergency management. My heart has always been in the public sector so my comments are aimed at my side of the fence. Yet I would argue that climate is much the same in private sector based on what I have read.

So as a profession as a whole we do need to be asking ourselves a number of hard questions. How do we create a way for new college graduates to be given the opportunity to begin their careers? How can they gain the experience they will need for the leadership role they will play? How do we make emergency management more relevant to corporation president, elected and appointed officials and seen less as a have to do and more as critical to operations?

We all have a ways to go. I been in it for over thirty years. I remember the creation of FEMA. So those of us who have been in the profession that long have helped created this profession but the future is really up to all us 

Key Decision Log

Once again the Wildfire community is leading the way in developing tools that are leading the emergency response and emergency management community in developing tools needed in all the communities. The Key Decision Log designed to be used periodically during a response to review decisions made during the incident is a key action in developing situational awareness and a common operating picture. This allows commanders and their team to review and to analyze their decision in almost real time. It can be used at shift change briefs and during the planning period for the next Incident Action Plan. It is a simple yet powerful concept of analyzing why a decision was made and making sure that the whole team understands the reasoning behind the decision. It also records the affects of that decision on the incident. This type of document should adopted in every EOC in the country as a response tool for any type of incident.

Large Fire Management Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

Key Decision Log  

The Key Decision Log (KDL) is one of a suite of evolving tools that make up the WFDS System. It allows Agency Administrators, Fire Management Officers, incident management organizations and other fire leaders to accurately record, in near-real time, implementation decisions that directly and indirectly affect the management of a wildland fire.

Identifying best practices and promoting organizational learning is the cornerstone of a High Reliability Organization (HRO). By understanding how and why decision makers select a specific course of action, the complexity of an incident can be better understood and transparently communicated through agency channels. It can also be used as a real-time reference to past decisions that promotes consistency during team transitions and key decision points along the life of an incident. The KDL facilitates high reliability and continual improvement by allowing practitioners and researchers to recreate the sequence of events that occur over the life of an incident. These patterns can then be used to develop Lessons Learned that embrace the fundamental concept of Doctrine by sustaining best practices and identifying and eliminating unwanted decision traps.

Moving forward from a "Lessons Learned" framework - mindset

Lessons Learned are not learned unless actions are taken to correct the problems identified. Also lessons learned does not necessarily mean what was done wrong. That is another misnomer of the phrase. I have seen organizations and people afraid of lessons learned in AAR's because they point out where they made mistakes. It can be a reinforcement for some actions and a source of information for the correction of others. 

It has been my experience that there are plenty of lessons learned produced but the attitude in the industry is not one of learning from them. I hate to keep harping on the military use of lessons learned but there is a correlation between the military profession and our own. I'll always remember when General Schwarzkopf giving a briefing after the first Gulf War about the overall tactics of the war. He mentioned a Civil War battle that he had studied at West Point as the basis for his determining the tactics he would use. That is the example of how lessons learned should be used in our profession. I'll never forget one official after Katrina stating that one of the most difficult and unexpected problem after the storm was the total destruction of so much of the communication infrastructure. That lesson was learned after Hugo and Andrew close to twenty years previous. Until we as a profession begin study disasters and the various problems they produce to create our plans we will continue to repeat our mistakes.

What are the ABC's for emergency management?

Like the ABC's used in EMS for every patient; airway, breathing and circulation. What are the first three most important things an emergency manager must know to begin their response to any disaster? Are there three over arching pieces of information that should guide emergency managers in the initial hours or days of a response.

In my book using the Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA Loop) as my guide I came up with What do you have? What do you need to do? What do you need to do it? Repeat. Repeating the Three Questions would keep everyone in a constant state of evaluation until a clear picture has been established. My objective was try to find out how to begin. What do you do every time no matter how big or small the incident (a tornado or tsunami or earthquake) in the first minutes, hours or days to be able to properly size up and respond to an event. But I still feel as if there is a better more complete set of questions or basic principals out there. 

Part of the answer has to be the ICS/EOC interface. The people with their feet on the ground are your only assets in the beginning. One of the answers it would seem to me is: what assets are still capable of responding and what are they doing. This would include fire, law enforcement, public works, hospitals etc. What is their condition and have the been impacted by the incident and have they begun operations. This would be reported by the IC or if the incident was large enough multiple IC's. It goes back to the old question we used in the field when we walked up on an incident. What you got?