Disaster and Emergency Management Blog

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OPPOSING IDEAS HELP TEAMS SEE ALL SIDES OF AN ISSUE.

But when leaders criticize disagreement turns personal, it can derail projects and destroy relationships if left unattended.

By letting go of their expertise to make room for empathy, listening, and supporting, the leaders of yesterday have an opportunity to develop better, stronger, and better performing leaders for tomorrow. They can do this through a coaching mindset that positions them to co-create relationships with new leaders

Unlike project management, post-incident coaching is strengths based, it’s not remedial, trying to fix what is wrong. Mutual accountability is developed, rather than it all being on the leader or one person.

Current emergency management consulting models have organizations believing that agencies and teams can leap from observation to learning by using strategies and expertise the consultant used in a previous career or contract.

Today’s disaster and emergency management leaders need the ability to let go of being the most qualified and highly trained expert. This is partially because their knowledge and skills are quickly becoming outdated by the rapid generation of new research, lessons identified, and entrance of more complex disasters.

Teams composed of strong relationships are less likely to have communication breakdowns. Focused on conversations where work gets done, teams with relationship intelligence promote healthy opposition to quickly see all sides of an issue, so they can make timely decisions that drive results.

Working, learning, and networking in Virtual Reality provides the same low-cost pricing as video conferencing but it adds a deeper level of trust due to unstructured social activity and the opportunity for ‘water cooler’ talk. With deep fakes, fake news, viruses, and our psychological data being used for marketing means Social Media platforms are quickly becoming places of distrust.

When will incident commanders and emergency managers use artificial intelligence, more than their GUT, to make response decisions? And no, I don’t mean a cyborg in the ICP dong the job of an Incident Commander.

Whether we are in an Incident Command Post, Emergency Coordination Centre, or at a reception centre for days, weeks, or months emergency management is stressful. And even if you are not in the throws of response, coordinating multiple stakeholders for a plan or policy is equally stressful, especially if everyone’s vision of the future is different.

For the most part, it ran smoothly, mostly because the impact of disasters from 1995 to 2009 was not significant. The 2007 southern Alberta floods were bad, however, the program seemed to meet the needs of most Albertans.

The history of the Alberta Disaster Recovery Program.

Disaster and emergency and management learning and development in Canada is still highly reliant on passive, lecture-style, in-class instruction in major urban centers. Pre-COVID there was minimal movement to active online learning.