Post-Incident Coaching: It’s not a one-off intervention

Why post-incident coaching? Because it is based on the principles for developing resilient communities and organizations. The Emergency Management Strategy for Canada: Toward a Resilient 2030 states that:

Resilient capacity is built through a process of empowering citizens, responders, organizations, communities, governments, systems and society to share the responsibility to keep hazards from becoming disasters.

Members of resilient communities are empowered to use their existing skills, knowledge and resources to prevent/mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. They are able to adapt their everyday skills and use them in extraordinary circumstances.

The underlying purpose of non-directive inquiry based coaching is to help individuals and teams enhance their mindsets so they can see possibilities that they could not recognize under the status quo. It’s a strengths based methodology for them to assess, reflect on, and use their existing skills, knowledge, and resources to solve problems within their existing budgets.

Post-incident coaching is strengths based

It’s not remedial, trying to fix what is wrong, it’s about seeing the abundance of skills, resources, and human potential on a team.

THE FINAL PUBLIC POST-INCIDENT REPORT IS NOT WHERE IT STARTS

Post-incident coaching can start after the initial internal DRAFT post-incident report is complete. For many governments, post-incident reports are made public; therefore, they are scrutinized at different levels, communication teams are edit them, and then political staffers and ministers review them and give feedback. In most cases, the public post-incident report is so diluted and twisted, it is no longer recognizable to the people who are responsible for learning from the lessons identified and making change in their organization.

Through the intake step, we support all involved with understanding the constellation of relationships that exists, the community, or organization’s values, we help to develop common ground and language, we go to the key foci of the post-incident coaching with confidentiality and agreements for ways of working together.

During design, a diagnostic and assessment is completed through 1-1 coaching, identification of personal objectives, and a ‘what to expect’ session is booked to communicate the process. The personal objectives of team members are weighted heavily because if staff can't connect what you are doing with what is important to them, internal conflict begins, stress builds, and sustainable change will not occur.

Once the coaching, or ongoing conversations start there is iterative goal setting, development of action steps and accountability, and ongoing capacity development which includes transfer of skills and processes.

Evaluation involves an inventory of new skills, processes, and awareness combined with work to help the team sustain the changes, identify what might lead to slippage or get in the way from continued success. We measure success in many ways including who is at the table and how participants keep committed. Is the energy high or low, are people not showing up?

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. Moreover, one of several solutions are considered to support the team rather than external advisors telling teams what to do and how they need to do it. Post-incident coaching is a process of change that happens over time, it’s not a one-off intervention.

Hazardscape provides post-incident coaching for organizations with limited budgets. How can we provide this work at affordable rates? Unlike other firms in the disaster and emergency management space we don’t compete with them. We are not trying to secure big fancy offices with training space, we don’t have consultant teams with highly decorated mid-career and retired first responders, we are not looking to sponsor the next in-effective conference trade show where we need to show off our qualifications and capability.

We are focused on working remotely with leaders that want to make a positive impact through the use of coaching, extended reality technology, machine intelligence, and relationship intelligence.