The New Standard for Disaster and Emergency Management
30+ years of emergency management (EM) consulting has created organizations that routinely outsource vital strategic capability, where an organization’s people are not only missing out on valuable growth opportunities, they feel less ownership. Moreover, a huge field of response and planning experts, exercise designers, operationally focused leaders, and trainers exist. But communities and organizations are not better prepared.
EM consulting firms compete over many factors which is positioning them to be less relevant and more expensive. As we head into the future of disaster and EM these factors need to be eliminated or reduced. They include:
High reliance on being the expert, low reliance on empowering their clients.
Large and expensive centralized urban based offices with meeting and training rooms.
Consultant teams made up of highly decorated first responders and veterans with very low team diversity ratios.
Sponsoring and supporting ineffective disaster and emergency management conferences and trade shows.
The collective number of years of experience and training that the firm has which serves as a key selling feature.
Offices, training rooms, hundreds of years of collective experience, ‘real experience’ (whatever that means) and tossing around the word ‘expert’ does not impress the new era of emergency managers.
What got us here will not take us to where we need to be in terms of assessing our hazardscape’s and managing them.
Today’s disaster and EM 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 This is partially because their knowledge and skills are quickly becoming outdated by the rapid generation of new research, lessons identified/learned, and high frequency complex disasters. The next era of leaders want to provide their teams with latitude to engage with complex issues using new methods and thinking that has not been part of the experience of an expert EM consultant.
Hazardscape is supporting the next era of EM leaders by trading in our credentials and technical EM experience and training for tools and methods that create healthy partnerships with our clients that focus on building capacity within organizations to tackle issues, expediate change, turn insight into action, and to promote broad and clearly thought out decision making.
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.