Current emergency management consulting models have organizations believing that agencies and teams can leap from observation to learning by using strategies and expertise that the consultant used in a previous career or contract. But in today’s dynamic and shifting Hazardscape, this traditional way of solving problems is proving to be ineffective, expensive, and time consuming.

Whether you call it a post-incident report, assessment, or findings or a post-mortem (I am not sure why we use that phrase. The Latin phrase is post-death) or even an after-action review, after action assessment, or after-action report, they are all meant to do one thing. Document the observations and details about an exercise, emergency, or disaster so we can learn from our mistakes by developing controls to prevent and mitigate future ones. And if we are lucky, maybe become more adaptable.  

Lessons observed are not projections (projects). They are simply observations about how a system, process, technology, operating procedure, or team performed during a certain situation. You can use an observation to make a projection, but if the organization or team does not understand the observation, if they do not see the value in the change, if they do not all see it the same way, or if they do not understand how they were impacted by what occurred, better results are a fantasy.

Project management and emergency management tools and techniques rarely support the shift from lessons observed to lessons learned. Project management fails us for many reasons.

The Project Management Institute defines project management as ‘the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to deliver something of value to people’. Projects are projections, an estimate, or a forecast of a future we want. In many documented cases, emergency managers have failed at using project management to build a better future.

This is mostly because the team and organization rarely ‘buy’ into the observation which means it has no value; therefore, they can not learn from it or make it part of their desired future.

Adults, teams, and organizations learn better and perform better under certain conditions, including when:

• They use their own experiences as a basis for action and learning

• They find their own solutions rather than being told what to do

• They anchor their learning in what really matters to them and the organization

We start with intake: building relationships, digging into your community's (or organization) values and principles, developing common ground and common language. Then we get started on design. Post-incident coaching is a methodology for helping teams to identify, prioritize, and understand what they observed. It is an inquiry-based process that helps individuals, as a collective, see problems in the same light so they can move towards making sense of what needs to change. It helps them comprehend the WHY (understand the value) before the what and the how are determined.

Post-incident coaching is a multi-month conversation with purpose. Groups and teams can use the process to expedite lessons identified into action because the lessons are important to the people involved. It is less expensive, more agile, and less time consuming, than traditional ways of implementing lessons identified because more time is spent on anchoring learning in what really matters to them, and the organization, as opposed to being told which recommendations are priority.  

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.