Incident Management Matters
An irregular blog with thoughts and challenges on all aspects of Crisis Management, Emergency Preparedness & Response, Incident Risk and anything else that comes to mind.
COVID and Crisis Management
In the UK the first Module of the statutory enquiry into the Covid 19 pandemic, on the resilience and preparedness of the United Kingdom, was published last week. It contains findings and recommendations which the wider Crisis Management would do well to read. Many of the conclusions of this Covid report should resonate for any Emergency Planning professional.
I have pulled out some which I think are relevant across all sectors below, but you can read the full report here: https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/documents/module-1-full-report/
First of all, the Findings:
- The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic. … preparedness was inadequate for a global pandemic of the kind that struck.
- How often are we all guilty of “fighting the last war”? Are we imaginative enough in the scenarios we consider when we build our Contingency Plans?
- The institutions and structures responsible for emergency planning were labyrinthine in their complexity.
- Peacetime corporate compliance checks and balances do not always translate well to the management of a crisis. Introducing multiple levels of sign-off approvals may just result in multiple potential failure points
- The UK government’s sole pandemic strategy …. focused on only one type of pandemic …
- An echo of the first point. In the oil and gas industry I do see a lot of attention (understandably) on loss of well control incidents, but this should not be at the expense of considering other incident scenarios in our planning.
- There was a failure to learn sufficiently from past civil emergency exercises and outbreaks of disease.
- Often our “lessons learnt” procedures actually just collect “lessons identified” and then fail to do anything about putting improved procedures in place to prevent the issues from re-occurring.
- … Despite reams of documentation, planning guidance was insufficiently robust and flexible … unnecessarily bureaucratic and infected by jargon.
- Impressed by how thick your Contingency Plan is? Think again!
Procedures need to be simple and quick to read and understand at 3am in the morning
- Impressed by how thick your Contingency Plan is? Think again!
- In the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight.
- How engaged are your Executive Leadership Teams in the Crisis Planning and exercising process? Without senior-level buy-in and a commitment to learn the plan will fail.
- The provision of advice itself could be improved. ….. The advice was often undermined by ‘groupthink’.
- Why not nominate a “dissenter” in your team? It avoids the fear of getting labelled as ‘being awkward’ if you’ve been specifically asked to take on that role. However you do it, challenging our plans is crucial.
...and then the Recommendations:
- … government should create a single Cabinet-level ... committee ... responsible for whole-system civil emergency preparedness and resilience, to be chaired by the leader or deputy leader of the relevant government.
- Have we got very clear, senior-level crisis leadership structures which span our normal ‘peacetime’ functions and silos?
- The UK government … should develop a new approach to risk assessment that moves away from reliance on reasonable worst-case scenarios towards an approach that assesses a wider range of scenarios representative of the different risks and the range of each kind of risk. …
- Once more; the need to avoid focussing on just one ‘big’ risk; instead looking at a range of crisis scenarios
- (the) civil emergency strategy … should be subject to a substantive reassessment at least every three years to ensure that it is up to date and effective, and incorporates lessons learned from civil emergency exercises.
- Regular formal review of our plans and a positive focus on the learnings from exercises in incidents is the sort of Good Practice we all should embrace.
- The UK government … should hold a UK-wide pandemic response exercise at least every three years.
- What is your minimum Major Exercise frequency? Is it genuinely an exercise or is it more of a demonstration of capability and a tick in a box?
- Each government should publish a report within three months of the completion of each civil emergency exercise summarising the findings, lessons and recommendations, and should publish within six months of the exercise an action plan setting out the specific steps to be taken in response to the report’s findings.
- Holding ourselves to account to learn from our exercises, rather than mutual back-slapping at the end of an exercise is foundation for growth
- All exercise reports, action plans, emergency plans and guidance from across the UK should be kept in a single UK-wide online archive, accessible to all involved in emergency preparedness, resilience and response.
- How accessible to all our your exercise reports and findings?
- External ‘red teams’ should be regularly used … to scrutinise and challenge the principles, evidence, policies and advice relating to preparedness for and resilience to whole‑system civil emergencies. response.
- Independent external review of how we do our Contingency Planning and Preparedness which brings a challenge to our principles and policies is a great idea. Most audits only check that we are following our own rules; this is an opportunity to ask whether our own rules are worth following!
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