The Human Element

We spend millions of dollars on new equipment and somewhat less on training our people who operate the equipment.  That is understandable.  The problem is that we spend even less on training Key Decision Makers, who, arguably, are extremely important during a disaster or incident.

Decision makers are responsible for the following:

• Planning
• Information Management
• Tracking and controlling resources
• Communicating
• Making decisions

Let's look at these roles in detail:

• Planning:  Who made the plan?  Do we even know if it works?  Will it work in the worst case scenario?  Is the plan accessible or even followed during a disaster or an event?
• Information Management:  How do decision makers get experience managing large quantities of information outside of a disaster?  Practice makes perfect, but how do you have realistic practice for something as dynamic as information management?
• Tracking and controlling resources:  Doing this during an actual event is much harder than during a tabletop exercise.  Also we bring people in to the EOC who are experts in a particular domain (police, fire, EMS, etc.) - what OTHER training is required to give them the expertise to employ and make decisions in other domains?  What about operating in an EOC environment?  The military has a one-year course to help officers transition to a Staff Officer role - what are we doing? Tabletop exercises allow us to "talk" about what we would do, rather than actually "doing" it.
• Communicating: One of the most prevalent problems is communication issues between the responders, the EOC and other agencies and departments.  How do we get better at this? Tabletop exercises don't really allow effective and realistic practice for communications and Live or Full Scale exercises are costly and can only be run infrequently.
• Making Decisions:  How do you give someone the confidence that they are making good decisions during a disaster or emergency?  They need practice, but realistic practice is very difficult outside of an actual event.

So herein lies the problem.  We have people in the EOC who play key roles, who have come from the field and may or may not have experience operating with other organizations.  The current training methods are wanting or very costly, and the decisions they are expected to make have a very large impact on the overall response.  

How do you solve this problem?

Luckily about 35 years ago, the military came up with a training methodology for key leaders that can be modified and brought over to the EM world.  

No, we don't have to train to be tank commanders or naval task force commanders.  This training methodology is called Constructive Simulation and it has the potential to greatly assist training key leaders and decision makers.  The military realized that it was hugely expensive to run large scale "functional" exercises to train leaders.  Even though everyone was in the field, these exercises also always had some limitations on training.  The other leader-focused training was Tabletop exercises.  Sound familiar?

Constructive simulation uses a computer to play the part of the "field" (Police, Fire, EMS, civilians, the disaster/emergency event, the buildings and terrain).  The EOC personnel interact with the on-scene personnel exactly how they would in real life - by telephone, radio, email, etc..   The on-scene personnel, instead of controlling ACTUAL resources in the field, control the resources in the computer.  They watch what is going on, report back to the EOC and implement any instructions.  From the viewpoint of the EOC, the training is nearly 100% realistic.  

Constructive simulation exercises cost much less to run (about as much or less than a Tabletop) but provide vastly improved training.  We ran a country-wide exercise in Jamaica last summer and they said that they learned much more during the two day Constructive Simulation exercise as they had during two previous functional exercises for which they paid $7M.

Constructive simulation bridges the gap between expensive functional exercises that can only be run infrequently and tabletop exercises, which are great as a walk-through, but are not realistic or extremely effective.

Municipal Emergency Management Plans

Train Derailment

How many municipalities have an Emergency Management Plan?  They all should.

A Municipal Emergency Management Plan is designed to be pulled out during a time of crisis so that whoever is manning the Municipal Emergency Operations Center doesn't have to invent the best way to respond to an incident - they just have to follow the plan.  Just like how football teams have multiple plans and contingencies, so should a Municipality. There are no "one size fits all" disasters, so the plan has to be flexible enough to handle nearly any problem and lead the team to employ resources to successfully solve the issue.  Additionally, a properly designed plan is one that the EOC staff believes in and will follow because they KNOW it is the best way forward.

So how does anyone KNOW that the plan will work or believe in it?  One of the best ways is to conduct an exercise.  There are essentially three types of exercises:

• Tabletop Exercise
• Constructive Simulation
• Live Exercise

The tabletop exercise can be used to talk about the plan and who would do what during a crisis, but it suffers from "bathwater drinking" in that the participants can wish away problems or consider problems to be solved, even though in real life they would not be. Tabletop exercises are a good way to run through the plan and discuss options, but care should be taken not to adopt "results" without additional study.

Constructive simulation exercises are where participants use a computer system to judge their actions impartially and inject time and space realism into the exercise.  The constructive simulation is a step above the tabletop exercise because the computer acts as an external "reality check" and therefore forces the participants to listen to feedback from the computer system rather than just make internal decisions.  The computer system should be relatively accurate for the purposes of training, but it does not have to be perfect. In fact, some imperfections may actually be desirable since they would cause a degree of unpredictability in the effectiveness of the participants responses.  A good plan is flexible enough to handle multiple situations, and similarly, flexibly thinking personnel are preferred for handling difficult problems.  Constructive simulation exercises are relatively new to the Municipal arena.  If you want to find out more about constructive simulations, check out my company's web site at www.c4ic.com.

Live exercises can be very realistic.  There is nothing more realistic than putting people in the field and dealing with the thousands of minute details, issues and logistics.  If you need to confirm that your processes for deploying, employing and supporting large groups of people in a stressful and fluid situation are going to work, you should definitely consider conducting a live exercise.  Live exercises have two drawbacks.  First, they are very expensive and take people away from their day to day jobs.  Secondly, since they do take place in the real world, they must suffer from built-in lack of realism.  What I mean by this is that while we can do a realistic live exercise, there are going to be limitations.  Of course we can't light a refinery on fire or tip over a train car with toxic fluids inside, but we can usually work around these limitations and provide very good training.

One of the latest techniques to achieve the best balance of realism and cost is to run a combined Constructive Simulation and Live exercise.  The constructive simulation allows the size of the live exercise to be reduced and it allows the participants to play the events that would be impossible during a live exercise. The live portion allows for the detailed logistics and problems that having personnel in the field creates.

Getting back to the Municipal Emergency Management Plan - Why not run a number of constructive simulation exercises to ensure the overall validity of the plan(s) and then select one or two scenarios to either run as a live exercise or as a constructive simulation exercise with a wider audience?  In this manner you will be able to test drive your plans, confirm that they work and confirm that the key responders know their part during a major incident.

Why go to tall the trouble?  What is the worst that could happen?  Why do we have to be certain about what works and what doesn't?  Well, without being melodramatic, your plan is your community's insurance plan and it either works or it doesn't.  If you could spend a little time and find out where the holes were, wouldn't you rather figure this out ahead of time rather than on "game day"?

My company just went through an exercise with a government agency.  A brief half day exercise confirmed that parts of their plan worked, but their estimate on response times for some elements were out by a factor of ten...not intentionally - just a mistake that someone had made.  They have altered their plans accordingly and everyone now has a greater level of comfort.

Will your plan work when it counts?

Keep training!

Bruce

Emergency Response Plan Validation

Deepwater Horizon - a topical Emergency Response Plan

Companies spend tens of thousands of dollars developing Emergency Response Plans...how do you know if it will work or not?  Most times you follow best practices, cross your fingers and hope.

As they said in the Senate hearings a few years back "Hope is not a strategy"

Is there a way to quickly and easily validate your Emergency Response Plan?  How would you go about  determining, bad luck and human frailties aside, that your plan is reasonable and stands a good chance of working?  Let's look at the options we would have a few years ago:

• Hire an expert or someone independent to look over your plan.  I guess that is better than nothing, since two pair of eyes are better than one, but that person may miss some key things.  Let's examine some facts.  Humans are poor judges of timing and sequence, so it is likely that critical problems will remain around time and space 
• Wargame the plan.  Gather a group of people together, each taking on a role (like a mini-tabletop exercise) and try and play the plan out bit by bit to see how it may play out.  The problem is that although this does effectively play the human interactions, once again the time and space realist is lacking.

How important is time and space?  Absolutely critical for an emergency!  So is there another tool that can help to validate the plan accurately and realistically?  Fortunately in the last few years, advances in simulation technology have allowed constructive simulations to play a part in plan validation.

First of all "garbage in, garbage out".  If you don't have a simulation that realistically plays time and space, you are wasting your time.  Secondly, if the simulation is not set up to accurately portray what you need simulated then it is not going to help you.  Finally, unless you have a simulation that you can easily change the scenario and rerun the event to ensure the changes make a positive impact within your plan, you are going to have a hard time determining exactly what is broken with your plan and how to fix it.

Step 1 - Select a simulation.

Choose a simulation tool that is easy for you to use, doesn't cost a lot of money to set up and operate and can be easily changed to exercise all aspects of your Emergency Response Plan.  Remember that you are going to have run run the simulation a bunch of times for each possible scenario to ensure that your plan will work, no matter what the circumstances.  If your constructive simulation tool is too hard to use or too hard to adjust, use a different one.

Step 2 – Plan your validation event

Determine what parts of your plan you are going to validate.  Determine how the emergency will unfold and ensure that you know how the emergency response is supposed to occur. 

Take the time to go through the data with a fine tooth comb:

• Is the mutual aid agreement really in place?  
• What resources are actually there, right now to deal with an emergency?  
• Is the equipment the same as listed in the plan?  
• Are the roads still the same?  
• What has changed?

In other words, make sure that the simulation you are going to run is realistic and accurately depicts the personnel, equipment and conditions that are really in place.  If pieces are missing or if you are unsure if they can respond, then exclude them from the scenario – you want to have an accurate to borderline worst case scenario, since you seldom read about disasters that unfurled in "best case" conditions.

How many simulation runs are you going to need?  You may need to run the simulation again with a different wind direction, or perhaps run it more than once under different weather conditions to ensure that your plan will work any time of the day or night, or any season.  Plan the scenarios carefully and only combine them if you are certain you will be able discern if one thing or another causes problems.  You don’t want to be left trying to figure out what went wrong – was it the weather or the time of day?

If it is important that your results be statistically valid, you need to decide how many times to run each scenario.  In some cases, multiple runs are needed in order to ensure that the data you collect is valid and any one-off aberrations are smoothed out.   

Step 3 – Run the simulation

Set up your simulation scenarios and run them.  During the simulation run you should follow along with the Emergency Response Plan to make sure that the simulation is doing what it is supposed to and that the right resources are responding at the right times.  Keep notes and record any hunches you may have about how the plan could be run more effectively.  At the end of the simulation run, record the Post Exercise Review information with a useful file name that is easy to reference to the original scenario.

Some constructive simulation tools allow you to play the scenarios in faster than real-time.  If you are doing this, be aware that you may miss critical events if the time is set too fast.  You may decide to slow down the simulation time during these critical events and then speed it up afterwards.

By the end of your simulation runs you should have a number of post exercise review files, copious notes and hunches that need verifying.  Don’t change anything yet!  Finish your experiments then analyze the data before making any changes to your plans or the scenarios.

Step 4 –Analyze the collected information

Carefully review your post exercise review files.  Just like a football coach reviewing the video of a game, you should be able to spot important things that you missed the first time around.  It is best to have a very inquisitive mind during these replays.  Openly wonder why something occurred that way and make a note of the question.

Go through your hunches and try to determine if any of the data support your hunch.  Think of a way to alter the scenario to test your hunch and prove it right or wrong.  “If I re-do it this way, I should be able to easily see if the roadblock needs to be set up further West”, and so on.

There is another important thing you should achieve here – Face Value Validation.  You can determine that your plan works in most circumstances and you should know where it will fail.  A successful plan should be able to easily handle the projected scenario but also be able to withstand the worst case scenario.

Keep a copy of your data and put it somewhere separate if you are running additional scenarios – you don’t want to contaminate your first runs with subsequent runs.  Then make the changes to the simulation scenarios and run the scenarios you need to run again.  You should now be able to prove or disprove your hypothesis – or maybe decide that you need to run a different set of scenarios because there was no clear outcome.

Step 5 – Incorporate the changes in the Emergency Response Plan

Once you have determined through your analysis of the simulation that a change is warranted in the Emergency Response Plan, take some extra time to think about it before you make a change.

• Was this clearly a time and space issue that had been overlooked in the original plan that the simulation has proven without a doubt…or do you need more research?
• Can you prove through another means that this change needs to happen?  Remember the “garbage in, garbage out”.  There may have been problems with the way the simulation was set up, so this is definitely a case of “measure twice, cut once”.

SUMMARY

Wow, it seems like a lot of work to use a constructive simulation to validate an Emergency Response Plan!  

Not really, actually.  If you were going to do the validation in real life, what you accomplish in a day with simulation would take months to do and would cost thousands of dollars (and think of the time planning and coordinating the activity!)

A good constructive simulation allows you to make moderate changes to the simulation scenario in minutes, so you are really doing one scenario and making several minor “tweaks” in how it is run.  The hard part is being organized with your data and being clinical with your analysis.  A good simulation will show you exactly where the major holes are in your Emergency Response Plan and will help you to craft the corrective changes you need to make it work properly.

IMPORTANT – even if you don’t have time to completely clinical validation of your Emergency Response Plan, at least run an exercise with it using a constructive simulation.  You will achieve the following benefits by running an exercise with your plan:

• Participants will know the plan better because they will be using it
• Participants will know better how to work together
• The plan will be exercised in at least one realistic setting, and that is better than doing nothing at all!

Finally, if this seems overwhelming, don’t be discouraged – it is not as hard to do as it seems.  Contact me and I can help you or point you to some resources who can assist.

Keep training!

Bruce

Emergency Response Plans for Oil and Gas

Image via Wikipedia

In the last blog, I discussed how constructive simulation might be used to improve the quality of safety briefings.  This time I am going to discuss Emergency Response Plans (ERPs) and how constructive simulation can potentially revolutionize how these are prepared and used.

First of all, let's discuss WHY the industry creates Emergency Response Plans.  "Because we have to" is probably the wrong response.  "Because it helps create the conditions for success, mitigate loss and improve response when something goes wrong" is probably closer to the correct answer.  So stepping back, we can see that there is a need to make the potential response "successful" and that we need to limit losses when something goes wrong - this is the root of "why".

But what has happened?  People get focused on the "wrong answer" and create a 1000 page tome that no one reads (or can read) that checks all the boxes but in the end achieves absolutely nothing.  The problems with a long, text-based Emergency Response Plan are:

  a. they are hard to understand;
  b. the information is not readily accessible in an emergency;
  c. information is scattered in different places;
  d. it is hard to get an overview of "what is supposed to happen" in an emergency;
  e. it is difficult to translate text into "action" when it comes time to practice or when the real event occurs

So the current state is that we have (possibly) fully compliant Emergency Response Plans that are (mostly) useless.  How can we fix the problem?

Anyone remember back before GIS systems such as ESRI existed?  There were thousands of drawings with information in various formats which were difficult to overlay and cross reference, difficult to share and difficult to understand.  Sound familiar?

The same way that GIS has transformed the way the geo-information is stored, Constructive Simulation has the ability to transform Emergency Response Plan information from STATIC, difficult to use and understand to a simple and DYNAMIC tool that can be re-used in dozens of ways.

Here is an example of how a Constructive Simulation could assist in the creation of an Emergency Response Plan:

1.  Emergency Response Plan creator gathers relevant data from the existing GIS system and loads these into the constructive simulation.  Much of this information can be automatically or semi-automatically loaded into the simulation and this would usually only need to be done one time for all the emergency response plans in the area.  Nothing new is required - this is the same information that is needed for the paper-based ERP, except that it is in digital format. The information loaded would include:

  a.  Oil and Gas infrastructure
  b.  Surrounding municipal infrastructure
  c.  Terrain information
  d.  Local response equipment locations and catalog
  e.  Distant/on-call response equipment locations and catalog

2.  Emergency Response Plan creator then plans out a number of disasters using the constructive simulation. For a pipeline or wide area infrastructure this could be breaks, fires or explosions in different sectors (wherever a different response is needed).  For fixed infrastructure such as a gas well, it might be varying wind directions to show the differences in response.  With a modern constructive simulation, each disaster should not take a long time to prepare and place within the simulation - maybe one or two hours per disaster location.

3.  Emergency Response Plan creator finally lays out the actual emergency response by giving orders to the simulated entities within the simulation (the ones loaded during step 1).  Of course the response is done in accordance with municipal and mutual aid agreements that are in place.  This is done for each "disaster" that was created in step 2.  Depending on the size, duration and danger, each of the responses can be created in a couple of hours (the start state is usually the same).  Usually each disaster and response are saved as a single scenario.

That's it! Once the Digital Emergency Response Plan is created in the constructive simulation, the electronic file can be shared with consultants and government agencies with the same ease that a GIS shape file can be shared.  What you have at this point is a terrific digital product that has the following advantages over its poor cousin, the paper-based ERP:

• Fewer chances for errors - the resources (simulation entities) are placed on a visual map.  It is easy to see if there is something missing or out of place
• Easier to Use - the product, once created, can be used in multiple ways without each user having to re-visualize and recreate the data.
• Time and Space - the real world is taken into account when running the simulated ERP.  A truck can't drive faster than a truck can drive, and the simulated truck burns gas the same way a real truck does.  It is far easier to spot planning shortfalls in a simulation that uses time and space as opposed to a paper plan.
• Reuse, reuse, reuse - plot the data once and re-use it for multiple purposes, multiple times (more on this in a minute)
• Faster and less effort to create the plan

REUSE, REDUCE, RECYCLE

As was stated above, once you have the data in the simulation format, you can use it for multiple purposes.  Here are some examples:

1. Internal company policies and procedures - visualize the problem using the simulation and work together to solve the issues with the ERP and wide-area/long-term response
2. Safety briefings (as discussed in the last blog)
3. Internal Training - run mini-exercises to provide better training than a briefing in about the same amount of time
4. Provide government agencies with an easy to understand ERP document that they can visualize and approve faster and easier.  If a picture tells a thousand words, a dynamic simulation must be worth a million words.  Of course some text-based information will always be required.
5. Conduct Town Hall Meetings with a tool that lets landowners see and understand the ERP and get a level of comfort that you know what you are doing. Also it will be easier for them to understand what they must do in an emergency
6. Yearly Training - using a simulation is much more effective and realistic than a tabletop exercise, and it costs much, much less than a live exercise.  Live exercises will always be required, but this provides better training in the interim for a lot lower cost.

In summary a Digital ERP can provide significant value to all parties. Government approval agencies can approve plans faster because they understand it better and don't need to wade through a miry document to get the information they need.  Companies can produce better ERPs faster than before and at a greatly reduced cost due to the data reuse and less waste generation of words that no-one reads.  Landowners benefit because they have an easier to understand ERP that can be shown and validated with a simple to use tool.  Finally the public benefits because they have a better system that takes advantage of the recent advances in simulation technology to produce better ERPs that are being properly approved, diligently tested and exercised and efficiently approved with less bureaucracy.  

I hope that this has generated some interest and discussion.  I will discuss the validation of Emergency Response Plans in my next blog.

Keep Training!

Bruce

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Constructive Simulation for the Oil and Gas Industry

Several people have asked about the application of constructive simulation for the Oil and Gas Industry.  As we have seen, safety and loss prevention are huge items that are at the top of everyone’s mind today, mainly due to the problems with BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  As previous blogs have discussed, constructive simulation has broad applicability to nearly any public safety scenarios – how can simulation be used as a tool for the Oil and Gas Industry?

Constructive Simulation is new to the Oil and Gas Industry.  Simulation and simulators of different types have been used for many years for a variety of uses, from production to reservoir visualization.  Constructive simulation is a different tool that has huge potential to change a number of facets of the energy industry, much the same as GIS technology has revolutionized how we record and present data.  Constructive Simulation brings a real-time, dynamic and visual tool into our tool bag that greatly improves the way we approach emergencies, safety and training.

Because we are talking about a new application of constructive simulation, let's review some of the basics.

What is Constructive Simulation?  Constructive simulation is a computer-based tool that allows one or more users to control a large number of “entities” within the simulation.  An entity can be a person, a vehicle or even a piece of equipment.  All of the entities interact within the simulation according to rules that are part of the simulation, itself.  Sounds complex?  Not really – once a scenario has been designed and built, much of this interaction is automatic and it occurs behind the scenes.  The people controlling the entities typically have simple on-screen menus to control their movement and interaction. 

I believe that Constructive Simulation could very successfully be applied in the following situations:

• Digital Safety Training Briefings
• Emergency Response Plan Preparation 
• Emergency Response Plan Validation
• Integration with Existing GIS Products
• Incident Command Training
• Replacement or augmentation of tabletop exercises

I will discuss each of these applications in turn, but for today, I will cover just the first one.

Digital Safety Training Briefings

The aim of a safety briefing is for people to understand their role during an emergency so that they will know what to do and instinctively do it.  If people have to understand what to do during a dynamic situation, why use static tools like a Word document or PowerPoint?  Let’s face it – people often have a hard time reading a static document and then applying what they learned in real-life.  Why not use a dynamic, visual tool that will show people in real-time what they are supposed to do? 

The airplane safety videos do a good job of showing a dynamic safety briefing – Constructive Simulation can do the same thing for the energy industry, except on a much larger scale and with a greater degree of complexity.   Imagine being able to conduct a safety briefing using a dynamic tool that allowed you to walk a group of trainees through a complex event with a simple-to-understand and visual tool.  Imagine being able to show the trainees what they needed to do – from any perspective, fully controllable in real-time.  All of this is possible with a good constructive simulation. Imagine being able to re-run the scenario quickly and easily, showing different possibilities and contingencies.

Why not extend the capabilities of the safety briefing?  You could create your own constructive simulation-based safety videos that can be placed on your web site that would be playable by anyone.  Workers could use these briefing videos to improve their safety knowledge before being assigned to a new area and the energy company could monitor access to ensure that employees watched the video as part of their safety indoctrination.

If you use your imagination you can quickly see that Constructive Simulation has the potential to greatly improve safety briefings - even to the point of holding a small simulation exercise at the end of the briefing to ensure that the employees (managing their own "entities") can confidently and successfully do what they are supposed to do in an emergency.  Imagine being able to play the safety briefing/exercise with any type of emergency and switch to new emergencies in a couple of minutes to give the trainees a realistic training indoctrination in multiple environments.  Imagine the knowledge that the employees could have by DOING instead of just reading or listening.

In the next blog I will tackle the subject of emergency response plans.

Keep training!

Bruce

How to Plan a Public Safety Exercise in 5 Easy Steps – Part 2/2

In the last blog, I covered the first three steps of planning a Public Safety Exercise:

1. Establish Training Goals
2. Determine the Training Audience
3. Hold an Initial Planning Meeting (at least two months before the event)!

Now it is time to finish off this article with the remaining two steps:

    4. Mid-Term/Master Scenario Events List Meeting

    5. Final Planning Meeting

Step Four – The Mid-Term/Master Scenario Events List Meeting

This meeting takes place around 45 days prior to the exercise and should involve representatives from all of the working groups that you set up two weeks earlier.   Just after your Initial Planning Meeting, you should have sent out meeting minutes and solicited milestones and a work plan from each of your working groups.

With this information under your arm, you should publish an agenda to the attendees.  

As a minimum, this is what you should try to accomplish during this meeting:

• Finalize the overall plan for the exercise
• Have a detailed exercise timeline completed
• Have  all of the Master Scenario Injects planned (but perhaps not fully completed)
• Finalize the exercise documentation, or at least have a concrete idea when the documentation will be done and by whom
• Agree on the physical exercise location and have a very clear idea of the internal layout (who will work where)
• Set a date, time and location for the Final Planning Meeting

Despite occurring only two weeks after the initial planning conference, the bulk of the planning and the vast majority of the exercise design should be done by the Mid Term Planning Meeting.  If your work groups are motivated and the work was planned out well, it should have gone quickly and according to plan.  If you had the forethought to set good milestones and check up early on the progress of the working groups, you would now have a very good idea about the exercise status and have a high degree of comfort. 

Often you will find out that things have not gone according to plan and some key work has been left undone.  This is the reason for holding the Mid-Term Planning Meeting so closely following the Initial Planning Meeting – you have only lost a couple of weeks and you have at least a month to go before the exercise.  You can re-assign the work and still recover without breaking a sweat.

Who should attend this meeting? Definitely the Exercise Control Working Group needs to attend, as well as key representatives from the Personnel Working Group and the Administration Working Group.  Depending on the state of the exercise design, you may have to a smaller or larger number from the Scenario Design working Group.   Remember that minor participants can connect with the meeting via WebEx/GoToMeeting or teleconference during key discussions.  There is no need to bring everyone together again.

Here are some key documents that need to be put together, or at least designed during the meeting:

• Exercise Background – the read-in for the exercise that describes the background situation, the resources available,
• Simulation Cell Plan – who will do what during the simulation?  Who are the role players and what are they doing?  What is the constructive simulation component to the exercise?  What are the master scenario events list groupings,  who is delivering them, and how are they being delivered? What is the communications plan for the simulation cell to communicate with the participants?
• Exercise Plan – Objectives for the exercise, plan for achieving the objectives, linking between the simulation cell plan and the objectives, the plan for Observer/Mentors – how will they observe and interact and how will they record what they see?  What is the security plan?  How will the exercise be laid out at the facility?   Where will key events take place?  What about name tags?  Feeding?  Coffee?  The exercise plan should manage all of these key details and more.

By the end of the meeting, you should have nearly all of the details coordinated finely enough and written down in enough detail that anyone could run the exercise in your place.  Remember that an exercise that requires Herculean effort to pull off at the last minute is not a success – it is simply a sign of poor planning.  The more sweat that goes into the upfront preparations, the fewer tears that occur during the actual event (and after).

Toward the end of the meeting, you should probably do a verbal walk-through of the event from start to finish so that everyone shares your vision as to how the exercise will take place.  The last thing you should do is make sure that the action items are covered and that everyone knows what they need to do, when they need to do it and what is next.

If all has gone well, you will have the following in hand:

1. A detailed Exercise Plan that completely describes how the event will take place, how it meets the training objectives, how the objectives are tracked and met and who does what
2. A complete and detailed timeline for the exercise and key events
3. The Master Scenario List Events entirely planned out (when/how/what/who) and a plan for completing the writing details
4. A detailed Simulation Cell Plan so that describes what information and events will be portrayed by the Simulation Cell and how they will be passed to the participants.
5. The Exercise Background Document in enough detail that it can be passed to participants

Within a day or so following the meeting, ensure you send out the minutes and finished products to everyone who needs it.  As a minimum, this is everyone who participated in the Initial Planning Meeting and anyone who you think should get it.  The only documents that should be “close hold” are the Master Scenario Events List and the Simulation Cell Plan, as these will spoil the surprise for the participants.  Everything else should be distributed as far and wide as possible to anyone who will read them.

STEP 5 – Final Planning Meeting

The Final Planning Meeting should take place about two weeks prior to the actual event.  It is a good idea to send out the agenda a week in advance so that you can collect any comments and make any desired modifications ahead of time.

By now, all of the heavy lifting has been done and ALL information has been completed and documents are done in for review.  The entire exercise is basically “done” and everything is coming together nicely.

Here is what you want to confirm during the meeting:

• All of the writing is done
• All of the logistics are prepared
• The participants are ready
• There are no issues
• Everything is ready to go to print

There should be no adjustments to the plan – just smoothing out wrinkles.  

Here are some specific tasks that you should ensure happen during the meeting:

1. Approve any documents that have not been approved.  People need to get on with using these documents right away, so you can’t hang on to them any longer.
2. Review the logistics in fine detail and ensure everything is in place.  What about name tags?  Do we have enough flip charts?  Pens and paper?  Do we need whiteboards?
3. Review and approve the simulation portion of the exercise.  Is the scenario fully designed?  Are all the resources that are needed programmed in?  Is the MSEL complete and ready to go?  Ensure that the simulation portion is fully developed and ready to go.
4. Go thought the exercise conduct step by step to ensure that everything is ready and in place and someone is in charge of it.  Take time to brainstorm and make sure nothing is forgotten – who will meet the bigwig at the door and show her around?  This is “now or never” for the event.
5. Final Check – the whole reason for holding this event is to achieve the training objectives.  Take a last look and make sure that you are, in fact, meeting the training objectives you have set out to meet.  Has your exercise grown too large and complex, or is it just the right size?  Is the focus properly on the Primary Training Audience and have all the distractions been eliminated?  Do you have a foolproof plan for capturing post exercise points with experienced observer/mentors?  How are they briefed?  How are they controlled?

With a final sigh of relief, you can push your chair away from the table, having planned an effective and well-focused exercise. 

Congratulations…And keep training!

Bruce

How to Plan a Public Safety Exercise in 5 Easy Steps – Part 1/2

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One of the biggest failures in the actual execution of training for public safety managers (or for anyone, for that matter) can be traced back to the lack of a plan.  Everyone’s time is valuable, so why waste it?  A little bit of planning can alleviate most of the issues and produce a positive training event and an experience that will gain you esteem and compliments from your peers.  Fortunately this is no secret and the steps are easy:

Step 1 – Establish Training Goals

What are you trying to teach?  Often people hold exercises for the simple reason that “it was scheduled” and then improvise the exercise design and content.  Mistake!  If you haven’t checked, first why not see if your organization has some training goals.  If you are fortunate, there will be clear training goals set out, complete with measureable objectives.  For instance, you may be working up toward next year’s TOPOFF exercise and your organization (or your superior organization) may have a plan to that end.  Work with it!  If there is no plan, then it is up to you.  Why not do a little research and find out what your organization is bad at doing and design an exercise to improve that.  Even if your organization works great together, why not stretch things and make the goal to work better with other organizations.  This leads in to the next point – establishing your training audience.

Step 2 – Determine the Training Audience

Who needs the training?  Everyone should undergo training, but you need to focus your training to a particular audience to provide the best benefit.  What I often do is divide the group of people to be trained into two groups – the Primary Training Audience, which is the small group that we are designing the training SPECIFICALLY for, and the Secondary Training Audience, who is everyone else who is attending the training event, but who are not the specific focus of the training.  What this does is add laser-sharp focus to your goals and objectives.  It either improves training for the Primary Training Audience, in which case it is necessary, or it improves training for the Secondary Training Audience, in which case it is non-essential and would ONLY be included if it DOES NOT impact the training or resources going toward the Primary Training Audience.  This seems harsh, but trust me, it is the ONLY way to separate the wheat from the chaff.  The good ideas (the ones that support the Primary Training Audience) get included and the well-intentioned, last minute, good but not great ideas don’t end up impacting the event.  If you are Draconian in disallowing stuff that detracts from or does not add to the Primary Training Audience’s training, then you WILL have a good training event. 

Step 3 – Hold an Initial Planning Meeting (at least two months before the event!)

The best training is a group effort with well-motivated and involved people who believe in what they are doing.  You need to invite the right group to the Initial Planning Meeting, and this means doing some research.  Who can you rely upon to complete tasks?  You need some “do-ers”.   Who needs “buy-in”?  In many cases you are going to have to forge together a number of working groups of people who, in the worst case, don’t want to work with you and are too busy.  The best case is that they want to help you and have some time to help you.  Plan for the worst, and hope for the best and you will do well. 

In preparation for the meeting, you should publish an agenda ahead of time to the agencies or groups who will be attending, monitoring and assisting with the exercise.  You need buy-in from everyone, so you might as well state it up front.  You also need to be clear that it is going to be a working meeting, so people who come should be prepared to make decisions on behalf of their department or group and that they will be participating in the planning.  You should publish with your agenda a tentative date or a few dates for the exercise event, as well as the planned participants - the groups, agencies, departments – as well as the overall training goals and objectives.  Solicit feedback prior to the event and try to iron any issues with the basic plan out prior to the planning conference – or else you will waste the whole session deciding what that training objective is or whether or not you are having an exercise at all.  

You should try to get the following out of the Initial Planning Meeting:

• Exercise Concept and Training Objectives - How long is the exercise?  Where will it be held?  Do the dates work? Break down the training objectives to at least one more level of detail.  You need to know more detail about your goals in order to design the exercise properly.  This is so important that for large exercises this portion is often conducted as its own meeting.
• Initial Groups of Master Scenario List Injects – what types of informational problems are going to be provided?  These should link directly to training objectives.
• Basic Scenario Overview – What is the constructive (time and space) side of the exercise going to look like?  What is the emergency (or emergencies) that the participants need to interact with in order to accomplish the training objectives
•  Outcomes – what is the training going to achieve?  After the training is over can we draw a line directly between the outcomes and the training objectives?
•  Goals for the Exercise – Perhaps there are one or more goals that the exercise is trying to achieve (over and above the training objectives).  “Establish a working relationship with Department X” or “Involve Agency Y” in training are examples of this.

After you have hammered all of these items out and have some good agreement amongst the participants, you will now see that what lies in front of you is a bunch of work. You probably need or organize the work either as formal committees (with a formal schedule of meetings) or as informal working groups (with a formal schedule of meetings and milestones). The point is that unless it is a very simple exercise or you are a tireless worker with nothing else to do, there is probably more work here than one person can accomplish.  Here are some examples of the working groups needed:

·         Administrative Working Group – working out the details of the venue, feeding, travel, accommodations, administrative instruction, contracting, work parties for setup and teardown (if required), bookings, etc.

·         Scenario Writing Board – the group of people who are going to create the exercise.  What types of subject matter experts are needed?  Where will they come from?  Who will create the Master Scenario List injects?  How will the constructive side of the exercise come together?  Where is the scenario?  How do we find out about which assets will be involved?  All of these details (and more) need to be discussed.

·         Exercise Control Working Group – The exercise control working group is in charge of the overall exercise.  How it all works out in the end is dependent on this group and how they create the overall exercise – Their aim is to ensure the exercise meets the training objectives.  This group is usually small and members sit in on the other working groups.  This group will also be instrumental in choosing the tools to be used and the contractor(s) to be hired for the exercise.

·         Personnel Group – someone needs to coordinate the invitations for other departments and agencies, managing the big wigs who will be attending and their interaction with the exercise, the invitations to the subject matter experts, finding suitable observer/mentors to work with the training audience, and so on.

These groups should set objectives, schedule and milestones and meet as frequently as required to ensure the work is being done.  Often the meeting can be a simple teleconference where the products are shared beforehand and the meeting focuses on any issues with the products and what needs to be done next. 

In the next blog in this series I will focus on the two remaining steps – the Mid Term/Master Scenario Events List Meeting and the Final Planning Meeting.

Keep Training!

Bruce