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.

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