Profiles in Preparedness #4: September 2024
Articles and resources for those serving our communities
In skiing, you are taught to focus on where you want to go, not what you want to avoid. If you look at the trees, chances are, you’ll hit them.
Too often, I see organizations fixated on the problems they want to avoid rather than aiming for the outcomes they want to achieve during an incident or disaster. When you shift your focus from "What are we trying to avoid?" to "How can we ensure we grow as an organization while recognizing and navigating those obstacles" your approach to readiness changes dramatically.
To grow through disasters, we must put controls in place to prevent the obstacles from impacting us, and then steer toward our desired outcomes. That's the key to not just surviving, but succeeding and thriving, in the face of adversity.
With that, here are a few things I’ve read lately and wanted to pass along.
1. The Lahaina Fire Incident Analysis Report
Published last week by the Hawai'i Attorney General, this is the second of three reports about the August 2023 wildfires that devastated Maui.
If you're in the public safety field, I recommend you carve out the time to read it. In the words of Lexipol co-founder Gordon Graham, we need to continually improve how we "make the knowledge of all, the knowledge of one," and this report provides many lessons to learn.
I shared one of the seven takeaways I had on LinkedIn this week (here).
2. Practical approaches for more effective teamwork
Have you been a good teammate lately? Every once in a while, a reminder about what sort of behaviors make you the type of person that people want to work with can go a long way. This short article from Seth Godin does just that.
3. How Russia-Linked Malware Cut Heat to 600 Ukrainian Buildings in Deep Winter
This wired.com article looks at the cyber attack experiments being run on Ukrainians, but how does your city or county provide water, sewage, electricity, cell phones, and internet services? So much about the critical lifelines serving our communities we use on a day-to-day basis goes without thought, but preparing for outages and disruptions can be hindered by uncertainty or a lack of familiarity. To truly understand what needs to be prepared for when a piece of critical infrastructure goes offline, we need to continually deepen our own understanding of how they work.
4. Supply + demand + risk = How to think about security budgets
A passion for budgeting is probably not what drove you to public safety or security leadership, but it is a crucial part of the job. If you feel like more is being asked of your organization than you have the people, equipment, and resources to do, you have experienced the dynamics of supply and demand.
While this article from Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables was written for IT and cybersecurity leadership, the principles transcend security/safety organizations. “Most of the work of budgeting is essentially translating risk themes into strategic plans, into tactical execution mapped across your...teams." Give it a read.
5. Experts vs. Imitators
I posted on LinkedIn last year that there are a lot of really strong resumes in emergency management. The point was that with all of the incidents and disasters our country has recently experienced, the paper presentation of a person's background, qualifications, and experience all looked fabulous.
The post reflected the feeling I had at the time that, to find the right job candidates, my team had to do a ton of initial interviews to identify the public safety professionals most capable of serving our clients as consultants. The resumes weren’t a lie, but they were rarely helping us identify the strongest candidates. We had to speak to people to find them.
This Farnam Street article examines that dynamic and recommends that people learn how to distinguish people with real expertise from imitators. AI is helping people talk the talk, even when they haven't walked the walk. Self-proclaimed experts flood social media following any incident. Who do you trust? Who do you take advice from?
While leaders can use this article to think about who they choose to join their organization and inner-circles, we all can use it as a reminder that we need to put in the work to continually deepening our competence in our field.
A Book: The Gray Rhino, by Michelle Wucker
I'm re-reading The Gray Rhino by Michelle Wucker and am really enjoying it. I had forgotten how great this book is, but it ties into many of the topics from this newsletter. Wildfires, the resilience of our nation's electrical grid, cybersecurity risks, extreme weather - we probably aren't as ready for these very obvious dangers as we should be. This book has been a great reminder to put in the work now, instead of saying "we never thought this would happen to us."