A Framework for Evaluating Your Emergency Plans and Preparations

By Christopher Stitt

The emergency management cycle is made up of four major parts: Mitigate, Prepare, Respond, and Recover.  Emergency management for entities with wide-spread, particularly multinational operations present unique challenges.  Ultimately, the goal of emergency management is to minimize the impact on operations, respond effectively and recover efficiently so the organization can get back to its core functions.

Other than facing a crisis, how can you evaluate your plans and preparations to see if they have a good chance of success when it comes time to respond and recover?  Having a solid template that is adapted to your industry is a good start, but each operating location will have its own unique variables that are going to impact the plan.  To ensure maximum effectiveness, it is critical that the plans and preparations are viable, accurate, and usable for each operating location.

What do I mean by a viable plan?  Unfortunately, the plan designed for Ottawa will likely not work in Ouagadougou, nor will the plan for Chicago work in Calcutta. Plans for production facilities will differ greatly from administrative or public-facing operating sites.  There are myriad factors that come into play when trying to put together a viable plan for a given location.  Some of these include variations on the size, structure, and operations of the location, local laws and effectiveness of local response services, and even variances in construction and fire codes.  Another major factor is the make-up of the staff: pre-defined roles and action items will need to be adjusted to fit the specific location being evaluated.  The working groups that develop the plans for their location need to be encouraged to evaluate and incorporate these factors into their planning and preparations, not just accept the template as adequate.

Each city in the world is going to have variables that need to be accounted for and there will likely be variables you would never think to consider.  It’s always useful to reach out to the local emergency management services, organizations like the International Association of Emergency Managers (www.iaem.org), other companies working in the same environment, or the embassy(s) of the countries in which your company is headquartered to get some ideas of the variables to consider. 

What do I mean by an accurate plan? The shelf-life of the information in your plan and the equipment used to implement it is limited.  Without a regular refreshment, the plan’s viability is again at risk. Contacts need to be regularly reviewed and updated.  Here are some example questions to be answered:

• Has the operating location itself changed, such as increasing or reducing in size or staff, or a change in operations that needs to be accounted for? 

• What about the incorporation of new technology into the worksite, such as upgraded cameras, alarms, or communications?

• Are there any changes in the local environment, such as a fire department that gets new trucks that are now too big to access your location, or an increase in civil unrest or terrorist threat?

• Emergency preparations need to be refreshed as well. 

  • Do the people you trained to take specific actions still work at this location? 

  • Do they need some refresher training?

  • Are the supplies expired?

Finally, plans and preparations need to be usable.  Having a huge binder, or even a small flipchart, that no one ever looks at is not a usable plan. Too often, plans become bloated with too much information and preparations that rely on high-tech solutions that may fail when needed most.  Keeping it simple is important.  While the overall plan may appear complicated and dense, ensuring it is structured by phase of the planned-for emergency with role-based checklists allows for key information to be extracted in a shorter, more useable form for each employee.  While not restricting knowledge of the whole plan from anyone, the key is to help employees focus on their part.  Regular communication of this is also key, so that employees are familiar with immediate, potentially life-saving, actions that can be taken if needed.

Keeping supplies accessible and ensuring people know how to use them is critical. Instead of locking up emergency supplies so they are not pilfered, tamper-evident seals or other controls may be a better idea.   Make sure to offer regular refreshers on how to operate emergency equipment such as fire extinguishers, satellite phones, or automatic defibrillators, and specialized equipment unique to your business or industry.

Ultimately, no matter how good the overall template is, no template can account for the uniqueness of each operating location in a global setting.  With a focus on getting local working groups to adjust the template to focus on creating viable, accurate, and usable plans and preparations the chances of a successful response and recovery can be dramatically increased.

Christopher Stitt has spent more than two decades in international security, emergency management, and law enforcement with the Federal Government. He is also Adjunct Faculty at George Mason University and is credentialed as a Certified Emergency Manager by the International Association of Emergency Managers.

His specialties include: Emergency management; multi-jurisdictional crisis management; enterprise-wide crisis management policy development; program development and management; strategic planning; risk analysis and mitigation strategies; policy and procedure development; technology/policy/process integration; criminal, personnel, internal, and counterintelligence investigations; and dignitary protection. 

Empathy: The Security Leader’s Invisible Superpower

When I train cops about operational empathy, I make the claim that empathy will save their lives more often than the gun on their hip. This is initially met with blank stares, because empathy is not a tangible tool or a defensive weapon. However, when we take the time to understand empathy and apply it to our work, it has a habit of turning into a superpower.

The same is true as corporate security leaders, whether we are talking about customer service at the uniformed security officer level, or if we are talking about influencing the decisions of the C suite.

Let’s define empathy. I like to keep it simple: “The ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes.” This means taking the time to look at an issue, an encounter, an experience, from someone else’s perspective. When we start to understand another person’s perspective and then adjust our approach to them, this is where the power of empathy can shine. So, what does this all mean in the context of security leadership?  We have an opportunity to extend our native skills and competencies. A superpower, in this context, is a human trait taken to a much higher level.

For the purposes of brevity, I will focus on perhaps the most important core activity that contributes to empathy and the creation of a superpower in leadership: Asking Questions.

Ask the Right Questions at the Right Time:

If empathy is the practice of placing ourselves in someone else’s shoes, the most practical way to start is by asking questions! To help explain this, I will start out with one of my empathy failures (I have plenty of those!)

When I managed security for the Washington DC Metro system, I managed a team of special police officers, stationed at rail yards, bus depots, and office buildings. I was also charged with beefing up physical security. In one location, I spearheaded the effort to enhance the perimeter fencing around a rail yard, to deter people from being able to cut or climb the fence. This meant a much tighter and stronger metal mesh on the chain link fencing. Installation day arrived and it was a beautiful fence. It went all the way around the perimeter, and right up to the guard house near the front entrance to the property, where all vehicles and pedestrians entered. I was proud of my accomplishment.

I went to the guard house and asked the officer what he thought of the fence, assuming he would be grateful towards me and shower the fence with compliments. Instead, he looked uncomfortable and said begrudgingly, “The fence looks great, but now I can’t see cars as they enter the property.” Oops. The fence I had installed, had such tight mesh, and was installed at such an angle that the officer literally had no visibility of the front entrance of the rail yard. I stepped inside and stood in the exact position of the officer, and sure enough, I couldn’t see the driveway. All I could see was that beautiful tightly knit fence mesh. In this case, when I was planning the project, I made two major failures. Number one, I did not take the time to evaluate the impact of my decision from the perspective of the end user, in this case, the officer in the guard house. Number two, I failed to ask the right questions at the right time, of the right person. Had I practiced these basic building blocks of empathy; I could have mitigated the issues during the planning stage. I never tried to place myself in the shoes of the right person. A few basic questions of this officer would have prevented my mini disaster. In a broader security leadership context, we can easily see the relevance beyond operational physical security.

Imagine when it is time to implement a new travel security policy, or access control policy. Perhaps you are announcing a handful of countries that you’ve deemed “no-go” zones that are too “high risk” for travel. It is easy to benchmark with other security professionals and lean on your own security expertise for such decisions. However, if we don’t take the time to ask the right questions and listen to our stakeholders about the impacts of our plans, we run the risk of never finding the true solution to the problem at hand. Or worse yet, like my fence mistake, our solution produces a new problem.  In the travel security example, what if one of your new “high risk” countries is the next emerging location for new market entry for your core business? Suddenly you are preventing your company’s executives from traveling to that exact country where they plan to do major business. How do you think that will be received?

When it comes time to make decisions that will have an impact on our stakeholders, it is crucial to activate our empathy muscle. Step inside the shoes of your stakeholders by asking them for feedback and seeking to understand how your actions will impact them. When you truly place yourself in their shoes, you will then be able to make a decision based on a holistic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.

Burke Brownfeld is Director of Global Safety and Security for Visa Incorporated and is part of the 2020 faculty in The Great Conversation in Security in Palm Beach, Florida

The Future is Ours to Create

Two CSOs. Two perspectives. Both in a Great Conversation on May 21, 2019 at The Great Conversation in Security™

Their interest and their passion? The future of the ‘art of security’

Garrett Petraia, Levi Strauss and Tyson Aiken, Nike, started their conversation with a simple logic statement.

·Art often refers to the past: the value of what has been accomplished.

· State of the art implies more of an active present tense or emergent standard of conduct.

· Should we refer to the Future of Art as the process we use to revise or disrupt a standard based on a new way of thinking?

For example, we all practice “Risk Management”. But the term itself is limiting. It is only one side of a coin. The other side represents the opportunities that would arise if we had knowledge of the risks and leveraged them. This is an opportunistic mindset our industry must adapt to if they are going to become true business advisors and leaders.

And for business leaders, this strategic intelligence might move them from business enablement to business acceleration.

Tyson asked us: “How do we get to that place?”

And both speakers suggested we need to hire more business talent and train them in risk principles. “We need to move from hiring a resume that fits our current ‘state of the art’, to hiring based on intellect and values”, said Garrett. “I cannot allow my lack of perspective and knowledge to blind me to the risks or the opportunities. I must hire to support my blind spots.

But they acknowledged that it is easier to hire for security subject matter expertise then it is to find business talent that wants to join the security industry. The talent pipelines from the government, intelligent community, the military and the law enforcement community are crowded. So, our search for diversity will be more difficult. But it is desperately needed.

As Garrett said we need to understand why people fail. It usually comes down to the culture and the degree of collaboration they can foster with the community; the value intersection of their wants and needs with your own.

And both agreed, we need to learn how to gather, analyze, and leverage data that will allow business leaders to better comprehend their own risks and their opportunities by collaborating with our people and programs.

And it just might start with re-writing our own job descriptions to better represent the future of our art.

The Technology World is Evolving, Are You?

Steven Antoine, one of our Great Conversation faculty, had an article posted on Enterprise Security that is well worth the read. Written by Steven Antoine, Director, Global Assets Protection, Yum! Brands we have provided a starting point for the article and a link to read it here.

With the digitization of business, security often finds itself in the familiar, yet uncomfortable space of being reactionary; again. GTRM and the security of data typically are found in bifurcated skill sets, CISO vs. CSO. With the evolution and internet of things, everything is more connected. In the restaurant space, for example, predictive and prevention techniques are being refined as apps and gift, and credit cards are now the focus of the digital criminal enterprise. Camera and alarm vulnerabilities have to be (re)addressed as savvy hackers seek to become more criminally creative and less physically confrontational. The development of new tools such as facial recognition and artificial intelligence and the availability on consumer data make it such that “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” is being acted out in ways that five years ago couldn’t have been anticipated.

Read More