Risk management

What do Emergency Managers do?

PICT213

Dr Layla Branicki – [email protected]

Emergency Managers 1. Highlight to management the importance of a variety of risks and threats

that could potentially undermine the capacity of the organization, network, community or country to function on a daily basis

2. Have many of the formal characteristics of a profession, • Professional bodies (e.g. Business Continuity Institute)

• Codes of ethics and conduct

• Certification (e.g. BS25999-2, and ISO 22301)

• Education (e.g. degree programmes at all levels)

• Training (e.g. Emergency Planning College)

• Clear body of knowledge and legal status

3. Various job titles used - Emergency Manager, Resilience Manager, Emergency Planner, Chief Risk Officer or Business Continuity Manager

4. Work in the private, public sector and voluntary sector

Basic Job Description

Coordinate crisis management and disaster response activities, provide training, and prepare emergency plans and procedures for natural (e.g., earthquakes , floods, hurricanes), wartime, or technological (e.g., hazardous materials spills,

nuclear power plant emergencies,) disasters or hostage situations.

‘Business continuity management (BCM) is a process that helps manage risks to the smooth running of an organisation or delivery of a service, ensuring

continuity of critical functions in the event of a disruption, and effective recovery afterwards. The Government aims to ensure all organisations have a

clear understanding of Business Continuity Management (BCM)’. http://www.ukresilience.gov.uk/preparedness/businesscontinuity.aspx

…However, in smaller organizations being an emergency manager may only be part of your job!

Key Tasks

• Risk assessment and monitoring

• Disaster planning

• Collaborate with key stakeholders inside and outside organisation

• Exercising and testing (i.e. rehearsing emergency plans)

• Design and administer training and resources

• Inspect facilities and equipment

• Keep informed about local, state and national legislation

• Attend conferences and professional meetings to expand knowledge

• Coordinate disaster response and give status reporting

• Coordinate recovery

• Learn from crisis events experienced

Considerations for Organizations

Private Sector How would your organization cope with…

• Reductions in staff?

• Denial of access to a site or geographical area? Site evacuation?

• Unexpected loss of mains electricity?

• Disruption to transport?

• Disruption to the availability of oil and fuel?

• Disruptions telecoms, IT..?

• Disruption affecting key suppliers or partners?

Public Sector How would your organization cope with…

• Loss of major infrastructure?

• A large-scale evacuation?

• Disruption to travel network?

• Pandemic disease spread?

• A mass casualty event?

• Loss of access to part of a city or region?

• Loss of access to homes, hospital or school facilities?

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Reflective Exercise

Spend 5 minutes thinking and / or talking about what would it would be like to be an emergency manager…

•What would be rewarding about the job?

•What aspects of the job do you think would be easy?

•What about the job might be challenging?

•Is this a job you would want?

Emergency Managers Confront Risk on a Daily Basis

(1) Exogenous macro-shocks,

• Natural disasters, e.g. hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding

• Pandemic disease

• Threat of terrorism

• War and / or political instability

(2) Man-made (Turner, 1978) / manufactured (Beck, 1982) risks,

• Organizationally created risks (e.g. chemical spill)

• It can be argued that the impacts of exogenous shocks are partially organizationally created

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…Emergency Managers also Face Uncertainty

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Adapted from Courtney, Kirkland and Viguerie (1997) in Angwin, Cummings and Smith, 2007: 9)

All strategic decisions are taken in the context of uncertainty and risk and predictions about future states are made

on incomplete information and commit resources (McGee, Thomas and Wilson, 2005)

Definitions:

Risk - ‘the measurable consequence of uncertainty for an organisation’

Uncertainty -‘the limits to the precision and the extent of knowledge about a subject or event’

Example - the Film Business and Uncertainty Uncertainties in film industry:

•prediction of success •Making decisions to continue •No data which can reliably inform decisions, gut feel, persuasion and ego… •E.g., predictable story and ending, budget overruns big box office success

Decision makers are surrounded by uncertainties

Uncertainties stem from…

• Not being able to anticipate changes in environment

• Not being able to predict the consequences these might have

Uncertainties can result in…

(A) False Positive – an incorrect prediction that an emergency or extreme event will happen and have a significant impact (i.e. the predicted event does not materialize)

(B) False Negative – an incorrect prediction that an emergency or extreme event will not happen, and/or will not have a significant impact (i.e. the emergency or extreme event is missed) 10

Reflective Exercise

Spend 5 minutes thinking and / or talking about…

Q: Would it be simple to distinguish between a false positive and a false negative in practice?

Q: Was Y2K a false positive?

Quote from UK Resilience Manager,

I was actually doing Y2K testing … [country a] had two nuclear power stations go down because of Y2K on 1st of January and then the coast guard system in [country b] went down for three days because of Y2K. Now they are life safety issues. So I know afterwards, everyone said it was a damp squib and nothing happened and it was all fine but we spent billions on it. In actual fact that is not true because a lot of organizations globally did have big problems with it on the day, but it is a typical media response to say well actually it wasn’t a massive disaster so we shouldn’t have bothered.

From, Branicki, Steyer and Sullivan-Taylor (2016).

Black Swan Events Taleb, 2007

• Differentiating risk and uncertainty is difficult

• People think that they can predict better than they can (problem of induction)

• Performance upon risk as contextual, e.g. senator who unfavourably introduces tighter regulation for airlines prior to 9/11

• People good at retrospectively predicting random events but find looking forward impossible (retrospective distortion)

• People think that it won’t happen to them!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDbuJtAiABA

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‘I asked them to go to the recovery centre across the city and they just

refused’

Branicki, Steyer and Sullivan-Taylor, 2016

Theme Key Features

Impossible Work

‘Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t’ as they have either over- reacted (i.e. successful preparation results in a non-event), exaggerated (i.e. threat doesn’t materialise) or not done enough (i.e. disruption)

Pointless work Experienced as non-value creating work which engenders symbolic engagement

Unsupported work The majority of the sample experienced a lack of buy-in from across their organization

Unpleasant work

Other organizational actors don’t want to engage in ‘nasty things’, and a sub- set of resilience workers experienced resistance to their work from colleagues through the use of both aggression and humour

Experiences of embarrassment, refusals to follow instructions, stigmatization, risk to job and in extreme cases threat of prosecution

It’s Sometimes Tough to be an Emergency Manager!

From, Branicki, Steyer and Sullivan-Taylor (2016)

Sullivan-Taylor and Wilson (2009) found that practitioners typically respond either…

Defensively (‘we have done all that could reasonably be expected of us’), or

Or

Fatalistically (‘an attack is inevitable and will be overwhelming, so there’s not much point worrying about resilience’)

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… But this isn’t always the case, in the next session we will examine resilience and high reliability organizations

Tutorial Activity – Tourism & Leisure

Scenario:

Imagine that you are the emergency planning team for a large theatre situated by a body of water in a major city (you can choose any type of theatre and any country).

Part 1 (25 minutes):

In your allocated group discuss and answer the following questions,

Q1: What are the top 3 threats/ risks facing your theatre? Why have you prioritised these threats / risks?

Q2: What actions would you recommend that the theatre takes to mitigate against these threats/ risks?

Q3: How will you convince the owners / managers of the theatre to make changes, or to invest in your plans?

Part 2 (25 minutes):

Be ready to share your answers with the rest of the group, and to discuss the issues raised by this activity.