We have the great privilege of meeting with small and large Emergency Management Agencies from across North America and spend a good amount of time getting to know their capabilities. Despite the best of intentions, some of these agencies will fail to meet their mandate during a mid to large scale incident. In most cases, a significant amount of responsibility for the failure can be attributed to operational testing that is either non-existent or too lenient.

Failure needs to be an acceptable option

Testing the operation of an EMA’s capabilities is a big deal. It costs money, involves multiple agencies and significant staff hours. These high profile tests often attract political figures and there’s real pressure on senior staff to put on a good show. Given these circumstances, who in their right mind would want to engineer a test to implode their entire operation? Turns out not too many people.

So our mock scenarios run smoothly. Sure, a few little hiccups are injected for good measure but senior staff know these hurdles can be cleared with little effort. Another successful exercise is wrapped up. Staff debrief, talk about little things that could be done better and then complement each other for a job well done. While it might feel positive at the time, ineffective testing only serves to set us up for trouble come game day. As organizations, we need to start valuing failure for the positive impact it can have on our performance. More importantly, we need to educate outsiders about how failure can be leveraged to increase our capacity to handle big incidents.

Testing with Teeth.

Testing an EMA’s capabilities should (from time-to-time) be a brutal and relentless assault. Your best staff should be investing time working in opposition to the organization, trying to find new and innovative ways to derail operations. The more problem areas that can be identified in advance of an incident, the better your team will perform. On occession, failure should be the goal.

While everyone likes to talk about the benefits of failure, few groups embrace it. Everyone in the organization needs to understand that a reasonable portion of operational tests should result in failure. This shouldn’t be an embarrassment but rather a point of pride. It is through this failure that we uncover weakness and gain insight into the steps needed to enhance our operational capabilities. Some will argue that pushing staff to their limits isn’t realistic or that every eventuality can’t be prepared for. Perhaps, but after years of working in emergency services, we know that the impossible happens with shocking regularity and that lobbing softball operational tests at your team will eventually spell trouble. There is no amount of money, infrastructure or technology that makes an EMA immune from unforeseen events.

Here are some ideas from one particularly effective EMA that often pushes their team to extremes. The below elements were all compounded into one recent exercise that helped this group to identify a number of areas to work on. How would your agency have coped?

Random timing

Don’t test your EOC’s capabilities at a scheduled time. If everyone is anticipating a test, they’re mentally prepared for the exercise, tend to be waiting around for it and show up at the EOC in minutes with everything they need. In reality, this doesn’t happen. Randomly stand up the team. What happens if you run an unannounced test at 2:00 in the morning? Prepare for some surprises.

Missing personnel

100% of your staff aren’t going to show up during a major incident. Make sure a material number of key personnel don’t show up until late in the exercise. You’ll quickly know if you’ve cross-trained deeply enough.

Multiple infrastructure failures

Don’t just cut the power and wait for the back-up generator to kick in. Cut the back-up generator as well. Now what? Don’t talk theory, actually solve the problem. If you can get your hands on a number of portable generators, does anyone know how to use them to drive critical infrastructure? Will these smaller units actually carry the required load? Now would be the time to figure that out.

Multiple Communications Failures

Kill your radio communications. Take landlines down too. Now take away 50% of the available cell phones. Could it get worse? Restrict all cell communications to text only. Can you fail over to text only? What about Satellite?

Venue Change

It’s at about this point that things are probably breaking down. If things haven’t already ground to a halt, your team will certainly be pulling hard on all of their faculties. Perfect time to require an orderly evacuation of the EOC. Now what? Where to? How do you get there? Can you figure it out given the reduced infrastructure and limited comms?

There’s no doubt that this type of training is extreme. It will certainly induce failure for many groups but it will also bring out the best in your people and expose gaps in your pre-planning and theory. The next time you initiate a test of similar intensity, you’ll probably fail again but you’ll fail different and that means you’re improving.