Inside My Canoehead

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What we have all seen in the southeastern USA over the past week has been heart wrenching, whether here in Canada where I could do little more that financially support the NGO conducting operations, to the individuals charging into the chaos to provide relief and rescue those in peril. Evidence is clear that humans do not panic, they rally to the cause, step up to the occasion and do not turn to crime. Acts of violence and theft dramatically fall in disaster zones, though any instance of opportunistic theft is labelled as looting and broadcast across all channels as a representative behaviour of the local population. Abhorrent. 

Misinformation is the intentional spreading of information one believes to be true but is in fact false, while disinformation is the international spreading of information the individual knows to be false, but does so anyway. Disasters include a breakdown of communication, where normal and stable networks are disrupted, sources of facts are interrupted and a void of available information seeds conspiracy theory. Dependable sources of accurate information are difficult to find and follow, this is a significant problem we are watching in the aftermath of hurricane Helene. 

Institutional trust in the government has been on a steady decline, amplified in the pandemic and has shown little indication that statistical trends are returning to a growing public confidence in the government. FEMA is a federal government entity and therefore is subject to a mandate from the Stafford Act as well as other regulatory and policy frameworks. I have written extensively about the importance of building trust with the served population in times of peace and calm, building relationships with the affected population in advance of any disaster, so that when the event occurs, FEMA is seen as a trusted and valued addition to the response.

If EM is trying to establish themselves as a trusted source after the crisis begins, little success is likely. That requires dedicated pre-event population engagement over time, with all sectors of society acting together. We call it the community response council, the gathering for all parties in the area to discuss how they expect a response operation to be conducted, to establish priorities and to discuss who can do what for whom. Cooperation, coordination - not command and control. The secret sauce is just that, create the council in your area, be the champion and bring together all sectors of society. Leverage what has happened in Helene as an example of why a successful response operation requires a whole of community effort. When the trust is established it won't matter what mis and disinformation is present, residents will turn to their trusted sources for guidance. That is how you win, not by authority or title, but through engagement across society.

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Season 11 was a breakthrough season for the podcast, rapidly expanding our audience, which sets season 12 up for great success. 

There are a number of tag lines, monikers, colloquialisms and catch phrases that permeate every discipline. They roll off the tongue without effort, others in the field smile and it becomes a language of its own. Newcomers adopt the practice, often without understanding the roadmap or the rationale for the sayings. The meaning ebbs and flows, eventually being morphed into some new concept, often by the ever-present policy entrepreneur. 

At its foundation, the collective modern human system includes four principle spheres: public (government), civil (population), not for profit (community) and private (corporations). Each are inter-dependent to some degree and all are necessary to sustain the human ecosystem. When considering any policy endeavour, good administration requires the inclusion of all spheres. The inter-connectedness means that whatever legislative, regulatory or administrative modification is considered will have an impact, to different degrees, across the spheres. An inclusive society requires the involvement of everyone, not just the ones you like or support.

Hurricane Helene provided a stark example of nature's power. We cannot prevent a disaster, we cannot stop a flood, but what we can do is reduce our exposure to the effects of an event through preparedness planning. The sights and sounds from Appalachia are tough, but the serve as a great stage for you to reflect, are you ready?

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On the eve of Canada's largest gathering of the emergency preparedness and climate adaptation voices, we are in a unique position to create some epic advances in society's readiness.
From considerations on a national disaster response force, to leveraging the power of the private sector and bringing together the skills already embedded in society, we have a chance to do someone important.
We have a growing awareness of the impact of a changing climate, increased costs of disasters, the coming global conflicts that will erode the military's ability to respond to events in Canada as well as the exposure to loss of critical infrastructure. 
With awareness increased, will we choose to adopt a culture of preparedness, build resilient communities and see collective success, or will we continue with out culture of dependancy on government intervention to address societal challenges.
Time will tell. 

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While the world is not going to collapse, the 2020s will continue to be quite spicy, with exogenous shocks happing across political, cultural, economic and familial spheres. 
The stoics are famous for encouraging you to consider what is within your influence, the ideas and actions that you can do to improve your life, while accepting that others are beyond your control. You cannot influence the unemployment rate, but you can make personal financial preparations to navigate labour disruptions.
Your superpower is investing time and money into your physical, mental and financial health. You can do so without spending any money, the choice to adopt a prepared life through taking care of yourself is doesn't not require an investment beyond time and effort.

The choice is yours, to accept that no one is coming to help, but that you can improve your life surrounded by like minded people. Your ability to navigate a disaster is directly correlated to your health - physical, mental and financial.

I discuss how I turned my life around and the strategies I employed, how I grabbed control and began the long process of righting a sinking ship.

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We live in a modern, technologically enabled society. The leaps in life-improving scientific achievements in the last few decades alone is substantial. From the advent of general AI access for the public, to autonomous systems, we are indeed in the 4th industrial revolution. Robotics, human-machine interfaces and a host of emerging technologies are poised to revolutionize how we create, repair and dispose of products. 

Our societies, urbanizing more each day, are possible through the provision of critical infrastructure (CI), often considered the legs that hold up the a city's foundation. In Canada, there are 10 sectors, 16 in the USA and in some locations, CI is referred to as lifelines. However codified, CI is the operationalization of the technological advances across our communities, enabling a mind-boggling plethora of opportunities that a decade ago would have seemed impossible. On the cusp of the 4th Industrial Revolution, society is evolving at record pace, and that is both unnerving and brilliant.

Grounding preparedness planning in loss of access to CI is designed to enable individuals, corporations and organizations to create bespoke preparedness plans that reflect unique operations across this technologically enabled modern society. When completed across the personal and professional frames, a responsible individual will have considered a minimum of 160 questions related to their dependancy on and exposure to elements and sectors of CI. The results of these questions provide a frame for the preparedness plan that is unique to the author. The intent is to mirror the value of disaster impact reduction (DIR), whose premise is that it matters not why access to a sector of CI is lost, but that we have constructed a plan to mitigate. Differing from disaster risk reduction (DRR), which is focussed on hazard reduction to mitigate potential future impact. 

Close on the heals of the paradigmatic alterations in preparedness communications to the public, adoption of CI grounded strategies across all four spheres of society will lead to a better prepared and resilience community. 

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Resilience is the 21st century emergency management (EM) buzzword, every initiative is grounded in the theory, flavoured for the desired outcomes, but linked to the overall concept of a capability and capacity to navigate through and emerge from an exogenous shock leveraging only internal resources. A generalist definition, but one that retains all the elements of a series of theoretical and practical language models. Simply put, can what we designate as a tribe make it through our risk profile without needing external assistance?

Community resilience has been the focus of a decade of research, both personally by our staff and as a corporation. We've endeavoured to both challenge the paradigm and to develop the operationalization of the theoretical concepts. As an academic, I am a fan of peer reviewed articles, but left to their own, they offer little for the community of practice. Necessarily vague, academic articles provide insight into variable association and what this means for generally accepted principles and where future studies should move the goalposts. Excellent and necessary. However, what EM requires at the local level, as all disasters are local, are the 14 specific ordered steps necessary to create community resilience from zero to hero. That specificity is not present in journals, nor should it be, but that remains the focus of our efforts, to deliver the exacting process a municipal EM agency can execute.

We argue that community resilience is a by-product of a number of increased capabilities and capacities. By increasing the preparedness of a community, you increase resilience. By expanding and deepening social capital in a community, you increase resilience. By strengthening the cross-sphere (civil, private, public NGO) coordination & cooperation, you increase resilience. Our position remains that resilience is built through the identification of variables correlated in academic literature and then executing practical initiatives to increase their presence and strength. Each of these lines of resilience influences will require locally influenced approaches, but remain grounded in identical principles. 

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Many of us have reflected after a significant unforeseen event, when we've done what we could in the moment, with the resources at hand, and wondered what we might have done to be better prepared for such an event. Whether it be an economic, political, natural, cultural or familial disaster, emergency or manifestly uncomfortable moment, we're often left with reflective thoughts. How do we invest in better post event outcomes, to do what is reasonable to influence the quality and time required to restore life back to a state of personal normalcy?

We know preparedness is the totality of cognitive thoughts and physical efforts undertaken in times of peace and calm that facilitate the navigation of rapid onset exogenous shocks. We're written at length on methodologies about how to incorporate preparedness into your strategic plan, to create the conditions for rapid reaction and limitation of harm. But, how are these related to the post-response recovery?

Recovery is a longitudinal, difficult and emotionally taxing experience. Creating robust preparedness plans influence the quality of recovery and expedites the return to normalcy. You cannot prevent a disaster, but you can mitigate against the impact before it occurs and have a strategy to navigate it, and that begins with preparedness. There are a myriad of variables to include in your preparedness plan, from housing and income, to education, relationships, professional. Each family has a unique set of needs,  leading to different inclusions in preparedness strategies. 

When calamity strikes your family, you're better off launching a well rehearsed and understood plan, versus being awe-struck and relying on external support for your next steps. This is not a question of financial investment beyond insurance, this is a question of the dedication of time and effort to ensure your family is set for the least disruptive recovery possible. Your investment in times of peace and calm, to strategize as to how you intend to navigate loss will directly influence your recovery timeline. You can recover with less disruption and in a shorter time period through preparedness. 

Zero hurt is not an option, reducing it is within your ability, the choice is yours.

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To quote Brock Long, a former head of FEMA, "a culture of preparedness in society" is one of the necessary legs of a chair that supports our modern and technologically enabled society. We've written and argued at length that our society is enabled and supported by the 10 sectors of critical infrastructure (CI), Director Long's commentary speaks to the human supportive elements of a successful community, namely: a strong local government, robust private sector infrastructure, and federal assets available, through the sub-national governments, for use in an emergency.

Since the transformation of civil defence into the modern emergency management (EM), we've seen a growth in the public sector role in preparedness. Our fore-fathers were independent, responsible for the totality of their lives - from building their own homes, growing food, earning an income and taking care of the family throughout calamities. As the urban density increased, the need emerged for more robust services for the residents, over time the modern EM was born and adopted the responsibility to serve and protect. That role was gladly offloaded by the population, along with a host of other supportive functions, from food production and distribution, to power, water, sewer and essentially all the modern day 10 sectors of CI. 

What we have done is create a utopia of daily living, without which we will collapse in short order. To bring back the culture of preparedness requires significant cognitive investment, one that is longitudinal and in grounded in honesty. We need to first amend the public sector resident-facing preparedness communication to reflect the responsibility of the individual to assume care for and delivery of services to their family in times of significant disruption. To outline the reality of a loss of cascading CI due to cyber, natural or human induced circumstances. We need to bring back the idea that prolonged lapses in our wonderful technologically enabled world are likely and that it is not the government's role to provide for you in the interim. This must be supported by education, through models similar to the German THW or the American CERT programs, to build cable communities that are collectively able to support their members without government intervention. 

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Today, we've lost the art of intellectual debate, in the pursuit of convincing others they are wrong. In the words of Neil DeGrasse-Tyson, we used to accept that everyone could have a different opinion or view, we were never concerned with pointing out their shortcomings or proving ourselves right and them wrong, we simply existed knowing that others had opposing views and that was both perfectly normal and acceptable. Today, if you're not in my camp, there must be something wrong with you - cue the emergence of labels.

The question for experts, practitioners, academics and researchers in the EM field to consider is are you OK with being challenged and having your ideas debated, in a classical forum. The Monk Debates in Canada provide an insight into the beauty of intellectual combat, the battle of ideas, all in an effort to better understand a phenomenon, to improve the human condition. If someone disagrees with your thesis, they're not the enemy, they're not in need of an education, they don't lack experience and yes - they very well may have a point that cracks the foundation of your ideas. This is the brilliance of science.

Do we have the fortitude to return to classical debates and allow critics to exist once more?

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Your local emergency management office is under an unmanageable regulatory burden.
In Canada, this is becoming more prevalent. Within EM, governments in Western and Central Canada have appointed political staffers to key positions within EM to drive an agenda for change. 
The first iteration is when the key municipal leadership is of a different political stripe than the premier. This has flowed into new regulatory frameworks downloading significant responsibilities on an unfunded municipal entity in order to ensure that the future liabilities remain outside the political halls of the provincial government. Further, political appointees have been placed in senior roles above the directors influencing the allocation of budgets and steering the EM initiatives towards isolating the Minister from blame or responsibility. The end result of these two principal activities, is to deliver results for the government, to separate responsibilities for future mitigation, preparedness and response operations, leaving little hope that municipal governments will be capable of managing significant disruptions. Opening the door for the sub-national government to be seen as at the level of government intervening in the crisis and saving the day. These appointees do not arrive with EM education, leading to additional rifts within the senior EM-trained positions, who are attempting to move EM modernization through bureaucracy.

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