The crisis situation is underway, you’ve activated your crisis process and assembled your crisis team in your emergency operations center.

What do you see around the table?

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba discuss the need for diversity in education, experience, personalities, and backgrounds on your crisis team. In particular, we talk about how having a diverse crisis team helps your group make better decisions in the heat of the moment.

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser:                   The boom happens. You’ve had the event. You’ve activated your crisis process, and your crisis team’s assembling in your conference room or your EOC or whatever you have available to you. As they stream in you look around the table and what do you see?

Jen Otremba:                        Hopefully you see a bunch of different people going to work. They know what their role is, so they just start.

Bryan Strawser:                   So they all have degrees in the emergency management. They just dress differently.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah. They look-

Bryan Strawser:                   They look different.

Jen Otremba:                        They look a little different.

Bryan Strawser:                   But that’s not what you mean by diversity.

Jen Otremba:                        No, not at all.

Bryan Strawser:                   It’s not about-

Jen Otremba:                        Maybe they don’t all have degrees in emergency management.

Bryan Strawser:                   I don’t have a degree in emergency management.

Jen Otremba:                        Exactly.

Bryan Strawser:                   Do you?

Jen Otremba:                        No, I don’t, but I have a lot of experience in it.

Bryan Strawser:                   We’re talking about the diversity of your crisis team. What we’re really meaning here is diversity of thought and background and experience and role, and probably a whole host of things I’m not thinking of, education, and training.

Jen Otremba:                        Absolutely.

Bryan Strawser:                   Why do you not want everyone to be the same? Why do you not want a professional emergency management … crisis management team where everybody spent a decade at FEMA and has all these emergency management certifications and that’s your whole crisis team? That’s what you want, right?

Jen Otremba:                        Well, I mean maybe some of that is helpful if you have one, two people that have that background.

Bryan Strawser:                   Some.

Jen Otremba:                        Some. But the problem with that is that it really limits your creativity and thought and your problem-solving capabilities. If you have everyone thinking the exact same thing, you got nobody thinking-

Bryan Strawser:                   The same background, same education.

Jen Otremba:                        … what’s happening over here. What about this? What about this? What about this?

Bryan Strawser:                   I came around to this idea of diversity of thought and experience and education in a … It was very difficult for me to come around to that.

Jen Otremba:                        Oh, really?

Bryan Strawser:                   It was because I thought that … Well, I was kind of personalizing the whole thing. Here I am, this was when I was in my early 20s, and thinking about these conversations around diversity in the workplace. What I was missing in all of that that I don’t think I was mature enoug...