The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Agreements Are Not Enough in Public Safety - Action is Needed | Foundations Friday 74

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Sharing a synopsis of my LinkedIn and website posts that highlight how when jurisdictions make proclamations to do better after something bad happens that it's too late. Two key failures typically occur before a disaster happens at a special event.Poor leadershipLack of good All-Hazard Incident Management applicationListen to this episode and go to https://kevtalkspod.com/formal-agreements-are-not-enough/ to read more. Here is the story that got me fired up this Friday from Police1.Have a collaborative planStay informed with factsGet involved to make a differenceKevin

Hey everybody, welcome to Foundations Friday 1, Agreements Are Not Enough. If you recall, Foundations Friday was a staple of the People Process Progress podcast and we're bringing it back. It would seem to be pretty popular and it's a great way, honestly, for me to share my two cents on Fridays to give you a quick hit of something. And this week it focuses on, it's called Agreements Are Not Enough because a friend of mine via text, a group that we have with those of us that worked in incident management and public safety, shared a story that the city of Houston in Texas signed a formal agreement that calls for unified command. Well, guess what?

That's not enough. An agreement is a piece of paper that people signed and said they would do something that I bet already exists somewhere and that city's plan, it's not enough to have a piece of paper, right? And unfortunately, and why I seem fired up about this is unfortunately I've been part of planning processes where public safety agencies and private sector folks did their own thing. It resulted in poor communication,

poor resource management, and in some cases, injury or death or bad response to those. So we have to do better, right? And the first failure, and I'm a huge Jocko Willink fan, like I've talked about, is in leadership. Leadership is not only important on the battlefield, as Jocko and Leif and the other Echelon Front folks say, it's important in the classroom and in the boardroom and in the squad room and at the dining room table in a firehouse and everywhere, and particularly in the leadership in the big office for the city or the county

or whatever jurisdiction someone is in charge of, they are responsible to say all agencies will work together. And when they don't work together, to say, why aren't you? Try and fix it and then get rid of folks that don't. If you Google after action or lessons learned from any bad thing over the past year, let alone five or 10 years, all of them have, we should have worked together ahead of time. We should have planned together ahead of time. So this story is kind of, it's a neat headline that says, look at us, what we're doing. Well, it's not groundbreaking. It's been in

existence for a while. So leadership has to change. And the second thing is all hazardous management that I've talked about for years, and it's not my idea, but I know it works because other folks showed me it works and was part of the team that made it work. You have to do that. You have to work together. And so leadership is the first people I blame. And the second is that they didn't really embrace the incident command system and incident management and working together in public and private partnerships and having a joint planning process and agreeing that they'll have the same radio channels. And it just didn't happen, right? And people got hurt and people died. And they didn't necessarily cause it, but they didn't help

with the response. So you may say, Kevin, on this Foundation's Friday, how are you going to help solve that problem? Well, one, I'll share the link to the story that Police 1 put out. And then two, I'm going to give you the same six steps that I shared in my LinkedIn post and on Facebook. The first one is make a phone call to the other public safety agencies and build the relationships. You have to. It's all about it. That's the people part. Get real training. Beginner level incident command system that everyone has to do. Some of those are online courses, some are taught in person, but it's great for a basic, basic understanding. But for the people, particularly public safety leaders, mid and high level managers, you

got to be trained up. You just have to. And I have resources if you reach out to me to help with that. And it can refer to folks or help you do it. The third thing is you have to practice the all hazards planning cycle, that planning P that starts from, hey, someone told us this event's going to happen in six months through, okay, now we're at the event and we're going to keep evaluating what we're doing. You have to do that all the time. You have to practice, practice, practice for pretend and use it on small events that are relatively not complex, right? Get your reps in just like

cops go to the shooting range to get better or should regularly, or I practice jujitsu to get better at defending myself and grappling. You have to practice these techniques, these processes, right? This is where the process piece comes in. And you have to require, as I said earlier, if you're a leader, you have to require it, not just have a piece of paper as a too late because people already got hurt. But right now, you need to pull your leaders together. If you're a mayor, if you're a county manager, if you're the head of a CEO of a private company and say, if we have an event and other public safety agencies are involved, or even if they're not involved, we're going to pull them together.

We're going to work together, get their input and respect it. The fifth thing is don't copy and paste a plan from last year or years ago, because that's not helping at all. Work with a fresh process. You can start with that as a template, but don't make that your plan, right? Go through it, work the process, change what needs to be changed, because nothing stays the same every year. The world changes. And work the process for real. And the sixth thing is keep working together. You have to keep working together day to day, right on the streets is one thing, you know, the police officer and the EMT and the firefighter, they work together on the streets all the time, where you get into the sticky part is mid and upper level management,

where some folks may have ingrained bad habits and some folks may have new innovative ideas and sometimes those clash, but you got to work through that. So go through them again. If you're looking to do more of what Houston's taking steps to do, make a phone call to your partners, get real good training, practice the all hazards planning cycle on pretend a little events. If you're the leader, require that it happens. Require it, period, or you're fired. Don't copy and paste the plan from last year and keep working together. Thank you for keeping to work with me on the KevTalks podcast where I have great conversations with interesting people that are leaders in both the processes they've used to get where they are and in the industries they work in and as a way to help us all make progress through other people's lessons learned who looked at knowledge and said, you know what,

I could use that this way or that way and helped innovate it and then shared it with us. Please share this podcast with people you think this may help. Folks all over the world are listening, so I really appreciate that. Remember, have a plan, stay informed with facts, not fear, and get involved so you can make a difference.