The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Why Practical Exercises are Critical | PPP #48

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

The back-to-school week is always a challenge. Exercising the morning routine with your kids can be helpful. Realistically exercising scenarios with emergency and incident management partners is critical. Based on a LinkedIn article I wrote before the 2018/2019 school year.

Welcome to the People Process Progress Podcast, where we understand that people are our most important asset. We emphasize and share examples of the importance of shared process so that we can move ourselves, our teams, and our organizations toward progress. I'm the host of the show, Kevin Pinnell. To learn more about me and the show, go to peopleprocessprogress.com. But for now, let's get on with another great episode of the People, Process, Progress podcast in 3, 2, 1. Hey everybody, thanks for coming back to episode 48, the power of exercises. Not necessarily physical exercises, but how do we practice to get ready for the real thing, right? Now, exercise is key obviously um but really want to do is i'm going to talk about the power of exercises post that i made in september 2018

um you know we we can't just exercise we need to be realistic right and to me this could not be more apparent perhaps on who did or didn't do that related to pandemic response, particularly making things actionable, not just big plans like we've talked about, but in particular in your real life too, right? So my example and article I wrote then is, you know, here's, I'm gonna read the after action report here, paragraph, and then we'll get into kind of the,

you know, episode podcast stuff. So again, thanks for coming in. Here's my initial example from this. So this week we received a 30% grade on exercise participants meeting a deadline and 60% were able to complete the given objectives. This deadline modeled the real bus pickup time looming the next day for the start. And this was at the time, the 2018, 2019 school year. The objectives were one, to consume an appropriate amount of food to sustain energy throughout the day, and two, to remove food residue and other nastiness from the mouth

in the most expedient way possible before departure. My wife, brewing as she is, devised this exercise to serve as a mock run for the real school day. Now, how pertinent is it that we did this a few years ago just to get our kids out of summer mode into school mode. And we are in this COVID air quote quarantine, and I won't make this a whole political thing, but we are staying home. We'll say, and we're getting ready to send our kids back. I, not everyone though, that again is a whole other episode, right? The effect of not having personal interaction, physical interaction, or just being in the presence of others. But we're all getting ready to do some blend of either all virtual or virtual half and half.

My kids are going half and half, half the day at the school, half the day at home. So quite a mix. If you're a parent, God bless you. Godspeed to all of us as we get ready to do this. For us at the time, my kids were 11, 7, and 5. Now they're, gosh, 11, 7, and 5. Now they're, gosh, 13, 9, and 7. And so we're really trying to get them through those summer hours. And what are the metrics for success? It was eat, brush your teeth, and get to the bus on time, based on some time. And so now what are our metrics for this virtual half and half COVID school year? Get up, you know,

if you've been sleeping in, get some food, show up in front of the camera on time, ready to work, or maybe for the bus, or if you're giving them a ride. The key to me for this episode, though, and I think the critical thing, you know, the critical power of realistic exercises, and my original focus with this was on emergency management, right? Because emergency management does tons of exercises, or hopefully they do, public health hopefully does. But we can do this for projects too, right? Hey, let's walk through the work stream or the workflow of this. Let's game it. Let's take some things out. So, you know, just as these are important for kids, they're even more important for emergency and incident

management practitioners to conduct realistic exercises, right? We need to plan them in the most realistic fashion, which means you're going to work that planning P process. You're going to do it, not just pencil with it, not just put dates in there, but you're going to make it realistic. You're going to build into the exercise radio failure. You're going to take someone out because they got hurt. You're going to bring in a secondary attack. And when we planned for the big bike race in 2015, one of those was a car on the course, a bomb on the course. Okay, now the first responders are there. And we've seen this model overseas, first responders show up, then a second wave of attack comes in to kill the first responders. So if you're in emergency management or incident management, you have to think like that. And now you have to think like that,

plus a biohazard exposure to COVID-19, right? We need to push people out of their comfort zones, I truly believe. And then when we evaluate, we can't just be everyone's friend as evaluators, right? We can't. We need to be objective and transparent. And if folks were really good at stuff, awesome. If folks need work in areas for improvement, then we need to give that feedback and we need to not worry so much about hurting folks' feelings. That doesn't mean don't be professionals. We've talked about before when you do after action reports and improvement plans, you got to be professional, but you also got to be transparent because I have often seen and heard feedback that was like perfect weather day, nothing happened, we coordinated perfectly,

the perfect outcomes, when in reality, it was a snafu. And if those things would have happened in real life, people would have died, right? And we can't afford to do that. We can't afford to do that. You know, in the healthcare space, we can't afford to do that in emergency management or incident management on the street. So if you're an evaluator of exercises, you know, use your knowledge, skills and abilities to put you in a place to help others, right? Once you have that responsibility, you can really help give good feedback. You can learn, you'll get better and better of giving feedback. You know, be real, but be professional. And again, the exercises that we will do, the training and the practice will give us a second

chance. Whereas in life, if we make these screw ups, we're not honest with each other, or we don't have those crucial conversations to work through hardships. It will not in life or death situations, particularly very dynamic ones like the civil unrest that we're seeing, the riots, the random attacks, the active shooters, right? School season's coming up where kids will be physically in schools, right? And we know, you know, masks are the thing. So imagine public safety planning for that, you know, where it's okay now to hide your face. In Virginia, pre-COVID, it was illegal, right? If you wore a mask and you wouldn't take it off in a protest, you get charged with it. Now, it's easy for people to hide their faces. And so it's a nightmare for that. Fortunately, you know, folks record themselves doing things they shouldn't be doing, and that gets

on the internet. And then thank you for all the information and intelligence. But that's just a thing. So circling back to the exercise, whether you're an exercise director, whether you're evaluating, whether you're observing or playing, there's an obligation to treat the scenario if it's real. And some of my good friends and mentors always make sure to say this. They say, don't fight the scenario.

So if you're given a scenario that your job is to go to this place and turn two doorknobs and walk through the door and take 10 paces, don't say, well, what if there's three doorknobs? Well, how about I only take seven? Just do what they ask you to do. And in the after action, say, you know what? I did this scenario as it was asked. And this wasn't realistic because of this, this, and that. But if you have a bunch of folks, particularly players, that are fighting this scenario or observers,

and an observer's job is just to sit there and watch, period. You're allowed to come there and see what's happening and learn from it, take that away. But your job is not to talk to the players when they're doing it, to talk to the evaluators. You can look at the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. talk to the players when they're doing it to talk to the evaluators. And there's, you know, you can look at the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. There's tons of documentation on how people should act and all that. But, you know, you might be tired when you're doing this, you might be overwhelmed. But you can work through those if you work through a team. But again, treat it like it's real, work through the exercises. This is probably best applied

when you get into some of the really hands-on like tactical combat casualty care or other stuff where you have to do things or practicing appointed dispensing or annual flu vaccinations or COVID vaccinations, whatever. Really go through the motions, get your people used to it. And then truly, after you've done after actions,

after you've had those good talks, implement the areas for improvement based on your improvement plan timeline. Don't just make it and forget it because you can say you did it, check the box, get the grant money. We've got to really get in there and make those changes across the board.

So just kind of my two cents based on some things that I myself have done well, not done well, learned from others, been part of as an exercise evaluator and writer and director and all that jazz. As for the kids, we ended up getting them at 100%, if you're curious. I hope that all of you listening, especially if your parents getting your kids ready, we're probably not going to hit 100% day one or week one or month one, perhaps, as far as mass compliance and picking up and dropping off. But you know what? We're going to give it our best.

It is real. We just need to cooperate with each other, with our schools, do the best that we can, be sensible. I wish you all the best out there. I thank you so much. We're coming up on about 9,000 downloads here, so that's pretty awesome. And that's all because of you all.

If you want to reach me, like you heard in the intro, peopleprocessprogress.com. My contacts and stuff are there. Thanks so much, everyone out there. Please stay safe. Wash those hands and Godspeed.