Preparedness sounds like momsense…

I can’t apologize for my pitiful puns.  Or won’t…maybe it’s won’t?

This month I’ll be joining other preparedness-minded moms in discussing some of the most important topics America’s PrepareAthon has to share.  While I was preparing my little section of slides (chatting about communication, surprise surprise!)  I really had to take a minute to wonder, what do other moms need to hear that makes them truly take a step in preparing their family?  Better yet, how can those steps be as feasible as possible?

If you work in preparedness and connect to the community at any point, I’m sure you’ve wondered this yourself.  Let me share with folks what doesn’t work.  Moms, dads, family members, feel free to chime in in the comments section.

This Doesn’t Work

• Acronyms
• Bestowing ALL of the information you know upon others
• Anything where you mention a directive, presidential and otherwise
• 10,000-foot-tall fear tactics
• Information that requires training to understand

These things don’t work because they don’t matter to anyone outside of the field.  If you’re not in the preparedness business, all you need to know is what will keep you and your family safe, and the time and financial cost of it.  Nobody disagrees they’d like to be prepared during an emergency or disaster, but if we’re all going to live like “that will never happen here”, we have to know that preparing for it is worth the effort.

This Does Work

• Reasons that what you’re saying is important
• Free things
• Easy things
• Plans that also improve daily life
• Simple, relatable language
• Realistic examples
• Understanding who you’re talking to

Some of us enjoy a family game night, movie night, standing dinner, Sunday drive. My family and I enjoy lots of those things, but we also enjoy family preparedness.  I know, it sounds like I made that up just so you’d listen to my blog and trust my opinion.  But hearing my kids process what they think is safe and smart, giving me their feedback on where our family meeting spot should be if we have a house fire, taking a few moments in the car during a bad storm to talk about sheltering, or teaching them a song that helps them remember my phone number – these are things that bring us really close together.  I continue to be amazed by the way they see the world and in turn, I don’t fear their safety the way I would if I sent them out in to it completely unprepared.

So fellow emergency management folks, let’s communicate with the community the way they need to hear it, not the way we want to say it.

Fellow moms (and family members, et al), bare with us while we share something that is desperately important to us, to help us all reach our goal of keeping our families safe.  After all, it takes a village…

If you’ll be joining me on this webinar, I’ll have 7-10 minutes of solid reasons why you need a communications plan, how to create one and how to make it successful.  Don’t wait!  Register for the webinar!

The Perversion of Social Media

I read an article today about a fatal accident that occurred in the Dallas/Fort Worth, TX area yesterday (6/3/2014).  The article focused somewhat on the accident itself, but moreso on the reaction of an off-duty responder who noticed bystanders using their phones to capture footage of the accident, rather than assisting.  (You can find the aforementioned article here in a new window if you’re interested in its content before reading further.)

The article shares the point of view of Lt. Anthony Williams (the off-duty responder) who attempted to assist in the incident as he pulled on-scene to a burning car where reportedly two people died, burned beyond recognition.  He recalled onlookers pointing their phones at the scene in his peripheral vision and called it “the perversion of social media” that they would be more interested in capturing video footage instead of helping the victims.  That phrase caught my attention and left me wondering…is that where social media has now led the public in emergency situations?

 Post plane-crash selfie…

Upon further investigation, I found that even being a part of disaster situations isn’t enough to distract from the need to immediately share those experiences on social media.  You can search for  “selfie after plane crash” or “selfie after stabbed” and there are, in fact, results that turn up by the plenty.  Another video seen today made light of a teenager with his dad who saw a semi-truck stuck on some rail road tracks.  As a train approached, they began recording the unfolding incident and the video was soon uploaded to YouTube and shared across the web.  And the teenager literally stood in the middle of the debris saying, “is this real life??”

So what is encouraging the public to make these choices during disaster situations?  I would argue it’s actually a list on influences that should be considerably eye-opening for my fellow emergency management focused friends, especially in their planning and response strategies.

The public isn’t empowered enough to act during disaster.  

We spend a lot of our time telling people what they can’t touch, where there can’t go, what can’t do, what they can’t say, or generally protecting whatever “territory” we feel is ours that it’s no wonder community members look a a crisis unfolding and feel helpless to do anything.  For the lay community member, what is outside of their daily job function is outside of their “basement” level thinking – the kind of thinking that happens naturally and automatically in response to a stressful situation. (I should note that concept is learned from a 2011 meta-leadership seminar I attended!)  For the officer in the story above, jumping into response mode was the obvious choice.  For the other bystanders, they’re so often made to feel that the only thing they can and should be allowed to do is wait patiently.  Is this all encompassing, of course not.  Is it pretty common?  Well, the story above is one of many examples.

The public experiences fear, and fear can be paralyzing.

One of my favorite books related to emergency management was Amanda Ripley’s Unthinkable.  It’s a great read, not too complicated and very eye opening about the reactions people have to disasters.  Plane going down?  Everyone shares a laugh.  Building burning down?  Let’s wait and see what’s REALLY going to happen.  Fear paralyzes people, removes their normal thought process and makes excuses against what they’re experiencing to put it in a more digestable format.  When you’re afraid, the ability to make rational decisions is quickly diminished, and that lack of recognition and decision making is paralyzing.  What do you do when you don’t know what to do?  Which leads me to my next thought…

The public has a disconnect with crises. 

We’re not empowering them, and without knowledge or training there is fear.  And where there is fear and inexperience there is a disconnect from what a crisis really is: a bad situation that can happen to anyone, anytime that is completely dependent on who will step up to handle it.  The 24-7 news-like exposure folks have to disaster in our culture so often puts them in a realm of automatic disconnect to the reality of it that when it’s in front of them, it automatically turns into almost a movie-like experience.  As long as nothing happens to someone, they will believe that nothing will happen to them.  And when it happens to others, it’s a very unfortunate, very impersonal scene that they haven’t been given a role to play in.

The public processes information in a very unprecedented way.  

There was a point in my life that if I didn’t know what to do, I’d open my phone and click on Twitter.  Or I’d sit down to do a task at my computer and type “Faceb…” before I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.  Am I proud of this fact?  No way!  “Recovering” is a more accurate description.  The point is, social media is a decision A LOT of people make when we’re in the basic, “basement” way of thinking.  Nowadays, events haven’t been experienced until they’ve been shared.  They’re not processed unless they’re discussed.  We use social media to document information, to show we’re the first to know it, to receive empathy, to alert that we’re okay, to share the unbelievable.  We use social media to experience that which simply “can’t be happening to me” during the times we “can’t do anything about it” because it isn’t real life until we can go through our notes with those we connect with.

Yes, I realize I’m speaking in absolutes, recognizing this is a thought for a general population and not all-encompassing.  But you get the idea.  It is a terrible tragedy that anyone should lose their life needlessly in disaster.  It’s even worse when there are things that can be done that aren’t done, whether for ones self (evacuating, preparing, sheltering…) or for others.

So what are you going to change about your message and your interactions with your community to humanize the emergency management field, empower your citizens and foster a whole community response to keep these things from happening any more?

Tweet #BiggerThanMyself or mention me @tjlasagna if you have some suggestions.  If this is a topic you’d like to see researched further, please also let me know.

-Tanya

Strengths, Weaknesses and Finding your fit in EM

It took me a long time to figure out the things I was good at, and the things I wasn’t so good at.  Or maybe, rather, it took me a long time to accept it.  Maybe that’s because it’s easy to see what you’re bad at, albeit tough to admit, and hard to give yourself credit for what you do well.

Kind of hoping the arm on the left represents my strengths…

For me, I know I’m great at developing new concepts and starting them off, I’m bad at following through and completing them.  I’m sure of my decisions when directing others, but doubt my decisions when I’m the one pulling the trigger.  I enjoy being in the middle of action and long for that hands-on response, but know I’m most useful waiting until there’s a role and a function I can fulfill.  I have strengths and weaknesses, but in the end all I want is to do is provide an effective response. I know I’m talking a lot about me, but I do so because I want to exemplify a very important task that we all, including myself, need to do.

As folks involved in disaster, we have to recognize our weaknesses and our strengths.  Not just know…recognize.  And then plan to deal with them.

Don’t get me wrong, this statement is true for everyone.  But the reason it is so critical for our field is because emergency management drives passion and excitement, and those things can cause us to enter superhero mode (and yes, I believe everyone I work with is a superhero) without realizing where we’re really needed.

When it comes to response, so many people want to save the day as soon as it is understood the day will need saving.  It is one of the things that make our career field so different from many others…when our day gets worse (i.e. a disaster strikes), we can’t stop working.  We don’t want to stop working.  Our pulses race, our instincts take over and all we want to do is protect life, property and everything in between.

The problem with this is we are at great risk for doing a disservice to that which is motivating us.  I want to protect my community, but I can’t if I’m burnt out.  I can’t do that if I’m duplicating someone else’s efforts at the same time as them or if I haven’t recognized where I can do the most good.  We want to keep working and want to fulfill every task because we want to protect everyone, but by not recognizing our strengths and weaknesses,  we are not doing what is best for the community.

Can’t…stop…working…!

I have a special place in my heart for public information…it was my introduction to the world of emergency management over six and a half years ago.  I knew my strength was working with the press because I had been on the other side of that relationship, but my excitement became my weakness because I’d develop tunnel vision when I was on the ground.

With the help of some very good mentors and the stress of real-life application, I realized I could easily become lost in the PIO role, and lost people are at risk for making bad decisions and being ineffective.

By recognizing my weakness, I was able to develop tools in order to manage it and then step back and figure out what my strength was in the same arena and learn how to make a true difference.  I used to feel bad realizing that something I loved deeply wasn’t the best fit for me in its active form.  Even now, I hate admitting this on my blog because I wouldn’t want anyone to lose faith in the assistance I can provide.  But weaknesses are only disabling when you don’t make a plan to adjust to them or let them lead you to your other strengths.

Yep, still hate admitting it!

Now, wherever I am involved in my broader level of emergency response, public information is addressed where it may often be neglected.  I’m great at Joint Information Center support and evaluation and found that social media is a niche I am most at ease with…a largely uncharted territory in EM.

I wanted to share this piece of my journey in identifying some of my weaknesses and strengths because once I finally did, my effectiveness in emergency management was altered in such a positive way.  You may be amazing at on-scene media management and speaking for your agency.  Or maybe you are the BEST at training others.  Or an invaluable asset with your ability to track supplies or finances.  Perhaps you are level-headed in disaster and perform flawlessly as boots on the ground, providing those critical services that literally save lives.

Whatever it is that you are the best at, give yourself credit for it.  And then stop letting your weaknesses get in the way of finding your perfect fit.

#EMVine Challenge

I never thought I would admit this but…I love vine.  If you ever saw my first post, one sad afternoon in June, you remember that I entered the Vine world kicking and screaming.  I mean, really?!  Six second looping video clips?  Who wants to see that??  It was very reminiscent to my introduction to many types of technology.  The world wants to change and here I am content, but eventually I give in and hate myself for not being the first one to do so.

 Honestly? Will Sasso made me do it.

Another thing I’ll admit, but am slightly less surprised to do so, is that emergency management is not a message we can expect people to seek out sans current disaster.  And even then the information that is sought is always too late in terms of preparedness, and more response and mitigation based than anything else.

Emergency preparedness is on the average individual’s mind, oh about, never percent*.  It seems to me that if we want to change the culture of community preparedness, we need to be in the middle of that culture.  We have to be fun, interesting, engaging, captivating and relevant.  I know I’ve said it a hundred times, but we have to meet people where they’re at.

That’s not exactly what I had in mind…

Last week, following the most excellent National Capital Region Social Media in Emergency Management (#NCRsmem) conference, my fellow blogger and Twitter friend @Preparedness2Go wrote an interesting post about the use of hashtags in emergency management.  The post was spurred because one of the presenters had an amazing recap of their response as the tweeter for the Boston PD, but personally didn’t like to use haghtags.  While I understand (and even rejected them as a nuisance to read through in my earliest Twitter times), my response was that sometimes we do things we don’t want to do, or we don’t like, because that is what puts us in the middle of conversations that are going on about us without us.

But without a disaster, conversations are just going on without us.

I think we have some opportunities to insert ourselves into those conversations. So long as we’re being interesting and relevant, people will listen to what we have to say.  Take, for example, Gloria Huang – Red Cross Tweeter Extraordinaire.  She nailed this during Sharknado, making quick-witted, off the cuff live tweets during this SyFy masterpiece that made preparedness interesting, fun, and very noticeable!

My challenge to my fellow #SMEM lovers is to spend a little time during September and make National Preparedness Month our excuse to join those conversations.

For the month of September, I’ll be attempting to combine my love of Vine and emergencies by researching trending topics and creating Vines that are both relevant and preparedness driven.  By hashtagging a trending topic and #EMVine, it’s possible to join a popular conversation and create a buzz about preparedness.

I’m not even gonna ask permission!

Since many of my Twitter friends and followers, as well as my own MRC units, will be participating in 30 Days, 30 Ways, a preparedness game that encourages followers to complete daily tasks for prizes through social media outlets, I thought it would be the perfect connection.  Not only are we sneaking in creative entries into the game (snicker!) we’re also creating six-second public service announcements that, if interesting and visible enough, have the ability to lead others to seek out what this “preparedness stuff” is all about.

And sure, maybe they won’t care.  But you can only ignore a redundant message for so long before you’re curious.  And I have my sights set on the assistance of the “Vine Famous” …

Tanya

P.S. You can always follow @tjlasagna and Vine at Tanya Ferraro or Tanya Ferraro MRC!

*Not a scientific measurement.

Time to Get Engaged

If you’ve read my previous post, you know I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am going to engage my non-emergency minded colleagues and volunteers.  I’m always thinking about that because I know that if I can get everyone involved, resiliency skyrockets!

 

Engage!  Colleagues, that is.

This past week, I participated in facilitating a disaster behavioral health seminar and something occurred to me…they totally nailed the engagement concept!

It seems we spend a lot of time encouraging folks to take Incident Command System (ICS) courses, learn our FEMA ways, and give our jargon a special place in their hearts.  Now, I absolutely believe this is a necessity for responding to disaster.  Especially when we’re asking folks to become acclimated to a field they know nothing of and connect with on a basis of once to never.  It might seem foreign, but ICS is where it all starts!

There’s just one thing we forget to do sometimes.  To teach people where they fit in, why they fit there, and how to fulfill their specific role.

Does this go here?

At the seminar last week, they didn’t get lost in the weeds of leadership.  And what I mean is this – ICS tells us how to lead, what the overarching structure is and a broad overview of the ins and outs of organizing emergency response.  We have to know this, but we need to know more.  We need each block of that organizational chart to function independently and completely to make each branch, section and dotted line as efficient as possible.

Our speakers and our participants acknowledged the inner workings of ICS, but then did something wonderful with the information.  They recognized where they fall in the system and how they can fulfill the role they’d be given.  They focused on how to be consistent, work together, and make their branch of incident response as efficient, effective and generally as rad as possible.  Yeah, I said it.

It’s safe to say that most of our colleagues and volunteer members won’t have to lead during an emergency, so we have to meet people where they’re at when it comes to emergency information.

If I don’t make ICS applicable, if I don’t go that one step further and say, “You are here, and this is how you make your role successful so that others may be successful,” I am failing those I am asking to serve, and I’m failing those they will support.  And I really, really hate to fail.

You know how I feel, Twitter fail whale.

Not bringing the information to where people are at and giving them a reason to care and a way to be successful leaves us talking to an empty room.  And I don’t think that’s just in emergency management.

Tanya

For more information:

If you haven’t completed and Incident Command Systems courses, visit FEMA’s Independent Study website, and start with ICS 100 (b, most likely, but there are equivalents tailored to certain types of organizations).  Then give IS 700.a a go for an introduction to the National Incident Management System.  These are the basics to get you started!  If you love that, explore what other ICS courses FEMA has to offer, and in the meantime, locate your agency or local emergency manager and find out what your role might be and how to get ready for it.

Try this: Disaster in Place!

There aren’t a lot of jobs that require everyone’s participation.  And not just everyone in a certain facility or agency, I mean everyone.  It’s tough sometimes!  I certainly find myself “silo-ing” people into their jobs.  I don’t know how to be engaged and I’ll never need to know how to be engaged.  I think in the emergency world we find a lot of the same thing.  We have jobs to do and whether people know we exist and what our jobs are, they expect they’ll be done and all will be well.

But it just takes more than that.

Working with professionals who have volunteered their time, I am now much more accustomed to adjusting to individuals who don’t think of emergency management on any type of regular basis.  It’s kept me from having tunnel-vision or becoming so immersed inside an emergency management world that I forget how to relate with the public.  (It’s also done wonders for this fast-talking acronym lover! To slooooow down, spell things out, give meaning to each word of our accurately/overly descript titles!)

Couldn’t have said it better, public health memes!

That being said, I know no matter how many disasters happen, and no matter what has actually impacted our area, encouraging people to think about disasters and preparedness on a realistic level is still a challenge.  This is true for community members, colleagues in all types of organizations, schools, and so on.  But I think I might have a solution that will help engage people using the best ally we have in preparedness: their minds!  ♫Dun dun dun!!♫♪

As an emergency management addict – yes, I’ll admit it – I live thinking about the “worst case scenario” every day.  Behind a truck with a radioactive symbol on the highway?  I’m planning.  Driving through gasoline storage tanks?  Planning.  Standing at the edge of the ocean?  Planning!  Random zombie apocalypse in Wal-Mart?  Oh, you know I’m planning.  I’m sorry, but no disaster scenario you throw me into is going to be as colorful as my “what if…”

So I wonder, what will the public’s “what if’s” do for them?

This month, I will begin a new series with my awesome Medical Reserve Corps teams and leave it open for adaptation in any facility that would like to play off of it.  It’s called Disaster in Place and will be more than just a tool to raise “alert” response numbers (those availability responses I monitor when I send out events, tests, etc.)  For example, for the month of May, I have scheduled to send out alerts to all three of my units on Tuesday during standard business hours on an Active Shooter scenario.  However, the scenario won’t be mine to write.

It will begin with the explanation of Disaster in Place, the purpose and the instructions on how to successfully complete it.  (For those of you that may want to replicate this idea, what I’m more or less using is below.)  But I won’t leave my friends without some educational resources as well!  Months ago, after the Aurora, CO shooting, I encouraged my members to take FEMA’s IS 907 Active Shooter: What You Can Do and we had some interest.  But talking yourself through your own active shooting plan, right where you are at that very moment?  That may encourage a little more planning indeed.  I will also include a link previously shared on some of our Facebook sites, Houston’s popular RUN. HIDE. FIGHT. video on YouTube is a very clear, useful way to consider your choices in an active shooting incident.

The purpose is to leave our members feeling ready (and maybe even the people around them, if word spreads!).  Not to live in fear, but to live in preparedness.  To create strong, powerful communities where everyone is a part of my job and that’s what makes it successful.  Disaster in Place will have several elements I think are critical for success – giving our communities something they can think, something they can see, and something they can do.

Next month, we’ll give severe weather a shot one evening or on the weekend!  And once that catches on, I think letting people choose the time/place of that days drill will be appropriate and even more engaging.  Stay tuned and I’ll update how it goes, and if you decide to participate, please comment, or shoot me an email and let’s share some great ideas.

Tanya

Want to implement Disaster in Place in your organization?  Here’s a snapshot of what’s cooking in my MRC’s:

Purpose:  To engage non-emergency management related personnel at least once a month in their normal environments in order to increase awareness, personal preparedness and readiness.  (MRC specific purpose: to also increase our alert response and stay actively connected to our members.)

Introduction:  Our introduction looks a little something like this…

Good afternoon team,

This month we will begin our Disaster in Place series, designed to increase awareness, preparedness and response no matter what your environment today may be!  Please take five minutes to participate in the exercise, and respond to this alert with a “yes” or “no” that you have done so.  Please respond either way so we may track our alert response rate, even if you are not able to participate.

This month’s scenario is an Active Shooter event.  Please take two minutes to review your surroundings where you are right now.  What are your exits?  Where are your hiding spaces?  What resources, such as phones, windows, and other people are around you?  Now take three minutes and decide, what would you do if an active shooter were to advance towards your area?

For tips on what you can do in an event like this, please review the following 5:22 video: Run. Hide. Fight.

For additional FEMA training, please advance to the following course at your leisure and forward your certificate to your coordinator, if you choose to participate.

Thank you for all that you do!

Goal:  To require as little time as possible in order to encourage participation – professionals are busy!  But in the end, you make time for what you care about, and I believe our members will do just that.  We’re asking for a five minute interlude in their day, we’re offering several more minutes of optional training, with an unlimited potential community value.