Profession(s) of emergency management

I

I think we’re all familiar with advocacy pieces that call for more adaptive, collaborative, comprehensive, integrated, holistic, and resilient approaches to hard issues, without however providing the details for that implementation.

It’s easy to dismiss these, but notice their positive implication for policy and management: Those who do know (some of) the details have much to say about their respective abstractions.

We know that real-time operators and managers of infrastructures coordinate, adapt, improvise, and redesign all the time in the face of system surprises and shocks, big and small. They also practice different types of resilience (i.e., adjusting to surprises in normal operations differs from restoring back to normal after a systemwide disruption). When it comes “comprehensive and holistic,” these professionals seek to maintain team situational awareness and a common operating picture of the system, again in real time.

Note two inter-related assumptions in the preceding. First, they are professionals, whether officially certified or not. Second, because they are professionals, their operational definitions of adaptation, resilience and coordination, among other abstractions, matter for and in practice.

II

Yet what do we hear n our interviews of emergency managers and infrastructure operations? Answer: the attempt of some to separate the goats from the sheep, namely, those who understand the centrality of the state and federal incident command systems to emergency management, and those who operate outside these structures when collaborating and improvising directly.

It’s accepted, of course, that at some point in some emergencies, horizontal and lateral micro-coordination may well be required. But those are exceptions and do not determine emergency management from the perspective of the incident command systems. That said, a magnitude 9.0 or greater earthquake in the Pacific Northwest will destroy infrastructures, including those for government emergency management, leaving behind the rest to self-organize and self-provision for the duration.

In our view, self-organization and self-provisioning have always been part and parcel of professional emergency management in major disasters

There is no place in this view for the credentialed to see the uncredentialed as amateurs for want of something better. The reliability professionals we write about are not neanderthals, as one interviewee with engineering certification put it to us. Emergency management today is in the 21st century; it should have no time or place for the likes of 19th century canine veterinarians asserting their professionlism by deriding 18th century dog-doctors.