Incident Management – for Whom?
Rick Christ, MEP, CHEC
Preparedness Professional: planning, training, and exercises for all disciplines.
In the version of ICS-300 I helped to create for Washington DC, the first question we ask learners is about defining the stakeholders in the scenario we present. The more I teach the course, the more learner workbooks I review, the more important seems this question.
All learners can articulate that the term includes the emergency responders to the incident. Most go on to include civilians immediately present at the scene, and the property owners.
Very few learners mention the protesters in the scenario, the business owners nearby, and others not mentioned in the scenario but likely impacted.
The term “stakeholders” is mentioned 16 times in the current (2017) NIMS doctrine, but never defined. So please allow me the arrogance to define it for the NIMS: “those who are significantly impacted by the incident, or by your response to the incident.”
We don’t often spend time on the concept of stakeholders because, incorrectly, we think it’s obvious. The late great Godfather of urban Incident Command, Phoenix Fire Chief Alan Brunacini, wrote a manual called “Essentials of Fire Department Customer Service” in which he explained to his medics that their customers were not just their patients, but their patients’ families. In emergency management, we can go farther.
Understanding who are your stakeholders is essential to developing good objectives for an incident. The Incident Commander must not only develop objectives that respect each distinct stakeholder group; they must also screen those objectives to make sure they respect the other stakeholder groups. While we can’t always make every stakeholder happy, we must strive not to unduly burden one stakeholder group in order to please another.
领英推荐
In one of the typical ICS-300 scenarios, there is a college basketball championship game scheduled, and a protest gathering across campus, for an animal rights cause. The weather is projected to be brutally cold. The protesters are certainly a stakeholder group, and if I have learned nothing else from my work with DC, I have learned that protesters, (or, as DC calls them First Amendment Activity participants) are to be respected. Even if police arrest some of them, they must be provided protection from the freezing weather, and from others.
Imagine a railroad train incident with hazardous chemical spill. Certainly, the prime stakeholders are the railroad employees abord the train, and civilians nearby. People downwind and downstream are stakeholders. The fish in that stream are also stakeholders, and so minimizing the leak’s impact to the stream becomes the basis for a SMART objective. The shippers and the railroad are of course also stakeholders.
As I will explain in a future article on SMART objectives, when we determine the measurability of objectives, we should do so with the stakeholders in mind. In other words, we should measure the success of our objectives the way they would: not by how many resources we throw at the problem, but by how well we solve the problem from their perspectives. Not how many snowplows we deploy, but how drivable are the roads.
It's crucial to know our stakeholders, because they’re what emergency management and incident management are all about.
#incidentcommand #emergencymanagement #planningp
Planning Section Chief | FEMA - Region VI - Response Division - IMAT 2
9 个月Great sentiment but I always caution against use of words like "everyone"... In using your definiton: The term “stakeholders” is mentioned 16 times in the current (2017) NIMS doctrine, but never defined. So please allow me the arrogance to define it for the NIMS: “everyone directly or indirectly impacted by the incident, or by your response to the incident.” That would mean that groups and interests far removed from the actual response effort would need to be considered if they are directly or indirectly impacted by the response. Imagine, for a second, this definition applied to a terrorism response or an oil spill... whose impacts and actors might be globe spanning in terms of second and third order of effects. Imagine as well that by saying "everyone impacted" without defining the word impacted creates an unmanageable burden. I offer this tounge in cheek... take someone whose morning commute found itself slightly elongated because of a road detour around your scene is technically "impacted". If we start taking our management efforts out that far I don't want to be the PSC responsible for that IAP. ;) I think you may be on the right track but a modifier word or three might help you dial in a more operational definition.
Disaster & Emergency Management Specialist - Educator - CLO - Speaker - CEM(R) - iAEM Certification Commissioner
9 个月So true. Another for you Rick, try finding a Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition for Emergency, Crisis, and Disaster Management.
Director of Preparedness @ BAM Weather | "Left of Bang" co-author
9 个月Rick Christ, MEP, CHEC - Great article and I like the definition. Before reading this, I would have been one those that said this was obvious. But without a good definition, I would certainly have missed some stakeholders as a result.
The Contrarian Emergency Manager 災
9 个月Despite ‘common terminology’ and ‘plain language’ being fundamentals of ICS, NIMS/ICS does a poor job of defining many things, including those very concepts. ICS Canada recently convened a working group exploring some issues with implementation, the fundamental roots of which were misunderstandings, likely driven by poor/no definitions of key concepts. The old NIIMS had a lot of supporting doctrine that better supported things, but with the introduction of NIMS, much of that went away. We need to thoughtfully and intentionally build the support the system needs. ICS Canada report here: https://www.icscanada.ca/images/upload/docs/ICS%20Canada%20Doctrine%20Review%202023%20final%20v2.pdf