If It's Broke, Fix It...Using PPOST in Multiple Languages Maybe?

?What an interesting fall it’s been. What an interesting year it’s been. Our little team has been busy, that’s for sure. We’ve seen a big uptick in interest in the PPOST methodology, particularly since we’ve started to share with people that it can be so much more powerful than just for response planning. So, this weekend I got up early and had a big cup of tea as I so often do and reflected a bit on the PPOST thing. For those of you not too familiar with PPOST, here’s a quick summary.

Here's what it stands for:

• Priorities – set your community priorities
• Problems – identify the issues and challenges specific to your community interests (conflicting priorities with others)
• Objectives – what needs to be done; set them based on what you are going to do to solve the problems
• Strategies – how you are going to do it; set them to achieve your objectives
• Tactics – who is going to do what by when; set them to achieve your strategies

In keeping with our innovative practices, we’ve added a couple of things to the process to make it viable for any number of other applications. We’ve added:

• A Source column at the end to identify where to get the resources for the Tactics
• An ICS-based org chart that quickly identifies the construct of the recovery operations team or whatever the application might be. We develop this as we’re facilitating a PPOST session; sometimes the org chart isn’t really necessary
• A cost estimate for each resource and the facilities for an appropriate period of time

PPOST is a simple method of inquiry that quickly gets you from high level problems down to the “who is going to do what by when”. Recall in some of my previous articles, I’ve mentioned that we really saw some great application for PPOST in recovery planning. Here in British Columbia the last few years, for those communities that have chosen to engage us on using PPOST for developing initial plans large flood and wildfire recovery, there’s been some great recovery planning and quick support to those impacted residents who need it. Basically, those initial recovery plans have been the answer to the Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness saying “tell us what you need.” In less than 72 hours we have been able to turn out that initial recovery plan that contains:

• Initial short, medium, and longer term objectives
• A prioritized list of initial activities to set up the recovery team and get the going immediately
• An org chart for that initial recovery operations centre
• A list of resources required, how they are to be procured, and an initial cost estimate

We’ve been able to do it with a very small team. For example, back in the 2021 fall flooding from the atmospheric river event here in southern BC, we delivered the initial flood recovery plan in less than 72 hours with a team of 4 people, two of which were flood recovery operations subject matter experts. We did similar work with several First Nation communities that flood season as well. And in 2023 on the West Kelowna fires, we were engaged on a Friday afternoon and by Monday noon not only had we delivered the initial recovery plan but we had found two contracted Recovery Managers for them and got their re-entry planning and debris management teams going. This time all with a team of one…yes you read that right…one. Mid-August is not a great time to pull the team away from their family holidays, so I facilitated the session and generated the report solo. Pretty easy when you’ve got templates for some of these PPOST activities like we do.

A best practice we’ve seen is when we’ve been engaged within the first few operational periods, pretty much as soon as the emergency operations centre (EOC) realized that there were significant impacts. But let’s bring this back to my mega cup of tea session this past Sunday morning early. I had a thought, did a bit of research, and landed on this.

It turns out that PPOST probably has some multi-language implications. For example, in Spanish it could look like.

• Problema
• Prioridad
• Objetiva or Ojectivo (feminine/masculine)
• eStrategia
• Táctica

When I saw that, I said to myself “hmmmm…things that make you go hmmmm…”

And still something else that made me go “hmmmm” again. In French:

• Problème
• Priorité
• Objective or Objectif
• Stratégie
• Tactique?

So, arguably, 3 of the top 5 languages spoken in the world translate PPOST over quite well. Hmmmm…

I know how powerful PPOST can be, particularly for advance planning at the Incident Command Post and EOC. My example of powerful quick initial and ongoing recovery planning notwithstanding, there are some other applications that either I ?have done and/or think would be suitable for PPOST. And I also know that I’m only really scratching the tip of the iceberg on this one. I think that anything that you can prioritize has the potential for problems/conflicts and probably has a PPOST solution. Some examples of other applications include:

• Re-entry planning
• Large scale debris management planning
• After-action reviews/debriefs – if you’re looking to dig down to some level of cause
• Business continuity planning – not for 99% of the time when your business continuity plan will do, but when an event really goes sideways and you need to start prioritizing around restoration of services it looks like it will work
• Multi-jurisdictional EM program planning
• Program workload planning
• Strategic business development (Yup, we did a session a couple of weeks back with a company looking to bring some new business practices into wildfire operations here in Canada where we identified their ideal initial market and drilled down to some key activities around who would do what by when to get things going before next fire season)

Those of you who have read any of my previous articles and posts know that I’m big on innovation, and that I don’t always consider it to be the exclusive domain of technology and equipment. To me, PPOST was an innovation to the Incident Command System. And now, it looks to me like it is poised to experience another evolution in its usefulness. But only if you folks all decide to look at it a little closer with more of an “outside the box” kind of a lens.?

And speaking of innovations, we have created our initial beta version of an AI-enabled PPOST tool. V1.0 allows you to:

• Identify your incident/event
• Select your priorities, either from an existing list and/or create your own custom list
• Ask the AI tool to generate some recommended problems, objectives, strategies and tactics; we’ve trained this on some actual PPOST content so it returns pretty good results for things like fires and floods and we’re working on other incident and event types, but that said it gives you a draft version of the PPOST table to start with so you can modify, update etc.

We have some interesting ideas for V2.0 already so we’ll see where this next little while takes us.

If you’re interested in exploring PPOST a little more, DM me here in LinkedIn and I’ll share some of my thoughts with you. In the meantime, consider a couple of quotes in the context of your emergency management future.

"The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic."

— Peter Drucker, Management Consultant and Author (originator of management by objectives)

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“The most dangerous phrase in our language is ‘We’ve always done it this way.’”

— Grace Hopper, PhD Computer Scientist and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral

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If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. But then again, where would we be today if we had followed that mantra over the history of humanity?

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Innovate, Innovate, Innovate…?