I Want to Go Home!

What is the mission of Unified Command? Simple to define, right?  Or is it as simple as ‘go home’?

Here’s how USDA describes the purpose of Unified Command:

“Unified Command is a team effort process, allowing all agencies with geographical or functional responsibility for an incident, to assign an Incident Commander to a Unified Command organization. The Unified Command then establishes a common set of incident objectives and strategies that all can subscribe to. This is accomplished without losing or giving up agency authority, responsibility or accountability. Unified Command represents an important element in increasing the effectiveness of multi-jurisdictional or multi-agency incidents. As incidents become more complex and involve more agencies, the need for Unified Command is increased.”

How about Incident Command itself?

Here’s what FEMA says: “The Incident Command System (ICS) is a management system designed to enable effective and efficient domestic incident management by integrating a combination of facilities, equipment, personnel, procedures, and communications operating within a common organizational structure. ICS is normally structured to facilitate activities in five major functional areas: command, operations, planning, logistics, Intelligence & Investigations, finance and administration. It is a fundamental form of management, with the purpose of enabling incident managers to identify the key concerns associated with the incident—often under urgent conditions—without sacrificing attention to any component of the command system.”

Go home!

So, the mission of Unified Command is to ‘establish a common set of incident objectives and strategies’, or is it ‘to enable effective and efficient domestic incident management’?

So much for simplicity!  Here’s a shorter mission statement: Go home!

Every response structure or system is designed to accomplish the same goals with differing levels of involvement, expenditure and outcome. Each response has its own response objectives, but they generally fall around the same key points:

• Protect people – safety of public and responders is always paramount
• Stop the incident! No matter what happened, stop it!
• Secure the assets – whether boats, buildings or bridges
• Protect wildlife and environment – no matter what spilled, released, burned or erupted, keep it away from animals and plants
• Restore damages – whether things or beings, make them whole!
• And then, go home.

Any response that escalates to Unified Command is expensive in damage, impact, time and cost. Virtually all responses are ‘extra duty’, not part of our normal schedules or to-do lists. All responders put their ‘day jobs’ on hold, and their lives on hold. So ‘go home’ is actually a valid and valuable objective.

‘Go home’ focuses the ‘response mind’ on maximizing both effort and impact for the greatest (and quickest) good. It ensures the Unified Command mantra of ‘the best people making the best decisions for the best outcome’.

What it does NOT do is assure impacted stakeholders.

Unified Command participants say; ‘We want to go home!’ Impacted stakeholders say; ‘We ARE home! Our lives have been turned upside down, we’ve incurred harm! We need help!”

For stakeholders, the Unified Command decision of ‘over’ is most definitely NOT ‘over’. In many cases, the conclusion of response efforts is only the beginning of recovery efforts.

The conundrum is that Unified Command works best when focused on the short term, while stakeholder relations works best when focused on the long term. Hence the challenge for the JIC and all communicators: How do we practice long-term thinking in a short-term environment? Short-term focus leads to good response actions, but bad communication actions.

From the very start of a response to the end of all activities, how does a communicator craft an effective communication process?

First, stakeholder communication is only effective if it meets stakeholder information needs. Providing information about response actions may meet the expectations of responders, but it only begins to meet the needs of affected stakeholders.

Stakeholders need much more information than response facts. Let’s look at the following issues that surround this basic truth:

Responder expectations and why they are wrong

First, response leaders expect communicators to share information about response actions. Whether internal to a single response organization or at the Unified Command table, people responsible for directing response efforts want to be sure their actions are accurately portrayed to a watching world. They pore over facts to ensure accuracy. They wrestle with changing numbers and worry about inaccuracy. They check grammar and look for typos. They remove subjective information in favor of objective facts.

And they completely miss the point: Responders know facts, but they don’t know feelings. Effective response communication isn’t just factual, it is emotional. Only communicators major in this point. Responders strip the soul out of communication because they don’t recognize the need for it. When dealing with an affected public, facts are an important element of effective communication, but so is honesty, empathy and sympathy. Responders need to turn loose of their hold on the communication product, and trust the communicators to do what we do best.

Approval processes and why they are wrong

Every communicator deals with an approval process of some type, typically one that is longer and more draconian than it should be. Typically, one communicator submits their product to multiple approvers for review. Pre-Unified Command, content goes to Legal, HR, Investor Relations and/or Corporate leaders for review and revision. Each holds veto power over every word, thought or fact. The same holds with Unified Command, where one individual, the PIO, brings JIC product to the Unified Command table, where every member holds the same veto power.

In any setting, the result of this is delay, obfuscation or elimination of key messages. Subjective statements are summarily excised. Facts are revised or questioned, grammar and context are vandalized. The all too typical process returns a marked up, dumbed down, stripped out tossed salad of word to the JIC or the communicator for revision and resubmission. None of this should happen; this process does violence to timeliness and effectiveness of communication products.

How to make them right

Reverse the process. Give professional communicators full sway over the product. Trust their professionalism to generate effective, well-written and accurate material. To ensure accuracy, put a fact-checker next to the communicator or in the JIC. Their job is to screen the facts for accuracy. Let the communicators decide what needs to be said, what key nuggets to pull out of the avalanche of facts available. Instead of one communicator subjecting their work to multiple reviewers put one fact checker in with multiple communicators. This fact-checker can work with information gathering, to sign off on all information coming to the communicator or JIC.

What should Command do with communication products?

Listen to them! Read them! The communicators’/PIO’s role is to inform Command of public sensitivities and risks that need to be considered. The communicator/PIO is the communication expert at the command table. Communicators need to seize this role, and responders need to give it to them. Responders, don’t edit out what communicators have put in. Instead, ask them why it is important so you understand the response impact better!

Why all this talk about communicators’ roles? Because until this is settled, communicators can’t bring long-term stakeholder acceptance to short-term response actions. Once it is settled, communicators can begin to deliver better information for better understanding, to both responders and stakeholders. They can use strategies that ensure long-term understanding and acceptance of short-term response activities.

When does long-term thinking sync with short term thinking?

Immediately. Let’s look again at typical response objectives, and list some long-term concerns next to each short-term objective.

And the list goes on. And on. Who knows these concerns? Communicators do.

Communicators know that the simple, straightforward response statement; ‘We’re doing everything we can to stop this incident right now’, and the facts associated with the statement (that responders think prove their commitment) don’t answer stakeholders’ heart concerns. In addition to hearing about boats, boom and bodies, they need to hear; ‘We know how important this it to people who live here. We live here too, and we are working as fast as we can. We will do everything we can to stop it, as quickly as possible. Use emotional statements to connect with emotion, use facts to connect with logic. Neglecting one injures the other. Communicators know this. It’s our passion, to be heard and understood.

Planning ahead: the ‘why’

Once we’ve built heart into initial communications, we need to go to work on what we know is coming. It is very common to focus on key initial facts and actions at first, as communication has to catch up with response plans and actions. But very quickly communicators need to segue into more important matters. Yes, there are more important things to do than share facts. Facts are answers or proof to ‘what’. More important is ‘why’ and ‘what’s coming?’.

Facts demonstrate response actions, but response actions are selected for specific reasons. These reasons are the ‘why’. Here are some samples:

Seem like a lot of work? It is extra work to create the ‘why’ statements, while the ‘what’ is easier to find. But here’s a secret: Facts always change, so the ‘what’ always changes. The ‘why’ doesn’t change, so it can be used again and again to support the ever-changing ‘what’.

‘Why’ is also recyclable: Each ‘why’ statement can be used to meet later stakeholder concerns.

What about the facts?

What about the facts themselves? How do I keep them flowing?

• Develop a facts flow that doesn’t require ongoing approval. Use your fact-checker to verify response actions for incorporation into a standing Response Facts sheet.
• Select the key measurements you know stakeholders need for assurance of activity; boats, boom, bodies, birds – any information that becomes measurable evidence of progress and actions.
• Establish protocols for verification and use; typically, information is factual if it is associated directly with a response activity. If boom is being deployed, the number of feet deployed is a fact. If oiled birds have been reported and a team is responding, the report is a fact. If an injury has been reported, it is a fact. Each fact should have a corresponding action that renders the fact to be true.
• Publish facts as they ebb and flow. Remember and reinforce the universal response truth: All facts change with time and absolute truth will only be known long after the response is over. Use the best facts available and change them when they change. Remind everyone that facts are fungible.

Plan for the future

While most response facts reflect the past, some impact the future.

• Reports of oiled birds will result in oiled birds and all the concern and attention they bring.
• Spill trajectories showing oil is coming ashore usually result in oil coming ashore and the attendant stakeholder concerns.

Effective communicators note the key facts that lead to future communication needs and prepare for them. Very quickly in a response, communicators should identify these ‘hot buttons’ as key issues and track them diligently. Don’t settle for ‘what is’ from information gatherers, require them to always ask ‘what’s coming?’ If the Wildlife branch says there are no impacted birds, ask them if there are reports of impacted birds, or if they’re planning on opening rehab centers. If the Environment section is planning booming strategies, ask them where and when. Is dispersant use being planned? Has a permit been submitted? Are they being staged somewhere?

As soon as any ‘hot button’ issue is touched by response plans, communicators need to prepare for it. This is not just preparing materials, it is informing Command of needed ‘lead time’ to prepare stakeholders for the eventuality. The time to talk about bird rehabilitation centers is before oiled birds are reported. The time to talk about shoreline protection strategies is before they’re implemented. Want to see trouble? Start using dispersants or burning oil before you tell stakeholders you’re going to!

This rule applies to more response action than a responder may think.

• In one response involving a spill of bunker fuel during refueling, responders decided to move the involved vessel without informing the public. Unfortunately, viewers from the shore didn’t know the ship was being moved for decon, they thought it was leaving the ‘scene of the crime’.
• In the same response, communicators had to override Command’s resistance to conducting a media briefing on a beach. Communicators knew the public needed to see the negligible impact on the beach instead of looking at a white board.

Advise and Consent:

Note the critical ingredient for success: Communicators who know what the real issues are, and have a plan to address them. This goes back to the communicator’s role with Command: To advise. Don’t let good response decisions be wasted by bad communications.

Only effective communications balances the competing demands of ‘I want to go home’ with ‘I don’t want you to go home’.  Be prepared to lead Unified Command through a graceful departure!

Questions? Did you see ideas in this post that you’ve never heard of before? Contact me!

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