Volume 8 No. 8 August 2016

In This Issue

Featured Video

Blog Highlights

The Leadership Challenge

Consulting Transitions

Featured Article

Professional Development

Life Balance

From the Bookshelf

Speaker's Corner

Featured Video

A Day in Pompeii

Around noon on August 24, 79 CE, Mt. Vesuvius exploded with a force estimated to be 100,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. By 1 pm, ash and pumice was falling at the rate of 6 to 8 inches an hour on Pompeii. Herculaneum was wiped out about midnight by pyroclastic flow moving at over 60 MPH. Around dawn, Pompeii was enveloped and destroyed by a series of pyroclastic flows. This graphic recreation by the Melbourne Museum gives some idea of what the people of Pompeii may have experienced during this cataclysmic event.

Blog Highlights

Visit My Blog

The following are excerpts from my blog

Canton on Emergency Management. Please visit my blog to see the rest of my articles.

Do you really see me?

08-25-2016

It's harder to hate when you truly "see" the other person...�

If you are having trouble accessing these articles, go directly to the blog by clicking either the logo or the green "Visit my blog" button.

Visit My Blog

The following are excerpts from my blog, Managing Crisis, published by Emergency Management Magazine. Please visit my blog to see the rest of my articles.

Is ICS Missing an Essential Function?

07-21-2016

In a Journal of Emergency Management article titled The evolution of shortcomings in Incident Command System: Revisions have allowed critical management functions to atrophy, researchers Kimberly Stambler and Joseph Barbera make a strong argument that four decades of policy/procedure changes have reduced the effectiveness of ...�

If you are having trouble accessing these articles, go directly to the blog by clicking either the logo or the green "Visit my blog" button.

The Leadership Challenge

What Is The Leadership Challenge?

Is leadership a learned behavior or an innate personality trait? While there are certainly naturally charismatic individuals who are considered "born leaders", leadership is a measurable set of behaviors that can be learned and taught. This is the conclusion arrived at by researchers Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner after years of rigorous research. Starting in 1982, Kouzes and Posner set out to understand what happened when leaders performed at their personal best. They conducted hundreds of interviews and reviewed hundreds of cases studies and survey questionnaires. What emerged were five fundamental practices common to extraordinary leadership achievements:

Model the Way
Inspire a Shared Vision
Challenge the Process
Enable Others to Act
Encourage the Heart

The Leadership Challenge begins with a 360-degree assessment of thirty leadership behaviors associated with the five practices, the Leadership Practices Inventory. The results are used to identify opportunities for improving as a leader by increasing the frequency of specific behaviors. Based on over thirty years of research, the Leadership Challenge is an effective and practical tool for leadership development.

To find out more about the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, consider taking The Leadership Challenge. Just click on the icon below for more information:

Click here to take The Leadership Challenge

____________________________________

The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations

by James M. Kouzes & Barry Posner

The Leadership Challenge is a registered trademark of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. www.leadershipchallenge.com

Consulting Transitions

Free Resource Guide for Solo Consultants

For solo consultants, true wealth is discretionary time. Don't waste yours on simple tasks that can be handled by technology. This free resource guide reveals the four essential online tools I use to manage my solo consulting practice and save hours of valuable time. And the best part is - they're free!

Interested in exploring the world of consulting? My new membership site might be just the resource you need to get started. You'll have access to blogs designed to answer very specific questions, a resource library of templates and articles, the opportunity to network with peers, and discounts on coaching and training programs. Download the free guide or click on the logo above to go straight to the site.

Quick Links

Quick Links

My Website

My Blogs

Follow Me

Archive

Welcome to the August issue of Emergency Management Solutions.

August has been a bad month for disasters around the globe: floods in the South, fires in the West, earthquakes in Italy, floods in Bangladesh - the list goes on and on. There's no such thing as vacation season for emergency managers. It also serves as a reminder that no matter where we live, emergency managers are the same the world over. We face the same problems and make the same sacrifices.

Regards,

Lucien Canton

Featured Article

_________________________________________________

ICS and ESF: An Unhappy Marriage?

Integrating the two can be a challenge

Over the past few years many jurisdictions have adopted the Federal Government's Emergency Support Function (ESF) format in the development of emergency operations plans in an attempt to mirror the National Response Framework. At the same time the National Incident Management System (NIMS) requires the use of the Incident Command System (ICS). However, there is no guidance as to how to integrate these two systems in the emergency operations center.

This gives rise to a number of questions. The first is whether or not the two systems should be integrated. Secondly, if they are not compatible, which system provides the best value to the EOC? The answers to these questions my surprise you.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE

_______________________________

If you are having trouble viewing my featured article, try clicking on the link at the top of the page. You can always find my articles in the white paper section of my blog site, Canton on Emergency Management.

Professional Development

Federal Inter-agency Operational Plans

FEMA has released updated Federal Inter-agency Operational Plans (FIOP) for three of the five mission areas outlined in the National Preparedness Goal: Mitigation, Response, and Recovery. In addition to the updated FIOPs, FEMA has released the first edition of the Protection FIOP. The fifth FIOP - the Prevention FIOP - contains sensitive information for the law enforcement community and is not publicly available.

All five plans link together the range of activities conducted by all of the Federal departments and agencies involved in national preparedness. They specifically outline the concept of operations for integrating and synchronizing existing national-level Federal capabilities to support local, state, tribal, territorial, insular area, and Federal plans.

Professional Development Opportunities

64th Annual IAEM Conference and EMEX

Savannah, GA

October 14-19, 2016

The IAEM Annual Conference provides a forum to discuss current trends and topics, share information about the latest tools and technology in emergency management and homeland security, and advance the work of IAEM.

Life Balance

Change your expectations, change your day

What is the difference between a good day and a bad day? I'm not talking about those days where things really do go to hell in a hand basket but rather those that just seem to be filled with bad luck. The ones where you start the day doing something dumb and things just roll downhill from there. Like yanking out that weed in your front garden that turns out to be the plant your spouse has been lovingly cultivating for several weeks. Like driving off for the weekend trip, leaving the garage door up.

Why do these dumb things seem to all happen at once? The answer is our expectations. By assuming it's going to be "one of those days" we create a self-fulfilling prophecy and imbue normal mishaps with more significance than they truly have. We create more stress for ourselves and, as Botterell's First Law of emergency management reminds us, "Stress makes you stupid". The more stressed we become, the more mistakes we make. The more mistakes we make, the more stressed we become.

Once we understand the cycle, we can do something to break it. Here are some of the techniques I use:

Stop what you're doing, take a deep breath, and calm down. Craig Fugate once suggested that in a crisis you take a deep breath and take your pulse; if you can do both, you'll be okay.
Employ a meditative technique. I use a routine taught to me by a good friend. I'm not sure about the New Age elements she incorporates but just doing the breathing and mind clearing helps me a lot.
Do something physical. I sometimes will just dump what I'm doing and take a quick walk with my dog or do some of the drills related to my martial arts hobby.

We all encounter truly bad days. But many of the days we consider bad are really self-inflicted. You can do something about them by changing your expectations.

From the Bookshelf

Curse of The Narrows

by Laura M. Mac Donald

On December 6, 1917, two ships collided in the busy port of Halifax, Canada. One was a Belgian relief ship but the other was loaded with war materials bound for the European Front. The munitions ship caught fire and eventually grounded after the crew abandoned ship. Hundreds of residents gathered to watch the pyrotechnic display as the ship burned.

No expected the explosion that followed nor the tsunami it generated. In a matter of minutes most of Halifax had been leveled and hundreds lay dead, buried in the rubble. To add to the misery of the survivors, by evening the town was isolated from outside relief by a massive snowstorm.

In this gripping account of the disaster, Laura Mac Donald gives an almost minute-by-minute description of the disaster and the response that followed. Her focus is on the people affected and how they responded and there are many emergency management issues that she highlights that we still face today in response. Mac Donald also dedicates a chapter to dealing with issues of recovery and reconstruction and a chapter on the liability issues arising from the accident.