Leading in Uncertainty: why risk leadership needs to change

In this episode of Doing Disasters Differently, Renae is joined by Dave Owens, an experienced emergency manager and former police officer who now works with governments and organisations to strengthen risk and crisis leadership. Drawing on more than three decades of experience across emergency management, Dave shares why traditional leadership approaches often fall short in complex and uncertain disaster environments. The conversation explores the shift from tactical response to strategic thinking, and why leaders need new skills to navigate increasingly frequent and compounding disasters. 

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Transcript

Renae Hanvin (00:07):

Hello and welcome to Doing Disasters Differently: The Podcast with Renee Hanvin, which is all about inspiring you to start thinking and doing disasters a little bit differently too. In this episode, I'm talking with Dave Owens, and we are talking about leading in uncertainty why risk leadership needs to change. So a little bit about Dave. After leaving the police force, after 30 years, Dave established a consulting business that specializes in a number of areas. He's been a consultant to the New South Wales and ACT governments on investigations, policy development, and emergency management in the areas of mining and transport. In 2015, David was appointed by the State Emergency Management Committee as the facilitator for the Greater Sydney Mass Care Exercise. And in June 2016 as the New South Wales State Recovery Coordinator for the East Coast low, and then in September 2016, as the regional recovery coordinator for the Central Western floods, gosh, he's been busy. 

Renae Hanvin (01:17):

In 2017, David was appointed by the New South Wales government to the New South Wales Energy Security Task Force. Now, the State Emergency Management Committee exercised lumen tenebrus in 2018 was the largest public private partnership exercise conducted in New South Wales. And in 2018, he did the facilitation of the New South Wales Health Influenza Pandemic Exercise and ANSTO, I think that's ANSTO Health Supply Workshops. In 2019, he did the ANSTO executive mentoring and the State Emergency Management Committee catastrophic flood exercise, which was four months of planning and facilitation. Now, I'd like to talk about where we met, and I haven't met Dave. I'm going to be honest. I literally reached out to him through LinkedIn because I was asking a few people about who would be good to chat with. And he responded and said, yes. So we're actually meeting online and kind of virtually in person for the first time. 

Renae Hanvin (02:15):

So look forward to sharing you the story soon. So now I am here with Dave Owens, who's, as I mentioned before, people kept telling me you've got to get him on for a chat. So Dave Owens, who are you? 

Dave Owens (02:27):

Oh, I'm an experienced or very old in the industry. Emergency manager. Look, I've had 35 years in the COPS and then I started my own company, risky business. And I love doing what I do, which is help or train managers to take that next step into strategic leadership. And that sounds really simple, but it's not simply by progressing by rank. You bring on those traits. And in the changing environment that we're seeing, I think there's a real gap at the moment with that process. 

Renae Hanvin (03:05):

A huge gap. And as we know, we're obviously experiencing more frequent, more impactful, compounding, all types of disasters and disruptions, which reading before your experience, you've obviously got the natural and the other side of the fence. But I think that that movement from tactical response and process planning to that strategic leadership is so important. And it's a different skill, isn't it? Oh, 

Dave Owens (03:33):

A hundred percent. And that's why I started by saying, look, we train managers, not leaders, because what we end up doing is the systems that we ... Everybody has to be compliant with the system. So it's compliance, it's control, it's predictability, and it's optimization. Now, in a disaster or crisis, what you want is you want judgment, you want courage, you want and you want moral clarity as well. And you want them to escalate matters quickly. You want to make sure that there's really clear authority. And now that's not rank-based, that's real clear authority in a team leader. This is what we're doing. You want them to take responsibility for their actions, and you also need really, really good communication skills under pressure. 

Renae Hanvin (04:31):

Oh, absolutely. And I was previously on the EMPA board. I've got a background in communications and stakeholder engagement and IMI, that is absolutely critical. In fact, quite a few corporate and industry things that I've been doing, I'm trying to get them a seat at the table in that real top, top, top, top, top. They should be right there, in fact, before the start. Now, I'm going to go into my first question with you. So you've clearly done lots of investigations, as I said, across the board. So what do the investigations consistently show about why systems are failing under stress? 

Dave Owens (05:05):

Look, they show that the warning signs were already there. The systems were in place, yet failure still happened. So you've got to look at, we don't lack the frameworks. The frameworks are there. 

Renae Hanvin (05:18):

Yeah, we've got a lot of those. 

Dave Owens (05:20):

Yeah. We don't lack the plans. Everybody has a plan. And we don't actually lack investigations or inquiries. We keep doing inquiries time and time again. So what you've got to get back and look at from a different angle, which is you got to look at leadership works when the systems fail under stress. And that's 

Dave Owens (05:41):

What 

Dave Owens (05:41):

Happens is with these inquiries, the systems fail under stress because they're degraded, your system's under pressure. So normally the inquiry will show a pattern of normalization of risk where the industry, the business, the agency, small failures are routine. They're accepted. So risk becomes that background noise over there so that the time a crisis hits, the organization is already operating in that weakened state and that's not good. You've 

Renae Hanvin (06:12):

Also 

Dave Owens (06:12):

Still got this, even in smaller businesses of fragmentation and silos, everybody operates agencies with different priorities from each other. So you've got to understand those priorities because the firees, the ambos and the cops all have different priorities. You've just got to understand them. Unclear accountability. Now with a uniformed service, it's not too bad, but still you've got to nominate. If you're not in uniform, you've actually got to nominate the accountability of who's in charge because we've moved to this group think in society and okay, so the populace vote says this, that's the way we're going. Emergency management can't do that. 

Renae Hanvin (06:56):

No. 

Dave Owens (06:57):

It's not a popular vote is the right way. It's knowing all of the information from all of the experts, hearing all of their opinions, the team leader makes their decision. Simple as that. But it's also about, I spoke about the interoperability. Different agencies still have different systems, processes, and stress exposes that coordination when everyone's 

Speaker 1 (07:21):

Under that massive 

Speaker 2 (07:22):

Stress. 

Renae Hanvin (07:23):

So do you reckon it's like, and I'm going a little bit off script here, but is it kind of connecting systems to the people? I mean, again, I do a lot of work in the social capital space and totally talking about bonding, bridging, linking ties. So to me, it's like we've got these processes and systems and plans, but it's really about connecting, I don't know, the people and the leadership. And is that sort of part of it? 

Dave Owens (07:47):

Yeah, look, it is. The people have to have the moral courage, I call it, to actually say on the information that I had at the time, because they never have the full information. If somebody says, "I knew exactly what was going on in that, " my radar goes up and goes, "No, you didn't. You did not have possibly known." So it's teaching them that rely on the plans, but actually have the faith in yourself to say, "Well, we went down track A, that's on the information we knew. That's now incorrect. We have new information. We're going on track B." But people see that as a weakness, "Oh, you're admitting that you were wrong." You know what? It's absolute strength because otherwise your leadership is rigid. It's delayed. You're defending yourself the whole time. Whereas you want leadership to be adaptive because this disaster, this crisis, it will not do what you want it to do. 

Renae Hanvin (08:44):

No, and I guess that needs to be decisive. We need leaders. So if everyone was waiting for all the information or more information or enough information or information that wasn't going to change, then no one would be leading anything. But when disasters occur, we need seasoned leaders who take us in a direction and yeah, things change, so decisions have to change. And I guess we don't always get it right. But for the vast majority, we've got pretty phenomenal leaders in a lot of our governments and emergency management and different organizations. 

Dave Owens (09:17):

And you'll find that you'll get a team, and this is from other agencies as well, is they want to come and work with you. 

Speaker 1 (09:26):

They'll 

Dave Owens (09:26):

Know when you get appointed to a natural disaster, whatever it is, they'll go, "Oh, look, so- and-so has been appointed. I want to work with them. I've worked with them in the ... " And you'll find the players start coming together all the time. Why? Because actually you trust that person, you trust them making decisions and it's really, really important. 

Renae Hanvin (09:49):

It's so important. And I mean, social capital 101, Social Capital 101 is the connections, trust, and cooperation between people. And the more you're connected and the higher your levels of trust, then absolutely you're going to work for better decisions and better outcomes. Now, can I ask you about the leadership gaps? One of the questions we're sort of posing was the leadership gap exposed in emergencies and why do they keep repeating? So why do we keep having these gaps that we sort of repeat time and time again? 

Dave Owens (10:24):

Yeah. Look, I think I've said you train managers, not leaders. You've got to train leaders. And it's really hard because you want them to understand compliance, control, predictability and that, but you want them to think outside the square. You've basically got to give that team leader, whoever's in charge, the incident controller, you've got to give them their head. You've got to have the faith in them and go, go and step back. Now, what a lot of people in authority have a problem in doing, executives and that is stepping back and letting those people do their job. It's the hardest thing. They've got to have really good judgment. The leaders, I've said the courage, improvisation, and I mean good improvisation. I don't just mean you make it up as you go, but the cycle repeats because inquiries that come don't change the culture. What happens is you reduce the reports, recommend the reforms, 

Speaker 1 (11:21):

And 

Speaker 2 (11:21):

The deeper issue stays there, which is leadership is treated, it's an individual trait the leader has, rather than a system capability. And you said it is, should the systems be built around the leader? Well, built around leadership skills and abilities, I would say definitely. And until leadership becomes embedded, strategic leadership becomes embedded structurally until it's in disasters, those disasters will continue to repeat and change and be highlighted the cracks when these events occur. And it's really hard. 

Speaker 1 (11:58):

It is hard. And I guess you're changing people and experiences and staffing. So let's be honest, we have a lot of change across the board. And then from my observation now, I've never worked in government, so I don't think I'd last a day there. I don't think anyone in government would want me there. I think I'd drive everyone totally nuts. But I worked with MCOP in Victoria when they came together about 10 years ago. I did all the comms actually around the WeWork as one and bringing all the agencies together. And I think that approach is really awesome. But over the past 10, 15 years, there's a big difference between tactical responders and leaders of emergencies, yet a lot of the people coming up go from tactical responders to leaders. But I mean, going to my next question, how's strategic leadership in risk and emergency management? 

Speaker 1 (12:47):

I guess it needs to evolve from that tactical level as well so that we are building tactical incident responders or whatever who have leadership capabilities to then progress in that as we need them, I guess. 

Speaker 2 (13:01):

I think it's a bit more than that. I think you've got to link the academic knowledge with the lived experience. You've got to link the two of those because if you're an academic, you can't put it into play. And the majority, I shouldn't say you can't, but it's about the 20th century assumptions that we've gone on. They don't exist anymore. So what was once a stable threat? What was once linear escalation as it went across or commander control certainty? We don't have that anymore. What we got today is, and you've said it, cascading disasters, you get disaster upon disaster upon disaster and each one impacts on the one that follows. You've got climate-driven extremes. So you've got this unprecedented each time an event occurs. It's not actually unprecedented. The circumstances just change and it's climate driven. You've got cyber and infrastructure interdependence, and that's had a massive impact with the social trust breakdown. 

Speaker 2 (14:02):

What I'm seeing versus what I'm being told is completely different because the messaging from your strategic leaders needs to be instantaneous. It needs to get out there, needs to inform the community why? Because if they don't get it from you, they'll get it from someone else. It's as simple as that and misinformation during a crisis. I don't know how many times that's happened. 

Speaker 1 (14:24):

We've got to 

Speaker 2 (14:24):

Change our strategic leadership. 

Renae Hanvin (14:26):

How do we do it? How do we do that? Or what are you doing to drive that change? 

Dave Owens (14:31):

We're training, we're doing a uni program and in the university course, the course is actually masters in strategic leadership and risk and emergency management. This is this academia versus industry specialists. And we've actually got lived experience people coming in and talking about leading in ambiguity. You will never get all of the information. So how do you make good informed decisions? What are the academics say? What's the practicality of being in? Systems thinking, understand the interconnecting failures that will occur. If your system fails, they all will, what are you going to do when power goes down? 

Renae Hanvin (15:11):

The 

Dave Owens (15:11):

Commons. The comms. I don't think I've carried cash in my wallet for about four years. What happens when the power goes down? We lose FPOS. And people thought about that because I have, how do you pump petrol? 

Renae Hanvin (15:25):

Simple things 

Dave Owens (15:26):

Like that. I think you've got to really rely on, and this is hard. You touched on it, your corporate churn for your corporate knowledge and your people, 

Dave Owens (15:36):

You've got to have trust based coordination. You got to form partnerships with people before the battle begins so that you know that if you call on whoever it is coming into your team, you already know that your response and your networks will work. They'll hold up under pressure and you don't have to do everything. You can actually sit back and be informed by your team of specialists who are good at what they do. And I'm terrible at this. I always tell them what I want done, and then you're meant to step away in that. And the rule was always keep me occupied because otherwise I go around and I go, "What are you doing? Where are you up to? " So it is hard. I'm not saying it's easy. And I guess the last one is adaptive leadership. Your leadership's got to be flexible. You're not just oversighting people. 

Dave Owens (16:24):

You're not a manager. I keep coming to that. I like to refer it. It's a bit daggy, but less of an administrator and more of a strategic navigator into uncertainty. That's what you should be. Yeah. That's what you should be as a leader. 

Renae Hanvin (16:41):

Love the idea of that. I don't know if I'd heard of that course actually, but that's also a really great way to attract, I think, people to, not from the emergency management sector because it's a translatable kind of skillset. So we could be bringing lots of other people. And what I like about it too is that even if you have other people not from the emergency management sector do that program, that's going to help in their corporate world or in industries. 

Renae Hanvin  (17:04):

Yeah. And do you know what? It's so true. In a lot of the training and leadership training that I do, it's around that one of the first things I say is, "Put my number in your phone. We've met now. We're bridging ties because when I ring you, you're now going to take my call. So Dave, now that you're going to put my number in your phone now that we've had a chat, when I ring you next time, you'll be like, okay, I know Renee, she's that crazy one with the podcast. I'm going to take a call and chat to her because she might know a little bit about what she's talking about and I might be able to help her." 

Dave Owens (17:35):

But that is true because I don't know how many times, even though the company's CEOs haven't engaged us to do the mentoring processes, under crisis, they ring us up and they go, "Look, I just want to run this pasture." And you're sitting there as a sounding board and probably some of the greatest contributions I've given are just listening to them and you're going, "Uh-huh." And then they go, "Well, what's your advice?" I go, "Keep doing exactly what to do. " Yeah, you're good. You're spot on because they need that sounding board and they know they can trust in me because otherwise I'll go, "No, no, no, no, no. Please stop, stop. Change direction. Is there something I can't see that you're not telling me because that can't be done that way?" 

Renae Hanvin (18:19):

But it can be lonely. It's lonely at the top as a leader too. If you are tasked with, you need those mentors and those consultants or those experts to kind of make, if nothing more than just to say, "Yeah, you know what you're doing. Keep going. 

Dave Owens (18:31):

" And it's also on you that we teach that we start in the coroner's box, in the coroner's court, that there's been a fatality, work back and see how well your procedures work. And that's how we exercise. We don't just sit there and run through a script and say, "Look, this is really good. You're doing really well." We actually, we fluster them, we throw in media, we actually get the CEO to ring and say, "Hey, listen, you tell me this now. No, I cannot know you to exactly what they will be doing." Politicians ringing in. If they're silly enough to leave their phones on, we avalanche it because that's what would happen in a real event and that's what you've got to do. 

Renae Hanvin (19:12):

And again, it's so important. And I love the leadership component of it because again, we have a lot of focus on tactical response, et cetera, et cetera, but the leadership is absolutely fundamental. Now, I could talk to you for a lot longer, but I always end with, gosh, imagine if we actually met in person, I always finish with asking what are the two things that you think need to be done differently in the disaster space or sector? 

Dave Owens (19:37):

Look, I know we need compliance-based risk. I would never say you can't do that. You need your documents, checklists, your audits. Absolutely. But you need this capability-based leadership. You have to change that. So actually measure your decision quality, leadership adaptability, your agency trust, and are you a learning culture? That's the biggest one is, do you do that? Preparedness is leadership under pressure. Building learning systems, not inquiry cycles. It's what you've got to do. So I've got our learning systems and you do after action reviews and all, but actually implement what you're talking about. Otherwise, we'll do disaster inquiry, recommendations, drift for a while, disaster inquiry recommendations. First thing I do when I have an inquiry and I'm there, I go, "Can you get me the previous four reports, please, because I want to see what was done and did they actually enact what the recommendations were?" Most times- 

Renae Hanvin (20:41):

Well, that's the problem of the repeating. I think too, we like to, I guess, embed being resilient and ready into business as usual or your normal everyday culture. So I think that's really critical too. That's probably a big learning opportunity or cultural opportunity for the sector as well. 

Dave Owens (20:59):

Yeah, very much so. And 

Renae Hanvin (21:00):

Do you have one more? Is there one other thing that you'd like to be done differently in the disaster space? 

Dave Owens (21:05):

I think the continuing exercising in that uncertainty, having reality come in, and that's really hard. And I don't shy away. It's expensive because you want to simulate the reality. You want to put people under pressure. You don't want them just reading from a script. I would do, here's my plan. You actually go, "Well, you haven't got that. " Or, hang on, you're taking on too much of a role. You've now gone off sick. Who's your replacement? Who steps into your position? And it's amazing how many people say, I had the last one and after an hour and a half, the gentleman walked into the room and I said, "Oh, you're the single point of failure." And everyone in the room cracked up because they knew what I was talking about. And he goes, "What do you mean?" I said, "Without you, they all fell into neat." I said, "You can't have that. 

Dave Owens (21:52):

" He goes, "Oh, but that person over there should have taken my place." I said, "Perhaps you'd like to tell them that would be really, really good." So I think that exercising in uncertainty is you can't beat it because you fall back to the level of your training under 

Renae Hanvin (22:07):

Stress. Yeah. Dave, so nice to connect with you and chat with you. I'm really glad a number of people said all good things about you so I should get you on for chat. Really awesome to chat with Dave Owens on leading in uncertainty why risk leadership needs to change from risky business. Love the name as well. So I really do hope that we get to meet in person one day. And yeah, look forward to crossing paths, Dave. Thanks so much. 

Dave Owens (22:32):

Absolutely. My pleasure. 

Renae Hanvin (22:42):

I hope today's episode of Doing Disasters Differently, the podcast has inspired you to think a little bit differently about the role you can play before, during, and after disasters. Given the new era of more frequent and compounding disasters that we are now in, let's work together to build an all hazards disaster resilient future for all. Find out more about the work I'm leading as a social enterprise, building disaster resilience at resilientready.org. Don't forget to subscribe to doing disasters differently than podcast through your preferred platform. And we'll see you next time when we discover new ways of doing disasters differently together.