Connecting research, communication, and human behaviour to disasters

Today’s guest is Dr Barbara Ryan - an award-winning disaster behaviour researcher, communicator and long-time leader in emergency management communication across Australia.

Barbara has spent more than 40 years working across journalism, public relations, research and teaching, with a strong focus on how people seek information, respond to risk and engage during disasters.

She is the founder of Cicada Research and Communication and was a founding director of Emergency Media and Public Affairs (EMPA) — helping shape the emergency communication profession across Australia and New Zealand. 

Barbara’s work explores one of the biggest challenges in disaster resilience: how we better connect research, communication and human behaviour to real-world preparedness and recovery. 

She’s also a volunteer firefighter and community educator, bringing both academic insight and lived frontline experience to the conversation.

Subscribe now and join us as we explore smarter, stronger, and more connected ways to prepare for the future. 

Transcript

Renae Hanvin:

Hello and welcome to Doing Disasters Differently: The Podcast with Renae Hanvin, which is all about inspiring you to start thinking and doing disasters a little bit differently too. Hello. I'm so excited because today's episode we're talking about connecting research, communication, and human behaviour to disasters. And I have Dr. Barbara Ryan, who is an award-winning disaster behaviour researcher, communicator, and long-time leader in emergency management communication in Australia. Barb has spent more than 40 years working across journalism, public relations, research, and teaching with a strong focus on how people seek information, respond to risks and engage during disasters. And as most of you know, I have a background of public relations and stakeholder engagement too. So we are clearly two peas in a pod. Now, she's the founder of Cicada Research and Communications and was a founding director of the Emergency Media and Public Affairs, which is also called EMPA.

And if you haven't checked that out you need to. The links are below. She's been helping shape the emergency communication profession across Australia and New Zealand. Now, Barb's work explores one of the biggest challenges in disaster resilience, how we better connect research and communication and human behaviour to real world preparedness and recovery. She's also a volunteer firefighter and community educator bringing both academic insight and lived frontline experience into the conversation. And Barbie's currently writing a book, which I can't wait to hear more about, on how to understand, motivate, and support communities on the emergency preparation and recovery journey, which will be published by Routledge. I think it is next year. And that's so, so, so critical because so many of our communities have obviously been greatly impacted. So again, so much lived experience and research, et cetera, coming from Barb. Now, I like to start with where we met.

So I'd heard a lot about Barb. She's one of those names that you kind of hear a lot about in the sector. And then a few years ago, I joined the Emperor Board, which was a great experience to really play a role in listening to what's happening in that side of the disaster space. I got to meet Barb, spend a lot of time with her and really see, I guess, and embrace the passion of what she set up and created as a founder of the EMPA. So Barb, so nice to talk with you today.

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Thanks so much for having me, Renee. It's very exciting when I see who you've interviewed before and I'm really privileged to be here, I think.

Renae Hanvin:

No, opposite. I mean, I love talking to people, especially when they're from, I guess, my lens as well. So the communications and the behaviour and the research and bringing it all together, I can't wait to talk more about it and share it with our listeners. So you spent decades working across journalism, communications, and disaster research. So what first drew you into the disaster resilience space?

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

I was working as the corporate communication manager for Toowoomba City Council and it was the year before the Canberra Bushfires, just a few months before then. And usually for Queensland, we had a really big fire up here. I went for about three weeks in my little neighbourhood and on the last day it was going to come after the hill and the LDMG were still sitting around at 6:00 AM and they were telling us that we were going to lose houses today. I thought you have that feeling in the bit of your stomach that this has all gone well so far because we lost a few sheds and that was about it and a lot of acres burned, but it wasn't really real until that point, but we were so lucky we had rain that day. So we

Sort of averted, probably would have been one of Queensland's big fire disasters, I think, if it had kept going. So under the local Disaster Management Act, the Queensland Disaster Management Act at the time, the local councils were responsible for all the communication around bushfires. And so our team was seconded onto the LDMG and so me and three others sort of handled this, what turned out to be international media interest. But I was also wondering how well we were connecting with the community. We were trying to put out 15 minute bulletins on radio and all the local radio stations were amazing. TV stations were great. Everyone was really helpful, but I wasn't quite sure if we were saying the right things and doing it through the right channels. And this was in the days before social media, 2002. So that was all we had and we'd come into it with no experience, but just a really solid background in comms.

All of us were communicators. So we knew that we needed to be delivering the information that people wanted and we had to guess. So I went across to the university and I needed a study area for my PhD. So I looked at how people get information when they're in a disaster.

Renae Hanvin:

So my next question was actually going to be that. And again, I love hearing stories of how people kind of accidentally, because I used to work in film and TV and looked after Hollywood celebrities and that. So kind of going from a totally different industry into disasters, I find it really interesting what sort of pulls people in. So you just mentioned that you focus on how people look for information during disasters and that's so critical because in some situations it's literally life or death, like that information is so, so important. So what do most emergency systems, how do they sort of fill, I guess, the notion of misunderstanding about human behaviors? Like what's the sort of connection or what have we got at the moment?

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Yeah, I think there are a few aspects to answer that question. I think agencies are very wedded to their process, mitigation, preparation, response and recovery. And in reality, it's a bloody hot mess. It's just everyone is in different stages even within each of those phases. So there'll be people in our community who saw this coming, they're already, they've got their evacuation plan done and then there are other people who are only just realizing, holy hell, this is going to be big for me. So it's a real challenge for agency

To be communicating what people need at the right times. And I think also, especially operational people, they're so used to working in a high stress environment that their brains work really well. They don't realize that the brains of the rest of us can really let us down in times of acute stress and that our decision making goes completely out the window and unfortunately they label that panic. What is actually happening is that people are taking as much information and they're making decisions based on that information. So we need to give them the information that they need right at that time so that panic doesn't eventuate. They can still make okay decisions even though their brains completely let them down and all they're seeing is this tunnel vision. They can't make decisions. They're running around the house looking for undies rather than their grandmother's portrait, those types of things.

And probably the biggest thing that I think the emergency management system lets us down in is the way they consider community engagement as an add-on that it's really great to do it at grassroots, but it's more important to have it at a top level. So whereas really you know yourself in recovery and the resilience space, the only way community engagement works well is when you're face-to-face with people. And I think resources don't quite get pushed that way. I believe that everything else comes the top level community engagement team, their support. They should be support for the people who are working on the ground.

Renae Hanvin:

100%. And I think one of the emperor principles that I loved the most was seat at the table. I mean, we do a lot of work in preparedness and obviously response and recovery, but the connections and the conversations is what we always talk about. So particularly in the business community, if you're connected as a business community to other businesses, to others in your community, which you typically are through your employees or your customers or your suppliers, but also connected into emergency services and connected into those kind of linking ties, if you have those connections there before, you are so much further ahead in terms of understanding the messaging that might come, where it might come from, what you might have to do talking about it beforehand. So I totally agree. Absolutely. I think when we're thinking about systemic preparedness or even response and recovery, it's not a tokenistic, oh, you need to put out that Facebook message.

It's actually like, what do we need to say when and how do we need to say it and who needs to say it? So leading on to my next question, we talk a lot about warnings and technology and we know that there's some new things coming up, but how important, and I think you're going to say they're important, our trust, relationships and local connection in whether people actually act because that's the issue too, because you can have information being spat out by services, agencies, et cetera, and they're like, "Well, we've got 2000 people following us on Facebook, so that's okay." But then at the end of the day, the people who actually need the messaging might have been cut off or don't read Facebook or ... I think that's a real kind of disconnect too, or they don't trust to saying information.

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Yes, exactly. Trust is such a big thing and it really came home to me how lucky we are in Australia because we, on the whole, emergency agencies have a fairly high rating in terms of trust. But I was talking to a fellow for my book the other day, Fabio Silva from Portugal, who's a firefighter. He's really interested in community engagement and the trust and that type of thing. And it's completely different in Portugal because the Portuguese government has done the wrong thing sometimes intentionally in the past and they haven't had that stable political system that we've had for so many hundred years or so.

And Fabio was saying that their biggest challenge is being trusted by the community and undertaking activities that will help them win that trust so that when they have a disaster, then people will actually take the suggestions that they're putting forward and make their job on the fire ground much easier because everyone's doing what they're being asked to do. Whereas in Australia, I think we do have a much higher level of trust that runs through our systems, but it's a graphic illustration of how localized trust is much greater than the centralized trust from head office. So that's why local community Facebook pages just go, they just explode when something happens. And we point people to our head office page in those times, but they're not giving the granular information that people want and the local Facebook pages do. And it's really interesting. The research shows that our local Facebook pages are also self-correcting.

So if someone posts something that's not right, everyone piles on and says, they don't always do it in a haranguing way, but they'll

Renae Hanvin:

Say,

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

"Oh no, actually I heard that this ... " And you can go to that website and have a look to see that that's actually not quite right. So we need to trust the community more and this brings me back to shared responsibility and you've done a podcast about it, I think, and I can't wait to hear it, but there's not trust by agencies in the community. We're not trusting that community with the smarts to look after themselves and make the right decisions. And I think we're going to lose trust because of that. If we talk about shared responsibility, there is a shared responsibility on the part of agencies to trust communities to do the right thing.

Renae Hanvin:

100%. And again, I don't think this is a day that goes by that I don't refer to the 2011 disaster resilience strategy about shared responsibility. And I think we know it's not equal responsibility and there are certain roles to play. But Barb, I've always thought there's never been really any articulation around who has what role. I was talking to a researcher the other day and she was like, "Where do you think the gaps are? " I was like, "In my mind, the central foundation gap is shared responsibility but no roles." So how do you know who has what roles? And because we have the Federation model and in my opinion, I think that all Australians should be prepared for and responding to disasters in the same way, but that's a whole other podcast I'd say and a referendum probably as well. But I think that's the problem too as well, because there's no one way that we can all talk about it and learn it and do what I mean, do it and deliver it.

And we're all hearing different words and different sayings because we have to be different and we do things differently here and here and here. And again, I think when it comes to in particular disasters and preparedness and that's I think what we tried to do with the social capital work with Professor Aldrich was create a descriptor that was relevant to all states and territories so we could all talk about it in the same way. And interesting what you say about trust. So in the measurements we did with the three pilot communities of linking ties, which are connections between people and those in roles of authority and power, so our emergency services or councils, typically the linking ties are really low. So I get we would absolutely probably be higher than the likes of Portugal, but for Australia, when you compare them to other ties, they're actually quite low.

So a huge opportunity for councils and emergency services and governments to really look at these areas don't trust what we're saying or what we're doing. So there are very cost-effective programs that can build that trust. And again, having that reverse engined trust of like, why does the council or government not trust the community? And again, I think that's a whole PhD or something in there, I'm sure, another book down the track.

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

I think local government is critical to this because local government does community engagement really well and they know how to incorporate community voices into plans and activities and all of those sorts of things. Whereas agencies don't really get community engagement as well. They don't see the potential for the different types of engagement activities that you can do. And I sort of think we have to get local government more involved in that shared responsibility and building trust.

Renae Hanvin:

Totally. But even that, Barb, like again, Queensland set up so differently in terms of the roles and the legislative responsibilities to any other state pretty much I think at the moment. So that in itself, it's hard because they have to and they should be, which is amazing. But then you have other states like Victoria and stuff and it's like kind of tacked onto someone's role. Or I think now because of all the disruptions, there are recovery roles or whatever they might be, but they're only short term and you can't build that relationship. I've just been doing a lot of work with the City of Casey, which is their emergency management team is awesome. I'm such a fan. And we did a project whereby I was helping guide local community members and I said to Casey, I was like, "One of you have to be part of there with me because you need to be building relationships here." And the outcome has been phenomenal, like phenomenal for both sides of the fence.

So while the community's like, "Oh, that council person's actually really nice and really helpful and they want to do stuff and we're actually doing stuff." But on the other side of the fence, the council people are like, "Oh, those community people are really helpful across this, this and this. So let's bring them in, not in a formal way, but let's utilize their skills and knowledge and they're passionate." Yeah, it's actually the outcome's been really, really awesome in that sense, which that's what we need. But I guess in the structure of the current investment into disasters is response recovery after the fact. So I think the biggest challenge here and then even grave physical infrastructure. So doing something that can connect people, which is again, a lot of the work that we're in that can connect people, connect communities, connect councils and communities different, build those linking ties is kind of near impossible really at the moment.

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Yeah, exactly. I know that the new NEMA structure has been trying to shift money from the back end to the front end, but politically that's really hard. Anything could change on a whim. I don't envy the people who are trying to make that happen.

Renae Hanvin:

And again, all the disasters and disruptions we're having at the moment. So I think everyone's feeling that we're in the hamster wheel of responding, responding, responding, and then the next thing happens and the next thing happens. I mean, I think that's been going on for decades almost. Now you have worked in academia and frontline practice and I love translating research. I love translating complex data and research into really simple kind of practical things that normal people like me can understand. So why is translating research into practical and usable action such a challenge in emergency management? Because there's not a lot can actually do it or do it well. I

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Think there are a couple of reasons, one in academia and one in agencies. As you said, we've just gone onto the hamster wheel and we don't get a downtime season anymore. So the people in agencies who might use research, and I'm not just talking about community engagement or communication research here, it could be fire behavior or whatever. They don't have time to wade through published version, which is an incomprehensible academic article to try and apply the findings to what they're doing. I think that's one thing. And at the other end, academics who aren't, they're scientists, so they're not communicators. They just need a bit more help communicating. And I think universities, and it even goes back further, it goes to government level, the pressure on universities to generate research in certain avenues like published articles and so on instead of connecting with practice makes it really hard for that knowledge to be pushed out.

And I love emergency management so much because unlike any other communication or engagement sphere, I'm dealing directly with the people who use my research

Renae Hanvin:

And

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

I'm actually able to stand up in front of the people who use my research and talk about my research and tell them what are the three key things they need to know and what are the three key things they need to do from that. But universities aren't equipping scientists to make that translation. And I think that's because of the pressures on them to be publishing in all of these hidden away avenues of communication of research.

Renae Hanvin:

Yeah, such a big opportunity. I know from the social capital side, which is connected into communications, obviously it's connections and conversations, but slowly we're starting to see, and I mean, I don't know, I've been pick, pick, pick, pick, picking away, kind of building knowledge and advocacy and putting focus on us. And you obviously have too as well. And I hope at some point it sort of does change a little bit whereby it's not just, I guess, research and that around fire behavior, but there is more research around the other components that can sort of support how do people respond for fires or how do we need to communicate, et cetera. So I'm going to ask you a question about your new book and that in a minute as well. Now we know that unfortunately disasters are becoming more frequent, more complex and also compounding. I mean, so many communities we're doing a lot of work in far North Queensland at the moment and they just cannot get a break, cannot get a break.

Do you think Australia is genuinely shifting toward resilience and preparedness or are we still mostly reactive?

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

I think if things had stayed normal and in normal, I'm thinking when I started my PhD, it took me a long time. I lived in Queensland and we had drought and that was it. For 10 years there was drought. There was no cyclone, there was no bushfire, that was it. And then 2011 happened and suddenly we have been smashed ever since. And I think if things had stayed, so we had the odd cyclone every four years that I was going to really threaten communities, we would be doing the most fantastic job,

But we just can't keep up. But would we be at that stage if we hadn't had the pressure put on us to improve? I have to keep reminding myself that think that because I'm within the system as well as outside the system looking in, I might be a bit captured by the agency I work in, but I have to keep reminding myself, no, we are doing a really good job. We've got really good systems. We've got amazing communication between agencies with the different conferences that people go to. And the senior managers take sort of interagency cooperation really seriously. There are a few little areas that need improvement and I think probably community engagement is one of those. But on the whole, I think we're doing an amazing job, but we just can't keep up with what's happening. We don't have enough people and resources and for a country of 27 million we have a lot to pay for and every disaster costs us billions now.

How do we keep up with that?

Renae Hanvin:

Yeah, it's so tricky. I've always thought too, and this is just my own opinion, I've never worked in government, so I don't know. But I think too that to really have, I guess, a commitment and a focus on preparedness and resilience, it's different to recovery. I think that in my opinion too, that's part of the problem. If you've got the majority of funding and the majority of leaders who are great leaders, the vast majority of them, but if their kind of experience and mindset is about responding and recovery, I think it's really hard to have that preparedness as well. So I mean, in my perfect world, I think you'd split them. You'd have them working in collaboration, but you'd have a really dedicated response and recovery and then you'd have a really dedicated preparedness because we know that dollar prepared before can save whatever, 15, whatever it is now afterwards.

But I think the unavoidable costs and just the better standard of living, and again, I come from the connection, social capital side, to me, I think that's the biggest opportunity that there is never going to be a right time when we're all sitting around going, "Nothing happening today."That's just not going to happen. And it doesn't take big budgets to connect people, but if we can kind of have that recognizing the connections and the engagement and set it up now because it needs to be set up, but in a way that is aligned to but not, I don't know, I think that would be a massive game changer.

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

You're exactly right when you say sometimes it doesn't need a lot of money. It just needs people who are willing to make connections. Like thinking back to your podcast with the fellow from North Queensland, I think it was at Milanda?

Renae Hanvin:

Yeah, the business chamber. The

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Business chamber guy, the LDMG there got him and other business people involved and suddenly they had all of the focus was on preparation and they were able to really do some really good things.

Renae Hanvin:

Yep, 100%. I mean, budgets and whatnot, it does not take, probably it's like a 10th or a hundredth of the physical infrastructure budget, but I don't know, we just don't have the focus for it. And it sits in my head, I'm not going to say who it was, but literally 10 years before the 2019, 2020 bushfires, I was advocating for, let's get prepared, businesses prepared, small businesses are critical in communities, blah, blah, blah. And now, Renee, I love what you're thinking, I love what you're aiming to do, but you're 10 years ahead of your time. And I was like, I literally spent a decade going, "What a bizarre thing." I was quite a senior, a senior person in a government agency. I was like, "What a bizarre, but in my opinion, dumb thing to say, would you not be going, oh my God, you're 10 years ahead of your time.

Let's start doing this so we can get ready." And I kid you not, literally to the month, like 10 years later, the big bushfires happened and I don't know, still nothing changed, but clearly I'd have to vote myself in to be head of an agency, which is probably not going to happen. Now we talked about community engagement and you just mentioned there how important community engagement is. What does meaningful community engagement actually look like? To

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Me, it's really a process of motivating and connecting people. And we all know that social connections are pretty critical to community going through an event and then coming out the other side much better than other communities. I've actually worked on this with colleagues from QT and University of Technology Sydney, and we developed a model of community engagement for emergency management. So the five challenges in that model, and it's a fairly linear process, but people slip back and forth in that proces. The five challenges are the first one is to understand your community and that there are communities within that community. The second one is to help them understand their risk. And I think at a local level, like I have a tiny community, we don't have a pub. We have a hall, there's no school. So how do we connect? So look at who I've got in my community.

We have 25 artists in a community of 250 houses. So that's obviously a group that I'm going to talk to. And the second challenge is getting those groups to understand their risk,

Renae Hanvin:

Especially

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

In a community like ours, which is 30 minutes from a really big center, a lot of commuters, people who've moved in from interstate, there's a lot of work there to help them understand their risk. And then once you've done that, you go to the third challenge, which is really harnessing their interest and keeping them interested and motivating them to keep getting better at preparing and understanding their own role in their community and how important they are to their neighbors and so on. And the first challenge is really supporting the leaders that come out of that process. They're the ones who are going to be really further developing any connections that come out of this process. And then the fifth challenge is facing the event itself and supporting communities through that. And you sort of then end up back at probably stage two, three or four in recovery.

It just depends on people's own situations and how involved they are and where they're at in terms of their social circles. So to me, all of those challenge points have different methods of community engagement. So I would never go into a community who is just learning about their risk and do a risk mapping workshop because I know that a risk mapping work really needs a community that's already got a few connections developed to get people there even though it would be really great for the ignorant people to come along to that workshop, but getting them there is really hard. And public information meeting, that's people who go to one every year, they're probably up in the supporting leaders phase of emergency management, community engagement. And so they don't really need that information. They want more complicated stuff. At the public information session my community had, we asked people to put up their hands whether they were staying and defending and whether they were planning to evacuate.

So it was roughly half the room. That horrified us out. These people are staying and there were 30 people in the room, 15 were going to stay and defend. We knew we couldn't convince them there's an attachment to property all about that. So we decided, right, we're going to have to do a workshop with them to make sure they are prepared so that they do have the right sprinklers and the right amount of water and the right pump and all of those things. And so those people became leaders in the community that we supported and we were able to use some of those guys to tell their stories to get other people to at least prepare their houses, but not think too closely about staying and defending. And then the evacuation side, "Oh, I'm just going to leave." Do you know what that involves? Do you know what's going to happen to your head?

And the cat's going to disappear and the horses won't load in the bloat. It's just going to be the most stressful experience you'll ever have. And you'll come out of it really badly hurt after the event. So those really on the ground techniques have to be matched to the different phases that people are in, in their own situation.

Renae Hanvin:

100%, Barb. And I think, and again, I've done a lot of stakeholder engagement through being IAP2 certified and whatnot over the years. And I think also the language I know that if we promote come to a business preparedness or a business continuity workshop for small business people, we'll be lucky to get any where if it's like, come and tell us what's keeping you up at night about your business type thing. And we seed in messages or have someone like the amazing Fiona Jaigo, who I met who run the caravan park on Kangaroo Island, just really do her storytelling. The storytelling is so powerful. You're going to get people coming because they're just like, "Oh, listen to her and whatever, whatever." But it's a really interesting kind of sector and topic to be trying to get people to come and get engaged about as well. So I find the timing, but also the mindset is quite difficult there.

That's

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Right.

Renae Hanvin:

I was in Kansas this week at the Queensland Small Business Expo and I don't know, when you're presenting on a panel and you kind of got to read the room a little bit and oh mate, I tell you, if I don't work in disasters anymore, I might need to be a standup comedian because I got so many laughs from talking about risks and all the random words that no one ever wants to hear about. I was like, "Oh mate, there we go. We'll educate them through humor." Humor. Perfect. Yeah. That's my notion of having an insurance policy dinner party. I was like, "What crazy person thinks of that? " Yeah, that would be me. Now just quickly, misinformation and disinformation. So they're big risks when it comes to communication and then behavior relating to that. What are you doing in that space or ...

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

I am really worried about disinformation-

Renae Hanvin:

What's that? What's the difference? What's the difference?

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

So misinformation is false information that's shared innocently. People will push that out because they think it's going to help their friends and family. Disinformation is malicious. So generally disinformation will be to cause disruption. It'll be to rip off people financially, just really nasty Nasty stuff. And we think because we are in Australia and we're in Pollyanna land that we are not going to be targeted by outside entities in terms of social division. The disaster is the perfect place for that to happen. And I'm really worried that disinformation is going to just come up and blindside us. It's happened in India, it's happened in the USA. We know that we've lost people in India due to disinformation in the Kerala floods in 2018. There was some disinformation that came out about dam burst that was

Renae Hanvin:

False,

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

But it drove all the people evacuating into the next valley that actually was flooding. And it shifted emergency agency resources completely off track and they don't know who they lost, but they know that they did lose people in that event. And I just worry that that's going to happen to us. At the moment, it's the arson thing and it's the

Renae Hanvin:

Geoengineering

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Thing. But in America it really happens in recovery. And I know Red Cross has really suffered in Australia due to disinformation in North Carolina I think it was Hurricane Helene. There was so much disinformation going about what FEMA staff were doing. They had to pull FEMA out of that state. People were answering the door with guns and telling them to get lost. It's getting really dangerous. And I hope that the trust factor will protect us a little bit, but we can't rely on that. We have to be getting in front of it. And there are methods of getting in front of disinformation. Cambridge University isn't a lot of research on this. You don't have to do the whack-a-mole thing. You can get in front of it. And I reckon the first government agency that gets in front of it will be all over the front page because they're talking about it.

We have some amazing agency police spokespeople who just tell it like it is and they will say, "Right, this is what you're going to hear. Don't believe a word of it. It's absolute bull crap." And suddenly that'll be the story. And in the meantime, the community's thinking, "Oh wow." And when they see it, they say, "Oh, that's not right. That's rubbish. That's what you were going to say."

So that's how it needs to be going. And I think we need to be getting onto that.

Renae Hanvin:

But coming, I guess, full circle as well.That's why having connections and comms in the strategic foundation of your preparedness, response and recovery is absolutely fundamental. Now your new book, you've got a new book coming. So before I ask my last question, tell me about the book.

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

The book is a collation of a lot of research, not just of mine, but a whole lot of researchers who are working in mostly community engagement, but I'll do a little bit on the communication side because they're so integrally linked. Routledge is pushing it as a textbook, but I'm writing it so that anyone could pick it up. So if you've got someone in your community who's really keen to get the community motivated, they can pick it up and they can go to a certain chapter. They might just go to the chapter that's got all the techniques in it and they can go off and they can do some community engagement around emergency management. They can understand what works and what doesn't and what to expect. So those challenges, the five challenges I took you through. The first timer will think, right, all these people in the room, give them this message.

They're all at the same stage now, but not realizing that you've got a couple of community leaders here, you've got a few people who know what their risk is and are getting active and need a bit more. And then you've got these people over here who have no idea. They're only here because their neighbor dragged them along. So just helping them understand what they're facing when they start leading their community. And it's going to be a great resource for the volunteers in fire brigades and SES groups and units and that type of thing.

Renae Hanvin:

Love it. Can't wait to hear more and read it too. So my last question's always the same. So if you had to pick two things to change in the disaster space, what would they be?

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

It frustrates the hell out of me that there's a few different resilience models and one of them has 84 different pieces that contribute to overall resilience. The national resilience strategy from 2011 has three of those and yet emergency management has responsibility for the entire resilience picture. How does that work? Most of the resilience is in social connections, health, facilities, all the social capital stuff you've done with Daniel and yet it's emergency management that has to pick up the can and do all the heavy lifting. And that annoys me so much.

Renae Hanvin:

Here to here. Yep. I'll jump on that one.

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

Considering that picture, we're doing a pretty good job. The other thing I think is that community engagement is not really understood well at operational level in agencies. The recovery people are all over it, but the preparation and response side of things, people still think it's just doing public information sessions. Correct. I don't understand that there can be a whole planning piece about this and we can get the local chamber of commerce onto the LDMG and we can have planning sessions and then suddenly the load is spread incredibly because people from within the community are involved in the process. And I try to spread the word and there are evangelists in every organization who really get it, but we've still got a lot of work to do on helping the operational people who've come up fighting fires and driving flood boats and that type of thing, really understanding how community engagement could help make their job easier.

Renae Hanvin:

100%. And I think it's like systemic. The system just needs to be kind of like a little bit. Exactly. And I guess linked to what I was saying before around it's not just response and recovery and those leadership and tactical skills, it's the preparedness and that resilience building and whatnot before. Barb, I could talk to you for another hour or so, but finish their walks, you might have to do another one when your book's out. But thanks so much for talking to me. I've been talking to Dr. Barbara Ryan about connecting research, communication and human behavior to disasters. We've got links to her work, et cetera, below. So good to see you and I can't wait to cross paths again. Thanks, Barb. Thanks

Dr. Barbara Ryan:

For having me, Marie and I. We'll see you later.

Renae Hanvin:

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.