The Response Force Multiplier
Welcome to The Response Force Multiplier, the OSRL Podcast. On The Response Force Multiplier, we explore all aspects of emergency planning and response, through conversations with compelling experts and thought leaders, providing a fresh take on key issues and cutting-edge techniques in this field. In each episode, we’ll dive into one aspect of emergency planning and response using OSRL’s unique pool of experts and collaborators to gain new insights and to distil these down into actionable tools and techniques for better preparedness and response to crisis incidents and emergencies.
Emergency Response, Crisis Management, Emergency Planning
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The Response Force Multiplier
Crisis Exercises: Are You Wasting Your Time and Money? A Blueprint for Better Exercises
Hundreds of thousands of hours and millions of Euros are spent each year planning, executing and debriefing crisis exercises.
The return on this significant investment is rarely fully and honestly appraised. If it were, organisations would uncover an uncomfortable truth; many exercises probably fail to achieve their potential.
Dave Rouse, Crisis Management Services Lead at Oil Spill Response and Dr. El Parker, Specialist Crisis Management Consultant, discuss how you can maximise the value from exercises sharing lessons learned and a blueprint for better exercises.
Please give us ★★★★★, leave a review, and tell your friends about us as each share and like makes a difference.
Hello and welcome to the Response Force Multiplier, a podcast that explores emergency planning and response. On the Response Force Multiplier, we bring together compelling experts and thought leaders to provide a fresh take on key issues and cutting edge techniques. In each episode, we'll dive into one aspect of emergency planning and response and we'll use OSRL's unique pool of experts and collaborators to gain new insights and to distill these down into actionable tools and techniques for better preparedness and response to crisis incidents and emergencies. My name is Paul Kelway, we are OSRL and this is the Response Force Multiplier.
Speaker 1:In today's episode, we look at how we train for emergency incidents and test our ability to respond through exercises.
Speaker 1:These exercises are not just a check in the box, but are actually at the heart of being resilient and prepared to respond to emergencies. But are actually at the heart of being resilient and prepared to respond to emergencies. But in speaking with my colleague, Dave Rouse, the Crisis Management Lead for Osprey Response, and Dr L Parker, Associate Professor for Disaster and Emergency Management at Coventry University, we explore why they are not always fit for purpose or value for money, and also how we can make exercises a more meaningful tool in improving preparedness and creating resilient response systems. Hi, Dave, and welcome to the show. So you and Dr L Parker recently wrote this paper called A Blueprint for Better Exercises that examined the ways we relate to exercises for emergency planning and asked the provocative question of whether they are actually a waste of time and money. But before we get to that, can you just firstly explain a bit about what you mean when you say exercises in terms of crisis management preparedness? What is an exercise in this context and why are they so important?
Speaker 2:The crux of it is we need to be ready to respond to anything at any time. So what we do is we develop plans which are based on risk or scenarios which are likely to happen and we train people in their roles with the hope that, if something happens, the plans work and the people are competent. But we need to not wait until something happens to find that out. And this is where exercises come in, because actually the competence of the team and the competency of the people is far more important than any documentation. The documentation does capture arrangements which are made, so we need to know that those will work and we use an exercise to practice that. And we need to give people confidence and we need to put them under some pressure and test that they can perform in the sorts of scenarios that they might have to if it was real. So we do a walkthrough, discussion of some arrangements and think about how would they work.
Speaker 2:What have we missed? Talk through the steps. We can do a tabletop simulation where we get into a room, we put people into roles, we use a scenario that will play out in real time and everything then happens in that room. We don't have actual physical activity happening outside. That's the next layer of realism and stress testing things when we go to a full deployment of assets in the field alongside simulated command centers, so really putting the whole system of a response into practice. So exercises can operate on a number of different levels and we would choose to do a different type of exercise depending on what we're trying to achieve.
Speaker 1:So you wrote a blueprint which is focused on creating greater impact from exercises and giving them greater value for money. What was it that brought you to put this down on paper in the first place, and what were you seeing in the industry that made you think there were ways to be more effective in how exercises were developed and run?
Speaker 2:I guess the real catalyst for putting pen on paper to develop the blueprint with l was a particular exercise that I attended which triggered something. It was a big exercise for the major oil company. There were around 300 people in a room for three days doing a tabletop exercise, lots of really senior people. Most had flown in internationally to be there. We'd taken over the whole hotel. So a really nice hotel in a nice part of town, everything fully catered, everyone was staying in-house Just a really expensive affair. This was easily in the tens of millions of dollars and it kind of went the same as most of them go, and at the end of it there's really high energy in the room. Everyone's really buzzing. They feel like we've learned a lot. We've really connected with each other.
Speaker 2:This has been a great use of my time and maybe I'm a little bit cynical, having seen a lot of them. You know, and reflecting back on, actually we don't always see the performance in response, but I think I just felt a bit flat and I felt that the exercise wasn't really giving good bang for the buck. It cost a lot of money, it had taken a lot of people's time, but I think we'd lost track of what the objectives were. Some of them might have been met, but no one actually knew, or we could have achieved a lot more with this huge investment of people's time. And I didn't walk away feeling this company is materially better prepared for what it's just done.
Speaker 2:There are better ways. There are real life consequences of not being prepared, and that's why we exercise and that's why, when we do it, we need to make sure we do it well, because most companies are not professional responders. They don't have the time to spend exercising weekly and every month. So when you do it, you got to get it right, because there are consequences if you don't have the time to spend exercising weekly and every month. So when you do it, you got to get it right, because there are consequences if you don't so there was clearly some frustration on dave's part about how exercises were being run in.
Speaker 1:Dave thinking about and exploring this question of how to change that, he decided to reach out to professor l parker, associate professor at coventry university, where where Dave completed his degree in International Disaster Engineering and Management. So, elle, can you share a bit about your connection to this topic and what brought you and Dave to imagining this new approach to emergency exercises?
Speaker 3:Dave and I would periodically have a catch-up, and he was often involved in exercising and I was often involved in training and exercising and the mismatch between that.
Speaker 3:But it would turn into a little bit of a moan shop about what we were being asked to do and what the expected outcomes of that exercising process were.
Speaker 3:I'd been involved in proposing how we would go about designing an exercise to test strategic decision-making in another country and we were told in no uncertain terms that none of the strategic decision-makers could look bad and therefore we were going to have to very carefully manage the nature of the scenario. So we actually ended up having other people role-playing those roles and those strategic decision makers observing it, talking about things like that and the limitations of the exercises that we were involved with, we both started saying but it should be done like this, if we had a shift in culture, then we could achieve that, and I think one of the most recent conversations we had was how we knew whether or not exercises were valued for money, and that opened a big. One of the most recent conversations we had was how we knew whether or not exercises were valued for money, and that opened a big can of worms so what are some of the major issues or mistakes about exercises that prevent them from being good value for money?
Speaker 2:so if I take it away from just that exercise and talk about some of the bigger things that we see fairly consistently, we very often see exercises that are not difficult enough. They play easy. You're not really going to be prepared for a response where you will work a 12 or a 15 hour day for maybe 20 days straight and that time away from home in not very comfortable settings with poor equipment to work with. That's the reality of a response. Exercises don't often simulate that they start at 8, they break lunch at 12, and at 1 o'clock we come back and we'll be paid all 5 o'clock and then we go and have a nice meal somewhere, and that doesn't prepare you for a response. The number two thing we see a lot of is that the scenario either isn't realistic or it isn't testing enough. So it doesn't stress the procedures or the arrangements. It doesn't put people under that pressure that you need to feel so that if it ever happens, you have some muscle memory. On that unrealistic point, how helpful is it really to simulate for an oil company that have got some offshore installations and you might have a fire on a platform, but how helpful is it really to then simulate a zombie invasion over the top. So we often see not quite that extreme, but that gives you an idea.
Speaker 2:The third thing we see we never get into the real detail and in a response we might have some general arrangements and we know that no plan will survive contact. But there are certain things that you do need to get into the detail to really know will this work? How does an interface work between different agencies? Do we have contracts with the right provisions to give us what we think we might need and the ability to get more? Quite often exercises are over too quickly. They skim across the surface, so the big picture blocks kind of fit, but the details haven't been gotten into and that's where are over too quickly. They skim across the surface, so the big picture blocks kind of fit, but the details haven't been gotten into and that's where we see things fall down.
Speaker 1:So I know both of you talked about how preparedness documents are in some way divorced from reality and so not fit for purpose. What do you see as some of the key issues that come up when they don't prepare us properly for dealing with real emergencies and how we can think differently about how we prepare dealing with real emergencies and how we can think differently?
Speaker 3:about how we prepare. I came from a world where emergency plans didn't really exist. So you work internationally in locations where you're working on disaster risk reduction in areas prone to disasters, but quite often it was straight into response. That preparedness piece wasn't focused on and invested in. That wasn't to say that local groups didn't know what they were doing because of the frequency and scale of some of those events. That was more than perhaps we would experience in the UK, and so it meant that I viewed a more technocratic, bureaucratic approach with different eyes.
Speaker 3:If we don't understand enough about the nature of the risk, what people know, what people can do, the resources that we have, and we make basic assumptions that the impacts will be linear if A do B and if B do C and if C do D, we're giving ourselves a false impression of resilience.
Speaker 3:And then, when we base an exercise on that, where the objectives are being set, validating our arrangements that always strikes me as really odd. Why aren't you validating what you've got and what you can do and I know that's kind of implicit, but the testing the arrangements comes first before. Did we actually achieve what we set out to achieve? That got me thinking what would happen if we didn't have all those documents, but we could still achieve the outcome and that came from my background had been all about climate change and uncertainty Before this notion of adaptive capacity became much more universal in the world of resilience, climate change, right from the beginning, was talking about adaptive capacity what we can do naturally and instinctively and intuitively because you can't script and write for everything- that is so interesting and really well said.
Speaker 1:So speaking to that, are there any examples you could point to in the real world that illustrate the disconnect around preparedness and how we can fall into that trap of rehearsing the script for a play that will very quickly unravel into something very different and infinitely more complex?
Speaker 3:digital learning online schools being closed. We weren't ready for that. We planned for influenza pandemic, as opposed to any other kind of variation on a communicable disease, so we didn't have much in the way of adaptive capacity and so we didn't say, okay, we might lock down. What would the consequence of lockdown? What would the consequence of kids not going to school? And so we didn't say, ok, we might lock down. What would the consequence of lockdown? What would the consequence of kids not going to school? And so we didn't develop that web and therefore our exercise was a very narrow part of our preparedness, functionality and capabilities that were tested and lessons were learned about A&E and scaling up within that kind of emergency health service, but it didn't mean we were ready for a pandemic.
Speaker 1:That's a great example and really pertinent, and I think it really shows how there are so many cascading and unintended repercussions that can't always be rehearsed but can have profound real world consequences.
Speaker 3:And it's absolutely fine to have an exercise that tests a part of that. But you have to be very open and very transparent and provide the evidence for the bit of your risk ecosystem that you are now confident about, and you absolutely should not say to your CEO or set of directors oh, we're ready, bring it on, because we're not.
Speaker 1:Right right, that's really interesting. So if I think about an emergency incident as a whole jigsaw puzzle, essentially it's ensuring that you don't just focus on one or two pieces of that jigsaw and then think you have the whole picture figured out.
Speaker 3:Jigsaw is a great analogy and I think that takes us all the way back to how do you know how many pieces and how big your jigsaw actually is? And that's where the investment is perhaps most worthwhile. The big showpiece exercise that proves that you've got a bunch of people who can wade through enough paperwork, use enough apps, open enough software, fill in enough forms in the timeframe to be able to put in place those linear procedures that demonstrate you can implement those arrangements. But it's in a rather simplistic and expected emergency scenario. There's value in it, but it doesn't mean you're prepared and you're resilient.
Speaker 1:So now I want to back out a bit and talk about the blueprint you created, which focused on developing effective exercises and also highlighted the importance of taking a holistic, systems-wide approach to that process. Can you talk a bit about what you were trying to address with this?
Speaker 2:when exercises are not approached holistically, when they're dealt with in isolation and you've got objectives or lessons that might be learned in one that are not carried forward to the next, or we're lost or we repeat ourselves. That would be one of the symptoms of it not being thought about holistically, not being part of a big exercise program. Competency being more important than the plans by far is built in blocks, and so a big, three-day 300-person exercise might be appropriate if we've built in blocks the competence of the team to get there where we can really make the most of that big event. We don't often see that, and I think the last would probably be you need competent people who understand how things should go in order to do assessment well, and that's often overlooked. To do assessment well, and that's often overlooked.
Speaker 2:So if you reverse all of those that I've just talked about, then you would have the recipe, which we've encapsulated in the blueprint, for how to do things better. There's lots and lots of doctrine out there about the steps you need to take in order to get from a blank sheet of paper to an exercise. We're not trying to replicate the recipes for doing it. There are many of them out there. They all do a good job. They're pretty consistent with each other, but what the blueprint is trying to do is how to apply the recipe in order to get the best bang for the buck.
Speaker 1:And I think there are a few things you referenced around proactive versus reactive. Could you speak more to that and also touch on something that the blueprint emphasizes and I think it's worth highlighting here that there is often a focus on the exercise itself as being the place to learn, but you argue that there is a wealth of learning to be had in the planning of the exercise as well.
Speaker 2:It's about being deliberate. There are many things that I might say that are incorrect in a particular circumstance, but you have to know the rules in order to know how to break them. So when I talk about proactive versus reactive, a reactive exercise might be in response to a legislative change, something that was unanticipated, or a major event somewhere which hasn't been thought about by this organization. So we need to go and make sure that we are prepared should that happen to us. So there will be circumstances where reactive exercise is correct and appropriate.
Speaker 2:But generally speaking, we want to see exercises as proactive. They are planned, they are thought about, they are part of a program and a sequence that is very deliberate in its design, with very clear objectives, with a carryover of lessons and a development of competence for the team over time. So that's what we mean by a proactive exercise. That's why we think it's important to have so that when you do see that big 300 person exercise once every three years, it's the culmination, it's the world cup final and you're ready for it because everything has been leading up to that so one of the terms you use is the golden thread, or having a golden thread that connects key elements of the preparedness planning, and that's not to say that the procedures and processes used aren't important they're actually vital.
Speaker 1:But the blueprint you put forward moves beyond that, and I think what you're proposing is developing exercises in a way that ultimately reinforces and supports the learning and resilience of the individuals who, at the end of the day, are the ones that have to perform that role in an emergency, would you say. That's true.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, because we become plan focused and then exercise arrangements as our objective, the golden thread is lost because it's a very short thread between the plan and demonstrating that everybody can follow the plan, whereas my idea of this golden thread starts with the risk, the scale of the hazard and the threat, the vulnerable things that might be affected, the feedback mechanisms in terms of consequences. How big is the scale of the risk scenario? That I need to understand. So it has to be within my remit as an organisation. But we have to work with partners to acknowledge if there's a failure in a supply chain, if the consequences are already affecting the local hospitals or the local environmental protection teams, they won't be able to do what they need to do as effectively. So we need to acknowledge that. So the joint working then becomes really important, and the information sharing and the coordination. And then the plans, which need to be written in such a way that they're principled and outcome focused, but with a set of suggestions, and then the exercises can build on the training and the competencies of those involved and we have an assurance process that then looks at the exercise debrief what scale of risks and nature of scenario did it deal with? Were we flexible enough? Can we look at the competencies that we're expecting of our people as well as the arrangement that we put in play?
Speaker 3:It's always seemed very strange to me that you might use a very small team or outsource the exercise design and development process, because what scenario should we use? How should we stretch things? What do you know? What's been your experience? What were challenges last time? By outsourcing, you lose all that discursive social learning, organisational learning, rich analysis, different people's views and opinions. It's just such a massive loss background where participatory approaches in very low resourced communities in coastal Sri Lanka to help develop preparedness tools, it was all about bringing people together to talk about and plan and there was very little point in those big showy exercises. Resilience is all about learning to learn and I know for some people quality assurance sounds really boring and really bureaucratic. But for me I find it really exciting. By turning into a systems-based approach and that golden thread, I'm linking all of those hearts together and it just means that a good quality assurance process forces us to think about whether or not our risk management ecosystem is supporting us to actually improve.
Speaker 1:So both of you emphasize resilience and I guess the key question is how to build that resilience and develop responders with the right mindset for responding well in a crisis. What's the most effective approach? Not just around programs or exercises, but having responders who are ready for real world scenarios, with all of the unknowns that that might bring.
Speaker 3:Priority one is often having a plan as an output, a written set of actions to achieve a particular goal, and then the desire to demonstrate that we're prepared through using an exercise where we just test those arrangements but we don't come out of that knowing what our limits are on our capabilities and our capacities Seems to me we should flip our objectives, not to test our arrangements but to see what scale of emergency we are currently fit to deal with, so that shifts the objectives of our exercise. If we think about preparedness as a set of interrelated activities aiming to improve our capacity and capabilities, then that is a resilience-based approach. Resilience is about change and improvement. If we have a mindset where we're simply setting out to prove that we are prepared, those changes often make our arrangements fit for the exercise or the emergency that we've just experienced, not improving and increasing our adaptability, our flexibility and our ability to be able to deal with uncertain situations. And I get that. That experience and confidence to be able to adapt and innovate comes from practice and you may not have the opportunity to get that breadth and diversity of experience, which means we need to change the way we think about exercises and training.
Speaker 3:We've seen a shift to smaller scale, bite-sized training, emergency scenarios, tabletop working, discursive-based activities that allow people to consider, think, reflect on. Is this process or procedure flexible enough? Are these resources likely to be sufficient? Have we thought about the fact that we might not start from this start point in an emergency? So it might be winter, it might be in the middle of a economic crisis, there might have been a previous fire and we're already damaged or limited in some way? And those short tabletop discursive exercises provide more of a training and collective working and understanding field than the big showpiece exercise. And again, training is needed for that familiarisation with the fundamental procedures that mean you're not going to overstep the mark with your regulations and your health and safety. That's important. That's really important. You need to have all of that in your toolkit as a responder, to be able to test and validate whether or not your capabilities and your capacities are flexible enough to be able to deal with an unusual crisis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. I think what you're talking about here is the real value of working on a plan is actually the way it's carried forward in the people that put it together, that it's not so much a document that just sits there and is pulled off the shelf in an emergency, but there's been a process that people have been involved with. That means that a plan is essentially alive and those people are ultimately on a journey themselves to becoming more competent and embodying that plan more completely.
Speaker 2:Exactly to the point where the plan, the document itself, becomes immaterial, because what you've developed is a team of people and individuals who can perform as they need to in any type of situation. There's an interesting quote which encapsulates what we try and do when we're teaching people to be in an incident management team. Your job as a responder is to do precision guesswork based on unreliable data provided by those of questionable knowledge, and so, actually, the plan doesn't particularly help you when you're up at that level. You don't need it, because you're able to work with uncertainty, with volatility, with ambiguity and complexity. You're able to perform as individuals in a team with the problem in front of you, without having to get bogged down in things like the process.
Speaker 1:So can you relate that to the idea of bite-sized learning and hyper-realism and how you incorporate that into your trainings.
Speaker 2:We work with a client where, over a two and a half day period, we run five hyper-realistic scenarios for them and each one has a progression that builds the team and builds the individuals up to that cruising altitude that we want. And each scenario might only last an hour and a half, but in that time the hyper-realism comes from the way that we deliver the injects, the way that something will happen in the room. Someone will say something. We will role play a journalist, for example. We will catch someone unawares. They'll say something they maybe shouldn't have said.
Speaker 2:The next inject would be as it would be in real life A news story that's just quoting someone showing the picture from their profile. When we wire people up, which we sometimes do, to the heart rate monitors to see how the level of stress is in the room, you can see the spike. That's real. That feels hyper-realistic. That person has just got a great lesson from that example. The other way that we would do it in scenario design is making sure that you get all the details right so that it feels like the operation. We've got the names correct. We know the operations inside out. Everything would happen in the way that people would anticipate would through. So getting to that real level of detail for a scenario is that part of that hyper realism. But you can compress it and it doesn't have to be a three-day 300 person event. It can be an hour with five people, 10 people.
Speaker 3:And I think perhaps one of the other things in terms of making this more efficient is if over the next five years as an organisation, you develop more but smaller exercises or less resource-intensive, so they're more tabletop-y, virtual discursive, you will kill two birds with one stone. You will come to understand and map your risk ecosystem through that more frequent discursive process as you try and design exercise scenarios and that can then feed back into your risk assessments. So whichever comes first whether the risk assessment is done discursively and participatory, whether the planning is done with diverse range of stakeholders and by table topic exercises, use that process and that approach. Don't put somebody in an office on their own with a spreadsheet to do it.
Speaker 1:That's really well said, although, because in my day job I work in wildlife emergency response. Rather than kill two birds with one stone, I like to say catch two birds with one net.
Speaker 3:Okay, yes, that's much, much better.
Speaker 1:So ultimately, this approach really helps training and test resilience in a real world way, and that training develops the right mindset for responders to swim rather than sink in a high intensity situation. And what's interesting in some of the ways that this is now being applied are that they're actually borrowed from sports psychology and training. Can you speak a bit more about that?
Speaker 2:a lot of the research, the organizations that we've worked with to get to this point are around sport, psychology, sport performance where you think about you're taking the penalty kick or the drop goal, high pressure situation. The world is watching you. There are consequences if you don't get this right. It's the same in a crisis. So how do we give people the tools, how do we develop the mindset so that they can perform in that really stressful situation? You need the mindset to be right in a crisis team with the individuals to be able to perform under pressure and for the team to have that mindset of solving the problem and not getting stuck in an analysis, paralysis or any of those factors that hinder them. So one of the ways that we illustrate that point is we've got heart monitors that we'll put on people so at different points in the course you can illustrate it for the room the effect of stress that we can show through heart rate variability on the monitor, and then that helps to position for what we do.
Speaker 2:Next is we give people some really practical tools how they can manage pressure so that it doesn't manifest as stress on them or totally natural for everyone to go through that initial fight, flight, freeze response. We help people understand what it is, that it doesn't manifest as stress on them or totally natural for everyone to go through that initial fight flight freeze response. We help people understand what it is, how it works, how we can work for them in a positive way, and so over a standard two and a half or three day course, you can see the application of those tools and by the end you can see people using what works for them and performing much more effectively under pressure, much more confidently, much more competently. And then they can take it outside of the scenarios and if they ever need to use it in real life, it's there. They can bring it back.
Speaker 1:It's got the muscle with it so if you're an emergency planner listening to this and you're trying to breathe new life into your program, what would be some of the first steps that you suggest that they would take? Making sure that their training and exercises are fit for purpose and maybe, if they're considering implementing the kind of model you're talking about?
Speaker 2:first of all read the blueprint. That's an easy one against whatever other doctrine that you need to follow for the organization that you're in. About how to do it show you how to apply that. But I guess if break it down, it's stand back and look at the big picture.
Speaker 3:Number one I think my first question would be what's the unarguable evidence that you can do what you say you can do when you need to do it? And then, if you say, well, it's from that exercise we did last year, I would suggest go back and say, right, what were the injects based on? Why did we choose that location, that scenario? Does that link back to our risk analysis? Let me look around the sector and see whether or not there is evidence that it could be bigger, it could be different, more people could be involved. The starting point could be different. I think the one thing that I would emphasise is involving as many stakeholders as possible in the exercise development and that the exercise day is not the end point. The exercise development is the beneficial process.
Speaker 1:So we live in a very dynamic, fast-changing world, and sometimes we're dealing not just with the initial emergency, but compounded issues that can surface as a result of cascading repercussions from the things that are happening. So when I think about exercises in this ever-changing world that we're in, I guess my question to both of you is do you believe it is truly possible to be prepared and resilient?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it is, and I think the organizations that do it well are the ones who are honest about where they are, where they need to be, and are prepared to make the investment to understand that having a competent team and a simple process to deal with any sort of unusual circumstance is what they need to be shooting for. It doesn't have to be complex, but I think it's totally possible and I would go as far as to say it's unreasonable. If you don't do that, there are real-life consequences on whatever organisation you are. If you're the emergency services, being unprepared means people might die. If you're in the energy industry and you have operations, you have real risk where people might die. In organizations with a different risk profile, you still have the continuity of the organization at risk if you have a crisis that you are unprepared for. So I think it's not only possible to be resilient, it's absolutely critical that you're resilient.
Speaker 3:I have found that I have recently made a lot of use of the word acceptable. So the culture change about shifting from knowing what will happen to being uncertain about what will happen, to being uncertain about what will happen and thinking about what would be acceptable. There are some things that it is not acceptable that should happen. It would not be acceptable to accept any degree of loss of life, although in some emergency scenarios, scenarios it is almost inevitable. But I think setting ourselves up to be prepared to be able to prevent certain things and for the rest of it we are winging it.
Speaker 3:We know we've got skilled people because we know that they can innovate. We've got good working relationships with partners who can offer us mutual aid, all of those things. That's resilience. The formal procedures are made for bending, the formal procedures are made for bending. So for me, resilient is not what you do, it's how you do it. And preparedness is being prepared to draw on more than you've got, because in the crisis and emergency that's the very nature of it it's beyond your capacity to be able to cope with what you've got.
Speaker 1:So you have to think beyond that, thank you for listening to the Response Force Multiplier from OSRL. Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to explore key issues in emergency response and crisis management. Next time on the Response Force Multiplier.
Speaker 4:If we invite people to think about what mindset hat do you put on when you're under pressure, we can learn to think about pressure in a way that is helpful. We might not enjoy the feelings and the discomfort, but to know that pressure is necessary for us to give our best can help people to start to look at it differently.
Speaker 1:For more information, head to osrlcom. We'll see you soon.
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