AMU Emergency Management Health & Fitness Opinion Public Safety Resource

Be an Expert in Your Arena and Understand Others

Collaboration in emergency management

As we move from the authoritarian model of incident command into the multi-agency coordination (MAC) systems that are needed to manage disasters, we must also move to a collaboration model of operation.

But how do we make that transition effectively, and what components do we need to make the transition? Can we understand everything to make collaboration work? Do we need to know everything?

One way to ensure that we can collaborate better is through the idea of being an expert in your area, but understanding others.

Being the expert in your area

When we begin our professions, we often start at the entry level and begin to work our way towards the chief executive officer. Once we enter our organization, we have much technical information to learn. And as we begin our management ascent, much of what we learn involves leadership and management competencies, but also expands our technical competence.

For example, in the fire department, we begin by learning how to pull hose off the engine. As we move to the company officer, we learn how to direct where the hose goes when deployed from the vehicle. At the battalion chief level, we understand how long it will take to deploy and how this affects the fire. At the chief officer level, we decide on the staffing needed to deploy the hose and how much the hose costs.

The whole way up, we become more removed from the actual hose pulling and towards the outcome of pulling the hose.  But we must remember all of this information to maintain expertise

Knowing What Others Need

Looking from outside of the fire department, if I was a street department supervisor, I would need to know that the hose is only around 200 feet and that you must drive on the streets to get to the fire during a disaster.  I would know that I could support the firefighting part of the disaster by matching snowplows or bulldozers with the fire engines to ensure they can traverse the streets.

Working together and matching resources from your organizations with others is the key to disaster response, as our typical self-contained, day-to-day operations will not often be available during a disaster.

Dr. Randall Hanifen serves as a shift commander at a medium-sized suburban fire department in the northern part of the Cincinnati area. Randall is the CEO/principal consultant of an emergency services consulting firm, providing analysis and solutions related to organizational structuring of fire and EMS organizations. He is the chairperson and operations manager for a county technical rescue team. From a state and national perspective, he serves as a taskforce leader for one of FEMA's urban search and rescue teams, which responds to presidential declared disasters. From an academic standpoint, Randall has a bachelor’s degree in fire administration, a master’s degree in executive fire service leadership, and a doctoral degree in business administration with a specialization in homeland security. He is the associate author of “Disaster Planning and Control” (Penwell, 2009), which provides first responders with guidance through all types of disasters.

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