Catastrophic incidents often occur without warning. These incidents severely damage facilities, injure (and maybe kill) people, bruise the company’s reputation and ultimately cut into the company’s bottom line. When these incidents occur, management expects brigade members, led by an incident commander, to quickly respond to efficiently and effectively mitigate the incident, curbing losses and returning the facility back to operations as quickly as possible. Failing to effectively respond to an incident results in further damage to the physical and the intangible, costing the company millions — if not billions — of dollars and untold costs to the public’s perception of the company. A significant challenge faced by any company, regardless of its size, is the effective development of incident commanders capable of making decisions to solve highly complex problems in high-risk incidents. This challenge is compounded because these incidents may only occur once in an individual’s career, greatly limiting their experience of managing a complex incident. As companies seek to develop these leaders, the real question is: how do we develop competent and effective incident commanders capable of solving complex problems?
Challenges of catastrophic incidents
Catastrophic incidents happen often because the complex technologies and systems used in manufacturing and processing simply wear out. They also occur because management and safety systems are sometimes inadequate or flawed. These incidents have common characteristics that make effectively managing them somewhat challenging. First, by virtue of the systems involved, these incidents are almost immediately highly complex with high stakes, including severe financial and reputational damage. These are also — at least initially — ill defined. This means the true nature (and severity) of the incident is often not known for some time. This makes an accurate assessment of the size and magnitude of the incident — and ultimately its mitigation — difficult to identify. Moreover, these incidents, especially in the early stages, are also rapidly changing.
Additionally, incident commanders are constrained by three key elements: their training and experience, as well as the training of their subordinates; time; and available resources. Training and experience are critical to good decision making skills. Training provides the basic building blocks and processes for conducting operations. The knowledge, skills and abilities training develops are key to individuals’ long-term productivity. However, no one can be trained for every situation. Moreover, staying current is challenging, given the competing needs on the individual’s time.
Experience is even more critical to an individual’s problem-solving abilities. Experience fills an individual’s mental slide carousel with memories in which he can recall and compare against the current situations. They can recall the circumstances and events of the prior incident and what was done to mitigate it. However, like training, no one can have all of the experience to cover every possible incident.
Time works in two ways. First, because of the many unknowns of an incident, time is always of the essence. Decisions must be made without hesitation to avoid a phenomenon called paralysis by analysis. This occurs when decisions are delayed as the decision maker seeks further information. Time also presents a challenge to the decision maker’s capabilities as it wears on. In fact, studies have shown when individuals perform in a stressful situation over time, the ability to make good and/or accurate decisions drastically deteriorates.
The anthrax example
An example of this conundrum comes from the anthrax cases that occurred in Florida in 2001. Prior to 2001, pulmonary anthrax had not been seen in the United States since the mid 1950s, which meant, by 2001, most doctors who had experience treating the disease were retired. So, when an individual presented to a hospital in Palm Beach County, Fla., with pulmonary anthrax, the case went undiagnosed for a critical period of time, proper treatment was delayed and the patient ultimately succumbed to the infection. However, had the situation been sized up (i.e., diagnosed) within a shorter period of time and a proper solution implemented quickly, the patient would have likely lived.
Developing problem solving skills
A critical part of developing leaders to manage catastrophic incidents requires developing problem-solving skills. Effective problem solvers are also intuitive decision makers, meaning they recall their experiences to accurately assess a problem and then, based on that assessment, form a course of action that is predictable. Contrary to popular belief, intuitive decision making is not wildly shooting from the hip. It is a decision making style in which the decision maker sizes up a situation and chooses a common sense course of action that fits the situation. Then, before implementing the solution, the decision maker imagines how the solution would play out to evaluate its appropriateness. However, to build intuitive decision making skills, building an individual’s experience base is a must. The most efficient decision makers have significant experience and are able to quickly identify the problem, including the nuances that separate one similar problem from another. This is called recognition-primed decision making.
Unfortunately, building up one’s experience base in managing catastrophic incidents is challenging and can be extremely costly. As mentioned earlier, these major incidents occur seldom more than twice in an individual’s career. As our protective systems and process safety continue to improve, these incidents occur less frequently. While this is good news for shareholders, it is also problematic for developing effective, competent decision makers.
There are many training courses that teach incident managers how to prepare and plan for catastrophic incidents. However, few provide the realism, rhythm or level of urgency needed to provide the true context for problem solving. Therefore, the challenge in developing decision makers is providing opportunities to make decisions and solve problems in realistic contexts. When prospective incident commanders are able to do this, they become effective and efficient incident commanders.
Simulations provide effective, cost-efficient solutions
Creating experience-building opportunities for future incident commanders can cost companies time and money. For example, the time and costs it takes to plan for and carry out exercises and participate in training can be prohibitive, limiting them to occur only once a year or less. In addition, the costs and time needed to execute live evolutions involving other personnel limit the number of situations and repetitions that can be completed within a single training opportunity. However, simulation-supported, scenario-based training provides a solution to these challenges.
Simulation-supported training is used around the world in a variety of applications. Scenario-based training uses realistic scenarios with specific objectives intended to produce specific learning outcomes. By combining these two forms of training, trainees are immersed in realistic environments where carefully crafted events provide a context for individuals to apply their knowledge, skills and abilities. Moreover, these events can range from the simplistic to highly complex and can be repeated. This type of training allows for mental muscle building by allowing individuals to experience sets of experiences and repetition of those sets. In other words, simulation-supported, scenario-based training provides exactly the opportunities to build experience by immersing individuals in a realistic context.
Since 2003, the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) has employed simulation-supported, scenario-based training to prepare incident commanders to manage large-scale, expanding incidents. The simulation used is a computer-based environment developed by a team of emergency responders and software engineers from the Texas Center for Applied Technology (TCAT) called the Emergency Management Exercise System (EM*ES). This simulation provides prospective incident commanders with tools similar to what they would have in their home jurisdictions. The system is robust enough to allow dozens of trainees to participate in the same exercise from anywhere in the world with Internet access. In 2012, TEEX also began using E-Semble’s XVR, a 3-D simulation platform that provides a multitude of environments. This simulation has initially been used to prepare up-and-coming incident commanders on managing the initial stages of major incidents.
These tools are combined with highly experienced responders who coach and mentor students. Additionally, scenarios are developed by professionals with years of experience in the domain, so they are accurate down to the minutest details. This powerful combination has proven to be effective in developing the expertise in incident commanders that make them both effective and efficient in solving the complex problems created by a catastrophic incident.
For more information, visit www.teex.org/imprograms or call (855) 245-1614.
