CCEM Podcast Episode 9 Aaron Marks
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Aaron Marks: [00:00:00] Traditional governance approach is to say, well, it's the law. It's the expectation. You have to do it. And our society now is saying, no, we don't. So we have to adapt. We have to find a better ways to communicate. We have to find better ways to engage our partners, customers, our clients, whichever language we want to use there.
And look at that coordination and collaboration. Stop taking a dictatorial. Or a directive approach and look at an enabling approach. Look at accountability and transparency. We have to be able to explain the why now.
Kyle King: Welcome to another episode of the Crisis Conflict Emerge Management podcast. My name is Kyle and I'll be your host for the show.
Today we are going to talk about a topic that is not discussed that much within the emergency or crisis management space, and that is the topic of governance. And crisis management. Now, why governance? The concept of governance is central to crisis and emergency management. In this context, governance refers to the systems and structures that dictate how decisions are made during crisis and emergencies, including the roles, responsibilities of the various actors and processes for coordinating responses and the [00:01:00] measures for accountability.
Effective governance can help ensure that responses to crisis and emergencies are swift, organized and effective, minimizing harm and facilitating recovery. On the other hand, weak governance and can exacerbate the impacts of crisis and emergencies leading to disorganized response, delays, and even harm to the trust that the public has in institutions themselves.
So what are the transit issues in this space? While there have been several trends that are currently shaping the field of governance, and these include a greater emphasis on coordination and collaboration. So for example, there's an increasing recognition that managing a crisis or an emergency effectively requires strong coordination and collaboration among various actors from different levels of government to private sector entities and civil society organizations.
We also see an increased focus on resilience and that growing focus on building resilience into governance structures with an aim. To not just respond to crisis in emergencies effectively, but also to enhance the ability of communities and systems to withstand future shocks. There's also been a greater attention to accountability and transparency in recent years, and there has been a push towards more [00:02:00] transparency, accountability, and the crisis in emergency management space with efforts to ensure that decisions are made in an open and transparent manner.
That those responsible for managing crisis and emergencies are held accountable. And we also see a new incorporation of technologies. So new technologies are increasingly becoming incorporated into governance structures from data analytics tools that can help identify and respond to emerging threats from social media platforms or that can facilitate communication during a crisis, or even more recently, the complex issues surrounding the use of ai or if we even look at what's going on in Ukraine and the war, the widespread use of drones.
So helping us unpack all this today is our guest, Aaron Marks founder and principle of 1 39 Consulting, a fellows civil expert for NATO's civil planning committee, and a leading figure in chemical, biological, and consequence management. Aaron has been at the forefront of national crisis planning, civil military coordination and consequence management since 2006, dealing with incidents involving weapons of mass destruction or toxic industrial materials.
Prior to his consulting career, he served in the messy medicine as a paramedic, specializing in hazardous environment care and tactical medicine, and served [00:03:00] during hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Aaron hold a BA in psychology from Texas Tech University and a Master's degree in public administration with emergency management focus from Jacksonville State University and is a certified master exercise practitioner and National Registry paramedic.
Welcome to the show, Aaron. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you Kyle. Looking
Aaron Marks: forward to our discussion.
Kyle King: So let's unpack this a little bit more on the topic of governance. I really haven't seen too many people talk about it very much, but I think it's sort of, if I would say, infused into the way that we operate in the emergency management space.
So the regulations coming down from a federal level or and into the state level and local levels, down to our communities and how we function and how we operate. And so I've mentioned some of the trends just now, but let's start with what your view is on this topic. And so, What is your take on this idea of quote unquote governance and how it applies to merchant management?
Well, I mean,
Aaron Marks: I, I think you're right. We're in a period of transition right now. There are a lot of things that are changing about the environment that we live and we work in. There are a lot of things that are changing about the expectations of. [00:04:00] Our partners and the expectations of the, the people that we serve and we support, and there's a huge cultural shift in how people look at the world around them.
Some of this is driven by. I guess the term of, of the moment is crisis fatigue, where people feel that we've been in emergency mode since, you know, 2020 with, uh, the onset of Covid 19 crisis. Some of it is just general societal shift. I think we're seeing a big change where the traditional approach to governance has been pretty rigid, where they're looking at setting rules and regulations or setting absolute.
Checklists and experience has shown that while that make us feel better, might make us more confident that we know what to do. It doesn't necessarily work in the real world. So governance is changing, or at least I hope it's changing and I'm trying to make. Changes and support the little corner of the world that I'm [00:05:00] in to move away from that rigid, restrictive structure to more of an enabling structure.
We're setting expectations or we're setting broad boundaries. We're setting foundation elements, we're establishing authorities to work from, but we're not rigidly defining how that work is to be done because I think that that what people have. Either forgotten or have willfully ignored are two things.
Number one is that in any situation, the environment has a vote. We can't predict everything. We can't structure and reselect all the answers. And then the second piece, and I think this is gonna be become even more apparent in the future. Is that Mother Nature is the ultimate serial killer. And no matter what we do, nature and the environment are gonna surprise us.
And that combination of two things, people are opening their eyes to it, and I'm hoping that we're gonna see a shift from restrictive government to supportive or enabling. [00:06:00] Governance and work through that.
Kyle King: Yeah, I agree with that. I think that there is, you know, sort of that old expression that if everything is a crisis, nothing's a crisis.
So if we've been living through this for the last three years and, and everything is an urgent requirement, everything is a, you know, catastrophic event and everyone is sort of doomed scrolling on Twitter. Right Then we do have that fatigue that sets in. And you mentioned something that I think is really sort of instrumental to, to maybe focus on for a bit, which is the fact that if we already have crisis fatigue and we want to, for example, in the context of this conversation and we're talking about sort of our response frameworks and how we manage and resource and allocate and work in the emerge management space, and we're, if we're talking about.
Loosening restrictive sort of processes and procedures. You need to have an inherent degree of trust and people in the organizations to be able to do their job and make the right decisions. So at that sort of deregulation, you need more trust. But as you mentioned in this very ambiguous environment, we don't always have the answers, and I think this is starting to become a problem.
Within the public sphere, specifically in public [00:07:00] trust spaces and will eventually have an impact in emergency management in terms of, okay, we need the trust and the public trust to be able to make accurate decisions. But there's been sort of a distrust, Brett, for a number of years, and now we're facing this sort of weird conflicts of events, right?
So we don't necessarily know it's going to happen. We're doing our best to try and manage a situation and prevent an escalation of a crisis. We need that public trust. And at the same time, we don't wanna slow our response capabilities by having a highly regulatory and sort of bureaucratic environment.
We need the flexibility to respond to a changing environment, and we need that type of ambiguity, flexibility, or we need the flexibility to work in an ambiguous environment, I should say. The trust to be able to do that, and I think we're entering a very interesting space right now that we have not had for a very, very long time.
Maybe if ever, I'm not sure. What do you think about
Aaron Marks: that? I think you're absolutely correct. I think we've seen a huge loss of trust in leadership and I think that we've seen very, very overt politicization of crisis and emergency [00:08:00] management, at least in the United States, uh, and probably to a similar level across the rest of the world.
And it's not that decisions weren't made politically in the past or that politics and, and control and power didn't influence the decision making. It's that now it's out in the open and now it's very, very overt and it's blatant. And because of that, the people that we need to trust us, To make decisions in their best interest are now actively asking those questions.
Is it really in our best interest? Who does it benefit? And the failure in communications, the failure in transparency of governance, the the failure of the people making the decisions, setting the expectations to explain why and the tendency. To revert to a technique that any parent will tell you doesn't work, which is answering that question with, because I told you to, has created a singularity and it's sucking all of the influence.
It's sucking all of the trust, it's sucking all of the ability of a crisis or emergency manager to, to impact [00:09:00] their communities. And to make those decisions that's been degraded to a level that you know, to, to steal your line, that I don't think we've ever seen before. Where in the past there's been that level of trust that actions have been taken for the greater good actions have been taken for, you know, to save lives, to save property, to protect the environment.
Now people are going, wait a minute, is this action to save my life? Or is this action to save the lives of my family or my sphere of interest as opposed to the collective? And you know, they're, they're looking for ways to define their interest, and we need to adjust our governance. Structure our governance philosophies to recognize that loss of trust and to find ways to at least attempt to restore it.
I don't know if that's feasible, seen this huge shift from, okay, I'm willing to experience some discomfort. Personally, because it's going to allow the community, it's gonna allow the neighborhood, it's gonna allow the county to state the [00:10:00] nation to sustain to. Right now we're in situation where a lot of people seem to be going, well, I don't wanna do that anymore.
What's in it for me and traditional governance approach is to say, well, it's the law, it's the expectation. You have to do it. And our society now is saying, no, we don't. So we have to adapt. We have to find a better ways to communicate. We have to find better ways to engage our partners, customers, our clients, whichever language you wanna use there.
And you know, look at that. Coordination and collaboration. Stop taking a dictatorial or a directive approach and look at an enabling approach. You know, look at accountability and transparency. We have to be able to explain the why. Now, you know, looking at the new technologies, one of the side effects of these, these technologies is visibility.
We aren't making decisions in small dark conference room with a bunch of insiders anymore. They we're moving more and more towards a true technocratic democracy where everybody [00:11:00] can see every decision and if they want to, they can make a comment or or attempt to influence it. So all of this has to be taken into account as we adjust to our new environment and.
You know, if we don't adjust, then you know, it's the old cliche, it's the dinosaurs screaming at the asteroid as it comes down to, uh,
Kyle King: hit the earth. Yeah. I think that there's an interesting dynamic happening, as you mentioned, in terms of social media and sort of always on in terms of being with social media and the rapid way that information spreads, especially during some type of crisis or emergency event, and.
The public essentially, you know, requesting or asking for things or sort of saying, why aren't you doing this? Or Why aren't you doing that questioning and sort of investigating and these narratives come out, which are, I think part of the frustration is when you're sitting in the governance structure and you're trying to manage an event and you've got all these questions coming in, you know, obviously you're dealing with a lot of information and people are sitting on the sidelines, sort of armchair quarterbacking the event, which always happens.
But I think the speed of which that is happening is a lot. Different now. And so that, and escalate [00:12:00] very quickly and get out of control. So there needs to be a rapid sort of containment of a crisis in terms of getting information out to the public and being able to sort of put your face out there, so to speak, and, and get information to the public to let people know and acknowledge that you are doing something and trying to mitigate an event.
I think one of the challenges, and you mentioned the coordination, collaboration piece, in the past we had sort of, here's this group of people that would make a decision. They would consult each other, get the experts in the room, and then. Send that decision down for implementation. And I think now we have to be extremely comfortable with the transparency that's needed to build trust, right?
And so then being able to come out and say, this is why we made this decision. These were the factors that led to that decision, and this is decision that we're taking moving forward based on these factors. You're always gonna get blow back from people, but at least are transparent about it. And you can stand there and say that, you know, this is why we've drawn these conclusions.
It's still gonna be very difficult because I think that the public now demands a lot. Of information, a lot of understanding as to why B decisions are being made, and it gets very difficult to be [00:13:00] able to provide 'em all that information in a very concise amount of time with a continuously, you know, changing environment as you know, the situation unfolds and you get a lot of questions about why aren't you doing this, or why aren't you doing that?
And it can be very, very difficult to try and manage. But I think in, in one way, and I'll sort of wrap up my rant here, but I think in one way it almost goes from this centralized approach to governance where we are sort of having a bureaucratic process and we are driving things down, policy changes, regulatory frameworks, and, and guiding people on how to respond and mitigate and manage communities and risks to a.
Almost a decentralized structure where we need to have really just extremely active community collaboration, community engagement, and really push the community forward first. And in that way you can build more public trust and build that type of environment to be able to influence your community a bit more when an event does occur.
So on that day-to-day, small decisions you're making, you're building public trust so that when something big happens that you already have a basis of trust to work from. That's sort of where my head goes with all of that. So I'll, I'll pause there and, and, uh, turn it back over to you for your thoughts.
No, I mean, I
Aaron Marks: think that's, uh, an important understanding to [00:14:00] have. There's research starting to come out now, or at least to be published now. It's been discussed inside of the community for a little bit, uh, as the peer review was going on, talking about the value of individual resilience preparedness versus community resilience and some preparedness.
And the theory now, and I, I like this pro agree with it, that the community engagement, community resilience, community focused governance, Has a much higher return because it creates surge capacity. Resilient community can step in and support a brittle individual. A prepared community can step in and help to support somebody who maybe isn't as prepared as everyone else.
Whereas focusing on individual resilience, individual preparedness, that doesn't create a surge capacity, and you want to take the same approach, I think, toward your mindset, toward governance or that rigid. Directive, you know, really structured governance doesn't have any search, it doesn't have any flexibility.
It doesn't have any adaptability in there. Whereas if you take, I [00:15:00] guess the cliche is you, if you take a more objectives or endpoint focused approach where instead of defining how you're gonna do something, you define why you need to do it and where and when, and you leave the how nebulous. You leave the how is where the adaptability lives that gives you that ability to flex, the ability to recognize that the environment has a vote and that nothing is ever gonna happen the the exact way that we predict it.
And you know, I think that, you know, coming back around to one of the trends you mentioned, that the new technologies, looking at machine learning or AI or variants thereof, you know, this is one of the places where that type of technology can be very, very helpful. Where it can help us. Try and look at the possibilities, you know, that can help us look at, okay, what, how are the way things could go differently or things could go wrong, you know, looking at contingencies at the same time, there's a risk there that we get sucked into the rabbit hole and get so, you know, we, we lose sight of the forest because we get focused on one tree, one [00:16:00] threat, one.
Possibility. You know, and no matter how, you know, existential or pretty, or, or however you wanna describe it, no matter how attractive that one tree is, we have to make sure that at least from a governance level, we stay at forest level view because we're responsible for all the trees.
Kyle King: I think the use of technologies is gonna do a couple of things.
I mean, in terms of governance, it's going to. If you are sitting in a key position in your government, in your city, county, state level, you should be able to use technologies and emerging technologies to try and discover a way to better help the communities better, enable a response better, you know, identify risk and mitigate, you know, other issues.
So there's an aspect there that's quite interesting. So from the adaption, the use of technologies, personally, I found 'em very interesting. I found 'em very useful. I think you have to know what you want. You have to know the end result of what you want to, what you want to achieve, what's the outcome. And so you can use tools to be able to achieve that objective.
At the same time, I don't think we're completely prepared for people that just use, use the same technology for other purposes, you know? And I think we're, it's just gonna continually undermine our efforts and [00:17:00] I think that that's where, if we draw a contrast and the parallel or, you know, between, you know, 19 sort of fifties sort of, you know, civil defense era and that.
Emphasis on individual and community resilience and all these things in that civil defense aspect. And then we draw parallel to today. You're exactly right, like individuals are not really prepared at all. We have actually weakened societies and communities in terms of resilience. The greater the implementation of technology, the greater our.
The susceptibility is to, you know, disinformation and we have simply just sort of undermined our best efforts that we built upon over the decades. And in many cases, in many sort of the NATO spaces that I've been in. There's been a, a real recall and, and remember, it's about the old civil defense time and how we've sort of lost a lot of things.
It has been some very interesting, you know, conversations around what do we do about bunkers these days? Right? Do we even have any bunkers anymore or do we have multipurpose. Bunkers. I mean, if you go look at Finland and their public shelter system, I mean, it's absolutely ingrained inside of their codes and their building codes and standards.
At [00:18:00] every apartment block, every building, every house, every office space has enough bunker space, shelter space to be able to house that entire building, and it's throughout the entire society. And so they. Made a conscious choice and coming back to the point of governance, they made a conscious choice years ago after World War II that they were gonna incorporate this as part of their society.
So they changed their codes, their standards, and now when you look at it now, especially in light of what's happening in Europe, you're, they are amazingly prepared cuz they have shelters under every building with air filtration systems and water filtration and all sorts of systems integrated inside there.
That is absolutely an amazing decision that they made decades ago. And I wonder today, What decisions are we making that are gonna have such a positive outcome in the next 20 or 30 years? Well, I mean the,
Aaron Marks: the example from Finland is really, really strong. And the best part of that is that their bunkers aren't dead space.
They aren't single use. They aren't single purposed every day. There are people in those spaces, their classrooms, their childcare centers, their cafeterias, their integrated space, that if something bad happens, they can close the [00:19:00] doors and turn on the filtration systems and harden them. And it's something that people use.
Every day. And you know, I do a lot of work with technology companies talking about designing ways to help manage incidents, to help make decisions. And one of the key design tenants is that if people don't use it every day, they aren't gonna use it in a crisis. If people aren't comfortable in a space every day, if they don't know how to to get there, if they don't spend time there, then they're gonna forget about it under stress.
And you know, when we talk about governance, I mean, that's one of the key elements. You write these governance structures, you create these expectations, and then you put the the file into a hard drive, a backup somewhere, or you print it up and you put it up on a shelf somewhere and you never look at it again.
Until you go, wait a minute, we need this. So I mean, that's another shift in governance and it's another piece that, that we need to change how we look, how we're setting expectations, how we're setting limitations on behaviors or how we're communicating, enabling elements. I guess we have to stop looking at incidents to stop looking at crisis as something that's unique or [00:20:00] special.
We have to look at it as it's an adaptation of our day-to-day big debates. In, again, in the United States about this, looking at the implementation of i c s, the incident command system in private sector and businesses, and you go and talk to private sector engagements or, or stakeholders, and they don't operate that way.
They don't have a paramilitary, they hierarchy in place. They don't have a, a very structured, you know, vertical leadership structure. Everybody's very flat. They're integrated, they're, they're networked. As opposed to Pillared, and you go into that group and say, well, we're going to impose a hierarchical vertical structure on you in times of crisis when there's already stress and there's already, you know, adrenaline impacting critical thinking, and, and everybody's already uncomfortable.
And instead of emphasizing the muscle memory, the habits that have already been put in place. We try and get people to switch to an entirely different mindset, an entirely different way of operating. And you know, that's another point in [00:21:00] governance that we need to address, where instead of trying to make something completely different, instead of trying to impose something else, we need to shift our governance mindset.
You play to the existing strengths. To take advantage of the existing habits of the existing practices. Of the existing structures, instead of trying to add something completely different top of it. And when I'm doing some of my work with nato, looking at that civil military interaction, the civil military coordination, especially in terms of.
Chemical or a biological response. That's where I think we have some of the most interesting conversations where, you know, a general officer standing up and go, what do you mean a mayor is gonna tell me I'm not allowed to do that? Or a mayor or a fire chief standing up and go, what do you mean? A soldier is gonna come in and think that they're in charge because they're working through those structures, those interaction points, and then all comes back to governance where we need to think about what do those interactions look like?
What are our expectations for that communicate? Or are we gonna use governance to establish, okay, this is the. Objective, this is the mission that we [00:22:00] want to accomplish. And based on your understanding of the current environment, find the best way to get there.
Kyle King: I think another example that came up recently was really interesting in terms of, you know, if we, if we continue along that thread of, you know, making decisions and, and for communities and sort of governing how communities are gonna act, and your point with Finland was spot on.
Those are dual corpus facilities. There's hockey rinks and all sorts of stuff in these shelters, which is fascinating that it's sort of incorporated and ingrained in the way that people live. And so if we look at an example of like what was recently happening in California, And I'm not an expert in California, but I saw obviously in the headlines, you know, the insurance companies not wanting to continue with insurance coverage in California for wildfires.
And this comes to your point about a changing climate environment or a changing, you know, weather environment, weather patterns, whatever the case is. But at some point something changed. With the risk factor for insurance industries, we're basically saying, we're not going to do this anymore, which will drive change in the communities and will drive change in the communities a couple of ways.
Well, you see what was already coming out from, at least in the media anyway about, well, the US government should now pick up the insurance costs, [00:23:00] or you take an alternative approach, which is okay, the communities need to change. They need to be, how can I say this? They need to be. Reoriented, or maybe that's not the right sort of phrase, but we need to sort of work with the communities now to understand that they're living through a perpetual crisis.
And basically, I just got off another call and somebody was remarking about how, you know, every two weeks was a wildfire and everything seems to be on fire about where they're at. It's just, it's just really an issue of where, okay, if that's a new environment we're living in, we need a new governance approach to this that's going to really provide.
The communities with the ability to adapt if they need to. And we can't continue to rely on, well, if this is mix missing or if a major insurance company stops with their process and their procedures in California because they have all the data and all the costs and they decide that it's too much risk, then something is off, right?
And then we can't just simply perpetuate this type of living in a that type of risky environment. When we realize and start, people start to actually realize that the fact that there is whole environment has changed. We need to change it. We need to start living. Which means that we have to [00:24:00] come up with new ways to govern our communities, new ways to mitigate risk, and then also to respond to crisis and emergencies.
And that's everything from the gamut, from public education all the way down to legal frameworks and rules and expectations at a community level to, you know, a state level. And that's sort of what I see sort of on, on your point about that, you know, changing climate environment, changing security environment.
So we're always living in a perpetual state of crisis in some form. And I think that is gonna be put upon us whether or not we want it or not. Oh,
Aaron Marks: I mean, that opens a whole nother can of worms. Is there such thing as a natural disaster? I mean, what's the disaster? What's the crisis around a wildfire?
Fires happen. Fire's been part of the ecosystem. Part of the environment since before humans came into the area. You know, there are, you know, going to California, there are plant species, there are species of trees, can't reproduce without fire. There has to be a burn in order to, to trigger their germination cycle.
So, you know, that tells us that fire is part of nature, part of the ecosystem. The disaster happens where humans interact with [00:25:00] fire. And you know, with governance, that that gets into a question of risk tolerance where, okay, do we wanna allow behaviors that increase risk? And if we allow those behaviors, who's responsible for managing the risk?
Who's responsible for managing the consequences? In terms of the insurance policies, people are looking at it as insurance as enabling them. To ignore risk. You know, they're not required to take protective measures. Now, they're not required to support controlled burn programs. They're not required to, to clear their lands to certain areas.
They're not re, you know, they're not required to, to actively manage the risk. They think that they can ignore it because the consequence is gonna be covered by insurance. And that's not the way the system was designed. And I think that's one of the points of consequence. But it's not just the fires. Look at the arguments and the uproar.
Over the modified national flood insurance program where they went through an updated risk maps for flood risk. And because of that, insurance premiums went up because the [00:26:00] understanding of environments changed because the models changed and, and people went from one category of, of flood risk to a higher category, and as soon as the insurance rates went up, they went to their political representatives and said, this isn't acceptable.
And the political representatives went in and influenced or attempted to influence both the insurance program and the risk program, and that political mass resulted in the updates to the risk maps being rolled back or being changed again, or having exceptions to it. Well, just because you can't afford.
More insurance that doesn't impact the risk that apex your tolerance of the risk. And once again, you know, to tie this back to governance, this is that communications point. This is that decision point where the purpose of insurance isn't to eliminate risk, it's to spread the consequence. And the problem is that, you know, in California, the insurance was being used to enable risky behavior.
To the point that the consequence could no longer be spread. It all ties back into governance, into setting those expectations, into setting [00:27:00] the foundations for decision making where a crisis response to this, in my opinion, should be, you know, specifically looking at the insurance fees should be that transparency and communication, explaining why the decisions were made, explaining why rates are going up, or explaining why policies aren't gonna be issued, and then providing potential solution.
This is what would need to change in order for the insurance to remain. In order for us to be able to provide more coverage or to not raise rates, that gets even more complicated when you bring the economics into it. When an insurance company goes, we're not gonna do this because it's not profitable anymore.
That gets into a whole other social dynamic that right now is becoming more and more prevalent in this time, talking about, okay, what's fair? What's equal, what's equitable? And that's an entire other podcast and an entire other discussion.
Kyle King: Yeah, it sure is, and it's really, it's an interesting discussion in terms of sort of international perspective on that too, and what's happening in the States.
But yeah, we'll have to save that one for another day. But I think the example of what you're talking [00:28:00] about with the National Flood Insurance Program, extremely interesting because of the fact that because of the community reaction, the political influence, rolling back the new sort of risk maps, that's extremely interesting because now to me, it comes back to what we were talking about before in terms of governance, right?
Something happens, the community reacts again because they're flooded now. When previously, you know, the climate, the overall climate, not just talking about sort of climate change, but the overall climate in their community was such that they didn't have very bad floods. Now they're in a different flood zone and things have gotten worse, and now it's more of a disaster because a lot more of the communities involved.
And so then that same social pressures applied upon the emergency managers and responders and the city councils and everybody else about why aren't you doing enough? So this really comes down to a question. I'd love to hear your thoughts about that. Where I sort of come back full circle in this whole conversation and today is the role of governance and emergency management to just perpetuate the status quo?
That's a
Aaron Marks: fun question. I think if you ask people outside of emergency management, the answer is gonna be yes. I think people want everything to be [00:29:00] comfortable. People want everything to be. The status quo to be the way that, that they like it. Most people don't like change. They don't like adaptation. They don't like challenges.
They want just their patterns. If you talk to people within the emergency management or crisis management, people who have, I guess, have been infected with this different mindset, you'll get a really emotional response because a general feeling is that, Once there's an incident, whether it's an emergency, a crisis disaster, or a catastrophe, that there is no more status quo, there's no, you can't go back to normal cuz things change.
Things are always different. And the hope from within the industry, and this is cliche, that's been taken advantage of and, and used in in Houston arguments. From all sides is the hope is that within the industry we can take advantage of the disruption. We can take advantage of the the emergency, take advantage of incident to be better, to find a way that we can become more resilient, that we can learn from it, that we can harden resources, harden infrastructure, so that the disruption is less [00:30:00] the next time it happens.
The challenge right now is that specific phrase has been co-opted. In terms of people taking advantage of the disruption to accrue power, to accrue benefit, and you know, this goes back to your coordination, collaboration, it goes back to transparency and accountability where most people don't understand what emergency and crisis management is.
Most people don't understand what the focus is on. Or what the targets are on. And then, you know, within the industry, just like everywhere else, you do have people that are more focused on what's in it for me versus what's in it for us. And it's all coming to a head. You know, we're in, to steal the cliche, we're in a perfect storm where because of the increased visibility, because of the 24 7 information overload, because of.
You know, the changing technology, the changing social and and cultural structures, all of this is coming to a head at once and there's a lot more visibility into it. You know, you can't have the, the secret star chamber [00:31:00] discussions anymore. You don't have that type of cultural acceptance, and the general public absolutely wants the status quo.
They want to be comfortable, they want to be, they wanna go through their own lives without having to think about risk, without having to think about consequence and the challenge. Is to educate people without scaring them and to influence people without threatening them. And to grow the shared understanding of what is the goal?
What's the intended output of emergency crisis management? What's the intended output of insurance? What's the intended output of building codes or restrictions? So we have to get a lot better at communicating, defining it first, and then communicating why. Behind the, the decisions, the why behind the plans, the why behind the playbooks, the why behind the restrictive activities.
And it's, it's a challenge because that all comes back to trust where, okay, we can tell people what we see as the truth. We can tell people what we see as the justification behind actions. And if they look at [00:32:00] us and say, well, I don't believe you, you, you're, you're lying to me. You're, you're trying to manipulate me.
You know, you're bringing this into an emotional debate. And really, really good friend of mine, My name Long, Melissa Agnes does a lot of crisis communications work, and one of her tenets is you can never answer an emotional statement with logic because it won't work, it won't get through. And you know, we're now in a situation where we're, uh, trying to apply logical governance on an emotional minefield, and we've gotta figure out a better way to, to
Kyle King: communicate that.
I agree. I, I think it all comes down to trust at the end of the day and public trust and and between the institutions and the public that they serve. And it's gonna be extremely difficult, I think, moving forward in terms of how we're going to do that. And it's gonna be nothing less than public engagement and it's gonna be a lot more than that.
But I think having to go. Sit with our communities and talk to people and to explain and to be able to, to stand there confidently and explain some of the decisions that we're making to make our community safer is gonna really have to take the forefront of that. I know a lot of [00:33:00] people out there that are listening today are probably doing that already, but it's just something that I think we're gonna see a lot more of here in the future, especially in terms of what we were just talking about, you know, these changing environments and understanding the impact on communities, how that's changing and the fact that.
You know, resources are getting more and more constrained, just a whole changing environment overall. And just on this last point, in terms of status quo, I mean, me too, right? I mean, I'd love to just have the status quo for the next 50 years, but that the problem is that's not realistic. And the problem is I think that we need to really, instead of having a reactionary process of.
Trying to maintain the status quo is that we have to really engage and try and lean forward and to, to govern in a new environment in terms of managing with changing risks and threats and everything else like that within our communities. And then the last point I'll say with that is that it will just require a lot from us that I don't think we're, when I talk to a lot of people, I.
Just don't have the feeling that institutions, even internationally, are necessarily prepared for the long-term engagement it takes to build a [00:34:00] cultural preparedness. And I think this is one of our biggest issues in terms of governance, that we we're not necessarily ready to invest heavily in the heavy lift of trying to mill build more prepared individuals and communities.
I, I don't have that feeling for many people that I've talked to. It's like, we really need that. But at the same time, they're understaffed, under-resourced, and simply can do it. And just putting out some tweets and some TikTok videos is not gonna do it. I think it has to give back to the individual community engagement.
At the same time, you also have to have a community that wants to participate, right? So it goes both ways, and I think this is something that we're gonna have to be really struggling with in the near future. So Aaron, I don't know any. Final thoughts before we close out the podcast for today? Um, sure.
Aaron Marks: I mean, the, we'll close it with a hard question and, and I think you opened it up with looking at the international application, and that's who gets to define governance.
Who gets to define preparedness, who gets to define resilience and who gets to define the status quo because the status quo and a Western First World Nation is entirely different than the status quo in [00:35:00] African second or third World Nation. Or in Eastern Europe or in Asia. So who sets the expectations?
You know, if I walk in and, and unfortunately this happens a lot, if I walk in a, in a room and go, okay, I'm the expert from the United States, my word is final. It's the best answer out there, I'm gonna get. Art and feathered and, and run out of, of a country on a rail. But at the same time, you know, other contexts, other frames of reference can't be universally applied.
And that's probably one of the major points in my approach toward governance is that my answers work for me and my environment and my culture. But if I'm writing governance for. Global, an international entity, a multicultural element. My rigid governance isn't gonna work for everybody. So who gets to set the standards?
Who gets to set the expectations, and then who's responsible for the execution for that long-term investment?
Kyle King: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think, you know, also just clarifying that point a bit more is that questioning is not [00:36:00] challenging, right? And so questioning is just trying to understand. And when we talk about questioning sort of the governance process in your communities, it's not about.
You know, questioning authority and challenging authority. It's just questioning about how does the system work? How do we get more resources? How do you know? What are the justification? Where are the grants? How is that planned? Who's spending the money? How are the decisions made? And exactly, to your point, Aaron, it's like everybody, every community is different, internationally, nationally, whatever the case is.
And they all have to sort of, you know, discover their own way in, in terms of how their communities are governed and to bring that forward. I mean, having an engaged community. That holds you accountable, I think is extremely important. And then also in terms of being able to, you know, have them invested and and invested in the work that you're doing is I think something that everybody wants.
So that's governance. We dabbled in that to just a little bit in terms of governance and emergency and crisis management, obviously it's a very complex topic. It can be very abstract. It challenges the old ideas and we have to be comfortable with the changes and the threats of new ideas. And so I think that's not going away.
Something that we have to continually work on. And it's something that, do we, I know it personally, we do [00:37:00] it over at C B I. We work on these issues quite a lot and there's not one single answer to Aaron's point. So thanks again for joining us. Aaron. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way to
Aaron Marks: find you?
Best way to find me is probably direct on an email, you know [email protected]. The number one. The word 30 t h i r t y, the number nine.com, my website at that same address, or they can find me on LinkedIn. And, uh, I'm always open for, uh, for conversations and debates and you know, I like to, uh, you know, to question without challenge, but I also like to challenge without confronting.
So I'm open for that debate and the discussion and hopefully we
Kyle King: can all learn from. Great. Aaron, really appreciate you being here today, and thanks for joining us and yeah, great discussion. Hopefully we'll have more of these. Thanks everybody.[00:38:00]
