Meet a Bright Spark: David Parson

Transcript excerpts:

Inspiration for Scenario Writing – 11:00

David: I’m a scenario addict, so I write hundreds of scenarios for use in training programmes, everything from the normal things from flood storms and bushfires to earthquakes to tsunamis to measles outbreaks in scout camps to cyber-attack. It’s all sorts of things. But I always based them on true stories, and so I’m always looking for case studies because people go off and say to me this can’t happen and I can go here’s the case studies where it happened.

Ohh and so the challenge is where do you find all those cases? So I go to a lot of conferences, so I have to pick up stories there. But there’s also things like the great resources from the Australian Institute for that staff. So there’s heaps of material there and the Emergency Planning College in the UK, there’s got dozens of free handbook you can certainly download there and there’s free resources like the Canadian Journal that’s of Emergency Management and people can get that for free as well. And certainly AIDR has their major incidence report that comes out every year is about four years of those now, and there’s a new product just out – a fellow from Queensland is creating a lessons hub of all the different reports to come out of all these inquiries.

One of the challenges of course – training needs to be realistic. It needs to replicate what really happens in the world. I think it’s really important that that people in the Emergency Management training space read widely of what really happens during incidents and during emergency events. So all those cases you can find are really a great resource to make you knowledgeable and relevant to the people that you’re actually training.

Emergency Planning College UK: https://www.epcresilience.com/

Canadian Journal of Emergency Management: https://cdnjem.ca/

AIDR Major Incident Reports: https://knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/major-incidents-report/

Using challenging scenarios in training – 13:40

David: A good example in the New Zealand programme we run, which is the leadership programme for the New Zealand government. The five day residential programme I talked about, which is the combination of their of their six weeks of online study. First we do five exercises, five big discussion scenarios. They have little small as well, but five big ones, one every day, which allows them to apply the theory. We’ve talked in the morning or the people they’ve heard talk in the morning with the specialist knowledge, and we push them pretty hard. They’ve got time constraints. They’ve got difficult scenarios. We purposely pick scenarios that people don’t know the answer to, and the answer is not necessarily easy. So scenarios that are outside the normal workspace. So they’ve got to actually stretch their thinking, building new ideas. They’ve got to actually work with others to solve that. So a leadership programme and a modern leadership programme for the Emergency Management – it’s about collaborative leadership. It’s about knowledge sharing. It’s about how do you solve unknown problems in a in a novel way. So, they’re really quite inspiring to watch. The students go from exercise 1 to 5. As they get harder and harder and time frame shorter and shorter, but they get better and better at pulling out key information, exchanging it, throwing around ideas, pulling ideas, pulling solutions, all those sorts of things.

We know that motivation and for people comes at a challenge, so you need to have challenge to have people step forward to actually progress and in that case, we’re also trying to build a tight bond between those people and we know that people’s bonds to others strengthen. If they’ve gone through a difficult situation together, as they’ve had challenge together. So, so hence those. Size as a part of building that bonding through, we both survived or the OR the groups that survived through a really tough three hours and has walked out with a success story in the end, but has had to work hard for that. And that’s the important too. In terms of learning. The challenge is, is that easy learning, does it or easy context doesn’t necessarily build good learning.

Kath:The idea of being discussion scenarios from a resourcing perspective, it requires time. It requires thought about getting that scenario together. But you know, that’s something that I think would work virtually. It could work face to face. You just need the people with that time. To think and talk and work through the problem.

FEMA – Discussion Based Exercises overview: https://emilms.fema.gov/is_0120c/groups/41.html

Ripple Mapping (Consequence Mapping) training activity – 16:46

David:Then we give them a part of tools to help them think. One of the ones introduced some years ago is thing called Ripple mapping where you have, it can be a wall or a chart, and you have in the middle what the problem is, so that might be an earthquake or a flood or a cyclone and you start look at all of the ripples of that. So what does that impact on? Well, people, communities, transport. OK, So what? So what does that cause? So what? And it keeps saying – so what? and so what? It helps you think ideas through to see forward so you stop being reactive. Start being proactive. It’s a tool for doing that, and it’s really tangible as people write on the post note, they stick it on the wall and you see these ripples start to grow. So now the question is, so who? So who do you need to be partnering with in your network? You know, we still teach command and control mindsets for simple problems, but they don’t solve complex problems and a complex problem consists in a network of interrelationships, networks of knowledge, and so good mapping is great for people without that, to go – Wow! There’s dozens of organisations here. Yeah, that doesn’t fit into a command and a control chart. So then we would take those organisations off that map and look at what is the actual network. And that’s a that’s a great learning experience for the students. They suddenly realised that, wow, there is 120 organisations are very loosely networked and some are strong network links. Some are weak links. And strong links. It breaks that 1970s command and control mindset.

Kath: And having seen you do Ripple mapping a few courses ago now it has been one that I have started picking up and using as well just because for all those things you said, getting them to think through and for me, I also found just getting people to think through their first obvious line of thinking. And to not stop at that first level, but that ripple mapping really pushes them to think about not just that immediate thought, but what else and that bigger picture that you might give up if you just do a quick brainstorm, whatever else you miss out on that extra layers and wider thinking. So that’s why I really like using it.

Basic explanation of consequence mapping from Let’s Talk Science: https://letstalkscience.ca/educational-resources/learning-strategies/consequence-mapping

Encouraging creativity and innovation during training – 20:43

It’s probably an emerging challenge that maybe wasn’t there some years ago. We want we want consistency of performance. So that comes from standardisation of training and standardised SOP’s. The challenge is, when you’ve got novelty, that doesn’t work, so you also need to create, teach, creativity and innovation. And if an organisation doesn’t get the balance right, it kills that and can’t activate that when it actually needs it. That’s the challenge providing those two types of training and how those two have to mesh. What we are doing with the training in New Zealand, is building the creativity skill set to go on top of their operational processes.

One of the things and we’ve done this with some of the people I’ve been working with is they’ll be training people as, say, say, an incident control level 2. And what I’ll purposely do is use scenarios that are not their normal day to day scenario. So they’ve got to actually apply thinking process to using the standard model, if you like the standard structures and thinking. But actually how do we innovate that? So now you’ve got a problem you’ve not seen before. You’re meant to be this person who can who can lead at this level. Let’s lead it in a in a context not seen before. Maybe 15-20 minutes later they’re up and running because they just need time to break from the restrictive thinking that says I can’t do this. I’m not trained cause I only learned hazard X. And then they break that barrier with their team and go, yeah, we can do this. We do actually have other knowledge and they bring the other knowledge they’ve got in and all of a sudden drop and running.It’s a constraint that’s built in to people thinking we need to break that for a world that’s got novelty and chaos aplenty.

Because what we’re seeing, and we’re going to see more of this is we’re seeing people working across multiple hazards and organisations. And what we’re seeing too is they’re growing international operations. So more and more, we’re going to see people playing across countries who have different cultures, different philosophies, different ways of thinking about what’s important and probably to adapt to those contexts.

Resource recommendations – 25:20

Australian Institute of Emergency Services (AIES) Linkedin site – free. We post there every week, probably a dozen resources from around the globe, but today we just posted a cyber incident response planning. Video and guide book out of the out of the US. So the resources have all sorts of countries all get posted on there, so people can certainly join that LinkedIn site. There’s no cost to do that and they’ll get access to all those things that we post there.

You can learn just so much by attending free webinars, and I know on the Australian Institute of Emergency services LinkedIn site, we do post up webinars from all over the world. And again, most of those are free and you can learn so much about ideas just by attending webinars for half an hour. So it really is you need to be that active learner to be to be a good trainer.

Australian Institute of Emergency Services (AIES) website:  https://www.aies.net.au/

AIES Linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/3844281/

Advice for new (and existing) trainers – 26:52

The challenge is you’re working across multiple industry groups, multiple ways of thinking. The states and territories are all different, all do things differently, even though we might say we have national consistency through things like AIIMS. When you get out there, it’s actually not as consistent in terms of detail, although the high level probably is. So it’s about realising that your way you do it, is not the only way. And not only the best way. And when you start looking, you start to pick up different ways of working through things and it’s really is about being prepared to do a bit of research and being open minded to other ways.

The first thing I would tell anyone who’s going to try and learn about AIIMS is go to read CIMS in New Zealand. CIMS, which is on the web for free, has some good explanations that I think that Australia could probably copy in our AIIMS work too. A very much more community centric handbook. So it’s about really different ways of thinking about and working through things. This is not just one way that matches every community and every situation.

NZ CIMS Handbook: https://www.civildefence.govt.nz/resources/coordinated-incident-management-system-cims-third-edition

Find out more about David Parsons: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-parsons-esm-92175b12/

Check out the following training programs/providers:

ACIM Solutions – Australian RTO specialising in Government Investigations and Public Safety qualifications www.acimsolutions.com.au

RRANZ – Response and Recovery Leadership Development Courses and Masterclasses https://rranz.org.nz/