Kath speaks with Gina Jones (now Whiteside), who has a fascinating background working in the Emergency Management and capacity development areas in Australia and the Pacific Islands.
While currently working with the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, Gina has previously worked for the Pacific Community as a Regional Disaster Management Specialist, and for the NSW SES as one of their early Incident Management project managers.
Her ability to work with a range of stakeholders from many different backgrounds has helped create change in Australia and the Pacific. Some of her work has been through roles that are supported by RedR Australia (an international humanitarian response agency that selects, trains and deploys technical specialists).
Transcript excerpts:
Working in another country – 06:05
Getting that context takes a while and it takes quite a while… But across 14 countries, in an environment where you don’t really have a network and you are kind of trying to catch up on context, it’s really difficult. So I heavily relied on my local colleagues who obviously have all of those networks, but once you start to build that, it becomes a lot easier. So things in the Pacific are very much done on your networks. It’s that talanoa, that getting to know people, that conversation, that building rapport, it really is. I mean, I think that’s common everywhere that you work, but very much so in the Pacific, it’s built on relationships and those kind of things. And so it was difficult and it was much more difficult at first, once I’d spent a lot of time there and started to build those networks, it became much easier…
Often you can feel like just a small cog in a giant piece of machinery. I never felt like that. In the Pacific, you can really see your impact and you’re working at both levels, like high levels of government, but also within the people, the trainers on the ground and standing amongst people, doing that grassroots kind of stuff and, and really seeing the impact that it has.
Having a collaborative and consultative approach to training and change – 10:20
If you’re building things for people, they’re never going to use them. You need to be building things with people. So from day one, it needs to be consultative. You need to be working on the planning together, working on the training together, working on the exercising together. Because when the rubber hits the road and you need those people, you need them to be on board. For me, from day one, really clearly know who your stakeholders are and start working with them, start informing them, communicating with them the whole way, making sure that they are part of the process, not things being done to people. I mean, I find that even in the organisation that I’m working in now, if you’re building something in a silo and then you’re kind of trying to roll that out, the take up is never going to be the same as if people are a part of that process and really understand it, know how to implement it, they feel some level of ownership with that. And I think that’s really the key to getting anything done, not just training, but any kind of work that you’re doing or that you’re trying to implement. You can’t just build it and kind of go hand it over and walk away. They need to be an integral part of that process from the very, very beginning, and that sort of change is very incremental and probably not very fast.
The experience in the room and the living library – 17:40
I often repeat this one, and it’s in an emergency management context, when you have a room full of people and getting people to stand up and line up in regards to their years of experience, and then you count up and add up all of those years of experience. So it might be from the person who’s had one month that’s only just started and been sent along to the workshop as a kind of learning and professional development experience, up to the commissioner or whoever’s at the end with 44 years in the fire service. And you add all of that up and you sometimes come out with over 300 years of experience. And then that conversation around, okay, that’s what we’re using today. That’s what we’re leveraging today in this workshop. It’s not about me as a facilitator, standing in front and talking at you all day. It’s about drawing out those experiences so we can all learn from them. I know that my learning style is not reading or writing. I learn from listening and absorbing other people’s experiences. And the things that will stick in my mind are the case studies and the examples that people give. And I think when I start a workshop like that and I get people to do that activity, they stop for a minute and take stock. And if they’re at the end where they’ve got 44 years experience, they’ll be like, oh, okay, great, I have a lot to contribute here. Whereas if they’re at the other end, they’ll be like, oh, I have so much to learn from in this group. And so for me, that always is one that has quite a bit of impact.
We did a thing in one of our workshops as well, called the Living Library, where we were trying to extract a lot of those experiences from NDMO directors and other organisational leaders as they started to retire. How do we brain dump? How do we collect all of that information for the people that are up and coming? How do they learn from it? And so we got them to sit and we called it the living library, and they literally just answered a heap of questions and talked about their experiences and we videoed that and it’s there for people to listen to and utilise.
Other links
PIEMA Project – https://gem.spc.int/projects/piema
RedR Australia – https://www.redr.org.au/home
Contact Gina (Jones) Whiteside
Via linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/gina-jones-05486533/
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