AFAC 2015* Emergency management: Our other challenges in a changing world (#42)
The challenging and changing nature of our climate, the uncertainty around our security environment and ever-shifting political environment have shaped the nature of our thinking over the previous decade. As a sector we are moving rapidly toward all-hazard, all-agency approaches with varying degrees of success but, undoubtedly, with evidence of strong progress. So where lie the challenges we face next as a sector?
As our risk environment changes around us, our real challenge is to adapt our internal environments and cultures. Are we evolving quickly to change our thinking models or are we still using old paradigms? Is the evolution in incident management models keeping pace with our changing environments and the most contemporary evidence?
Our doctrine, which serves us well, was built in the industrial age and needs to evolve, or perhaps even shift more fundamentally to be driven by information-age thinking. We have solid foundations for incident management that are being extrapolated to manage strategic, political events in an end-to-end emergency management environment.
Perhaps our next challenge is blending contemporary leadership and management thinking into our common doctrine. We need to build a genuinely contemporary sector that learns from the agility of business, employs the most advanced thinking around leadership and resource management and opens its doors beyond gender and diversity quotas to a very different workforce than we have previously engaged.
Using the latest research around management thinking, this presentation will challenge us to consider contemporary models that build on incident level success but allow us to manage consequence in new, strategic ways.
