Managing Emergencies

A Three Part Series By Thomas Helmer, Senior Director, CS&A International Risk And Crisis Management

The blog posts focus on current best practices in emergency management and are designed to provide a roadmap towards improving corporate resilience:

• Part One – PREVENTING AND PREPARING FOR EMERGENCIES, February 2015, focused on emergency prevention and preparedness
• Part Two – MANAGING EMERGENCIES, March 2015, covered the main aspects of actually managing emergencies
• Part Three – LEARNING FROM EMERGENCIES, April 2015, covers the processes and steps needed to learn from emergencies

Welcome to the third and last instalment of my three part series on Emergency Management!

Part Three

LEARNING FROM EMERGENCIES

When tasked with managing emergencies in your company, the following steps will need to be in place to ensure that you have deployed proven best practice:

1. Incident Reporting and Investigation
2. Learning from Third-party Incidents
3. Root Cause Analysis
4. After Action Reviews
5. Training and Exercises

1. Incident Reporting and Investigation

Each organisation must determine up front which types of incidents are reportable to the Authorities and/or Classification Society and what information must be provided. Typically, all accidents affecting members of the public, work related fatalities, major injuries, over seven-day lost time incidents, some occupational diseases, explosions, environmental spills and certain dangerous occurrences, are reportable. And requirements vary from country to country.

Companies do well by learning as much a possible from incidents happening in their own organisation as well as from incidents in the industry.

As soon as an emergency is under control, an investigation team with sufficient skills and sponsored by a company Director must be assigned to obtain the root cause of the incident.

Many companies have a policy in place stipulating that all incidents, violations and near misses must be investigated and have the associated procedures in place specifying how the investigation must be conducted and reported.

Recommendations must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-based.

TYPICAL ORGANISATIONAL PITFALLS

• Insufficient skills and time are allocated to conduct a proper incident investigation.
• Time pressure to resume operations cause critical information to be lost.
• Recommendations are not tracked, executed nor completed.

2. Learning from Third-party Incidents

Highly effective organisations experience fewer and fewer incidents themselves and do well by learning from third-party incidents to identify further improvement areas.

Key discussion questions:

1. Could an event like this happen to us?
2. Where would it have the biggest impact?
3. Are we confident that we would be able to deal with it effectively?
4. Which aspects need verification/testing?

TYPICAL ORGANISATIONAL PITFALLS

• External events are not used to check internal response capabilities.
• External incidents are not used to verify organisational controls.

3. Root Cause Analysis

A root-cause is a condition or trigger that leads to the undesirable outcome.

The fastest method is asking “Why” at least five times.

TYPICAL ORGANISATIONAL PITFALLS

• Investigators jump to conclusions and miss the root cause.
• Investigators focus on one cause and miss others.

4. After Action Review

After Action Reviews assess the effectiveness of incident response.

• Raising the alarm
• Evacuation and accountability
• Mobilising response services
• Mitigating escalation risks
• Resuming normal operations

TYPICAL ORGANISATIONAL PITFALLS

• Skipping proper review after incidents.

5. Training and Exercises

Organisations must ensure trained personnel for emergency roles.

• Floor wardens
• First aiders
• Incident commanders

Regular exercises and simulations are essential for preparedness.

TYPICAL ORGANISATIONAL PITFALLS

• Only basic drills without realistic scenarios.
• No full emergency response practice.

This concludes the three-part mini series. Contact:
thomas.helmer@csa-crisis.com

Thomas Helmer is Senior Director with CS&A International Risk, Crisis and Business Continuity Management.

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