Lessons From Maui: How Society Can Improve Emergency Prepardness

Invest in connection: know how to reach all of your employees.

To put this into practice:

1. Keep employee contact information up to date. Once a year, ask employees to check and update their contact information, including emergency contacts.
2. Make sure the information is easily available to whomever has responsibility for contacting employees in an emergency situation, and build in redundancy. If, for example, your Human Resources manager is the point person, what happens when that person is unavailable
3. Establish a contact chain policy. Have teams review their contact chain procedure and keep the chain information in a centralized place. Ensure team leaders review this information with their employees so each person knows who they will be responsible for contacting and how to report information back.

Invest in your back-up systems. With cell service and landlines knocked out for days, many Maui organizations found themselves unable to communicate in real time during and after the disaster. The only way to communicate was through radio, or by satellite phones — which most companies didn’t have, and which took days to get.

To put this into practice:

1. Take an infrastructure inventory: What infrastructure supports your organization?
2. Do you have back-ups for the critical infrastructure? To communicate it might be satellite phones, to provide emergency power it might be a backup generator or an offsite data storage facility.
3. Set a timeline for making the purchases that you deem critical and identify personnel who will be trained in and responsible for this infrastructure.

Determine who is in charge. Because communication was impossible on Maui, some organizations found themselves leaderless — and without a clear path to establish an acting head.

To put this into practice:

1. Discuss transfer criteria with your board of directors: What is the criteria for a transfer? To whom might it be granted? What is the power that goes with the transfer?
2. Enable electronic processes to enact the transfer. An explicit transfer of power needs to be easy to enact and understood by everyone. Whether Docusign of some other electronic signature system, ensure that a transfer may take place without in-person signatures being needed.
3. Determine the criteria to end the transfer and restore the primary leadership. What enables a leader to regain control? How does this transfer occur? What does the hand-off from the temporary leadership back to the senior leader entail?

Think beyond the job; Leverage extra skills in emergencies. In my interviews, I spoke with several people who had, unfortunately, been through previous disasters, and quickly became the relied-upon experts during the Maui fires. In several cases, the organizations they worked for were unaware of this prior experience and expertise, and only learned about them in the midst of the crisis. We all have skills, interests, and past experiences that may not be part of our job description. In an emergency, it’s valuable to know who is trained in CPR, who has volunteered with the Red Cross, who has a pick-up truck, and who knows how to detoxify soil once it has burned.

To put this into practice:

1. Create a Skills Inventory Form: Develop a simple form for employees to list their extra talents and special skills. Distribute this form during onboarding and update it annually.
2. Centralize and disperse Information: Keep this information on file with Human Resources and make it accessible to department heads and emergency response teams.
3. Develop Regular Updates and Drills: Incorporate employee skills into your emergency drills and response plans to ensure everyone knows who to call upon for specific needs.

Hierarchy has its limits. Although a clear chain of command is essential, hierarchy should not get in the way of expertise and action. Time and again, the Maui leaders I interviewed described identifying subject experts and empowering them to make decisions that might not normally be theirs. In a time of emergency, the normal checks and balances that organizations put in place need to be flexible in order to access the best information and ideas of your staff. Once a skills assessment is completed, enacting this recommendation becomes easier.

To put this into practice:

1. Determine who your subject matter experts are, and build in redundancy as well. Develop an organizational chart of the positions at your company where that expertise exists.
2. Identify who has final authority over what areas of the organization. At PWF, Dayna Garland was in charge until CEO Wrigglesworth could return to her post, but even without an explicit directive, she knew that Anna and her team were the boating safety experts, and she would enact their decision.
3. In order for your subject experts to be comfortable with senior management, include them in non-emergency meetings. At a moment of duress, you want to be sure that these people are experienced expressing their opinions and sharing their expertise.

Simulate realistic disaster conditions in drills. It was surprising how many of the interviewees reported that whatever disaster drills their company had conducted were not proximate to adverse conditions. While many organizations practice disaster preparedness through fire drills and active shooter drills, they often plan them for relatively convenient times, which doesn’t truly prepare people for how they need to adjust in a real disaster.

To put this into practice:

1. Schedule drills at inconvenient times: Conduct drills during lunch breaks, early mornings, or late evenings to simulate unexpected scenarios. For those drills that are not practical to conduct but that your organization wants to prepare for, consider a simulation to discuss with your team.
2. Conduct post-drill reviews: After each drill, hold a debriefing session to discuss what went well and identify areas for improvement, focusing on scenarios that couldn’t be fully practiced.
3. Incorporate the protection of company assets into emergency drills: Determine which assets need protection, assign responsibility to specific individuals, and outline steps to safeguard these assets.

Identify your assets that can be repurposed for emergency use. During the interviews, the Maui executives shared that, in many cases, they did not know what resources their companies had that could be repurposed in this emergency. Many organizations track inventory for the purpose of accounting and supply-chain. But an organization is made up of people, and in a disaster it is your people — your employees and their families — you want to assist. What resources does your organization have that can be mustered to aid your employees and/or the communities in which you operate?

To put this into practice:

1. Take an asset inventory. Does your organization have generators, a pick-up truck or offsite storage facilities?
2. Identify assets that can be repurposed in an emergency. Match the assets to how they are useful in an emergency. If your organization has work uniforms, in an emergency might these be repurposed to clothe people?
3. Centralize and disburse this information. Update the items that your organization is willing to repurpose for emergency use at the same time that the company collects information for other annual processes. If there is an annual regulatory filing for example, connect this update to that procedure.

Insurance doesn’t start when you pay the premium. All of the organizations I spoke with in Maui had the required insurance, but many of them didn’t know exactly what was covered by that insurance — and didn’t have their insurance policies immediately available. They also were not familiar with what state and federal emergency relief and aid was available to them. Not knowing what your insurance covers, or which state and federal organizations to call, can cost a company money and also valuable time in an emergency.

To put this into practice:

1. Know what is in your insurance policies. Have someone who is responsible for the policies create a summary page highlighting the major points of what is covered. Make sure that more than one person is up to speed on the coverage.
2. Ensure there are electronic copies of the coverage. Keeping documents stored electronically means that they can be accessed easily in time of need.
3. Have a document that outlines state and federal assistance opportunities that are germane to your industry and operations. What assistance might be available for your industry after an emergency? Which agencies oversee those policies? While you hope you never need it, government assistance may impact your organization’s other policies and enable you to know what extra coverage is available to mitigate losses after a disaster.

Think differently. Many leaders expressed how difficult it was to make such consequential decisions under extreme duress. Pressure can lead to subpar decision outcomes as decisions are negatively impacted by time pressure and stress. Typically, when we face these difficult decision moments, we turn to colleagues who think like we do, seeking validation for our decisions rather than challenging them. I have written extensively about how this doesn’t serve us. In moments of crisis, the echo chamber is even more dangerous.

To put this into practice:

1. Identify people who make decisions differently than you do. Who in your organization has provided a constructive new perspective when your organization’s leader has made big decisions? For example, while a CEO might naturally turn to the Chairperson of their board of directors, a more expansive approach could yield a fresher perspective. If your chief financial officer is someone with whom you have creative conflict, bringing in that perspective –especially when decisions are made under duress and stress when subpar decision-making is a real risk, it could be of great benefit to increase decision confidence and conviction.
2. Practice making use of creative conflict in non-emergency settings. Have these pairings of different decision approaches examine a few non-emergency decisions that yielded positive decision outcomes to lay the foundation for future work that may take place in situations of duress.
3. Create a document that shares these decision pairings for future perspective-taking and share it with senior leadership.

Identify the “yes” and “no” of emergency requests. All of the Maui leaders interviewed expressed that they not only wanted to protect their own companies, but also provide support to the wider Maui community. However, many expressed how difficult it was to determine what kind of support they were capable and prepared to provide. Consider what your organization can do for others before requests roll in.

To put this into practice:

1. Assess the kind of community support your organization currently provides. Is it monetary aid or volunteers on the ground?
2. Can the current support efforts be utilized in an emergency? If your organization currently supplies volunteers to a local soup kitchen, could that relationship be used in an emergency to quickly provide knowledgeable volunteers.
3. What kinds of other support does your organization want to be ready to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to in an emergency? Discuss the limits of your organization’s capacity and willingness for emergency response.

The 10 tips of advice from these true experts –people who have been through a disaster, can enable your organization to not need to live through an emergency of your own to be better prepared for one. The result is that in a time of true need, we all can get to the right decision more quickly.