If a hurricane or tornado or earthquake hit right now, would you know what to do?
Odds are, if you live in an area prone to those types of disasters, you might have some sort of idea. Odds are also that if that disaster were a bioterrorism attack, a disease outbreak, or another non-climate disaster, you may be less certain.
So, do you feel prepared? How do you think you would react to each of these situations?
In our neck of the woods (the rather nutty state that is Florida), hurricane preparedness is a way of life. It is part of our building codes, there are evacuation route signs all over the state, and a lot of people live with plywood and a stock of canned supplies in the garage.
Still, every time a hurricane threatens, people panic-buy all the water and gas in the state, and the highways are an absolute mess as people try to escape the oncoming storm.
Even with a preparedness plan and a stock of supplies, people are unsure of what to do in the face of such a high-stress, high-risk situation.
So, how do you increase confidence and the capacity to follow through with your plans?
Practice, practice, practice!
Preparedness is hard
Preparing for disasters, emergencies, and crises that you really don’t even want to think about let alone do anything about? Even harder.
According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), “Disaster preparedness refers to measures taken to prepare for and reduce the effects of disasters. That is, to predict and, where possible, prevent disasters, mitigate their impact on vulnerable populations, and respond to and effectively cope with their consequences.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) define preparedness as, “a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective action in an effort to ensure effective coordination during incident response.”
What an overwhelming set of statements.
That right there is one of the many reasons individuals struggle with being prepared and even wanting to prepare for disasters. There are so many things that need to be done! A lot of people just give up, assuming if they cannot do all of them, they may as well not do any.
And being overwhelmed isn’t the only reason people don’t prepare. The normalcy bias – a belief that things are more than likely to stay exactly as they are – leads people to believe that whatever hazard is threatening them simply won’t or can’t happen because it is so far outside their usual realm of experience. In addition, the human brain has trouble remembering how it felt to exist during a traumatic time, leading people who have been through a disaster or emergency and recognized their need to prepare for next time to never actually get around to preparing months or years later for the next threat.
On top of the more complicated psychological intricacies of the human brain and behavior, there are the basic lived realities of the day-to-day. Parts of preparing are expensive – stocking up on food you aren’t going to eat and buying a big first aid kit you only kind of know how to use cost money that a lot of people simply don’t have. The same goes for any kind of CPR or first aid training. Running a fire drill or active shooter drill can take a lot of time out of the school or work day, and practicing an evacuation route could mean paying for gas, food, and/or a hotel stay that you just can’t budget for this month.
Fortunately, there are ways to prepare that don’t actually cost any money. Creating an emergency plan may cost you minimal time and a little thought, but anyone can do it. And practicing that plan doesn’t have to involve a drive down evacuation lane or any physical activity at all, actually.
And this type of practice can be used for any type of disaster (hurricane, explosion, drought, volcanic eruption, space squid attack) because all it involves is: thought, conversation, and maybe a pen and paper.
The Exercise, Or Practice, Or Whatever You Want To Call It
In public safety and preparedness, we run a bunch of different kinds of exercises (a form of practice) to ensure that we know what to do when a real event happens.
One of these types of practice is called a tabletop exercise.
Ready.gov defines this type of exercise as “… discussion-based sessions where team members meet in an informal, classroom setting to discuss their roles during an emergency and their responses to a particular emergency situation. A facilitator guides participants through a discussion of one or more scenarios.”
So, it’s basically a structured conversation, run by one person who guides everyone toward an agreed-upon end goal, that provides a space to discuss some of the scenarios that are most likely to occur and/or could have the largest impact in that area.
When it comes to first responders and other public safety organizations, these exercises can be incredibly complex (involving multiple jurisdictions and organizations with varying levels of control and resource capability) or incredibly simple (involving only the hosting agency and for only internal staff or a small team). It is a flexible, adaptable exercise type, and it can easily be made to fit an individual, household, or community situation outside of public safety.
For our purposes, let’s break it down to the neighborhood level. Here’s how you run a disaster preparedness tabletop exercise with your neighborhood. How prepared are you and your neighbors to work together in the event of a disaster?
Make sure your neighborhood emergency plan and the roles of individual members have been ironed out – you cannot begin an exercise without having done this.
Note: roles (and just about everything else) can change during or after the exercise, if something isn’t working or didn’t work, recognize that and adapt your plans.
Once you have your community plan and roles figured out, you can begin preparing:
- Identify a facilitator – who is going to guide the conversation?
This does not mean the loudest person in the room or even the most outgoing. Facilitators are not lecturing from the front of the room, they are listening and engaged for the entirety of the exercise, and only interject when absolutely necessary to guide the conversation toward solution-finding instead of problem-identification. - Identify your scenario(s) – what are you responding to?
As part of your neighborhood planning process, you will have already analyzed what your community’s highest risks are and what you could potentially need to be prepared for. Pick one or two related hazards, and build a scenario for them that you can present in sections. Be sure to have at least 3 different events, one after the other, that encourage a continuous response from your participants.
The fewer people who know the scenario beforehand, the more effective the event will be. Be sure to reference the sample scenario we put together in our resource library as an example to build from or use that one if it is relevant for your community. - Gather your supplies – what do you need to make this happen?
A local map of your area is usually incredibly useful in tabletop exercises. Pens, paper, tables, and chairs are supplies you most likely will need. Perhaps a computer and projector if you plan to run through your scenario through a PowerPoint presentation, but paper and markers work just as well. Your supplies will depend on how you intend to run your exercise and should be whatever works best for you and your community. - Select a date, time, and place – when and where are you doing this?
This is an easy one. Figure out what works for everyone and a location that can hold the whole group (even if that means a video meeting at the current moment). Timing is very important. If people are stressed out because they had to rush to the meeting, or because they have to leave right after the allotted time, they will be less effective. Do what you can to make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to engage. - Ensure buy-in to the exercise – how do you ensure full engagement?
Full engagement and buy-in are essential to the success of your exercise. If the individuals participating don’t think the exercise is important or don’t particularly care about being there, the probability of the event succeeding goes down. Remember that not everyone involved in the community plan needs to participate for this exercise to be effective, and if you only have a small group of highly committed individuals, that is perfectly okay.
You have planned out every detail of your neighborhood tabletop exercise – but what happens on that very exciting day?
- Double-check for full engagement – is everyone present both mentally and physically?
Are your participants paying attention? Are they glancing at their phones or yawning or chatting in the back? Is there a lack of conversation or response?
Reading the room is extremely important in ensuring the success of your exercise. If your participants are struggling to pay attention or engage, be flexible, change up the way you are sharing information or the structure of engagement to encourage more participation.
That could mean breaking into smaller groups or shifting roles to keep things interesting. If you need to bring in the next event in the scenario sooner than planned, that’s okay. If you need to add an event you had not planned, that’s okay, too. Remember, the point is to keep this conversation going so that your community can talk through how to work together to get through an emergency, not to stick to a script or follow a timeline written out beforehand. - Find a way to entertain and educate – how do you keep everyone’s attention?
Every group is going to have a different energy level and preferred mode of engagement. If you have a highly energetic, engaged, fun group, feel free to be silly and throw in some dramatization if it helps keep the exercise moving. If your group is more serious, throw in some extra information and maintain a professional tone that they will respond to and respect (that does not mean you have to be boring, just maybe no costumes). - Encourage creativity and collaboration – what do you do if you get stuck?
Sometimes, things don’t work out the way we planned. You might throw out a scenario that your community has no way to respond to, or the scenario might change in a way they don’t expect and they get stuck.
That is not a failure. It is an opportunity. Emergencies and crises are often unexpected and have consequences we could not have foreseen. Practicing how to respond to that is incredibly important and helpful.
So, guide your participants through those struggle points. Encourage them to come up with ideas, no matter how off the wall, and give them more information if they need it to get to a solution. You can even switch up roles, move people into positions they would never fill, and see what they come up with just to allow for a creative, unrestricted space for brainstorming. - Keep it simple – how do you avoid tangents and trailing off into unrelated complications?
Sometimes, tangents are okay. If there is a piece of a scenario people have not thought of before, it might be helpful to allow the participants to talk that through. If it is not helpful, bring attention back to the scenario at hand by asking how the tangent is related to what you all are working on or your emergency plan. Tabletop exercises are informal, discussion is expected and desired, it is the facilitator’s job to keep that conversation going in a helpful direction. - Ensure learning was achieved – how do you know if you achieved your goals?
In the land of exercises, we usually use something called a “hotwash” to evaluate whether or not learning objectives were met and to allow folks to process that learning. It is a simple process and could be easily integrated into the end of your community/neighborhood exercise as well.
As a group, discuss what the participants feel they learned, what they are taking away from the exercise, and what they feel they need to do or work on now that the exercise is over. Discuss what the next steps are, both as a group and as individuals.
The hotwash is not the space to edit or change your plans. Write down any ideas you have or areas for improvement, and encourage others to do the same, but leave yourself and your community members some space and time to process the exercise. Return to your community emergency plans at a later date to reevaluate any changes that need to be made, and have those conversations at that point.
The great thing about tabletop exercises is that they can be adapted for any scenario.
If you need to talk through your emergency evacuation plan with your kids, dramatize the whole thing, throw in some aliens and space squids, and give them space to think through what meeting at an agreed location would look like if they were at school or a friend’s house when an emergency happened. Adapt it for your extended family with a financial bent, how would each person’s job be affected by a specific disaster and how could family finances be reworked to deal with the consequences of that situation.
We would love to hear from you if you use a tabletop exercise to plan, prepare, or practice in your communities! Feel free to reach out to us through our website or on social media (@globallyheated) if you have any questions or any specific ideas on how to incorporate discussion-based practice into our everyday preparedness!
