A Course on Emergency Management and Technology: Foundations to Consider

And the Future of Emergency Management

In the last article, I tried to describe the tension surrounding technology and emergency management. Generally, this course is meant to try and bring together 2 very different groups of students with 2 very different goals in order to provide some movement on the growing gap between the information communication technologies of the everyday person and that of emergency management.

This piece is focusing on where students need to end up so we can then consider how to get them there.

At the core of my being is this simple truth, “I am a giant pain in the ass.” I grew up in this sort of frustrating place where I was told that, ‘well, that’s just how it is’ and ‘You just have to accept those things.’ And so, as I went against those pushes from my family, hometown, generation, and various warehouse jobs, I really began to push back. And now, here I am in this position to push at more than just the expectations that a working class guy from a family with no college in it for hundreds of years should remain where he is.

In poking around at technology use in emergency management, I have heard much the same thing. ‘Well, they just don’t use technology. They’re just that way.”

But this has implications for a lot more than just, ‘omg computers are dumb, I won’t use them. I’m just a useless technopeasant.” We live in a world obsessed with systemic thinking, design thinking, and whatever is in between those. Much of this is part and parcel of the device that now sits at the center of a growing number of issues in emergency management. As a result, many of the current issues in emergency management can be encapsulated in where and what and why being “just that way” matters.

For example, where i’m currently at with understanding the technical capabilities of emergency management in preparing to create this course is a good example because it comes through not in the use of technology, but in how technology being used without understanding or comprehension of its black-boxed concepts can create misunderstanding and perpetuate blind spots, systemic issues, and other forms of those things.

I wanted to write a little bit about this as I think about how to shape the outcomes for this course.

Emergency Management is not a diverse industry with somewhere around 70–80% of directors or personnel being white, male, in their 40s, and mostly high school graduates. This isn’t really a massive issue for practice during a response. In the midst of a chaotic response, the expectations and predictability of personnel is of paramount importance. This is why the Incident Command System (ICS) is so powerful and why the personnel hasn’t really changed much when most other industries have.

However, outside of the chaos of response, when planning and procedures are being written, when expectations for action are being generated, the lack of diversity presents systemic issues that can’t be noticed until later, when it’s too late to do anything about it. Or if we want to use different terminology, we tend to avoid upstream thinking when we’re the ones where the stream begins.

These are systemic in that there are predictable and avoidable surprises within the population that was planned around. These present themselves, as the case with Hurricane Katrina, when the populations that aren’t noticed because of these blind spots present unanticipated needs (like not having a car to escape a Hurricane). Emergency management must include peoples and perspectives that are not like their own personnel in planning efforts yet without the technical capability to gather and crunch data, store data, and understand the qualities of data, all that will happen is data in, actionable data out (→ ■ →).

To me, this is where a technologically integrated emergency management can be powerful. Not because technology itself presents solutions but that being used to technology can help shift the possibilities and insights gleaned from data.

In the cycle of EM, much of this course, certificate, and minor will focus on the first two circles. Response and Recovery will be impacted should success be found in this approach.

On the impact of technology on perspective in EM.

There’s a fantastic piece from Rand titled, “A Scoping Literature Review on Indicators and Metrics for Assessing Racial Equity in Disaster Preparation, Response, and Recovery” which really gets at the issue. They note that, “A comprehensive set of reliable and valid indicators and metrics reflecting the uneven distribution of disaster impacts has not been established” in addition to pointing out a lack of validated metrics for equity and even more rhetoric for not really understanding what criteria are used to select indicators of equity.

And this has implications for diverse perspectives in that statistics overall will reflect the majority with minority perspectives maybe pushing a mean or median one way or another. So when we say something to the effect of, “EM just doesn’t do tech” and we see in this report that models and metrics seem to be not diverse and not even really validated, these are ways that a lack of diversity create issues. This is where the systemic issues become manifest.

At its core, and I think the thing that has been a consistent observation as I get further into EM is that the sameness of EM provides blind spots as a tradeoff for predictability in the midst of chaos (ICS). Yet, that chaos is quickly becoming an ever-present burn as the rate and scope of disaster increases. The blind spots and ability to see their implications will become ever more present in the foreground as we have been seeing.

On to Student Outcomes

The result of this is that I am left with wanting to do a few things:

1. Generate a program that enhances employability in emergency management.
2. Generate students that can push back on systemic issues in emergency management in ways that can result in positive change.
3. Generate students who can show the existing homogeneity ways to see the world that are a little less homogenous, but in a way that is not immediately disruptive.

Or in other words, generate students who are not “huge pains in the ass” but embody the pain similar to working out and getting healthy.

But what would those outcomes be?

Student Learning Outcomes (First Attempt)

In this course, students will:

• Demonstrate an understanding of designing technologies to be used in low-tech or no-tech environments.
• Investigate the current technological capabilities of emergency management in comparison with the technological capabilities of the everyday citizen.
• Identify problems in emergency management through that investigation that could be solved.
• Formulate potential solutions using appropriate theories, data sources, and methods.
• Apply an understanding of low-tech / no-tech environments to your solution.
• Justify those solutions using appropriate theories, data sources, and methods.
• Demonstrate professional and ethical responsibility by including intended and unintended consequences of that solution.
• Synthesize knowledge and insight gained by speaking to practitioners to better understand and improve those solutions.
• Work in teams to overcome problems that arise in multi-disciplinary work.
• Translate complex terminologies, technologies, and solutions in order to communicate effectively across practice and academic domains through written reports, oral presentations and discussion.

And so we’ll use these to walk backward.