Checklists? Plans? Adaptation? Plan to Adapt!

The Checklists

Many an academic debate about the merits or otherwise of checklists, plans or adaptation is started over a red wine. All three have their place but they work best in concert with each other with respect to emergencies and other organisational crises.

Checklists are widely used in OH&S and certified standards such as ISO27001 and ISO9001. They support quality checks and help ensure critical processes, steps or requirements have not been missed. In emergency management, they are also regularly used for key position holders in the emergency management team so they know what to do in a usually time-pressured, unfamiliar environment where the space to think is limited. The challenge with checklists is to focus on the outcome that needs to be achieved rather than on the string of tasks as a starting point. With this in mind, checklists can be a powerful tool but they are not the panacea.  

In emergency management, I personally advocate checklists being made up of several elements including:

• Role and accountabilities
• Tasks (can be by phases)
• Considerations

Considerations are included to ensure the person reading the checklist does not become singularly focused on the task at hand to the detriment to the overall response and recovery objectives. How to apply considerations also may need to be included in a plan. Outside of an engineering / process environment where critical variance limits are very tight, checklists can result in a singular focus that is at risk of becoming tunnel vision.  They also lack the broader framework provided for by a well formed plan.

The Plan

Plans are usually more detailed than a checklist (may include checklists as attachments) and will typically include:

• Background/purpose
• Objectives/goals
• Strategies to achieve those objectives
• Contingency arrangements and special contract arrangements
• Tools to support plan implementation

 

Plans provide a great basis for developing understanding and establishing the approach to be taken when crisis hits. They are an essential component of good business and good emergency and continuity management. However, Plans of themselves will never remove the risk as they tend to focus on a specific type of disruption or a specific threat. They can never account for the complexity of chaos. The cost of an organisational crises usually occurs as a result of the secondary and tertiary effect and the complexity born out of a multi-dimensional, multi axis wicked problem. The plan prepared for an emergency, contingency or crises will not survive first contact (initial execution) without change. For this reason, plans should not be developed to artificially constrain necessary action.

Adapt

Perhaps, then the answer lies in adaptation and agility, the ability to rapidly, change direction. To change, you need something to change from and in to. In terms of crises and emergencies, that change can often be very quick and sometimes painful if the level of preparedness is inadequate. Adaptation relies on effective leadership and a change ready culture. It also relies on risk intelligence. Without all these elements, we may end up morphing into something that does not meet the needs of the current situation. We may run head long into danger, never knowing what that danger really was.

Plan to adapt!

Every organisation is different and we often have difficulty ‘templating’ the success of one organisation and applying it to others. This is not to say we can’t learn from experience and adapt to our needs. Lessons and experiences should be built into plans and checklists, accountabilities, delegations and roles should also be clearly set out. The key though is to plan to adapt and continue planning, but faster (often much faster). In this way, all three elements work together to ensure the response (and recovery) meets the unique circumstances at the time. No business can afford to become blinkered in terms of their overall response to adversity – We must plan to adapt but not get lazy and think adaptation is the panacea to all our problems.