Reducing the Barriers to Readiness
Announcing the Prolonged Power Outage Readiness Workshop & Workspace
Welcome back to The CP Journal, where we break down what it takes to get left of bang.
Public safety leaders are often asked to prepare their organizations and communities for events that have not happened yet.
That creates a difficult challenge.
It is one thing to personally recognize a potential problem. But it is something else to organize a project that helps others understand it well enough to invest time, attention, and resources into addressing it.
Running a workshop, for example, sounds simple until the project starts competing with everything else on the calendar. The facilitation plan needs to be built. Slides need to be developed. Stakeholders need to be invited. Executives need to be briefed. Small-group facilitators need guidance. Reports need to be written afterward.
And because the work usually gets layered on top of existing responsibilities, the same patterns tend to appear:
Planning gets compressed into the final week
Outreach happens later than it should
Slides are being edited the night before
The event finishes without a clear path forward
The report never gets completed
Good preparedness projects fail all the time because there was never enough time or structure or support to execute them properly.
This is a problem that we exist to address.
So this week, we added a new resource to The CP Journal Academy.
The Prolonged Power Outage Readiness Workshop and Workspace
The Prolonged Power Outage Readiness Workshop is a facilitated discussion-based workshop designed to help organizations explore how a long-duration power outage could affect operations, services, decision-making, and community resilience over time.
Organizations can engage us to facilitate the workshop directly, or they can run it internally using the Workshop Workspace and implementation tools now available inside The CP Journal Academy.
The Workspace is a 30-day implementation package designed to help emergency managers and public safety leaders organize, facilitate, and close out this workshop in their own jurisdiction.
Inside the Workspace are the same materials, project tools, and facilitation resources we use ourselves:
Facilitation guide and speaking notes
Workshop slides
Participant placemats
Project management plan
Email outreach templates and calendar invitations
Small-group facilitator briefing materials
Post-workshop report template
Short daily implementation videos to guide preparation and project closeout
Our goal for developing the Workspace was straightforward. We wanted to reduce the amount of time, friction, and uncertainty involved in organizing a workshop like this while still allowing leaders to tailor the event to their own community, risks, stakeholders, and priorities.
This was built for professionals who do not have the luxury of spending months developing a workshop from scratch, but still want to run something thoughtful, organized, and operationally useful.
The Workspace breaks the project into manageable daily tasks supported by short videos, templates, facilitation tools, and planning guidance. Most tasks can be completed in one to two hours a day without taking over everything else on your schedule.
Accessing the Workspace
Like all Academy resources, the Workspace is included as part of a paid subscription to The CP Journal. There is no separate purchase required. A subscription provides access to the full Academy library, including workshops, playbooks, courses, webinars, and future releases.
If you are looking for a practical way to move conversations about prolonged power outages from awareness into action, this workshop was built to help.
Learn more about the Workspace here:
Looking Ahead
While a prolonged power outage is just one of many risks organizations may choose to prepare for, the broader idea behind this project is something we’re thinking about a lot at The CP Journal.
Preparedness conversations are important, but eventually they have to become projects, decisions, exercises, workshops, and capabilities inside an organization.
That is one of the reasons we are continuing to expand The CP Journal Academy.
Our goal is not simply to help leaders identify preparedness challenges. It is to provide practical tools that help them organize, execute, and sustain the work required to address them.
This workshop and workspace are the latest step in that direction.
The United States population, (note the exceptions of Alaska and Hawaii) is woefully ill prepared for an extended power outage. The large part of the problem is the system that Edison put into place more than 100 years ago and we have layered on miles of conduit, conductor and coax cable to it. Just take a ride along any route of march and look up at the infrastructure we rely on to power homes and businesses, you can’t miss the over sagged lines, rotten poles and transformer pots with bitter sweet vines covering everything and tree limbs hanging over the lines. It only took one tree limb 11 seconds to knock down an entire grid in 8 states in 2003, 50 million people went without electric power for around 3 days. It was summer and everyone had a party, 9 months later a mini baby boom. As one contemplates that, look at the MBA idiots in charge of the utilities running the infrastructure. Nothing like 3 generations of lying lawyers to build confidence. We now double down on an ancient system with the prospect of “data centers” which are gigawatt gobblers. The old regulated utility model went “unk” starting in 1998, with the first models of deregulating markets of gas and electricity were rolled out and accepted. There was money in them thar hills. I have got your attention yet?
This is such a great idea, give the people who claim to have no time, the time and resources, to actually sit down and plan. Having been involved in a pretty good attempt of a similar exercise, it was a local university that had enough interns and professors with working hours time to pull the basics together, a joint session was organized. The police, fire, local utilities and subject matter experts just needed to show up and bring their sets of experience and expertise to the meeting. However clunky, it sorta worked. At the end of the of the first session, some 3 hours long, everyone walked out of the meeting with at least one great take away. “We’re screwed.” Well there was solace in that feeling. So a second meeting was planned and executed. While not perfect there was a plan that got hatched. The local university had its own power generating island. There was enough infrastructure to be able to handle the community, assuming a lot went “right” for several days. One is reminded of the Tom Cruise movie “The Last Samurai” in which he demonstrates vividly that the military force he is supposed to be training is not prepared. “They are not ready.” A line which ought to resonate with every community that will face some sort of calamity in the future. No one is coming to save you. Stay left of bang.