When Every Second Counts: Managing Time and Risk Before Severe Weather Hits
The Benefits of a Framework for Situational Awareness
Imagine that severe weather is approaching your community. How prepared are you and your organization to act? As a storm threatens, there are crucial decisions you must make quickly:
Should you close offices or cancel events?
Will emergency shelters be needed or will high-risk areas need to be evacuated?
Should you activate the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) ahead of time?
Do you need to preposition any people or equipment to allow for a quick response?
Should you wait and see what happens?
With the clock ticking before the severe weather arrives, every second counts. And there are two factors that every professional making these decisions must understand: how much time they have available to make life-saving decisions AND how much time they need to make life-saving decisions.
The second factor (how much time do you NEED to make a decision?) is so important that we will dedicate an entire article to this in the future. How you reduce the amount of time that you require as an organization to recognize that a risk exists, consider different courses of action, and begin communicating the decisions to activate a severe weather response plan is a key component of getting left of bang. We will come back to this.
The first factor (how much time do you HAVE available to make a decision?) is what led to this article being written. If the first time you realize that severe weather is threatening is when you look out your window and see the dark clouds, hear hail falling, or see heavy snow, you are too late. To be proactive, we need to be able to identify the pre-event indicators of severe weather, and we need to create the time required to take action ahead of the storm.
While some of the incidents that organizations prepare for are truly "no-notice" events that present minimal opportunity for advance warning, severe weather rarely happens that way. In fact, there are almost always pre-event indicators of severe weather. However, pre-event indicators only present themselves if you know what you’re looking for and know how to put those signs together into a coherent narrative.
As a result, a deliberate approach to hazardous weather threat monitoring is a critical organizational disaster response capability. This enhanced situational awareness is how you increase the amount of time you have available to make a decision in the face of severe weather. Therefore, before we discuss the specific pre-event indicators for any specific weather event, let's develop a shared understanding of what situational awareness is and how to assess it.
A (Short) Situational Awareness Primer
Situational awareness is more than just looking around, reading a weather forecast, or keeping your phone tucked away while out in public. Simply looking and reading does not mean that you are "aware."
Situational awareness is the ability to perceive and understand what is happening in your environment (which is comprised of both the physical environment and the people within it), anticipate potential threats or changes, and take appropriate action to ensure your safety and that you can accomplish your goals.
While situational awareness involves being cognizant of your surroundings, recognizing cues and patterns, and understanding how these elements may impact you, the goal of situational awareness is to be able to take appropriate action. But before we can act, we must first decide what we are going to do. Enhanced situational awareness ensures that we are making decisions that are informed.
Because the professional decisions you make are dependent on your field, the elements that people use to define a situation and the life experiences required to use that knowledge effectively are also unique. For instance:
Business leaders might use their awareness to look for factors that reveal an opportunity in the market.
Teachers might use their awareness to develop creative ways to connect with their students or drive a point home.
Government leaders might use their awareness to identify gaps in the services they provide to the community and their residents’ needs.
Public safety professionals use their awareness to look for the indicators that can help them identify dangerous situations and take protective actions.
Having established a clear understanding of situational awareness, let's delve into a practical framework that helps individuals maintain awareness in varying levels of intensity: Cooper's Color Code. Created by former Marine Lt. Colonel Jeff Cooper, Cooper's Color Code can be used to categorize a person's level of awareness and help determine their readiness to respond to situations effectively. The five categories are:
Condition White: This is defined as a person who is unaware of their environment. As a result of the lack of awareness, they are generally unprepared to act should a situation demand it.
Condition Yellow: This is a person who has a "relaxed level of alertness." For the public safety professional, this is when you realize that bad things or situations could present themselves (and you are actively looking for the indicators that let you know something is happening), but you haven't found anything out of the ordinary just yet.
Condition Orange: This is defined as a person who has achieved a "specified level of alertness." This comes when a person has recognized the pre-event indicators of a situation they care about and has entered into a proactive planning phase. Action is not yet required, but planning is happening.
Condition Red: This is reserved for the person who is acting and responding to the situation. If they were left of bang to the event, they are putting the plans they previously developed in Condition Orange into action. If they were caught unaware, they are reacting to whatever the situation is without the benefits of early recognition.
Condition Black: This is defined as a person who is unaware of their environment. This is similar to a person in Condition White, except they are unaware for different reasons. Instead of choosing to let their guard down or being complacent to the risks, they have become overwhelmed by events and are unable to continue operating.
So why does an article about severe weather readiness need a discussion on situational awareness and Cooper's Color Code? Because there are three significant benefits that come with applying these concepts to your severe weather preparedness.
Benefit #1: Defining What You’re Looking For While in Condition Yellow
With an understanding of the five conditions in Cooper’s Color Code, we can identify ideal and non-ideal pathways to identifying and responding to a severe weather incident.
The ideal pathway is when a person progresses from Condition Yellow into Condition Orange and finally into Condition Red.
This means that a person and their organization were initially aware of their environment and, as a result, were able to identify indicators that severe weather would pose a threat before the storm occurred.
Once the threatening conditions were identified, the organization used the time available to develop an understanding of the storm, identify potential impacts, and select a course of action that best positioned their organization for success when the storm hit.
The non-ideal pathway is when a person transitions from being in Condition White or Condition Yellow straight into Condition Red.
When this happens, a person did not identify the pre-event indicators that could have alerted them that a particular storm was worth monitoring and did not take proactive action to prepare for it.
Because there was no advance warning or the warnings were missed, a person is developing their understanding of the storm and its potential impacts while simultaneously initiating their organization’s response activity to address the impacts that are occurring in real-time.
To successfully respond to a severe weather event, it isn't enough to just "be in Condition Yellow" and "looking for dangerous situations." You also need to know what you are looking for. This is the difference between information hoping and information hunting. For each type of storm that poses a risk to your community or organization, you need to define what elements of weather and what pre-event indicators you should be looking for. If you don't know what these are, you are merely hoping that you will be able to recognize a dangerous situation.
By knowing what factors are important, you can create the conditions to observe for these indicators more effectively while in Condition Yellow and confidently elevate into Condition Orange earlier.
Benefit #2: Becoming Comfortable While in Condition White
While it’s no one’s goal to be in Condition White—a person with zero situational awareness—there are inevitably times when you will be. You do have to sleep and, unless your job is solely to watch for potential threats, there are other things that will demand your attention during the working day. You may have to attend meetings, respond to emails, travel, or focus on other tasks. Whenever your attention is on something other than "looking for threats," your awareness of your environment naturally goes down.
Instead of trying to completely avoid being in Condition White, it’s better to be honest with yourself and recognize that your ability and capacity to monitor your environment ebbs and flows throughout the day. Cooper's Color Code helps you objectively assess your situational awareness and identify the times it naturally decreases so that you can find ways to provide coverage for your awareness gaps.
This is one of the benefits of using systems and services with alerts, so that your phone can wake you up at night or grab your attention while you're in a meeting. By recognizing that you can't watch the weather all the time, you can build a process into your severe weather plans that allows supporting partners and technology to do this for you.
The purpose of assessing your situational awareness isn't to simply say what is right, wrong, good, or bad on its own. It is to provide a clearly articulated statement about your current state of awareness so that false assumptions about weather monitoring don't undermine your plans before they are ever implemented.
Benefit #3: Elevating Others into Condition Orange
Organizations that are able to consistently get left of bang all have one thing in common. They are able to transition an individual's recognition of threatening conditions into an organization-wide understanding of the situation. For an organization to proactively take action ahead of a storm, there MUST be an ability for the person who recognizes the hazardous situation to notify others and initiate the organization's decision-making processes. In other words, the organization needs to be able to quickly and effectively go into Condition Orange.
But this isn't always easy to do. An organization's leadership team is busy, likely doing things other than monitoring for threats and hazards. Letting leaders know about a potentially bad situation is going to interrupt their day, which can make it easy for leaders to dismiss the warning or minimize it.
To escalate your understanding of the looming threat, emergency managers and public safety professionals need to develop the ability to explain why THIS storm or THESE conditions are different than the norm and why they are worth acting on. It isn't enough to just say, "This is a threat! You must act!". The ability to articulate the situation and facilitate the transfer of knowledge, context, and information about the storm and its potential impacts to organizational leadership is critical. This is a key step to ensuring they can make decisions and take informed action.
By defining what we’re searching for with severe weather in the following modules, our aim is to help professionals find the language and words they need to articulate to their organizations why a decision is needed. This is key to increasing the amount of time organizations have before making a decision and getting left of bang.
But this is a conditions-based process. When organizational leadership has acknowledged the potential threat and has begun proactive planning, this task is accomplished. If they are still debating about whether a severe weather event requires a decision or planning, they haven't gotten there yet.
The Desired End State: More Time to Decide
So why was a primer on situational awareness important in an article about severe weather readiness? Because by defining the goal of situational awareness and the categories in Cooper's Color Code, organizations can now intentionally develop capabilities to be ready to respond to future severe weather.
By defining Condition White, organizations can develop processes that leverage technology to cover gaps in severe weather monitoring that prompt humans to begin analyzing a situation as potentially threatening weather presents itself.
By defining Condition Yellow, organizations can structure the criteria that enables knowledge about what storms and weather conditions the organization's leadership want to be made aware of and to reduce any wasted time due to hesitation or uncertainty around whether a forecast warrants elevating the issue.
By defining Condition Orange, organizations can develop thoughtful response plans that capitalize on every moment available between the recognition of the severe weather and the time it begins impacting them with proactive pre-positioning of response resources and public communication.
By defining Condition Red, organizations can exercise and test specific sections or phases in plans before the incident and enter their disaster response confidently.
By defining Condition Black, organizations can better recognize when people or the organization risks becoming overwhelmed by events and mobilize the support required for the incident response to be sustainable.
Making effective decisions under the pressure of disaster response begins by being able to anticipate and mitigate potential hazards more effectively. That is getting left of bang not only for yourself, but for your organization.
From Concept to Capability
Coming out of this article, we recommend that organizational leaders consider their readiness for severe weather to translate these concepts into action. Our recommendations include:
Evaluate your organization's current approach to situational awareness, identifying gaps in weather monitoring and decision-making processes.
Identify ways to leverage technology, to ensure continuous monitoring of severe weather conditions, especially during times when human attention may wane (e.g., overnight or during meetings).
Establish processes to embed weather monitoring into daily operations to maintain situational awareness and be ready to adapt to new challenges or emerging severe weather patterns.
If you would like to discuss your organization’s preparation and roadmap for severe weather threats, or how technology can enhance your situational awareness, email me at patrick@cp-journal.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.