A Deep Dive into the UK Resilience Lessons Digest, Issue 2

What does the UK Resilience Lessons Digest cover

Part of the Government’s commitment to strengthening whole-of-society resilience, the second issue of the UK Resilience Lessons Digest explores the key lessons that have arisen from more than a decade of emergency exercises. What’s its larger purpose?

Well, knowledge is power – in fewer places more so than in emergency and disaster management. 

To that end, the Digest specifically seeks to summarise transferable lessons and themes. Those lessons and themes come from a wide range of relevant sources. And that serves the purpose of contributing to a growing knowledge base for emergency management best practice. 

Furthermore, lessons, once summarised, are then shared across responder organisations and the wider resilience community. 

The purpose, here, is to coordinate such knowledge in order to drive improvements in doctrine, standards, practice, as well as training and exercises. 

What are the lessons being analysed? The Digest focuses on key learnings from 14-public facing post-exercise reports (PXRs) and two PXRs dealing specifically with the Manchester Arena Inquiry and Grenfell Tower Inquiry. 

Putting it all together, 456 lessons were abstracted across the 16 reports, with the following six themes emerging most prominently:

• Information format and flow
• Gaps in planning and preparedness
• Role resilience
• Training and exercising
• Technological resilience and redundancy
• Media challenges

The subsequent guide will delve deep into the first five themes, with the attempt to aid readers in clarifying the following research aims:

• Identification of common learning themes of relevance to the resilience community
• Demonstration of transferable features that can be used to inform preparedness activity and drive continual improvements in response
• Relevance of learning themes and transferable lessons to existing National Resilience Standards, existing doctrine, and multi-agency guidance
• Practical actions suggested to support exercise activity and improved preparedness outcomes

Theme 1. Information format and flow.

More than a quarter of the lessons reviewed across the reports in question dealt with the theme of information format and flow, i.e., how information is collected, collated, recorded, and shared. 

That this theme should emerge most prominently comes as no surprise. Routinely, after-action reviews of masscasualty events focus on challenges in collecting, collating, recording, and sharing information. After all, information format and flow are key to forming a sound Common Operating Picture (COP) and maintaining situational awareness during an emergency response, both of which tend to be missing (or deficient) in the event of a major emergency.

For instance, as teased out in the Manchester Arena Inquiry, members of the public present before the bombing made staff aware of the terrorist’s presence. That information, however, didn’t reach the right level of personnel to act upon it, which had the effect not only of compromising the formation of a COP but also failing to prevent the eventual bombing. 

How are such challenges to be addressed going forward?

The Digest, for its part, recommends “better systems” be put in place to provide a common view of an incident and improve situational awareness during a response. It does cite another stark information management challenge, i.e., the quality of information itself. 

The report notes underlying issues with the very information quality, format, and flow used to develop and maintain a COP.

Part of the problem was the varying nature of Situation Reports (SitReps), where vital information within and across organisations is typically gathered. SitRep forms can and do vary across organisations and agencies depending on internal response requirements.

Standardised SitReps, though clearly beneficial, might also not be a cure all, found the report. After all, in certain circumstances, SitReps existed but were not applied. In other cases, SitReps were applied but populated with inaccurate or poor-quality data. 

Further information management challenges stemmed from ineffective version control, leading to misaligned templates and inconsistent information gathering within organisations. Here, “a ‘lack of compliance’ with pre-prepared templates meant there was ‘no easy or immediate information flow’ or ‘a lack of relevant information… displayed to be of use to the members of the cell.’” 

Presentation also matters. differences in presentation resulted in frustration and information duplication. As the report notes, “Even when information formatting was preagreed and applied, a lack of clarity was reported regarding the amount of information senders should include, and an incomplete understanding of receivers’ onward requirements meant that compilation was hindered.”

Beyond these issues, challenges with achieving a timely flow of information both within and between agencies, responder organisations, and departments were also identified. These tended to fall into two broad buckets

1. Cases where the daily rhythm of pre-agreed meetings in a response scenario seemingly failed to allow sufficient time between the various meetings for operational tasks, or the sharing of updated information ahead of the next meet.
2. Issues with meeting administration, including invites, membership, agendas, and action tracking. In the cases, agendas were found not always to be strategically aligned to ensure discussions generated the onward information required by others. Further concerns were raised about a lack of structure and framework in group meetings, potentially contributing to inefficiencies in decision making and communications.

Recommendations arising from the above included:

• Agendas to be strategically aligned, standardised, and pre-agreed to minimise disruption to future flows of information
• Clarification on data collection methods for compiling SitReps
• Templates to ensure more consistent, co-ordinated, and meaningful information presentation

Theme 2. Gaps in planning and preparedness

Gaps in planning and preparedness, capturing a range of issues dealing with areas for improvement in strategic, tactical, and operational emergency planning and preparedness, also featured prominently. In fact, this cluster of issues came in right behind challenges associated with information format and flow – as across PXRs, it became evident that exercise activity had indeed been useful in helping organisations to identify areas for improved emergency planning and preparedness.

What else? Scenarios also turned out to be productive when it came to determining the second and third-order effects that emergency scenarios were likely to trigger. Examples of this included a need for further assessment and planning around anticipated major road or motorway closures, potential for off-site casualties, and onward impacts for other agencies or partners involved in the response.

Recommendations, here, centred around clarifying the key decision makers with sufficient organisational authority to approve key actions within plans. Further recommendations consisted of defining trigger points and thresholds for activation (and stand-down) as well as updating operational instructions to guide personnel and resource requirements were also made.

All in all, recommendations included:

• Conduct internal reviews and examination of procurement contracts and relevant service level agreements
• Generalised reviews of multi-agency plans and guidance documentation, especially in terms of recovery planning
• Updated concept of operations documents to be produced in support of specific response scenarios
• Greater awareness of organisational roles and capabilities across agencies to be achieved

Theme 3. Role resilience

The third most prominent theme was role resilience. This theme deals with the availability, capability, capacity, and continuity of individuals and their respective roles, in both organisational and/or multi-agency contexts. The challenges associated therewith fell along three primary axes:

1. Inability to reach key decision makers with vital information because of busy telephone lines
2. Key individual being unavailable to attend concurrent or overlapping meetings because they were carrying dual roles
3. Insufficient numbers of suitably qualified and experience personnel and senior decision makers deployed and/or insufficient content-specific expertise

Further capacity and continuity issues were also raised. These stemmed from the volume of work created during responses. Beyond that, three PXRs specifically recommended bolstering capacity among administrative staff to ensure continuity. 

Additional recommendations included:

• Generalised need to improve business continuity and resilience for a protracted incident response and recovery by strengthening and deputising permanent roles
• Building and maintenance of surge capacity and capability
• Regular review into the readiness of external resources cited in emergency plans, e.g., couriers, additional communications infrastructure to be made available through retainer contracts

Theme 4. Training and exercising

Lessons about the exercise process itself were also identified, specifically frustrations in scenario planning. There were also failures to embed learning from previous exercises, practical issues in delivery, and an identified need for more training and future exercising.

Digging more deeply, challenges and frustrations with the exercise planning phase, most often in national level exercises, pointed up issues with consistent representation of participating partners and sector expertise at the planning table. 

Here, individual absences and/or organisational availability, referring back to the previous theme, frustrated the fluency and frequency of planning meetings. These, in turn, disrupted the exercise schedule and stalling progress. 

Similarly, resilience in the Exercise Director role was found wanting during the response. This lack of role resilience created delays in information flow and dissemination of exercise, generating the recommendation that deputy and/ or assistant director(s) be considered for future exercises, to bolster resilience in Exercise Control.

What’s more, PXRs also made frequent reference to training gaps exposed during exercise play, such as untrained participants and the absence of advanced training between key partners. The latter resulted in a “very steep learning curve.”

A recommendation proffered to mitigate the impact of absences, ensure sufficient representation and expertise to drive progress forward, and ensure timely responses to information requests was to nominate substitute personnel. 

However, where training had been in place, recommendations focussed on gaps in required competencies, specialist skill sets, and knowledge of response plans.

Further recommendations included:

• Need to embed response plans through onward training programmes
• Developing fast-track training packages for induction at pace during a real-time response
• Generalised need for further exercising and better testing of specific procedures

Theme 5. Technological resilience and redundancy.

The final theme this guide will tackle is technological resilience and redundancy. This theme captures key lessons concerning the ability of systems to withstand and continue to perform after damage or loss of infrastructure (i.e., resilience) and the ability to maintain capability after damage via diverse, alternative methods) of IT systems, connections, hardware, and software (i.e., redundancy).

Technological problems, despite the pace in technological advance over the review period, were not confined to earlier time periods, though. Rather, they endured, across not only the review period but also varying scenario contexts. They did prove most salient, however, when partners co-located, which tended to create multiple IT issues.

Most common, here, were partners struggling to access the internet on their own computers when operating from host locations; as noted:

Some had no working WIFI arrangements or IT access during the exercise at all. Others had insufficient access, battling with coverage and intermittent connectivity due to the weight of concurrent usage. Even those given the opportunity to use unfamiliar surrogate computers in situ then struggled to access their own systems, leading to significant communication and information sharing issues.

Relevant observations and recommendation, therefore, included:

• Provision of headphones for team members using iPads when co-locating
• Need to ensure that contingency plans were in place for WIFI access
• Need for platforms, plans, and procedures to support remote working models, online press conferences, and integrated multi-agency audio video conferences

Finally, the value of exercises like the Resilience Digest, in this age of escalating critical events, can’t be overstated. Longitudinal analyses generate the type of insights stakeholders need to learn from previous mistakes, to ensure continual learning. And this particular analysis, as this article as sought to lay out, has generated myriad. 

Now, it’s incumbent upon actors, whether they be responder agencies, private businesses, or non-profits, to heed these recommendations, implementing measures suggested in an expeditious manner before the next critical event.