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A Culture of Planning: How to Know if the Shoe Fits

By: Randy Templeton on January 06, 2012

We have all heard how important an organizations culture is and yet the essence of the culture of any given organization often defies accurate description. Charles W. L. Hill and Gareth R. Jones have defined the concept as: "The specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization." An organizations culture is always at work, always in force pulling, influencing and shaping attitudes and actions. The culture can be likened to gravity, constantly tugging us back to the reality of earth. A culture of planning has many facets. One of those facets is how the organization views and executes the task of planning. There are many types of planning, and all may not be equally valued or performed in all organizations. For example, an organization that fully embraces and values strategic planning may fail to commit the same level of collective effort to continuity planning. For the purposes of this writing/audience, I refer to the genre of emergency or continuity planning. Theres a qualitative difference between an organization that usually, frequently or occasionally plans, and one that has planning endemic to its culture. How does one know if ones organization has its affiliation in the former or the latter? I propose 10 characteristics of a culture of planning (CoP) and a brief description of each that can help with the distinction. 1. A CoP emphasizes resilience and understands the difference between it and recovery. The differences can best be understood if one realizes that resilience is an adjective, and recovery is usually a verb or noun in the emergency management context. Resilience is a quality applied to materials when they have the ability to resume their normal shape after being stressed. It is an innate quality rather than an after-the-fact campaign. Both may be necessary, but resilience is qualitatively better because it implies that the ability to recover is woven into the fabric of the organization. 2. Values planning and understands the appropriate level of detail strategic, operational and tactical. It is common to over-plan or under-plan, each caused by a different organizational trait/characteristic. Undervaluing planning reveals the deeper problem of apathy; over-planning (in terms of detail) runs the risk of assembling a collection of manuals that gather dust on the shelf but are of little practical value. The major value of the planning exercise is that it teaches us how to think about the problem; then, and only then, can we know what to do about it. 3. Has the ability to psychologically embrace the possibility of bad things happening. Some organizations, like some people, think that if they ignore a potential issue or incident, it will either go away or never manifest. A mature organization a CoP organization seeks out and engages the environmental hazards before they occur for planning purposes. While engaged in the battle is not the best time to be thinking about how to fight for the first time. 4. They compile an extensive experience bank by a multiplicity of methods. In his book, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions author Gary Klein discusses a model for understanding the human decision process. He reports that experienced decision-makers improve their skills by:

engaging in deliberate practice; compiling an extensive experience bank; obtaining accurate, timely and diagnostic feedback; and reviewing experiences to derive new insights and learning.

5. Anticipates and mitigates hidden variables; prevents ignorant variables. There are consequences to events and actions that occur despite our best efforts at due diligence. The threat of these hidden variables may be lessened by a disciplined approach and systematic analysis, but seldom can they be completely eradicated. There is no shame in being bitten by a hidden variable; the same cannot be said about its ignorant cousin. An ignorant variable is one that could and should have been foreseen had the evaluator had the requisite knowledge, applied the disciplined approach, and done the systematic analysis. Unfortunately the culture that gives rise to opportunity for ignorant variables seldom recognizes them as such. They are, therefore, prone to repeat their mistake if not in the same venue, in another. 6. Has a high tolerance of ambiguity. The root word of ambiguity is, of course, ambiguous, meaning unclear, indistinct or obscure. Where there is ambiguity, there is always uncertainty. Uncertainty implies a degree of a lack of control, and incremental lack of control is one pervasive characteristic of an emergency or disaster. There are those that assert that control of ones environment is an illusion at best. Yet, illusion or not, anxiety and apprehension in ambiguous circumstances are not characteristics of a CoP. One trait of a CoP is that the organization has the collective ability to preside over its circumstances even in the absence of clarity. This calmness of organizational spirit has a traceable cause; it is rooted in the preparation for action that comes with planning, with learning to how think about problems, not just the nuts and bolts of solving them. Once the process is mastered, problem solving becomes the application of a variable-yet-iterative process. 7. Embraces testing, training and exercising. Who in the brother and sisterhood of emergency managers has not had the experience of difficulty getting organizational executives to training and exercise sessions? A CoP has inculcated the value of dress rehearsal for the big one from top to bottom. 8. Constantly scans the environment and has a conversational/technical knowledge of threats. A CoP doesnt exercise the same tired old hurricane scenario over and over, but gives attention to the perhaps more exotic-but-deadly threats on the horizon. A conversational technical/knowledge of threats means that the emergency manager not only knows what is out there to put the organization at risk, but also knows enough about the threat to understand why the threat is real. For example, knowing the chemistry and gene sequence of the H5N1 virus is not necessary; knowing that an outbreak of the same would likely result in a 50 percent mortality rate is essential. 9. Does not confuse the distinction between frequency and probability. According to Liisa Valikangas, professor of innovation management at the Helsinki School of Economics, one of the human cognitive factors that complicates our ability to take resilient action is, confusion between frequencies and probabilities. Valikangas goes on to say, direct experience is a poor guide because of the human tendency to (because the lack of actually having an experience) discount the probability of a catastrophe from happening, hence reducing preparation measures. Our experiences (or lack thereof) make us poor interpreters of future probabilities where those probabilities fall outside of a mainstream of cultural history. 10. Resists the urgent in deference to the important. The point of Parkinsons Law of Triviality is that organizations tend to spend disproportionate amounts of time devoted to trivial issues. That is, the more time

and attention spent on important matters, the less time that is required to attend to urgent matters. Though the work indisputably expands to fill the time available for its completion, the nature of the work in which we engage is entirely under our control.

Randy Templeton is business continuity and emergency preparedness coordinator for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

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