How Do We Create and Maximize Impact?
A compass for decision-making
Hello from paradise!
This week, I am writing from the expansive Isle of Skye in Scotland. My wife, brother, and I are staying in a remote village where the sheep population significantly outweighs the human population, and the nearest main road is a 35-minute drive away. It’s the perfect holiday to refill my cup, which was nearing empty after the last eventful couple of months…
I’ll skip the challenging bits to go straight to the good stuff: After living in Southern California for over a decade, my wife and I decided to trade LA’s palm trees for New York City’s skyscrapers. Funny enough, an unusual 4.8-magnitude earthquake startled the entire Tri-State area the day we moved. It’s as if the disaster gods were saying: “Not so fast! You can’t escape us that easily!”
Our new home is a quaint Brooklyn neighborhood filled with beautiful brownstones and delicious mom-and-pop restaurants. I love to spend my time wandering the streets of New York to marvel at the stunning architecture that gives the city its unique flair. Over the next few months, I look forward to creating a new routine that includes enjoying the arts and culture scene and hanging out with my NY emergency management peers.
So, what’s in store for this month’s issue?
As I unpacked my suitcase, I realized I had forgotten to bring my notebook with me. It contained all the tidbits I wanted to share about my second week attending FEMA’s Executive Academy at the Emergency Management Institute (EMI) last month. So, instead, I’m opting to leave you with some questions to ponder that I’ve been grappling with.
I left my second week at EMI feeling a bit… defeated. We had some fantastic guest speakers, including the former number 1 and number 2 at FEMA. While they addressed the many ways in which emergency management has positively evolved over the years, they also shared the staggering obstacles they faced in doing their jobs. Knowing how much further we still have to go, I felt overwhelmed.
For a while now, I have been preoccupied with trying to answer a question that keeps popping up in my head: How do I create—and maximize—impact?
Philosopher and ethicist Will MacAskill presents a framework to help decide what to expend our scarce resources (time and money) on. As the author of Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, MacAskill urges us to address the most pressing issues the world faces. A problem is considered a higher priority the bigger, the more easily solvable, and the more neglected it is. It being bigger means there is more to gain from solving the problem; it being more easily solvable means it can be solved with less time and/or money; and it being more neglected means we’re not just throwing our efforts into solving a problem that has already gotten a lot of attention and that, therefore, has diminishing returns.
I think managing emergencies fits that framework pretty nicely. Bigger: More than costing human lives, disasters cause huge economic losses, affecting even more people. Solvable: We may not be able to prevent earthquakes from happening, but we can certainly build to higher standards to minimize losses. In short, we know what mitigation practices yield a higher return. It’s about the political will to implement those solutions. Neglected: Disaster prevention and mitigation are not sexy. Climate change or pandemic monitoring may be on the radar of some decision-makers, philanthropists, and venture capitalists, but all-hazards emergency management is not.
So this leads me to the next part of my question: How do we maximize impact?
As emergency managers, we have a clearly defined role. We write plans, train people on those plans, and exercise them. On a micro-scale, this helps an organization or a jurisdiction prepare for and respond to a potential disaster. But what about the macro-scale? How do we genuinely transform systems, policies and infrastructure? Organizations and jurisdictions do not exist in a vacuum. Instead of repeating one solution a thousand times over, is there a solution that, implemented once, can serve a whole spectrum? What solutions exist that are less time-intensive and cheaper and can help us achieve our purpose?
One possible solution I am drawn to explore is the insurance industry and the work that can be done not just by collaborating with the industry but also by working from within it. It’s not sexy at all. If anything, it sounds boring and dry, but unlike emergency management, the money and lobbying power are there. More importantly, we share the same goal. The better we mitigate disasters, the fewer people experience losses, and thus, the fewer payouts are needed.
What other possible solutions can you think of?
And what serves as your personal career compass?
Thanks but I would be hard pressed to build out a full book right now. Maybe in a year or so I could pull that off - would be really interesting as I am moving more and more to storytelling as the best narrative form - thanks for the idea!
Hi Lorraine - Thanks for writing this. I think your questions about big-picture fixes - which Emergency Managers and those of us in the pracademic world of Emergency Management can and should fix - also follow Eric McNulty's meta-leadership concept. We are many times, influencers and subject-matter experts, more than policy makers and executives-in-charge. Are you still on track to co-author a chapter in "Current & Emerging Trends in the International Management of Disasters"? I have one in there which is detailing my journey - and that of my co-author Jennifer Hope Russell - on a problem statement for infant/toddler feeding choices in U.S. disaster sites. We are trying to do what you describe here: fix a problem on a macro-scale and change policies, practices, and well, the way people help other people in disasters.