1. Unit 14 Emergency Planning IS 235
L2 Forming a Collaborative Planning Team

2. Bell Ringer Do you actually enjoy group work?
Describe one time where you had a great experience working in a group?
Describe one time where you had a bad experience working in a group?
What are characteristics of a great team working together?
What are characteristics of a bad team working together?

3. Who/what organizations would have an emergency operations plan?
Class Discussion:
Who/what organizations would have an emergency operations plan?

4. What is an example of collaborative work during an emergency?

5. Lesson Overview
As part of the first step in the emergency planning process, this lesson presents key considerations in building and organizing the planning team. After completing this lesson, you should be able to:
Identify the benefits and challenges of collaboration in emergency planning.
Identify the building blocks of collaborative relationships.
Select entities that should be involved in the planning process.
Indicate lessons learned from your jurisdiction’s planning experiences.

6. Emergency Planning Step 1: Form a Collaborative Planning Team
Forming a collaborative planning team is the first step in the emergency planning process.
Before discussing the how, let’s think about the why—why do you need a collaborative planning team? Why not just create the plan yourself?

7. Why Form a Collaborative Team?
On any effective team, people working together can accomplish more than individuals working separately. Or as the author Ken Blanchard put it, “None of us is as smart as all of us.”
Significant results can be achieved through collaboration—the process of shared creation that occurs when people produce something by:
Combining efforts.
Sharing ownership of the outcome.
Making joint decisions.
Exchanging expertise, information, and resources.
There is nothing routine about this process. When collaboration occurs, something is there that wasn’t there before.

8. Effective Teams
Collaboration can happen when team members work effectively together. Highly effective teams have several characteristics in common:
Participative leadership
Shared responsibility
Commitment to a common purpose and performance goals
Use of resources and talents
Open communication
Capacity for self-evaluation

9. Collaboration Challenges
Collaboration isn’t always easy. Among the greatest challenges to collaboration are turf concerns and mistrust.

10. Building Trust Based on Participation
Building trust among community leaders on the planning team is a way to build trust within the broader community, as they are the links to individual community members.
As trust is built, community leaders can provide insight into the needs and capabilities of a community and help to ramp up interest about emergency management programs that support resiliency.

11. Building Blocks of Collaboration
Below are four important building blocks of collaboration. The remainder of this lesson will focus on using these building blocks in establishing the planning team.

12. Identifying the Right People: The Core Team
Planning should involve the whole community to ensure that all perspectives, needs, and capabilities are represented.
The initial team should be small, consisting of planners from the organizations that usually participate in emergency or homeland security operations. Each mission area should be represented on the team—for example, a prevention and protection advisor, a hazard mitigation expert, and so on.
This group forms the core team for all planning efforts.

13. Identifying the Right People: Engaging the Community
As planning progresses, the core team expands to represent the many facets of the community, including:
Government agencies and programs.
Nongovernmental organizations and other community groups.
Advocacy organizations for persons with access and functional needs.
Private businesses and industry.
Infrastructure owners and operators.
Civic leaders and informal opinion leaders.

14. Benefits of Inclusiveness
Expanding the team in this way is one of the most important aspects of the planning process, for several reasons:
Broad participation improves the planning effort because the full resources of the community are tapped.
Diversity of the planning group results in more comprehensive and creative planning.
Team participation fosters trust and strong working relationships.
These relationships will extend into operations when the same people work together during emergencies.

15. Collaborative Planning in Action
Collaborative planning teams can play a much broader role than simply developing or updating an emergency plan.
For example, Medina County, OH, put together a broad-based planning team to resolve a complex set of issues encompassing urban development, flood protection, environmental protection, water resources, zoning, and emergency response.

16. Establishing a Shared Purpose
Establishing a shared purpose that everyone understands and buys into has a big impact on getting people to the table and keeping them motivated. To achieve this end:
Seek to understand each participant’s perspective. Learn what they want, what they can contribute, and how they define success.
Work with stakeholders to develop a unifying goal that is relevant to all groups.
Check alignment of stakeholders’ interests with the goal.
Find common ground on which to build consensus for action.

17. Implementing and Sustaining the Team
Once the team is up and running, the challenge is to sustain it. Below are some recommended strategies for implementing and sustaining the team:
Be a collaborative leader.
Practice shared decision-making.
Resolve conflicts constructively.
Communicate clearly, openly, and honestly.
Facilitate group interaction.
Promote inclusiveness and diversity.
Establish information-sharing strategies.
Everyone needs information in order to collaborate in an informed manner. The team should establish a strategy that accounts for:
What information should be shared among stakeholders.
The frequency of communications.
Communication methods.

18. Implementing and Sustaining the Team
Use a problem-solving process to work through issues.
Define the problem
Analyze the problem
Consider possible solutions
Identify the best solution
Implement the solution
Monitor/evaluate the solution
Follow up
Measure results and hold stakeholders accountable.
Celebrate success.