Author Eric McNulty joins us for the beginning of Season 3
This Podcast has moved to the readiness lab.
Disaster Tough kicks off Season 3 with an entertaining interview featuring author, speaker, and educator, Eric McNulty.
Eric is a Harvard professor who has been the Associate Director of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI) for more than a decade. He is also the co-author of the bestseller, “You’re It: Crisis, Change, and How to Matter When it Matters Most”.
In this episode, we tap into Eric’s experience in leadership and how it applies to the EM world, together with the importance of readiness, data, and how public and private entities can better work together.
This Podcast has moved to the Readiness Lab.
Host: John Scardena (0s):
You've just entered the Disaster Tough Podcast, the place for emergency managers, first responders and humanitarians who want to get the job done. Stories, lessons and tips are provided by field experts. This show is owned and operated by professional emergency managers at Doberman Emergency Management. We apply disaster tough logic by protecting life, property, and business continuity through planning, mitigation, and training. Check us out at dobermanemg.com or click on the show notes.
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Host: John Scardena (1m 42s):
Welcome back to the show everybody, it’s your host John Scardena. I am so excited for this episode. It also kicks off season three for us, we are really excited about that big news for our Disaster Tough Podcast. But this week we have Eric McNulty on here, and you can probably tell on the screen there, that he's the author of You’re It. we're a big fan of that book. In fact, our sister show EM Speaks, the webinar, has had it on there. He was talking about You’re It and those concepts behind that book, he's also been on Todd Devo’s show, a big fan of his with EM weekly. Again, another sister show of our Readiness Lab network. Eric McNaulty comes for the national preparedness leadership initiative out of Harvard. He has tons of experience. He's definitely a thought leader. He and I caught up in New York just a few weeks ago. Eric, welcome to the show.
Guest: Eric McNulty (1m 52s):
Thank you so much for having me here. I'm really excited to be part of the conversation.
Host: John Scardena (1m 56s):
Yeah. So as I mentioned, obviously in your introduction, you are one of those people who are looking at innovating the field of emergency management by looking at the different conceptual aspects, and the functional aspects of our field. We had a fun conversation sitting there getting ready to hear Pete Gaynor and Craig Fugate to be interviewed by Todd in New York. We had this fun conversation where we were starting to name ways that we could innovate our field, especially at the FEMA level, what is FEMA doing and FEMA's role in emergency management. But before we get into that, because again I'm a fan of your book, I think it's a really good thing for industry. Can you just give us a quick little plug for those listeners who might be interested in reading it?
Guest: Eric McNulty (1m 48s):
Always happy to give a plug for the book. Thank you for doing that. What we've done in You’re It, is capture about 15 years of stories and studies of leaders in the field doing disaster preparedness to response. So what we at the NPLI do is we deploy, try and be with people during events or thereafter to see what are the tough decisions, what are they wrestling with? What are the really good calls that they make? Try to capture that and distill it and put it into not just stories, but practical tools and skill sets that people could apply in the field to get better. So we really want this to be a practical book and it's been a really great reception in the field, I think for that reason, because we're not trying to lecture down, we're trying to capture and spread out the good practice.
Host: John Scardena (2m 28s):
Yeah, that's an interesting way to say it. We're not trying to lecture down. Sometimes it's difficult as someone who appreciates data and analytics. I worked for a substantial tech firm after leaving the national team where I led business intelligence for a year and a half. I'm a huge fan of machine learning and AI and all those things. What I find in particular is that our field of emergency management doesn't attack that as much they could, like trying to figure out, I don't know where the tornado is going to land next. Our basic understanding of that is… I got to pump the brakes here for a second, where we were a hundred years ago versus now is phenomenal and definitely weather data in terms of all the aspects of emergency management is far and beyond what anybody else is using for analytics for sure and understanding the physics of what's happening. But in terms of the decision making process, what I find is too many people are still using and I'm going to follow my gut here. I'm sure this is a tiring topic for people who've listened to the show because I've talked about this so much. But as someone who's actually studied this, in terms of a leadership perspective and your studies of leadership, are they doing that? I'm going to follow my gut versus data and what are some improvements we can make between those two sides of the house in terms of the decision making process?
Guest: Eric McNulty (3m 59s):
I think their are a couple of important things there, and one is, I think we are not too many years away from data assisted decision making for leaders being the norm and you're going to have to understand it. It's going to better inform you and all your gut is, it's important to us to understand your gut to all that your gut is actually really good. If you've seen the situation many times before, it's basically accumulated a lot of data, processed it into patterns and it helps you react quickly. You know, the greatest percentage, the greatest number of neural transmitters in your brain, the second greatest number is in your gut. They're connected by the longest nerve in your body up and down your spinal column and they're constantly constant communication.
So if you're in a situation you've seen a lot before that gut killing can be a good guidance. I always say, Ben, go to the data and see what it tells you. But if you're in a novel situation, you want to depend on less than your gut, because you're probably not fully recognizing what's happening. You want to look at that data. I think the tools are coming together and another guest you should have on your show is my colleague, Brian specifically looked at this really deeply in terms of AI and machine learning and how it's going to apply to leader decisions going forward. But I think we're at the point where we have the computing power, we have the data sets. We now just have to have the open minds among the leaders to realize this is, this is a compliment to what they do in an ill health and enhance their effectiveness. It's not a threat.
Host: John Scardena (6m 43s):
Oh man, you, you highlight so many areas. First of all, what a great pitch for following your gut and applying it to data. That's a great pitch. I will say that, you know, you brought up the novel, a catastrophic disasters, especially a type one. Now not a block swamp per se, but a type one event where a lot of what we're doing is trying to go by the fly. I think you're right. You don't have enough data for your gut to be a hundred percent accurate. In fact, your gut, usually isn't a hundred percent accurate, but emergency management rarely is you have to be able to make a decision quickly. That's right, it’s been a fun thing.
In terms of the tech world of data-driven versus data informed, and I really think that's just a good way to help you understand really what it's supposed to do, but it's a branding thing, right? We really want to get to is whatever the best cases, the best case being life sustaining, life supporting missions in the fastest and most efficient way possible, and a decision-making process and having the right information with the amount of time you have. That's the other problem that we have is time. There’s a really interesting call out in a way to look at that so way to way to kick it off the right way, for sure.
Guest: Eric McNulty (8m 10s):
I give you a quick example of a good view outside emergency management, which I think is useful here is in healthcare. Some of the larger healthcare systems now have default protocols for certain common diseases like certain cancers. So rather than a doctor drawing upon his or her, you know, hundreds of cases, they are looking at tens of thousands of cases across the system and saying, this is the default that you can go, you can do something other than the default, but then you have to explain why, but it gives you really quickly having looked at tens of thousands of cases. Here's what looks to be the most efficacious treatment plan for this particular cancer and it gives you a grid. So you can draw upon that larger knowledge. It doesn't take away your freedom to make a different decision, but it makes you think about to why. Why I going against the data and it helps you. I think you really can. It really helps inform the decision rather than dictate it.
Host: John Scardena (9m 3s):
Well there’s a very popular phrase in emergency management that says every disaster is different. That's like me thinking, well, every cancer must be different or every, you know, but I can name 36 manmade, a natural disasters that are going to act the same, right. If I get in there and I see a hurricane, okay, I'm going to see a wind event, I'm going to see a flooding event, I'm going to see a surge event and I can start making predictions and, or, you know we do say every disaster is different, but we stage resources and where we state resources and we put up shelters and how that supply chain is staged. All those factors start to go into play. Same thing with wildfires. We know it's going to be proceeded by mudslides when the rainy season comes. So there is predictability in that.
Guest: Eric McNulty (9m 57s):That's right.
Again, we won't go into too far in the weeds of data, but I believe there's enough data out there for us to start saying, okay, maybe not every disaster is different. Maybe there's a lot of the same and we need to start saying that. So we understand truly routine versus crisis mode, which is a, another reference to another book that's out there and understanding when are we truly in crisis mode? IE is that true novelty? Or are we in crisis mode because we just haven't done the right prep work to make sure that we're being as efficient as possible. So there's some call-outs there for sure.
Guest: Eric McNulty (10m 39s):
In fact, I just completed a research study, went public today, actually interviewed at nine global companies around their response to COVID. One of the places they've at least a couple of them tripped up most because they thought coronavirus is novel. They sort of throw out all the existing protocols and thought we had to start from scratch and it turned out, no, it's just like, yeah. Of the 10 things you had to worry about, four of them may have been in truly new and you have to improvise there. But six of them actually were basic emergency management, best practice. Here's what we ought to be doing and so I think we got to be looking at a continuum of events here, and either or will get us to a much healthier place.
Host: John Scardena (11m 14s):
Well, you're, getting to another, and I have all these passions. One of the passions to me is that public health is great for long-term trends, not great for response. You should be looking at your emergency manager because that's the person who can do response. Public health is one of the pillars that the emergency manager should talk to. The reason being in 2014, I was working at the National Cancer Institute where we were housing, the Ebola patients, building 50. My job was to make sure that there was no patient spread in building 50. Was I a doctor? Absolutely not, but I could work with doctors, I can understand PPE, I can understand the protocols and I can make sure that it was contained. Because of that, when I went over to another federal agency, I got put on the task force to understand what we should do for a pandemic response to reduce spread and we focused a lot of messaging. We focused a lot on this stuff. When the pandemic hit, I was contacting some of my friends in DC and saying, I know we have a plan here. Where's the plan? By the middle of March, I sent him a communication out to some of those former members, “hey, we're now looking at a multi-year thing if we don't get this under control.” They all agreed.
You know, lo and behold, we're at a multi-year issue because the messaging has been really bad. I mean, that's not novel. You know, the work from home thing is a scene. It has seemingly been a novelty concept for people, but they have been doing work from home before. So the one really interesting thing about COVID is the case studies that will be able to come from it. If you said in 2014 hey, we want to put every child at home for a year to do school at home and see what the impacts of doing that would be. People would just like laugh at you out the door. So that the current of a case study, we can see the impacts of a cultural shifts, societal shifts.
Host: John Scardena (13m 22s):
That’s really interesting as well. So the fact that you're talking to healthcare and the fact that you're looking at corporations and how they're doing COVID and doing research on that, I'm sure that this will be a wealth of learning, that the learning growth should go way up from this event.
Guest: Eric McNulty (13m 41s):
Let's hope so.
Host: John Scardena (13m 42s):
Yeah.
Guest: Eric McNulty (13m 48s):
Lessons learned versus lessons applied in a whole different thing, you know?
Host: John Scardena (13m 50s):
Yeah, sometimes we like to say, you have to go for the lowest common denominator. I don't think we do that. I think we get pigeonholed and thinking, oh, my way is right and if they don't like it, they're dumb. That's a stupid way to look at it as in terms of just being totally honest. You want people on your side and creating trenches of how people feel about things is never effective. You know, a good example of that is we've had gangs, rival gang stay in the same shelter. How do people who traditionally don't get along, stay in the same shelter? Well, yeah, come up with compromises and you work with leaders and you say, hey, there's something bigger here that's happening. I didn't really see that in a pandemic. So that's a whole other thing.
But in terms of New York, getting to like kind of bulk of our conversation, we were talking about several things, changes that we would like to see in the field of emergency management. It was kind of fun because as Craig and Pete were on the stage with Todd, you were kind of looking at each other for everybody. And we're like, oh, call that, call that. So let me just ask you for the sake of our audience. If you were going to look at the field of emergency management, what changes would you like to see in our field? More importantly, how do we actually implement some of those changes? What are the solutions that you think we need?
Guest: Eric McNulty (15m 22s):
Well, I think I'm going to get a little bit wonky on you here for, just for a moment, because it's one of the findings that came out of this coronavirus study as well, is that I think we need to engage in what's known as double loop learning. So single loop learning is you try something, you get, you see what happens and you may adjust your strategy or tactics. The double loop learning is when you can go back, when you get that feedback and you actually question your underlying assumptions. I think that's where emergency management needs to go with questioning the underlying assumptions from when FEMA was founded from when, you know, as the field has grown, what's still true and what has changed. So, for example, I think one of the things we've seen in COVID is that our traditional belief in a bottom up system, which works really well for a local or regional disaster doesn't work well at all for a national or continent wide, or in this case, a global incident, because I can't tell you how many stories I've heard of people having to deal with all the different guidance from different states and localities. For organizations operating across the country, and it gets worse and you get international that doesn't, but that bottom up piece doesn't work.
So I think we have to be thinking about one thing I want to look, we want to look at is when can you actually flip a switch and say, this is coming down more top down and we're going to have to have some coordination across the country, across jurisdictions in order to be able to address it effectively. I think we ought to be looking at some of the obvious things that we're looking to do and say, how do we get top talent to really want to choose this as a field or the options you have when you were coming into school? I know there's already a high school, I believe in New York, it's teaching emergency management where you can concentrate on that, but how do we actually attract top talent? Not that we haven't got a lot of talented people in this field, but many of the most talented I've met sort of found their way accidentally.
Guest: Eric McNulty (17m 16s):
Like I never thought of emergency management, but then I had this opportunity, or I met somebody who told me, I drifted into it. Even Pete Gainer, you know, he was career in the Marine Corps and he came out and he said, what do I do? Where do my skills go? He wound up working first in Providence and Rhode Island and FEMA. So I think if it just the data conversation earlier, we think rethinking how we train people to be leaders, to really understand decision-making. It is a science behind decision making to understand how to use data. It's going to be much more complex to operating in this field. When you looked at what we're going to have in terms of impacts of climate, are we going to age the population, which brings up all kinds of new vulnerabilities.
So being able to navigate that is going to be a really tricky thing for folks in the field. I think we need to be…I would be making changes to make the education, bring them up several levels of sophistication and some of these key areas of being able to think forward, make decisions and not just do the basics of emergency management. The basics don't go away, they're still important. But I think if you're going to lead in this field, you're going to have to be up there with the top folks who are working in the corporate world or in senior roles in government. That's some of the places I'd make some changes.
Host: John Scardena (18m 35s):
Yeah. I think those are phenomenal call-outs in terms of the sophistication. That's kind of what we were talking a little bit earlier in that sophistication process of doing that, you know, processes. We have Rodney Mossik on ears, basically the godfather, and yes, truly the godfather of emergency planning, modern day emergency planning because he's retired, but he's still influencing everybody in the field and he's very active in that. He says that process is more important than outcome. As one of my mentors and, and working with him directly on the national team, my change in that is just like slightly different it's process is just as important as outcome. You still have to have the outcome, but emergency managers can understand process, and I'm not talking about paper pushers or what firefighters think emergency managers do. I'm talking about us as a field in our own culture as coordinators working in that process. One thing that's, I think is really fascinating is that Brock Long on my show, Pete gainer on my show, Craig Fugate on my show, and then up on stage Craig and Pete saying the same thing is FEMA is largely a funding organization. The problem with a largely funding organization perspective versus emergency services, and more importantly, emergency response, this small areas of FEMA that focus on, on the National IMATS or kind of the regional IMATS too, but really the national IMAT and USR is that they don't really do funding, especially USR. It's not doing funding, but their certificate comes through FEMA. If you're talking about a top-down approach and you're talking about a more focused approach, what FEMA does for the federal government in that coordination of the Stafford Act and the camera and all those things work well in a large-scale disaster. Hospital, emergency managers, organizational campus, whatever they have to figure out, like, how does this make sense for me? It's kind of a hodgepodge of ideas of like, well, I'll never have a 204, but what do I have? They have to kind of make it up as they go. I would like to see standardization in process so that it can not just apply to the federal government, but it can apply to the other side of the house and really call FEMA what it is.
Host: John Scardena (21m 4s):
It's the funding of emergency services. It's not the actual emergency managers themselves. One other question I have for you is if we recognize that, especially if heads of FEMA are recognizing that they are truly most of the organization, doesn't do the emergency management part, the emergency part of emergency management, who else should take that on? Should somebody else take that on if those basics remain, but you're saying that changes should be made. Who else should jump in the game?
Guest: Eric McNulty (21m 42s):
You know, I'm a couple of minds of that one because I, on the one hand, don't want to spread that out so much because you get a lot of divergence in terms of approach and you come up with new problems of how to collaborate and coordinate. There perhaps should be a part of FEMA or maybe FEMA is the, is a funding agency and then there was a response I would like to see them focusing on strengthening state and regional level response capabilities, because I think there'll be, there'll be faster, more nimble. They were better connected to the communities they're going to have to serve. But I also think there needs to be recognition. This is my drum I keep beating since you beat yours on data, is it, I think we are in the early stages of an age that we cannot respond to our way out of when you look at the floods, the wildfires that the recent tornadoes things are going, we simply… the challenges are too big and too complex to simply respond your way out of. So preparedness has got to get its groove back and be, and that's where I think actually FEMA could have a lot of influence in terms of what they fund, what they ensure that the flood insurance program to shape policy in ways that keep us better, you know, preventing things prepared for things. So the, the lights and sirens side of the house is still part of what you do, but you're not relying on them as much. I think we need heroes who are a little bit less than in the dramatic part of the life cycle and more in the getting us ready, because we can't respond our way out of things that are this big, this fast moving in this complex and this constant there's no season for anything anymore, they all just kind of roll into each other.
Host: John Scardena (23m 22s):
Yeah, I agree with that. Talk about the wildfires, the fire crews, the wildland firefighters, or the guys who go out there on those mountains and expect to do that for three months, essentially from late July through October, and really, maybe even August through November, that's kind of the height of traditionally of wildfire season in California. That's gone. So now you have somebody on the side of a mountain year round that exhaustion takes a toll. It takes a toll on the body. It takes a toll on the mind you have turnover, it's unsustainable. What you're saying is truly the way that we're looking at responses is sustainable.
I totally agree. That's why I'm not a fan of resiliency anymore. I think the idea of resiliency being the king of emergency management, or like that that's favorite word for everybody. I don't want to have to bounce back. If I have to keep bouncing back, I'm not going to be able to bounce back. Eventually I've been to the same cities, the same towns for multiple, multiple times of the same event. I'm like, okay, the idea of that disaster tough like mantra or name the company is that we want to make other people, other communities more tough to be able to do with their own response, because at the end of the day, that resource might not be coming. Even if it does come, it will be likely insufficient and I think that's like your call out there is a hundred percent right. My question earlier about who should lead it, have you ever worked with like state guards, like the National Guard?
Guest: Eric McNulty (25m 05s):
Yes.
Host: John Scardena (25m 06s):
Yeah, I understand how the law works, but in terms of a local response, they are essentially the US perspective of the military humanitarian arm. Like if they're doing, they can do crowd control, they help out with floods, they clear homes. They help put up flood barriers, say they do wildfire response. They do a lot of things in emergency emergency services. So if you have a funding organization who is working on a federal perspective and you want to get states and localities more prepared, I would say that they start to segregate and allow states to have people who are highly trained, who are working on this to continue to work on that aspect, answering to the governor. Again, this would not mess with your title 10 or title 32 and whatever that the right number is there. But it would provide a perspective where funding versus response and response is much smaller than the funding. They can separate a little bit because trying to do this isn't really working that great. I don't know my 2 cents.
Guest: Eric McNulty (26m 15s):
Well I think if you want to understand the laws, the governance, the national guard, and then you're one of like six people in the country who do. I've looked into it and it's really complex actually what happens there? Yeah.
Host: John Scardena (26m 25s):
Ah, Virginia. Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Guest: Eric McNulty (26m 29s):
Yeah. But I think that that's one of the challenges, the Guards, they're very good. But they're very much a short-term response for us because they're part-time. So they can get deployed for a couple of weeks, but then all of a sudden, the economic impact of having them, not on their jobs, you can't deploy them for a couple of months. I've seen that in states where they, I know they deployed, it was great short term, but then people got to go home and it's, and you can't have them out there. So I think we've gotta be really looking at what are the risks look like going forward and data that can inform a lot of this. What our likelihood to need, who do we need for short-term medium-term long-term response as we bleed into, as we move into recovery. And yes, I think we should be open to all the different sources of resources and assets. We can deploy against that and figure, how do we best to rate them against the most probable situations we're going to face?
Host: John Scardena (27m 21s):
I think that's a good mic drop moment of the show. Eric, god, talk about knocking it out of the park. So I think you're right. I think we need to be open. I think things are changing. I think the data's going to be showing that it's already been showing that it's changing the frequency of catastrophic hurricanes alone should tell us something that frequency of wildfires alone should be telling us something, the frequency of active shooters. Maybe we should actually look into the real data of why that's happening instead of like the fluff pieces you hear on media and really dive in deep of why that's happening. Thursday paper and somebody's master's program about cross narcissism and the rise of active shooters, but whatever, you know, there's a lot of this stuff that's happening.
Host: John Scardena (28m 9s):
So great all-out don't want to be doomsday preppy, but you're right, we need to be nimble, we need to focus on what's best for the future. We're getting into new phases. You're calling that out as a thought leader. Again, You’re It. This is where my wrap up here is for the show, if you like, what Eric just said, which you should have, that mic drop moment that he just had, and you want to learn more about Eric's perspective on leadership and learn how to be a better leader yourself read You’re It. I'm sure Eric, you and I should continue this conversation. I had to stop yet you're blowing me up too much. So this is good stuff.
Guest: Eric McNulty (28m 49s):
We can always get tenured, always happy to talk with you, John.
Host: John Scardena (28m 51s):
Yeah, absolutely. So again, if you liked this episode which you should have. Here's that shameless plug, you give us a five-star rating and subscribe. If you do that, you'll hear more great content. Maybe Eric will come back on the show. Hint Hint. Since we probably should have him back on the show and we'll see you next week.