Dan Scott is the host of EM Student - Relaunch happening January 2022!
This Podcast has moved to the Readiness Lab
The EM Student podcast brings interviews of academic and industry leaders to students who are new to the emergency management field, as well as emergency managers with an always-learning mentality by discussing the multifaceted nature of emergency management, including how other fields interact with EM and what skills are helpful to cultivate while navigating a career in the EM field.
Host: John Scardena (0s):
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Host: John Scardena (1m 40s):
Welcome back to the show everybody! Its your host John Scardena, I'm so excited for this episode. As you've heard several times before, we've talked about EM weekly. We're big fan of theirs, obviously, cause they're one of our sister shows on the Readiness Lab and one of the co-hosts of EM weekly is also the host of EM students. His name is Dan Scott, he's a great friend of mine. He's definitely leading the way in emergency management, trying to get people to think conceptually about some of these topics in our field to try to push that needle so it's really fun to have him on the show. Dan, welcome.
Guest: Dan Scott (2m 12s):
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Host: John Scardena (2m 15s):
Good. We obviously interact quite a bit between everything that we do and I see on LinkedIn, you're a big fan of trying to inspire other people. You put up these quotes, you put up these comments out there to try to get other people. What motivates you or what's what's driving that for you on your side of the house of why you think you should be doing this?
Guest: Dan Scott (2m 41s):
Oh, well there's a couple things that drive me to do it. One is that ultimately, I need to see this stuff too. I need to be practicing what I'm trying to preach. But ultimately we see in our field of emergency management and this is opinionated in my area having done this for so long, because we don't see enough leadership and we don't see enough people taking action. There's a lot of theory out there. There's a lot of emergency management, which they feel that ultimately they need to be reserved there. A lot of reserved emergency managers out there. I'm trying to bring a little bit different approach to how we do emergency management a lot more forward, not just forward thinking, but a forward acting, being more out front, more vocal in what we do and how we do it.
My goal behind the inspirational quotes is to push people a little bit further, but also to engage them with questions and how do we get better and not just as emergency managers, but as people. Ultimately how we increase what we do and how we are, who we are, and how we approach things will definitely increase in and improve the way we do our jobs and whether it's emergency management or something else. I mean, my goal isn't to necessarily only, only approach emergency managers. That's what I am passionate about myself. That's what I love doing. It's what I do. But it's ultimately just in general, what we do and what we go about doing every day that we do it with passion and we do it because we want to be doing it not because we have to do it. If we do have to do it make the best of them.
Host: John Scardena (4m 21s):
Yeah that’s really good call out. You used these words like leadership, passion, and inspiration and people trying to get people to take the lead. Sometimes when people are passionate, it's hard for them to articulate that passion into leadership skills because they get really excited about it. If they're so excited about there, they almost don't want to step in the realm of leadership because they just want to focus on their little pocket of what they think is really important. But the problem with emergency management and emergency management field is that this our field in itself does touch everybody else. I think the pandemic has really highlighted that. I think it's exhausting for people. Great call-outs there. So in terms of your approach of how you want to do things differently and why you think it should be done, what are some examples that you could provide the field that say, Hey, like maybe you should try doing X, Y, Z, and this will be make you a more effective leader.
Guest: Dan Scott (5m 34s):
Ultimately the level of engagement that we see and not during disaster, there’s the emergency manager that we see during a disaster or during some sort of response. Then there is the emergency manager we see, and one of the ways I equate to, we hear this a lot, the blue sky versus the gray sky, right? Well, there is so much we could be doing in the blue sky that would make the gray sky so much easier. In emergency medicine, we hear this a lot. You should never be introducing yourself on the scene of emergency or in EOC. Well we say that a lot, but we don't necessarily practice it when we shouldn't be out engaging more. I've heard this and it ticks me off to no end. It's one of those things I have a chip on my shoulder about it is that emergency manager is usually in her office type could have a plan doing is working in our office. Emergency management in general is not an office driven job. Although a lot of what we do is in the office. It doesn't mean that we have to be in the office everyday, all day. We should be out engaging our community, engaging in our organization. Just recently, we had a conversation with someone on the podcast and it was about engaging the community. Well, you don't necessarily, necessarily need to look outside of your own organization for engagement. You can be engaging those that are within your own organizations to gain partnership, to gain goals that would be to aid you in what you do to aid them and what they do.
You build partnerships in the organization that you don't necessarily know were there, but we ultimately need to be engaging. That's what my goal is, to drive and inspire the emergency manager, emergency manager professional, however, you classify yourself because it's an arising thing. How do we classify ourselves? However, you classify yourself as the engagement that we see in blue skies and in gray sky. When I walk into a room and you got a gray sky environment, everybody should know who I am, what I'm bringing to the table, how I'm going to help them and that I'm there to help. I'm not there to take over. I'm not there to tell you what to do. I'm there to help you. There's no struggle for power. There's no struggle for who's doing what you walk in, you know, your capabilities, you know, each other, you know you're there to help there's trust in the room in gray sky. You build that in blue sky and blue sky is where we need to be spending more of our time.
Guest: Dan Scott (7m 49s):
There's a lot more of it, but we see the gray sky so often because that's what's sexy, right? That's where all the lights and sirens are. That's where we, when we just had the tornadoes. Right? Then I was just big response. What about all the stuff that led up to that, that we could have been doing to aid ourselves and repair ourselves and mitigate against these types of incidents? I guarantee you that wasn't done in previous and now we're this huge response. But as soon as this response over, what are they going to do going forward until the next huge response. I want more blue sky engagement and that's why I'm doing what I do.
Host: John Scardena (8m 23s):
Yeah. I think that's a big pitch of what we work on as well. From what we do when we get in there, one of our first questions are who's your stakeholders? Do you know who they are? Are you willing to hear that you might not know who all your stakeholders are. Reviewing them and sitting down with our side, the emergency manager that has hired us and the stakeholder and say, what is your capabilities? What's your competency? What are you good at? What do you want to bring to the table? Then when you start putting all these pieces together, it's much easier to see the puzzle. Also, it's a lot easier to make decisions because you can say, well, I don't need to do this myself. Somebody else can do this and somebody else can do that. You're able to refine that decision-making process to being most efficient. I think that's a great approach and I think it's the right approach. I think it's the approach of the future, which is a fun, little segue into you trying to attack the future by a podcast on EM student and helping those who are the future to think about these things. Can you just kind of give us a plug? Or what are your ideas for EM weekly and to help our audience, tune in essentially?
Guest: Dan Scott (9m 48s):
Sure. So with EM student, my goal ultimately was to drive not only just the student, but also the current practitioner to learn more, to be a continual learner, always looking to make themselves better when it comes to what we do, how will we do it, and the avenues in which we can do it, and what tools are available to us who don’t need it. As a student myself, I'm a lifelong learner. I'm going to be a continual learner for as long as I can learn, as long as my mind will allow me to. But ultimately what we see is that emergency management touches, as you said, so many different avenues, you touch everything, right? As a student myself, I wanted to reach out to those that are teaching emergency management and the levels that we don't think about using IT right? Information technology in an emergency management future and how we can use that and apply it to emergency management theory into practice. What we don't see a lot of is that we don't see a lot of theory into actually taking action to make it happen. Right? We see a lot of, well, this is the back history and this is how it could get by, let's apply it. So my goal for emergency the emergency management student or EM student is that we're going to have professors and people who've written books, and basically the specialist in the field to come on and teach what it is that they teach in the classroom in a very short amount of time. Or give you information on where they can go find more learning or specific topics, whether that be a core capabilities, whether that be technology, whether it be communications, was that a very under underutilized skills and leadership.
Leadership is one of the most underutilized skills out there, and it is don't get me wrong, no mistake. Leadership is a skill, not everybody is. If you're not a born leader, you learn to be a leader and then you apply leadership and you learn and you correct, and you learn and you correct and you apply. These are the things that I want to bring to the EM student podcast, not only as a student myself, but also as someone that teaches this stuff. I teach this stuff, I teach emergency management. I want to know that the stuff I'm teaching is going to be applied and can be applied. There's a lot of stuff out there that they teach that cannot ever be applied and what it is that we do every day. One of the ways I equate it is we have, you know, you have EMS and you have fire and PD, right. They go to the school and they already get certified to do what they do. As soon as they get into the field for filtering and what do they tell, forget everything you've learned in the classroom, I'm going to show you how to stand on the street. Well, that's the way emergency management is too. You learn all this stuff when in real life, it's applied differently. I want to bring those two together. How do you learn it and then apply it in real life situations? so that it aids communities or the organization of which you represent.
Host: John Scardena (12m 35s):
Yeah, great call-outs because I think of my own education and getting to my first EM job, you know, how many years ago that was 10, 15 years ago. It's like, okay, can you write a hazard vulnerability assessment? And I said, what? Then like three months later, I said hey, we need to write emergency operations plan and an occupant emergency plan and I said, what are those? You know, but hey, you asked me about the Stafford Act. I'm all in, you know oh good Samaritan law. I knew about that kind of stuff, but putting like theory into practice and how to do the actual application. So I think it's kind of a fun idea to talk with people who are doing the theory and say, hey, that's really great and this is how you apply it in as an emergency manager. It really is as you called out, whether you're a college student or you've been practicing for a while and you just want to get to that next spring, be willing to be teachable. EM student is for those who are teachable, those who want to hear different perspectives and learning models and apply that learning model. I think that's ultimately the goal. You know, we did a plug for EM students, I think that the plug for the Readiness Lab is that we want to innovate the field of emergency management. I think a great way to innovate the field is to help two different sides of the house that usually don't talk together and bring them a lot closer. I think your podcast doing that is a great idea, just because we were changing this model for ourselves. Speaking of models, you know, we're thinking about innovation and we're thinking about these changes. One way you're attacking it is through bringing theory to practice and how they can collaborate rather than fight against each other. If you were going to talk to our audience, we have what, 20, 25,000 emergency managers listening to this episode. You're going to tell them, say, hey, I want you to change one thing. There's this one thing about emergency management that I want us to get better as a field, as what would you say? What would be your call-out?
Guest: Dan Scott (14m 47s):
My call-out would be, how we classify ourselves. This is a new project that I, just within the last two days, I've been thinking about. We have so many names for what we do so many names for what we are. We don't classify ourselves in a way that is universal. You know, when you think of a fire, you say you know what that is, right? When you think of law enforcement, you know what that is. You think of EMS or, or hospitals, you know what that is. When you look at emergency management or you say I'm an emergency manager, people don't know what that is. Sometimes you don't even know how to explain what you do.
Host: John Scardena (15m 26s):
I have a dissertation every time I want to explain that to someone.
Guest: Dan Scott (15m 27s):
We need to get better at that as practitioners, and as those that think about it and teach it, we need to know how to define emergency management and what it is that we do. We need to get on the same page and what we call ourselves, how we describe ourselves and what it is that we actually do when we apply. When we show up on scene, if we show up on scene and to get away from the fact that emergency management is not a first response profession, it is a secondary tertiary response. We are not first responders going licensed sirens to the scene, and we need to get away from that in the visual aspect.
Host: John Scardena (16m 2s):
I think the hardest part of trying to get on the same page is that if I ask a hundred, I mean, I say this all the time on a podcast, I know I never call out my guests because I never want to make my guests like one way or the other. But if I ask people, what is the definition of emergency management? Now I've called it out on my show. I believe my definition is simple and kind of straight forward, you know, emergency management is protection of life, property, and continuity of operations. But if I ask somebody else, they'll say, well, it's about community lifelines and another person will say, well, it's about the whole community approach and resiliency and the whole community approach. I don't even know what that means, you know? So we can't even standardize what we're talking about because the reality is our field, as much as we want to claim this or that, had a major shift after 9/11, especially after DHS 2004. When that came out like that was a restart button in my mind of what emergency management is. Therefore as a general field, firefighters have been around for hundreds of years, they've had that time to refine what their job is, and the skill sets. We are essentially, if you want to be really nice, maybe 120 years, if you think of the hurricane, Galveston, and Red Cross response.
Host: John Scardena (17m 33s):
But if you really want to look at it, we were talking under 20 years, new programs left and right, there's no standardization, there's no any of this stuff. I think that's again, a great call-out, that hey, let's figure this out. It's time for us to figure this out and not have to be confused when we try to explain to somebody what we do. If you're confused, you don't know very well.
Guest: Dan Scott (18m 2s):
A lot of it too, is how it's applied, where it's applied, where it was formed. If it was formed, is it a primary duty, a secondary, or tertiary duty, other duties as assigned is very common. Or, if it's just someone who says, yeah, that's what I do because it's a mandated compliance issue. But they never really touch it ultimately, but they're the person that's in the position. That's supposed to be directed with that responsibility. There's too much of that going on right now and we ultimately can correct it. It's going to take time. It's not going to happen tomorrow. You know, it's going to take time, but we all have to be on the same page before that change is going to come. A lot of that comes too with no… you know ultimately there's so many different names for what disaster management, crisis management, emergency management, emergency manager, specialist, merchandise coordinator, disaster specialist. I mean, it's all over the place. Then their level of responsibility goes anywhere from safety compliance, OSHA, NFPA all the way, you know, to emergency managers responsibility, to prepare and response. These are full-time positions that are all being crammed into one job, that nobody can do fully. That's where we keep getting caught up and that's where we're caught up. Especially when you have someone who's other duties as assigned, because there's no way that they can do it. You have those, you think, it's only preparation. So I run the CERT team and that's emergency manager. No, it's not. So there's so many ways in which we look at it. We have to narrow that down to where we are focused on what it is we do. Even though we touch all these different things, there is still a singular focus on what it is we do.
There's many ways you could describe it for emergency management. One of the ways I describe it, emergency management is the road and then you have all of these lanes on the road, on the highway. We are trying to keep everybody going in the right direction, the same direction at various speeds and keeping them for going out of their lane. There are merging, there's going off. We keep everybody on the right place, moving forward, we're support and coordination. We keep people driving forward, right? There are two ways to a highway, but we keep them going, the ways they need to go in the lanes that they needed to be, and we help drive that forward. That's how I describe it the most. But they think, well, you know, you're the quarterback in the game. No, I'm the coach on the sideline. You know, all the directions of people to do. If you want to go that way and have a sports analogy, we're not the quarterback, we're the coach on the sideline. We know all the positions, we know what they're supposed to do. We help them do that. We'd call it, we call it on the sideline. But then some think you're the IC. We're not the IC. We play that role occasionally, but we are not incident commander.
We're the guy on the road driving for that coordination. That's one of the areas in which we just need to get on the same page, bring our focus down, but we're so all over the place, and it's not anybody’s fault necessarily just because of the way they're applied and where they're applied. Again, we just need to keep moving the ball forward. We're going to get there. It's not going to happen as soon as we would like it. Definitely not as soon as I'd like it to be there. You know, I'm very passionate about emergency management. One of the things that I tell people is that emergency management, generally, if you're not passionate about emergency management, then you're not doing it right. I love what I do. I love being an emergency manager. I don't necessarily like where I'm doing it, but I love emergency management and if you love emergency management, you should do the job correctly where no matter where you're at.
Host: John Scardena (21m 28s):
Yeah. You're talking about a response and you're talking about quarterback versus coach, and you're talking about these different concepts. That is definitely a very popular thing. I have guests come on the show and some guests are very passionate about, they only do response, and some are very passionate that they don't do response, and who's right. From this guy who gets to interview a bunch of really great minds. My thought is you're all wrong and you're all right, because maybe I should say the other way around to make people feel better. But the reality is it's emergency management. I don't want to be the guy known as the guy, as you called out, sitting in a desk, writing a plan that no one ever reads, but that's not the goal. That goal is supporting life, saving life, sustaining operations. 99% of what you should do is in blue sky so that you don't have a gray sky. So when gray sky happens, it's it's as short as humanly possible. The reality is not only are we the coach, but we're writing up the playbook. We're the analyst upstairs watching the game, we're the coach, we're the sub in the game, you know, we're kind of all parts. But the reality is, our real job is whoever has the football, we are the group moving all the debris out of their way to be able to get that football down the field. It's an ironic term because we say football for a nuke, so we're not trying to move nukes, but we're trying to understand. I love the idea of a coach knowing all the different players. Yes, an emergency manager must know all the different players, but one big gripe I have with the five areas of preparedness is you don't prepare to respond. You actually respond. You don't prepare to recover, you actually recover. So we have to get this mindset, as you're saying, most of the time we need to focus on the blue sky stuff so we don't have the gray. Just reiterating. But I think they are great call-outs and I think these high level discussions have to happen. Again, I'm going to do a nice big plug for your show is your show. You’re show will talk about people who are arguing on those different perspectives, and you'll say, hey, well, this is what we actually do in practice. How do you make that fit? And I'm excited for the 2022 season. I'm going to call it, you're getting a football analogy for EM student and for you to run with it even harder and to do great things there. I want to thank you again, Dan, for coming on my show, kind of a fun conversation to talk about your road analogy, how we can make the rubber hit the road. Too many puns, but.
Guest: Dan Scott (24m 35s):
Really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me and bringing me on, and hopefully we can do it again soon..
Host: John Scardena (24m 39s):
Absolutely. So again, if you like this show, we always shameless plug, give us a five star rating and subscribe. If you have a question for Dan Scott, the easiest thing to do is actually start following EM student because they'll probably answer it on one of the shows. But you can also reach out and ask a question on one of the social media channels for the Disaster Tough podcast. We're trying to build disaster tough communities. We want people to be better and the way to be better as blue sky as Dan's calling out some great thoughts there again, and we'll see you next week.