Welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head. I came in podcasts about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. Alright, welcome back to the Ottawa studios.
Inside My Canoe Head, listen, thanks for joining us this week. We are talking about the art of planning. So if you think about it in our lives, like why do we plan? Why do we plan things and events, etc?
It's a generalistic principle of problem solving. Now, it doesn't matter whether you're a professional emergency management field, you're a professional public service, you're a member of a military, or law and order person, or you're just a really incredible individual living an awesome life in this world. We all face problems in life. The art of planning is a skill set that allows you to find the best possible solution to a question or problem you're facing.
And we do it to answer questions that are not necessarily intuitive. Now, don't get me wrong, whether I have a Harvey's or a W-Burger is a question to be answered, but it probably doesn't require some type of formal intuitive process that we're going to deliberately go through. So logically speaking, this is what we refer to as more of the complex problems that we face in life. And planning by definition is a very formal and deliberate process.
It has a set of logical steps to follow. Now, it goes by a number of names. Now, within the military field, the American military calls there the MDMP. In the Canadian military, they call it the OPP.
In the emergency management field, they have a planning process within the incident command system, management system. There's some great books like Sung-Zoo's Art of War, and a whole bunch of other books that talk about planning processes. Each one of them have logical steps contained within them that generalistically address all of the necessary elements of the planning process. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I did 28 years in the Canadian Army, that their planning process is the best, or that the Americans MDMP nailed it.
I mean, I've done deep analysis of the ICS, IMS planning process in emergency management. There's nothing wrong with it. Sure, each one has flaws that could be addressed and improve it. Or for example, I'm very much used to and accustomed to a planning process because I lived through it and had to use it throughout my entire professional career.
I'm obviously inherently biased that that's a better system, but on face value, it's not a better system, and neither is the ICS a better system in emergency management. It just happens to be the system that used, and they're not fault worthy. We're not here to take one down, but we're to say that they're all out there. But it's an art.
It's an art. It's a skill that some incredibly talented people possess, inquisitive minds, thought-provoking individuals that are able to initiate grand and glorious and deep discussions on important issues we face are generally the type of people that are very, very good in the art of planning bias. We all have bias. There's bias that exists in all the things we do, and most of that is learn through life experiences, or from what I've always said on this podcast is your theoretical framework as an individual, your worldview, your orientation, you create and maintain bias.
The thing with planning though is the really, really inquisitive, incredible people who are excellent at planning are able to identify their bias, set it aside, and go through a deliberate process that comes up with an answer that is the most appropriate, but not one that they would have inherently picked at the beginning. Creative, charismatic people, because unless you're going to plan on your own in the corner, this is very much a collective process that you're going to do, especially when we talk about the purpose of this podcast is individual and family emergency preparedness. When you're developing and planning a family preparedness plan, you don't do this in isolation. You might do some framework of it, but when you get down to the detailed questions, I mean, you're not going to deliver a plan to your family.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, I am in charge, and here's the family plan. For the love of Lord, no, if you want anybody to take a board and inherently believe in the process and see themselves in the plan, then those individuals are going to probably want to have some form of involvement in its creation. So we have a set of steps. So today, what I'm going to go through is the general steps that are present in each one of these planning processes.
It's inherently here to give you an idea about the formal nature of the art of planning and how and when we talk about the 12th step of emergency preparedness planning that we have here at Inside My Canoe Head, dozens of previous episodes on this at various different stages. It's all about following a general process, and we're just here to remind you of it and basically tweak a few things in your head. Hopefully to entertain it, because if you're not entertained, what's the point of hanging out with us? So what we're looking at here is the first part of any planning process is the question.
Now in the military, it's called mission analysis, but let's try to keep a civilian space to this. The question you're trying to answer, so problems present themselves generally in the form of a question. What am I to do? Where am I to go on vacation?
What supplies do I need to buy? What how should I buy? What new car? I mean, we could go on and on.
So it's always best to frame what you're trying to address in a question. But this isn't an, this is probably one of the longest steps. It may seem simplistic, but this is where a lot of the folly starts. Exactly what are you trying to solve specifically and exactly?
And I say that over again, because sometimes people have a difficulty in expressing it. So what we do in the military side that I think informs civilian planning very, very well is think of it in effects. What are the effects that you want the result to have? So we would say, for example, in the military, we want to answer a question, we want to take town A, right?
The effect is we no longer want the enemy to possess parts or occupy parts of town A. Or I want to win the voting in this district of my writing so that I can become elected. The effect is best expressed. And then you try to address that effect.
So if you have a problem answering the question, if it's a very binary question, a yes or a no, a lot of times you're not going to need a deliberate planning process, you're just going to need some deep considerate thought. More more so the issues for planning processes are questions that have many possible answers, some of which you have not identified that may come up in your decision making process. So think of it in the effect that you want to have, but be very careful. Because if you if you present the wrong question, you're going to get the wrong answer.
And if you don't frame that question correctly, you're going down that rabbit hole, you're going down that tunnel, you're chasing all kinds of variables, and you're going to answer the wrong question. Your answer may be incredibly correct, well thought out, well defended, and brilliant. But the answer is to the wrong question. And you're still at the same place you were.
The second part in the military is called intelligence preparation of the battle space. But in civilian side, we can look at as information gathering. What do I need to know in order to have the information at my hand to answer the question? So in science, we refer to this as variables.
So the first thing that we always pick is the defendant variable and we do a scientific experiment. Dependent variable is what we want to examine what the effects on X. So that's our dependent variable. What are we checking?
Voting patterns, personal reactions, preparedness levels. Like we're going to talk about 75 things in the environment. And but the dependent variable is the family preparedness level. Does it go up?
Does it go down? It has a five step range? Where does it fall? The external variables are called independent variables.
These are all the things in the world that could affect this. So you want to gather information that can help you answer the question. In the military, it's also referred as situational awareness. Now in the military, we color code it.
Blue SA is your friendly forces. Red SA is your enemy forces. Green SA is your topography, the ground, the you know, everything about the area. If it's a city or anything, it's all of the infrastructure, the weather, everything that happens.
White SA is the people that's on the ground, the civilian, the population. So you understand if you're answering a question that's not a military attack plan, you think about all of the things in the environment, all of the things that might affect your question, might provide you the information that you need to know to answer the question. For example, are if you're trying to understand what are the threats to my home. So you might think of the military would look at the essays.
You might look at what are the big picture hazards. So we go through, we gather all the information on earthquake hazard. We gather all the information on flooding hazard. We gather all the information on wildfire hazard.
We gather all the information on industrial level hazards that you may face. We gather all the information on people, crowd and security threat. You see what I mean about figuring out all of the variables that could affect your decision. And Donald Rumsfeld, Garrest, his soul had a great saying, he was very famous for this.
Know what you know. Know what you don't know. So we have the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns of those variables you just are completely unaware of. And those are the ones that sometimes keep you up at night.
But you're thinking about what do I know that I don't know. And then you go find that information. So you're gathering a whole bunch of external information, answering a whole bunch of questions about that external information and bringing this all to the table to prepare yourself to do the next step, which can generally be called options analysis in the military. It's called Coa Development, course of action development.
It's basically saying the ways to address the question. What are the different ways that I could answer the question? And remember, if we framed our question and planning about the effects we wish to happen on site or at the time of the question, now we're going to look at what are the different options available that will create that set of effects on the ground that I'm looking at. The first stage to it is developing, right?
So this is where you think, and this is where your creative, charismatic, inquisitive individuals are really, really good at this because your brain's normal with a bunch of people. One of the ways we can address it. So if you're looking at the different ways of food preparation, post utility, so if all of your utilities are cut off in your home, how are you going to create food? Well, you could have a wood stove, but realistically, wood stove is an option.
But are you going to install a wood stove in a townhouse where your city has two parts per million maximum solids in smoke out of a wood stove? And that's going to be incredibly difficult. So now your thought, what are all the really cool ways or interesting ways? Think about big spectrum.
How can I cook food? You might go just turn on the stove. But remember, we're talking about, we made the question maybe, how do I cook food after all of the utilities are gone? Well, I can start a fire in my backyard.
I need a source of heat to cook. Great. What are the different sorts of heat that are available? I can have gas.
I can have electricity. Well, maybe you have a battery powered stove burner. Great. That's a way.
And you see how you use inquisitive, interesting, incredible thought progress and you develop all of, no matter, and this is the point, you're not excluding anything at this point. It doesn't matter how freaking crazy the answer to the question right now is. You're simply developing the options to answer the question. The effect maybe I want to cook food without any utilities in my house.
What are all the possible ways I could do that? These are options development. Now we're going to evaluate them all. Now, once we've laid out your 22 or 21 or 17, whatever they are, different ways of develop, we're going to answer, we're going to brutally and brutally evaluate, does this answer the question?
Does this option analysis answer the question? If the question was, how do I cook food? Does this cook food? And you're brutal.
Yes, or no, it doesn't. You exclude them. Now what you have is a set of options that you've come up with and thought about and basically develop, not in grave detail, but basically develop that answer your question. And now what you're going to do is you're going to have a look at to see a comparison.
Everything is better than something else and something else is better than this. And that simply means that you're going to compare and contrast. Now, in the military, we would conduct a war game. So we would take our options of taking this town.
And we would play, we would have an intelligence officer there who would play the enemy. He understands the enemy inside and out and backwards. And I would play the good guys. And I would say my first action is this.
He would say the enemy is likely to counter with this. And we would play the war game each analysis out and have a little war game and see what the likely outcome of each of the possible options are. And then we would weigh those options. But if you're answering your question about what to cook, you're now going to start comparing them.
What's easier? What costs less money? What matters? What is more effective and efficient?
And those are the two biggest ways you can come up with a whole thing. Speed matters, freedom matters, simplicity matters. Listen, in options analysis, I get right down to is it effective and is it efficient? Effective is how well does it answer the question?
Does it answer the question? So everything got through the evaluation stage and you answered the effective. Each one of the things options analysis that are in front of you are now effective because they'll actually answer the question. So they're all effective.
So now you're going to do our efficient and efficient is generally best thought of as how well does it use the resources? How many resources does it consume? How easy is it for me to do? Is it efficient?
I have a limited set of resources, money, time, power, whatever it may be. How does this use it? Is it efficient? And so then what I do is I analyze them, compare them against what efficiency they have.
And then I rank them and you have to rank them, you know, to you certain things are going to be more important. And this is why I don't set out a list of things and why I use efficiency. So for you based upon your individual situation, I've got five options to answer the question here. Rank them inefficiency.
What is the easiest and simplistic and least amount of resources for you to do becomes number one and you go down, you take a second thought, you look at the list, do I have it right? And then one of the most important things people never do in problem solving and the heart of planning is you actually have to make a decision, right? And this is the thing governments are wonderful. They don't make decisions.
They do huge planning evolutions. They have great meetings and huge stakeholder engagement sessions too. You know, because they want the look of look, we're talking about it, look at all the wonderful things we're doing and we're engaging everybody. But if you don't make a decision, all of that other crap is pointless.
Best possible outcome. And you have evaluated it, you look at it and you make the decision, the best of the available options. Remember, the option you really, really want may simply not be available to you. You don't have the resources, you can't get it, you can't have it.
So you have to pick from the best available, which means effective and efficient is done. Now you got to implement it. You have to implement and I get to this and this is not simplistic because my, a good portion of my education is in public policy, right? And a lot of policy failures happen in implementation.
We have a great question. We have a great analysis. We have a fantastic solution. But the policy fails based upon an implementation failure because the implementation plan was weak, ill conceived and improperly resourced.
In other words, I know what the problem is. I know exactly what I need to do to fix it. But I'm going to put it over a 10 year span and put a little bit of money and time behind it to make it look like I'm doing something and this is famous for governments of all stripes. But they're not actually going to fix it because they don't want to put the resources into it.
So their policy is beautiful, sounds good, great announcements, all kinds of fanfare, lecters, everybody gets their Starbucks and pat each other on the back. But the policy inflammation is brutally under resourced and it never happens. So in your implementation plan, so you're gone through this whole thing, you found the most efficient and effective way to cook, yet you don't go out and buy enough fuel, right? That's an implementation failure because you found the right plan, you found the most efficient plan, you agree that this is the way to do it and then you fail to implement it, you either fail to do it or you fail to get the resources necessary to execute it.
The last part of planning that people are usually exceptionally poor at is evaluation, right? So evaluation is a very, very important stage in the army, they call it lesson learned, but you evaluate the implementation of development, decision and implementation of a public policy measure goes into place and we evaluate it was an effective, did it actually address the problem? We went through the whole process and we believe this would actually be effective and efficient at addressing the problem we faced was it? And a lot of times people and most of listen, I'm talking about human beings, you and I right here, right today, listening to this, you know, are you a good self critique, are you willing to look yourself in the mirror and say, dude, you thought about that?
That sounded like a good idea, but in the end, man, that sucked. That was not the right course of action. The planning worked well, but it turned out in the end, from some unknown thing, and we call those calm founding variables in science. And it basically, you just you just weren't aware that this wouldn't work.
There were things that you either didn't consider, or as Donald Rumsfeld said, you're unknown unknowns that you were unaware of. So the point is this, are you great critique? Are you willing to look yourself in the mirror and say, no, dude, that was wrong? We have to restart because if you're not self critical and you're not very good at that, then you're not a very good evaluator because you're not able to look at something you did and say it's wrong.
If you run an emergency management process right now, there's a whole bunch of professionals in emergency management conducting some type of evaluation process on their pandemic response. If these individuals are not willing to call themselves a failure, if they failed, what they're trying to do is find the measurement of success they had, and how we can improve it, then they're going to fail. They're going to fail because what they're doing is they're trying to seek out justification from the evidence for the actions they took, instead of taking a hard look at it. A great leader is able to look himself or herself in the mirror and is able to look at their subordinates and their team members and say, I failed.
I thought through this process, I thought we were doing it correctly. I failed. I didn't implement it properly. My plan didn't work.
Ownership is huge. If you're somebody who loves to find somebody else's at fault for your failures, then again, you are going to be an exceptionally poor planner. If you can't accept the fact that you did everything right and it turned pear shape and turned into a bucket of turd, and therefore it was something you missed or something you didn't do, yet you're going to go out there and you're going to find the victimhood idea and you're going to find a whole load of people and circumstances to blame this on. My plan was great, but so and so affected.
I didn't consider screwed it up. It would have worked, but it was out of my control. If I had to do it again, I'd do it the same. If you're not the inquisitive, thought-provoking, creative, charismatic individual that has such a high level of self-confidence that you're willing to knock yourself down when you fail, you're going to be a poor planner.
Think about the art of planning as a skill set that you learn and you become intuitively better at it. It is planning has a very, very deliberate and formal process and it's there to ensure that you don't miss something, that you don't leave a step out and forget to do something, but it is very creative. You stay within the process, but you're very creative, you're very thoughtful, very intuitive, inquiring minded individuals, because a whole bunch of things that can come up in discussion, you allow thought, you do a lot of brainstorming, but always, always remember the key parts of the process. The first and most important thing, and I'll repeat it ad nauseam is answer the question.
Make sure you develop the right question. What are you actually doing this planning process to solve? What are the effects that you want to have when you're done? Like seriously take the time on that, because you may come out with a brilliant plan and I said it through this podcast and I'll say it again, you may come with a brilliant answer to the wrong question.
That is a lot of wasted time and hours. So think about it, understand the process that may be in place for where you are. So if you're an emergency manager, you work in the emergency management field and ICS IMS has been adopted by your agency organization, fantastic. I've got nothing against ICS.
I don't work in it. It's not my gig. I'm a researcher that evaluates things like ICS, but understand it, learn it, learn its nuances, learn from people who have used the tool for a long time, because remember, any of these formal processes are just that. They are tools that help you answer question.
They are not religious doctrine that must never be broken, but they are tools that help enhance the process. These tools have been developed and they're continually being developed and evaluated and modernized and changed and governance structures altered. And it's all done in a way to help people using the tool. And this is why you see both ICS, Canada, FEMA and other organizations have incredibly detailed formal books and literature and courses on planning with an ICS.
And because it's a tool and when you really, really learn to use the tool, you use the tool. You're not governed by the tool. And I hope you understand the difference between those two. So thank you very much for taking this time out of your day.
This is the 99th episode of Inside My Canoe Head. On Thursday, in two days, we will be releasing the 100th episode of Inside My Canoe Head, a little reflective time on what it was like to be a podcaster to start something. And if you're inclined, we're going to be live on Instagram at 1900 Eastern Hours to talk live with anybody who wants to drop by about Inside My Canoe Head, the philosophy and everything behind it. So thank you very much for being a supporter.
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