Episode #29: Safeguarding livelihoods and services after disasters

Renae Hanvin

David is a founding partner of Response and Recovery Aotearoa New Zealand which provides emergency management leadership training throughout New Zealand on behalf of the National Emergency Management Agency. David is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security Studies at Charles Sturt University. David’s company Crisis Management Australia provides a range of emergency management advice to jurisdictions across Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific and Europe.

David previously regulated the NSW mining industry for emergency preparedness and managed Sydney Water’s Emergency Management and Counter Terrorism Programs. He served as a member of the Australian Critical Infrastructure Advisory Council for 14 years.

David is a volunteer member of the Resilient Ready advisory committee and works as a delivery partner on projects including Council disaster event reviews.

David Parsons

Good day, Renae. Thanks for having me on your program.

Renae Hanvin

1. Now let’s start with David as a volunteer member of my advisory committee you’ve been part of the C2C journey, which is now Resilient Ready? What do you think is the most important part of what through Resilient Ready, we are aiming to achieve?

David Parsons

The principal goal is to help Australian businesses be better so when there is a disaster they pull through, thrive and prosper from that disaster moving, moving forward. And to do that, we need to build mindsets and capabilities and ways of thinking and tools that help people do that. We know a lot about the disasters and we know a lot about what makes businesses more successful, during a post-disaster. So it really is about building capability, building strengths that help people keep on going and keep on thriving.

Renae Hanvin

And I’ve been so grateful to have you on the advisory committee because obviously you are an emergency management and a crisis management expert, and I think there’s not a lot of people in the sector, I think, who gets businesses as that stakeholder group that you know, is important.

2. And I guess why do you think now’s the right time to build resilience and readiness in all types of businesses? Because when we use the term business, when we mean micro and small businesses and large and medium-sized corporates, but also not-for-profits and government entities of businesses. So why do you think now’s the right time to build resilience and readiness in all types of businesses so we can safeguard livelihoods and services? 

David Parsons

Look for the last decade now, we’ve heard more and more the term VUCA which is volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and last one at which is ambiguity being talked about and the world of high turbulence because of a whole range factors. We’ve seen the turbulence from the pandemic, which has sort of a long way to go before it becomes history to severe weather events, whether it be big bushfires between 2020, the major flood events across Eastern Australia just in the last couple of years, the whole supply chain issue with the global shipping crisis we’re currently seeing with the disruption of suppliers coming out of places like China and the whole geopolitical risk that’s sitting in the South China Sea. So what we just see is there’s back-to-back events where the ability to forecast effectively even weeks ahead is so hard because of the turbulence and there’s no sign that’s going to ease up.

So what we just have to be saying to ourselves is we are living in a cycle in history where uncertainty is, is the norm and therefore the way you get through those periods of uncertainty is being resilient. A business who’s ready for whatever is thrown at us, and who knows what three months or six months holds. So I think that’s our challenge, just saying to ourselves, yes, we’re in turbulent times, it’s not going away. There’s lots of uncertainty, so let’s be ready for it. Let’s, let’s make it good for us. 

Renae Hanvin

And can you just, sorry, you said an acronym right at the start, but I didn’t quite get, can you just tell what that? 

David Parsons

Yeah, it’s actually a military term. It’s used a lot these days, which is volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and finally ambiguity. And it’s really just saying that our ability to forecast forward is so poor because the amount of turbulence happening through the whole of society, whether it be, you know, supply chains, power supplies, natural resources, the weather just goes on and on. So, so no one really knows what the water will be like in even 12 month’s time without worrying about in two years’ time. So, in this highly turbulent times, it’s about having the skillset that help people survive turbulence, and that those skill sets around forecasting and readiness, all the things that are embedded in the programs that you run, Renae. 

Renae Hanvin

And I think too, I guess, you know, for me, what’s really starting to transition is the word livelihood. So I presented on the Gold Coast a couple of weeks ago where we actually launched Resilient Ready, and I heard the term used by others and I talked about it because whilst the room was, you know, there was a lot of council people and state government and community people, but unless you have a huge trust fund from your family, then you have to earn a livelihood. So you earn a livelihood by working for a business. Again, whether that’s a for-profit and not-for-profit or government entity. So if we don’t have businesses that can thrive through disasters, then we lose livelihoods. And that has, I guess, direct and indirect consequences of unemployment and mental health for people, you know, who’ve like myself, who’ve put their heart and soul into setting up businesses and that then alludes into homelessness and domestic violence, et cetera. So I think having those, and you know, if not for-profits can’t operate, then, they are already servicing those most vulnerable in the communities and, and that capacity to serve them stops too. So, you are having a double effect of I guess very true negative impact in communities.

3. Now, you and I often talk about how in Canada they put the same focus to getting businesses back up and running as quickly as possible following a disaster like in Australia we do, when it comes to getting kids back at school. Now, do you think it’s time Australia follows Canada’s lead and puts a greater focus on prioritising businesses reopening? 

David Parsons

Yeah, look, the example coming here is the Calgary floods a few years ago now, and they had a one in 200-year flood event. So it’s a quite a large flood event, flooded many, many hundreds of homes, many, many hundreds of workplaces. And there was a conscious decision taken by the leadership team in that flood event to help people get back in their homes, but to help people get back into their businesses. And it was a very big flood event. And what was interesting, the study showed that because of the support given to, given to small to medium scale businesses that run the floodplain, they had a very small loss of businesses. In fact, the majority of the businesses reopened. And that was ‘because they were given support throughout and they were given support to clean the business out.

They were given support to get organised. And of course, the big oil companies there were very impressed with this because in the supply chain, those small businesses supply medium scale businesses who they then supply the big corporates there and they realised that keeping the small businesses going was just as critical for the big businesses too. So it was recognised that the leadership team in the floods in Calgary, were held up as an example of how to get it right, that to recognise that a community is people living in homes, there’s also people going to work producing products and services supporting other businesses. And seeing that integrated network as an integrated group of entities of homes and business, et cetera, meant that the community as a whole were able to recover from those floods in an effective way and to keep going.

And this is important. So I think there’s a challenge for us that we see getting people’s homes back in their homes as important. But one of the challenges is people go back to a home that’s actually been flooded. They’ve got a lot of costs ahead of them. So if they haven’t got a job because we didn’t help the business restart, we’ve let everyone down and we need to think in a more holistic way about how all that works and, and to try and see it as an integrated system of helping not just one aspect of the community, but all aspects get back on their feet. 

Renae Hanvin

A hundred percent. And I think too, again, you know, we’ve recently gone through a rebrand from corporate2community to Resilient Ready and you know, yourself and, Anne Massey and Kate Carnell and Daniel Aldrich have provided such great advisory support for this transition. But it comes because there’s a need, because, you know I get asked to consult and provide advice on various government strategies, et cetera. And I remember one that was only about three months ago, and it was the process of a person going through a bushfire kind of impact and recovery scenario. And I listened and I was like, well, that, that’s great. That’s very interesting, but where’s the part where they go to work or open up their shop? And the response was, oh no, we are not looking at that.

And I can’t, I think there’s a long way to go that hopefully we can drive that change around. You have to include people’s livelihoods because again, if that business doesn’t open whether they own it or whether they work in it, there is no livelihood coming into that community and into that person for rent payments or food or, you know, so it it has, it’s a big problem. Yeah. And I think we talk a lot about obviously 97% of businesses are small businesses. So when we talk businesses, we’re not talking about the big profit making, you know, corporates. I mean, they obviously exist, but, you know 97% are small businesses that have been impacted, and if they’re not up and running within five days, they are gone within two years. So the statistics are very clear in telling us globally that we need to be doing more to help keep businesses in business. And I think government of all the stakeholders needs to better understand the vital need to build the capabilities, because otherwise they’re going to be on unemployment et cetera. 

David Parsons

What see Renae is, is that has both a physical and mental health impact, and those are high costs for the community. So they’re often hidden costs because they don’t really tend to segregate those out and see those as cost of the disaster. They’d be ongoing costs within the community. 

Renae Hanvin

Yeah, a hundred percent. 

David Parsons

Can be quite a big cost. So if we actually see that whole ecosystem of family, home, business work, that whole ecosystem needs to be supported to become a functioning ecosystem, a healthy ecosystem again. 

Renae Hanvin

Definitely and hopefully we’re talking to some academics and what not around potentially looking into some research around that, because I think it’s fundamental and again, it’s just not even on the radar, which it has to be.

4. Now working in crisis management, what do you see that best gets communities ahead of future disasters?

David Parsons

There’s some well researched and documented things here. First of all, networks, people are well networked. They know who to talk to, to get information, to get support. Those networks share information about threats and hazards and about solutions. So, for small businesses, this can be belonging to the local chamber of commerce going to breakfast functions with other members of the business community, getting their networks in place. What we know is that again to be crisis ready means you are proactive and you are forward-leaning. So they’re proactive in terms of identifying developing threats, identifying developing hazards, whether it be a cyclone season, a flood season, a bushfire period. There’s indicators of increasing risk doesn’t just suddenly happen. So they’re practically seeing those increasing risks and therefore they’re able to take proactive actions to be ready for that risk when it actually comes.

So that whole thing about being forward leaning, that just means that we’re taking readiness actions. We don’t wait to be get hit by the hazard. We’re actually ready for it when it actually comes. We also see that in those communities that they have leaders, and it’s not usually just one leader. It’s a band of leaders from all parts of the community who, when something happens, band together quickly or interconnect with each other to provide this stronger leadership capability, sort of admit that there’s this one person leads. But what you usually find is there is this network of people who, in their part of the community, in their demographic, in their social structures or in their business area step up and provide that central hub of guidance to others. And one of our tricks in any community is knowing who those are, the influencers, and getting those influencers connected to make a more powerful, if you like, or a more energized group of leaders who can lift that whole community and drive it forward. And that’s a challenge. And, and certainly for most Australian communities, there’s a local emergency management officer or there’s a local disaster planning person. I can go to Townsville, I can go to Rockhampton, I can go to the Blue Mountains. They all have these people and they should be connected to all of these network leaders too. So, these sort of things make a big difference. 

Renae Hanvin

And I think Daniel Aldrich’s work is very much in this space around connected communities are more resilient than affluent communities, which always sticks with me. So you don’t need to have money to have connections. UI think too David, as you know, we’ve recently published a white paper alongside Business BM as one of the projects that we’re delivering in the Blue Mountains, where we did some research into the business community and what they thought about networks. And it was quite interesting. I’m going to say there’s an area of opportunity which we are activating in the sense that they don’t really understand why businesses should network or what the benefits are, or even how to network, I guess. There’s that, you know, old school, oh no, they’re the competition I’m not gonna network with them. But at the end of the day, in this current era of, you know, various disasters that you alluded to before there is so much benefit in connecting with the businesses next door and the the same type of business around the corner because you might need to work together on your supply chain. 

Renae Hanvin

So you might be able to work together to get procurements from councils or governments that you couldn’t do by your own. So I think that business community networks is a really key part of community resilience and definitely helps in that recovery process as well. 

David Parsons

And what’s interesting, if you look at results from Griffith University on the difference between middle managers and senior executives in large corporations one of the differences is the senior executives see their networks as a critical business tool. And it’s a whole pot of attributes they see in those networks. One is they see them as an intelligence source. They find out things through those networks. They see those networks as a peer support network. They’ve got people they can contact to get ideas, to get solutions. They see that that network as a very valuable tool set. And if you think about people who want to change things around the society, they’ll start to gather people around them with similar ideas. They start to build an actual momentum of a group which is more influential than an actual individual. So, these networks are highly valuable and for a whole range of reasons. 

Renae Hanvin

5. Now, I was going to ask you what role businesses play in resilience and recovery, but I think we’ve kind of already covered that a little bit in the conversations that we’ve had. 

David Parsons

Look, obviously if we’ve already talked about those businesses provide employment, provides physical and mental health benefits noted about that. I also know their community, the local taxi driver knows the people when they get out of their house once a week to go shopping or once a fortnight who are housebound any other time. If you talk to local chemists, they know the people who don’t go and see doctors. So in our community, those business owners know a lot about those people that are their regular customers, and that knowledge in their recovery process helps us to know who we might need provide assistance to, helps us know what’s the true nature of the community, that we’re actually serving. And lot of that knowledge is embedded in those individual business owners. If it’s a local vet, they’ve got so much knowledge about that community, different segments and sectors of that community. 

Renae Hanvin

Yeah, a hundred percent. Thank you. And thank you for acknowledging that and including that because I agree and I think the chemists, the hairdressers, you know, you shouldn’t go into a community and not work with and and learn from the people in that community. I mean, you know, there’s the seagull kind of sign that I guess is everywhere at the moment about coming into a community and telling them how to do things. And I think too, it’s important to recognise that business people are often wearing multiple hats. So they might be the captain of the local fire brigade or in the SES – I know a lot of myteam at Resilient Ready have community service roles as well. And I also know of small businesses in little communities that were impacted by the bush fires. 

Renae Hanvin

The business almost went under because the owner of that business was actually out fighting fires for not just his community, but the one down the road as well. So businesses as an entity, but also business people, they just play such a big role in communities in the resilience and the recovery process as well.

6. Now, as you know, we are actively delivering projects in Australian communities through Resilient Ready that have been impacted by various and multiple disasters. We have a micro learning formats which are all about helping business people understand, anticipate, and reduce negative risks in a five minute format. So again, really short snippets. So, David, you’re an expert in the risk space and you’ve written multiple handbooks, et cetera. So how can people in business and remember businesses include not-for-profits and government entities? How can they better anticipate their risks? 

David Parsons

Yeah, look, there’s a couple of ways. First of all, it’s about knowing the hazards in the area in which you operate. Uh, if I operated in a large bushfire area, knowing which direction the fires come from, we know for example, in terms of fires, we know when the high risk part of the day is we know when the most property losses occur, all that knowledge is out there. So it’s really about talking to people who can actually tell you that. Secondly, that’s about being environmentally aware of the developing threats. So this is everything from looking at the weather forecast for the next few days on a phone app, looking at the fire weather index, for example. And again can be, can be done on an app.

All the states and territories have quite good apps with their fire services, et cetera. So, looking at what are the hazards, and that includes understanding what your supply chain is. So next time t that delivery driver delivers that big box of product for you, just ask them where does this come from? Where do you pick it up from? Or do you know where it actually goes to before you pick it up? Are there multiple centers it gets to, to get to that person? Try and understand how that product and services get to you. What are the vulnerable points in that actual supply chain? And talk to people. So whether it’s, whether you’re in a area that’s got a fire service or it’s got an SES service because it’s got cyclones or floods, they like being asked, can you come and talk to us?

So if I belong to a chamber of commerce in my local community, I’d be asking those people come and explain how does this work and how do you prioritise things and do you think about business? You need to engage and talk to people. So I think understanding of risks is really taking the time to ask questions, doing a little bit of research, learning from the past. There’s in my own local government where I live, I choose to look on a history site on, on a website. And I’ve learned so much about hazards just from that, seeing past big fire events and past big snow events and all the other things that have happened. If you don’t have time to do that, get people in to talk and ask questions.

And if you’ve got that actual network, whether it be a small community where only there’s 20 businesses or 15 businesses, again, even if it’s just a breakfast function where the SES or the fire service come and talk to you for 25 minutes or 30 minutes, there’s lots to be learned. That makes you more able to see a developing risk, but more able to understand what’s happening around you. And if you can understand what’s happening around you, you’re much better able to make, you know, decisions and choices that benefit your own business. 

Renae Hanvin

That’s right. So I, I think if you understand the hazards and understand the risks, then you can look at how you can reduce or mitigate those negative risks, but also there could be some positive risks that bring big opportunities to your business as well. Now, my final question is always the same.