Episode #45: Leading in Uncertainty: why risk leadership needs to change

After leaving the police (after 30 years) Dave established a consultancy business that specialises in a number of areas.

David has been a consultant to the NSW and ACT Governments on Investigations, Policy Development and Emergency Management in the areas of mining and transport (Sydney Metro-formally North West Rail Link).

In 2015 David was appointed by the State Emergency Management Committee as the facilitator for the Greater Sydney Mass Care Exercise. In June 2016, appointed as the NSW State Recovery Coordinator for the East Coast Low and in September 2016 as the Regional Recovery Coordinator for the Central Western floods. In 2017, David was appointed by the NSW Government to the NSW Energy Security Taskforce.

State Emergency Management Committee (Exercise Lumen Tenebris) 2018 – largest public/private partnership exercise conducted NSW. 2018 facilitation of NSW Health Influenza Pandemic Exercise and ANSTO Health Supply Workshop. 2019 ANSTO (Executive mentoring), 2019 State Emergency Management Committee Catastrophic Flood Exercise (4 months planning & facilitation).

I’d like to talk about where we met, and I haven’t met Dave. I’m going to be honest. I literally reached out to him through LinkedIn because I was asking a few people about who would be good to chat with. And he responded and said, yes. So we’re actually meeting online and kind of virtually in person for the first time.

So what do the investigations consistently show about why systems are failing under stress?

Dave Owens (05:05):

Look, they show that the warning signs were already there. The systems were in place, yet failure still happened. So you’ve got to look at, we don’t lack the frameworks. The frameworks are there.

Renae Hanvin (05:18):

Yeah, we’ve got a lot of those.

Dave Owens (05:20):

Yeah. We don’t lack the plans. Everybody has a plan. And we don’t actually lack investigations or inquiries. We keep doing inquiries time and time again. So what you’ve got to get back and look at from a different angle, which is you got to look at leadership works when the systems fail under stress. And that’s

Dave Owens (05:41):

What

Dave Owens (05:41):

Happens is with these inquiries, the systems fail under stress because they’re degraded, your system’s under pressure. So normally the inquiry will show a pattern of normalization of risk where the industry, the business, the agency, small failures are routine. They’re accepted. So risk becomes that background noise over there so that the time a crisis hits, the organization is already operating in that weakened state and that’s not good.

Now, can I ask you about the leadership gaps? One of the questions we’re sort of posing was the leadership gap exposed in emergencies and why do they keep repeating? So why do we keep having these gaps that we sort of repeat time and time again?

Dave Owens (10:24):

Yeah. Look, I think I’ve said you train managers, not leaders. You’ve got to train leaders. And it’s really hard because you want them to understand compliance, control, predictability and that, but you want them to think outside the square. You’ve basically got to give that team leader, whoever’s in charge, the incident controller, you’ve got to give them their head. You’ve got to have the faith in them and go, go and step back. Now, what a lot of people in authority have a problem in doing, executives and that is stepping back and letting those people do their job. It’s the hardest thing. They’ve got to have really good judgment. The leaders, I’ve said the courage, improvisation, and I mean good improvisation. I don’t just mean you make it up as you go, but the cycle repeats because inquiries that come don’t change the culture. What happens is you reduce the reports, recommend the reforms,

Speaker 1 (11:21):

And

Speaker 2 (11:21):

The deeper issue stays there, which is leadership is treated, it’s an individual trait the leader has, rather than a system capability. And you said it is, should the systems be built around the leader? Well, built around leadership skills and abilities, I would say definitely. And until leadership becomes embedded, strategic leadership becomes embedded structurally until it’s in disasters, those disasters will continue to repeat and change and be highlighted the cracks when these events occur. And it’s really hard.

how’s strategic leadership in risk and emergency management?

Speaker 1 (12:47):

I guess it needs to evolve from that tactical level as well so that we are building tactical incident responders or whatever who have leadership capabilities to then progress in that as we need them, I guess.

Speaker 2 (13:01):

I think it’s a bit more than that. I think you’ve got to link the academic knowledge with the lived experience. You’ve got to link the two of those because if you’re an academic, you can’t put it into play. And the majority, I shouldn’t say you can’t, but it’s about the 20th century assumptions that we’ve gone on. They don’t exist anymore. So what was once a stable threat? What was once linear escalation as it went across or commander control certainty? We don’t have that anymore. What we got today is, and you’ve said it, cascading disasters, you get disaster upon disaster upon disaster and each one impacts on the one that follows. You’ve got climate-driven extremes. So you’ve got this unprecedented each time an event occurs. It’s not actually unprecedented. The circumstances just change and it’s climate driven. You’ve got cyber and infrastructure interdependence, and that’s had a massive impact with the social trust breakdown.

Speaker 2 (14:02):

What I’m seeing versus what I’m being told is completely different because the messaging from your strategic leaders needs to be instantaneous. It needs to get out there, needs to inform the community why? Because if they don’t get it from you, they’ll get it from someone else. It’s as simple as that and misinformation during a crisis. I don’t know how many times that’s happened.

I always finish with asking what are the two things that you think need to be done differently in the disaster space or sector?

Dave Owens (19:37):

Look, I know we need compliance-based risk. I would never say you can’t do that. You need your documents, checklists, your audits. Absolutely. But you need this capability-based leadership. You have to change that. So actually measure your decision quality, leadership adaptability, your agency trust, and are you a learning culture? That’s the biggest one is, do you do that? Preparedness is leadership under pressure. Building learning systems, not inquiry cycles. It’s what you’ve got to do. So I’ve got our learning systems and you do after action reviews and all, but actually implement what you’re talking about. Otherwise, we’ll do disaster inquiry, recommendations, drift for a while, disaster inquiry recommendations. First thing I do when I have an inquiry and I’m there, I go, “Can you get me the previous four reports, please, because I want to see what was done and did they actually enact what the recommendations were?” Most times-

Renae Hanvin (20:41):

Well, that’s the problem of the repeating. I think too, we like to, I guess, embed being resilient and ready into business as usual or your normal everyday culture. So I think that’s really critical too. That’s probably a big learning opportunity or cultural opportunity for the sector as well.

Dave Owens (20:59):

Yeah, very much so. And

Renae Hanvin (21:00):

Do you have one more? Is there one other thing that you’d like to be done differently in the disaster space?

Dave Owens (21:05):

I think the continuing exercising in that uncertainty, having reality come in, and that’s really hard. And I don’t shy away. It’s expensive because you want to simulate the reality. You want to put people under pressure. You don’t want them just reading from a script. I would do, here’s my plan. You actually go, “Well, you haven’t got that. ” Or, hang on, you’re taking on too much of a role. You’ve now gone off sick. Who’s your replacement? Who steps into your position? And it’s amazing how many people say, I had the last one and after an hour and a half, the gentleman walked into the room and I said, “Oh, you’re the single point of failure.” And everyone in the room cracked up because they knew what I was talking about. And he goes, “What do you mean?” I said, “Without you, they all fell into neat.” I said, “You can’t have that.

Dave Owens (21:52):

” He goes, “Oh, but that person over there should have taken my place.” I said, “Perhaps you’d like to tell them that would be really, really good.” So I think that exercising in uncertainty is you can’t beat it because you fall back to the level of your training under stress.