As a continuation of the Gauging Return on Investment in Preparedness series (read the first one on Planning here), this post’s focus is on the POETE element of Organizing. There are a number of ‘organizing’ efforts we engage in through our preparedness endeavors. Some are temporary, like establishing working groups to solve a certain problem; while some are intended to be long-term, like forming an incident response team.
Why organize? Most organizational efforts are fueled by the need to capitalize on the power of many. What one person can do, more people can do better. Problem solving, responding, etc. Often our organizational efforts are internal, but, particularly in public safety, we coordinate with other agencies. We might be building a professional response organization, such as an Incident Management Team (IMT), or perhaps we are building a community organization, such as a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT).
What costs are associated with organizational activities? Foundationally, it’s simply the staff time needed to prepare for, attend, and perform follow up work from meetings and other organizational efforts. Depending on how complex our efforts are, however, and the intent of our organizational efforts, this can take on full time duties. You also have to consider who is being drawn into these efforts and what the ‘replacement cost’ is of their time – meaning, what is the cost of someone else performing their work while they are involved in the meetings, etc.? We also need to identify what costs might be associated with organizing? The remaining POETE elements (Planning, Equipping, Training, and Exercising) can probably lead you to identifying these.
What are the benefits (value) of organizing?In order to identify the return on our investment, we need to be able to ascertain the benefits our organizational efforts bring – some may be tangible and relatable in dollar figures, others may be more intangible and amorphic.
As with many preparedness efforts, we find ourselves needing to make reasonable assumptions to identify cost savings or value. We need to follow the bouncing ball of our efforts. As an example… If we create a CERT team, citizens will be better able to tend to their own needs in the event of a disaster. This leads to less immediate need of limited resources (first responders), allowing them to focus on more critical needs (i.e. saving lives and protecting infrastructure). In this example we can make some assumptions about the types of infrastructure to be impacted by a certain incident and the costs associated with it becoming incapacitated.
In regard to saving lives, it’s difficult for us to attach a dollar value to that. We often say that lives are priceless, and while that may be true, we sometimes need to make an educated guess. Depending on who you are reporting figures to, they may be satisfied with a reasonable number of lives being saved… others may want to actually compare apples to apples (that is, dollars to dollars). If you engage the use of your favorite internet search engine and search ‘what is the value of a life’, or something similar, you will find a number of results. In perusing some of these results myself, I found that the dollar figure assigned to a life is obviously subjective and very much related to the industry in which the question is being asked. This particular article makes for an interesting read on the subject. Spoiler alert: they peg the value of a human life at $5M USD (2011).
In the end, organizational efforts need to have a purpose providing a net value. Even in routine matters and daily business, we should examine the cost of organizational efforts – particularly meetings. Meetings are one of my biggest bugaboos, as they are often too long, have little purpose, and the objectives can be met in a much more efficient manner.
What ideas do you have on determining the return on investment for organizational activities?
© 2015 – Timothy Riecker
Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC
The Contrarian Emergency Manager 