Oddly enough, I’ve recently seen a spate of LinkedIn posts espousing the benefits of the Incident Command System (ICS). Those who have been reading my material for a while know that I’m a big proponent of ICS, though I am highly critical of the sub-par curriculum that we have been using for decades to teach ICS. The outcome is an often poorly understood and implemented system resulting in limited effectiveness.

Yes, ICS is a great tool, if implemented properly. Yet most implementations I see aren’t properly conducted. To further muddy these waters, I see emergency plans everywhere that commit our responders and officials to using ICS – this is, after all, part of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) requirement that many have – yet they don’t use it.

So why isn’t ICS being used properly or even at all? Let’s start with plans. Plans get written and put up on a proverbial shelf – physical or digital. They are often not shared with the stakeholders who should have access to them. Even less frequently are personnel trained in their actual roles as identified and defined in plans. Some of those roles are within the scope of ICS while some are not. The bottom line is that many personnel, at best, are only vaguely familiar with what they should be doing in accordance with plans. So, when an incident occurs, most people don’t think to reference the plan, and they flop around like a fish out of water trying to figure out what to do. They make things up. Sure, they often try their best, assessing what’s going on and finding gaps to fill, but without a structured system in place and in the absence (or lack of referencing) of the guidance that a quality plan should offer, efficiency and effectiveness are severely decreased, and some gaps aren’t even recognized or anticipated.

Next, let’s talk about ICS training. Again, those who have been reading my work for a while have at least some familiarity with my criticism of ICS training. To be blunt, it sucks. Not only does the content of courses not even align with course objectives, the curriculum overall doesn’t teach us enough of HOW to actually use ICS. My opinion: We need to burn the current curriculum to the ground and start over. Course updates aren’t enough. Full rewrites, a complete reimagining of the curriculum and what we want to accomplish with it, needs to take place.

Bad curriculum aside… For some reason people think that ICS training will solve all their problems. Why? One reason I believe is that we’ve oversold it. Part of that is most certainly due to NIMS requirements. Not that I think the requirements, conceptually, are a bad thing, but I think they cause people to think that if it’s the standard that we are all required to learn, it MUST be THE thing that we need to successfully manage the incident. I see people proudly boasting that they’ve completed ICS300 or ICS400. OK, that’s great… but what can you actually do with that? You’ve learned about the system, but not so much of how to actually use it. Further, beyond the truth that ICS training sucks, it’s also not enough to manage an incident. ICS is a tool of incident management. It’s just one component of incident management, NOT the entirety of incident management. Yes, we need to teach people how to use ICS, but we also need to teach the other aspects of incident management.

We also don’t use ICS enough. ICS is a contingency system. It’s not something we generally use every day, at least to a reasonably full extent. Even our first responders only use elements of ICS on a regular basis. While I don’t expect everyone to be well practiced in the nuances and specific applications of ICS, we still need more practice at using more of the system. It’s not the smaller incidents where our failure to properly implement ICS is the concern – it’s the larger incidents. It’s easy to be given a scenario and to draw out on paper what the ICS org chart should look like to manage the scenario. It’s a completely different thing to have the confidence and ego in check to make the call for additional resources – not the tactical ones – but for people to serve across a number of ICS positions. Responders tend to have a lot of reluctance to do so. Add to that the fact that most jurisdictions simply don’t have personnel even remotely qualified to serve in most of those positions. So not only are we lacking the experience in using ICS on larger incidents, we also don’t have experience ‘ramping up’ the organization for a large response. An increase in exercises, of course, is the easy answer, but exercises require time, money, and effort to implement.

One last thing I’ll mention on this topic is about perspective. One of the posts I read recently on LinkedIn espoused all the things that ICS did. While I understand the intent of their statements, the truth is that ICS does nothing. ICS is nothing more than a system on paper. It takes people to implement it. ICS doesn’t do things; PEOPLE do these things. The use of ICS to provide structure and processes to the chaos, if properly done, can reap benefits. I think that statements claiming all the things that ICS can do for us, without inserting the critical human factor into the statement, lends to the myth of ICS being our savior. It’s not. It must be implemented – properly – by people to even stand a chance.

Bottom line: we’re not there yet when it comes to incident management, including ICS. I dare say too many people are treating it as a hobby, not a profession. We have a standard, now let’s train people on it PROPERLY and practice it regularly.

©2024 Timothy Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®