Tag RAPOETE

It’s a Disaster. Shit Happens.

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager Leave a comment

Subtitle: Be ready for it or find another profession.

A moment of venting as I’ve been seeing so many of the same complaints and issues over and over again.

I’ve been at this for over 30 years, though I’ll never say I’ve seen it all or that I know all there is to know. I learn something new most days. I think many of us in emergency/disaster management share that perspective, yet it feels like there are some in this profession who don’t seem to learn at all.

Yes, there are plenty of things that are out of our hands. We fight funding gaps and politics and chain of command issues. The nature of our work means that, to some extent, we inherit the issues of other people and other agencies. But there are a lot of things we still have influence over.

I regularly read and hear about many emergency managers who express frustrations with other agencies, systems not working, or people now knowing what to do. So much of this is self-inflicted. Yet there is so much that emergency managers can influence. Can we fix everything? No, but the very nature of our work lends itself to addressing these issues. It is (or should be) a big part of what we do.

We can’t be ready for all possibilities, but we can and should be ready for most. That’s our job. Stop taking preparedness for granted. Do the work.

RAPOETE – Relationships, Assessing, Planning, Organizing, Equipping, Training, and Exercises. If you’ve not read my recent post on this, please check it out (and the other posts I’ve written on POETE).

I’m not going to cover every preparedness element of RAPOETE here, but there are some highlights that jump out at me. Emergency and disaster management starts with relationships. It is your job to know people, to know who to call, and to build a solid enough relationship that when you call, they will answer the phone. Stop complaining that your chief executive went rogue or that another department head didn’t do what they were supposed to. Check yourself. What’s your relationship with them? Is it as good as it could be? Do they trust you? Yep, sometimes people are difficult, or have their own agendas. Sometimes they are straight up assholes. Or maybe they just don’t get it. Whatever the issue is, unless the relationship is new, you’ve had time to figure it out. Solve the problem.

Stop saying you don’t need plans because people know what to do or they will figure it out; or even worse that they don’t read them anyway. Planning is a foundational preparedness activity for a reason, regardless of your attitudes toward it. Building a plan isn’t about getting people to read it. You need to TRAIN them in their roles and responsibilities in the plan. So, have they been trained on the plan? (and no, ICS training is NOT training them how to execute a plan). Have they practiced their parts? Has the plan been tested? If any of those answers is no, you failed at your job.

Oh no – your incident management platform crashed. Again. How many times has this happened before? Even if it hasn’t happened before, we should always have a plan B when it comes to technology. Maybe it happens regularly but you can’t afford a new system. That’s certainly legitimate, but doing nothing is negligent. Solve the problem.

There are always lessons to be learned from disasters. Certainly disasters won’t completely unfold the way we anticipate. That’s why we call them disasters. Shit happens. I’m not saying we can have everything ready to the extent it should be, or have a contingency for every possibility, but so many of the problems that we encounter in emergency management are not new. We need to do our jobs and solve the problems. If you are going to complain about the same things over and over yet not do what needs to be done to address them, it’s time to find a different line of work.

©2026 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC™

Relationships are Key to Preparedness

Tim Riecker, The Contrarian Emergency Manager 2 Comments

It’s been said and written, by so many of us across all the varying practices of emergency management, that the essence of what we do is about relationships. Why is that?

While emergency managers and emergency management agencies have some resources, those are of very limited scope and quantity. So when needs are identified in the community, we work with partner agencies to obtain resources and coordinate efforts. We solve complex problems, which wouldn’t be so complex if they were easy to solve. Our contact lists hold incredible value, but that value isn’t just in an email or phone number, it’s in the relationships that we forge with those on the other end. That relationship may be nothing more than familiarity – we’ve met a couple of times in meetings. Or perhaps the relationship runs deeper from working on various projects or even incidents together. Some of us even forge friendships with the people with which we work. Even familiarity brings with it a credibility that goes beyond a cold call, and the better relationships we forge means that people are more naturally inclined to help and to prioritize that help.

While we certainly find ourselves forging new relationships in response and recovery operations, the best time to do that is now. But when we look at preparedness constructs, forging relationships are rarely mentioned. Readers know I’m a big fan of the POETE preparedness elements – Planning, Organizing, Equipping, Training, and Exercises. I’ve written earlier about adding an A to the front of that – Assessing – although assessments may be part of planning, they can also be a stand-alone activity. Something I like about POETE/APOETE is that it is philosophically the order in which we do these activities, at least to begin any preparedness project. It starts with a plan, supported by internal and external organizational support, followed by acquisition of equipment or systems to support plan implementation, training of staff on the plan and the equipment/systems, then exercising it all. Aside from the ‘form a planning team’ step in developing a plan, I’ve largely put any relationship-centered activity under the Organizing element, but if we look at POETE as a programmatic order of operations, that’s far too late. I think Organizing is still very relevant where it is, because following the development of a plan, we need to ensure that internal and external organizations are aligned to support plan readiness and execution, but relationship building in general is a distinct, ongoing activity in which everyone in emergency management must engage.

Looking at POETE/APOETE as the elements of preparedness, and in consideration of the need to add Relationships to the acronym, and in further consideration of the order of the acronym emphasizing the general workflow, I propose that we add an R right up front. As such, my new version of POETE is now RAPOETE. I’ll let you figure out your own pronunciation of the acronym, but I think this is an important recognition of a critical element of preparedness that has been underrepresented at best among its peers. Relationship building, just like the other preparedness elements, also requires deliberate effort on the part of emergency managers. While it may be less tangible, it strongly supports the collective success of all our preparedness efforts.

Long live RAPOETE!

What are your thoughts?

© 2026 Tim Riecker, CEDP

Emergency Preparedness Solutions, LLC®