Crisis Lab Podcast Season 4 Episode 19
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Tom Sivak: [00:00:00] Emergency management has never been funded, staffed, or resourced appropriately ever. I think about, people that, talk about what their needs are. And we are always understaffed and underfunded.
Tom Sivak: And so now we have a tool that is in our toolbox. We have to practically leverage it overall. Now, let's talk about hesitancy for a second. I hear it. I hear that, people are worried about it. IPI hear that AI is gonna take our jobs. And I still go back to what I heard a couple years ago as AI was coming, out into the field, which is humans are still the lovers behind it. We can either, wrap our arms around technology or technology is gonna run circles around us. And I share that experience because where we are today is that it's here. It's not going anywhere. If everybody's saying AI first, we should be adopting that.
Tom Sivak: We should be thinking about how AI is a forethought in emergency management.
Kyle King: Welcome [00:01:00] everybody to the Crisis Lab podcast. I'm Kyle, I'll be your host. And so today we're gonna have another one of our conversations, and today it's gonna be with Tom Vac, who is, currently the Chief Emergency Manager at Emergency Management One. And so, Tom, thanks for joining us.
Kyle King: As always. It's good to have a, a conversation with other professionals in the field and, and your career has been full spectrum of what I would call like US emergency management. You've gone from municipal operations to federal regional leadership. Most recently serving as FEMA Region five administrator leading disaster operations across six states and a number of tribal nations responding more than 15 presidentially declared disasters, including a number of ones that we've seen in the headlines.
Kyle King: But your operational foundation was really built in the field. As a deputy director of operations for Cook County, you manage preparedness and operational coordination across 135 municipalities. You spent a number of years in the field and most recently you have transitioned.
Kyle King: And I don't think you've retired. So I think you've transitioned and you're now with emergency management one, leading the effort in terms [00:02:00] of, integration of technical platforms. And even AI into the emergency management space. Tom, welcome to the Crisis Lab podcast.
Kyle King: I think I covered the foundations here, but I'd love to hear. What you're working on these days and what's keeping you busy.
Tom Sivak: Yeah. Awesome. Well, Kyle, thanks for having me today. It's really exciting, to be able to just do some shop talk, especially as it relates to emergency management, crisis management, consequence management, whatever we call it today.
Tom Sivak: What's interesting is that, over as I transitioned from fema, and I love how you said you haven't retired yet. I got a little bit, more of a longer runway, for that. But what's exciting is that we're finally seeing some technological advances that are actually gonna be supportive of the emergency management community overall.
Tom Sivak: When I was with fema, if I go back to my time at FEMA region five, that was when Chichi PD was starting. You know, you start looking at these AI tools and I remember our chief of staff was really getting into it. His output was amazing.
Tom Sivak: What we were finding is that he was doing a lot of stuff personally, as it related to, AI and maximizing our ability for all of our [00:03:00] programs it was this new thing. And I remember one day I was talking to colleagues.
Tom Sivak: I was over at the city of Chicago, hanging out with colleagues that I worked with when I was at the city, and they were like, gosh, yeah, I'm, I'm working on this exercise and I don't really know what to do, and I go watch this. So I pulled up my phone and I had the app on my phone and I said, write me an exercise for a large metropolitan or area and make it a hazmat incident.
Tom Sivak: And they were their eyes wide open. So when I met the two co-founders, Tyler and Gunner, with Em one, I was really intrigued. This was about 15 to 20 hours before my tenure with FEMA was over. And it was what's next? What's been interesting is I've been watching the AI field explode, especially in emergency manage everybody.
Tom Sivak: It's a buzzword. Everybody's using it. You walk into the airport, you see something about AI and any conferences, there's gonna be at least one, if not two, if not three entities there. Over the last, basically since January, I've had an opportunity to see things in a different set of lenses as when I was with you know, as a 20 year career emergency manager.
Tom Sivak: I knew the Midwest. [00:04:00] We flood a lot. We have, severe incidents, we have risk. I knew the Midwest very well. What I didn't really know, and I didn't have many experiences at least, I had some experiences during my FEMA tenure, but I was really starting to understand the true challenges that emergency managers face across the us.
Tom Sivak: When I look at the technological advances that are happening, and I've talked to, leaders in the field who have said, finally we have a solution that's actually gonna support the emergency management community. We get to hear the stories from these emergency managers who are saying, look, I'm underfunded, understaffed, and under resourced, I don't have a large budget.
Tom Sivak: I've been asking for staff for years. I'm being told I have to cut my budget by 10%. But still expected to do the output of 2, 3, 4 or five different people overall. As I've continued to, spread the wings in AI and emergency management.
Tom Sivak: I'm seeing that we have an opportunity here that's different, but I also believe that we have to have some foundations for [00:05:00] how people are going to leverage it over time. If I look internationally as well, everybody's using something, to maximize their output.
Tom Sivak: Overall. And I actually personally believe AI is actually gonna help us. Actually, you know, we focus on mental health. As emergency managers, we don't focus on ourselves, and I believe that we're, what we're seeing is AI is starting to, get some of that time in a day back so we can spend time with our family and friends, and have a little bit more of a home life, outside of our 12, 14, 16, 18 hour days so with EM one, I'd say that from technology standpoint, we're there. We're seeing it, everybody's talking about it. But our opportunity now is to actually get AI operationalized in the field. As we're operationalizing ai, one of the things that we can be focusing on are foundations coming up with a, you know, using our planning processes, setting foundations, doing your assessment to say where it works.
Tom Sivak: Where can AI benefit you on a blue sky and gray sky day? And then also having an implementation, period of how it's actually gonna be leveraged, on a regular basis. If we use [00:06:00] AI every day, it's a forethought, not an afterthought. If we don't use AI and we're only using it in an incident, that's gonna be the afterthought component.
Tom Sivak: That's where I'm seeing, the value of, the intersection of AI into the emergency management field.
Kyle King: So there's a lot of discussion about this of course. We see similar discussions in the international space in terms of international crisis management, the use of ai and actually we're recording this thousands of miles apart right now because, you know, you're in one location sort of over in the us I'm actually in Bulgaria.
Kyle King: I was presenting in a course about complex crisis management. But the things that are coming up that we're seeing, and so let's, let's set the scene a little bit, in terms of what we're seeing broadly across the profession and the field in terms of. Broad emergency crisis management what we're seeing, and it's an interesting contrast, at least for me to see anyway. Which you've got a growing adoption of ai, commercially. The private sector and business environment. If you're monitoring any of that, it's sort of like we're all AI first now, right?
Kyle King: All companies are AI first, and there's a growing recognition that [00:07:00] there's going to be a fundamental shift in the labor market. If you're in emergency management you're already feeling the squeeze on the labor market.
Kyle King: Right, exactly. To your point. And so then why not leverage the use of AI to be an enabler, right? But there's still a, a significant, I guess I would say there's maybe not significant, but I think there is a, at least a certain amount of distrust. Using ai, especially when it comes to management and planning and having, it make mistakes or whatever the case is and human in the loop concepts.
Kyle King: And then you have, this broad recognition that everybody's being AI first in the commercial market, everything's gonna be AI everywhere all the time. And then you have a, resource constrained environment where, AI does become an enabler, especially in emergency management.
Kyle King: And then you have, professionally and even culturally in organizations where there's possibly a reluctance for the adoption of ai. So how do you sort of overcome these challenges? And I think the last one being the most difficult.
Tom Sivak: Yes. While you're hitting on all the things that we're seeing, across the markets, I go back to 1994 [00:08:00] and, we had the worldwide web and then, you know, everybody now says Google this and Google that.
Tom Sivak: And everybody was, oh my gosh, we don't want people using Google and we don't want them. I look at it in a different, like my set of lenses are, okay, so that was 1994. Fast forward to 2018, when I was with the City of Chicago and I had leadership wanted a common operating picture and to know, instantly what the situation, you know, I always said in emergency management, what do you need to know, size, complexity, and scope to be able to then come up with courses of action to be able to, you know, adjust to be managing the consequences.
Tom Sivak: In 2018, we were dealing with machine learning, and we were doing, things manually, like literally by hand. Now all of a sudden you have, this tool that basically, things that would take a couple days, a couple weeks, a couple months, maybe a year, is now, really put into this, world where you can do it within, minutes, hours or days.
Tom Sivak: And when I was with the city, one thing I always said was. We can either, wrap our arms around technology or [00:09:00] technology is gonna run circles around us. And I share that experience because where we are today is that it's here. It's not going anywhere. If everybody's saying AI first, we should be adopting that.
Tom Sivak: We should be thinking about how AI is a forethought in emergency management. We say we have limited blue sky days across the world. Now we're talking today, Hurricane Melissa has just impacted the Caribbean, two nations that have been, you know, greatly impacted which Jamaica in Cuba. And, the other preparations that are happening and people are truly doing whatever preparations are needed and understanding the size, complexity, and scope of that situation.
Tom Sivak: So we have these complexities that are happening across the world. And thing is we have enough staff, staff. Address the needs of the communities that have been impacted by catastrophic events. This is where AI is meeting the crisis management and emergency management world, blue sky days.
Tom Sivak: We should be leveraging it to be able to enhance our plans, look into continuous improvement, ensuring that we're meeting criteria of whatever is outlined, [00:10:00] whether it's FEMA's comprehensive Planning Guide 1 0 1, whether it's the community risk reduction framework if you were to upload that into a system right now.
Tom Sivak: And say, find the similarities and differences and help me, you know, that's used to the US system. Then we can do that and it, it can be simplified in a way that we can ingest it overall, which is what we should be doing. There's layers of complexity that we should be making. Simple to be able to articulate it.
Tom Sivak: To the broader communities that we serve overall. Emergency management has never been funded, staffed, or resourced appropriately ever. I think about, people that, talk about what their needs are. And we are always understaffed and underfunded.
Tom Sivak: And so now we have a tool that is in our toolbox. We have to practically leverage it overall. Now, let's talk about hesitancy for a second. I hear it. I hear that, people are worried about it. IPI hear that AI is gonna take our jobs. And I [00:11:00] still go back to what I heard a couple years ago as AI was coming, out into the field, which is humans are still the lovers behind it.
Tom Sivak: I was listening to a podcast the other day where they said, in the end AI has no feeling. You know, we're learning it, and it's learning along. But then there's other ones, our, our CEO at, em one Tyler, he'll say, this is as bad as it's ever gonna be. Now let's think about that for a minute.
Tom Sivak: If this is as bad as it's ever gonna be, and we can create efficiencies over time, that's what we need to be doing. So when it comes into hesitancy, the one thing that I always think about is what do you do day to day? And if you were to just take a moment to just, you know, when I go back to my career, people have always said, let's take a stop check moment for a second.
Tom Sivak: What are we doing? What do we need to solve? You know, this is a emergency management, you know, term that we hear is what are you trying to solve? After Hurricane Helene, when I responded, with FEMA I heard the term begin with the end state in mind. What is it that you really, wanna get to?
Tom Sivak: [00:12:00] Over time how can we, in Hurricane Helena what have you always wanted? Because you're gonna have a lot of money that's gonna be pumped into a community that's been, potentially impacted what is it that's needed for this community to continue to build that community resilience over time.
Tom Sivak: So I think about with ai, I think the same thing. Begin with the end state in mind. What is it that you're trying to accomplish every single day? Number one. Number two is where are you working? Are you spending time writing briefs? Are you spending time putting together situation reports for, localized incidents for chief elected officials?
Tom Sivak: Are you writing grants? Are you training those plans, exercising those plans so people know who does what, when and where? What AI can help build those efficiencies are because we spend a lot of time behind a computer screen. And as emergency manager, for someone that lives in a community, I'd rather my emergency managers be out there understanding the risks of the community, understanding the resilience factors that can go into them to build community, readiness and not sitting behind a computer punching keys into a keyboard.
Tom Sivak: We need to, that [00:13:00] approach of being the writer, in the maturity model should be, we should be really thinking about being those editors over time. Hesitancy is going to be there with something that's new. The more a person understands how it can support them individually, and in the profession, understanding the.
Tom Sivak: Ingestion process of how AI's gonna be applied and then continuously improved. That's gonna be where there's gonna be a change. Because really a lot of the time things are afterthoughts. Who uses plans? What are plans? Everybody always says a plan only meets first contact.
Tom Sivak: I go, oh, the plan that's sitting on the shelf, there's thousands of hours that have been placed into it. We're held to this standard. Updating, our plans, policies and procedures on a regular basis. And then we have incidents. And the question is, did we follow the plan? Did we follow the policy? Did we follow the procedure?
Tom Sivak: And ultimately, what I'm gonna see, potentially, or what we're gonna see is there accountability that's placed more on emergency managers and are people willing to [00:14:00] take that accountability? We're responsible anyway. We're accountable to the communities we serve. But then how do we continuously improve over time?
Tom Sivak: As you just brought up, there's complexities in every incident across the world. Any incident that takes place today, there's gonna be a complexity that we didn't plan for, but we're gonna have to problem solve for. And as we do that, we need to be able to understand the situation and come up with those courses of action to respond to and recover from that event, to ultimately build that resilience for that community overall.
Kyle King: Yeah, I think that there's a, lot and just in terms of hesitancy, I think that there's a lot in terms of, I don't know the best way to phrase it. I, I wouldn't say fear, but I think, so the way I sort of equate it, and I reserve my right to judge this completely different later on.
Kyle King: But you know, the way I equate it now is, it's essentially like the difference between email and letters, email changed how we work, you have the memes out there where it's like, this meeting could have been an email people just so accustomed to digging into email for hours and hours and hours
Kyle King: We don't send [00:15:00] letters, at least very rarely, like official documents maybe. But it's that sort of impact that changes your workflow in the way that you're thinking about how you do your work. It becomes a tool. It's something that is enabling you and making you work more efficiently because your time should be spent, in emergency management focusing on.
Kyle King: The glue that binds things together in the community and the agencies and to your point about plans, it's also funny because I've used this comparison before as well, but you know, one of the other contrast is people say, well, the power will go out and then there is no ai. But you have a plan on the shelf.
Kyle King: It doesn't do anything either, right? You can reference it, but more than likely every EOC has power. Then it's sort of like old school whiteboard and paper, right? I mean, that's what we get back to. So how do you build that skillset in today's environment when you're behind the computer with email word documents and Excel sheets?
Kyle King: Right. That's the contrast. You're still putting a lot of time behind the computer Exactly. And then you're missing those key human skills that you need to be adaptable and work in those [00:16:00] austere or different conditions.
Kyle King: And so it is this weird contrast that's happening right now. I think it's gonna fundamentally shape the way the economy is running but it's gonna fundamentally shape the way that we're doing work. Being an optimist, I hope that it places more emphasis on being able to do the things of what you're talking about, which is actually go out and talk to people instead of having to, spend 40 hours writing something or a grant application and you can actually just say, I need a grant application for this, and it writes it, and then you can move on to something more meaningful and impactful.
Kyle King: Those are just my 2 cents in my thoughts right now. I reserve the right to go back and say this was a terrible idea. But right now it just seems like that's the place we're at.
Tom Sivak: The thing is we're a people first industry. We're always focused on the, you know, whether it's readiness, whether it's building resilience within that community, understanding the community.
Tom Sivak: We're people first. And, the more we can understand the situation on a blue sky day, understanding our communities wherever we serve, knowing where the risks are, knowing how we [00:17:00] need to reduce those risks and build that resilience. That's gonna buy our time. If we had an incident today, and it was catastrophic and AI was being leveraged, which it's being used in incidents across the world today, I would rather have that future planning
Tom Sivak: the next 48, 72, 2 weeks, one month, three months, one year. I would rather future planning cell, be able to talk, track some of that stuff and be coming up with, things that we should be planning for instead of dealing with what's right in front of us.
Tom Sivak: Which of course it's always life safety, life preservation, that's first. But at the same time, what's gonna happen is that the response is gonna work itself out. And then you have this. Astronomical, long road ahead of recovery. I was just in New Mexico last week and I was hearing the stories of Ruso, like where, you know, it's like how do people feel when it rains?
Tom Sivak: When they've had back to back floods over time, how do we make sure that we're thinking of what are the next two weeks four [00:18:00] weeks and eight weeks, and when it's no longer in the news that community is still impacted. How do we make sure that we're taking care of those community members who aren't thinking the way we think as emergency managers?
Tom Sivak: We think about this every day. We talk about it, we teach about it in terms of disasters, I was talking to Dr. Randy Collins. One thing he and I talked about is like, we as emergency managers deal within this world , on a regular basis.
Tom Sivak: It's the community members that we wanna make sure that we're taken care of, and that we're meeting them where they are. But the only way to do that is to get out from that computer. I think about incidents in terms of future planning where we can actually. Find that space that we can think and put ideas onto paper.
Tom Sivak: I'll give a prime example. I was, talking about, the, incorporation of ai, what we need to be thinking about in terms of when someone says, Hey, I'm AI curious and I wanna be AI competent and what's that road look like? Our CEO goes write that down.
Tom Sivak: And I'm like, okay, wait a minute. Between. Travel family, calls. When [00:19:00] am I gonna write this down? And all of a sudden, I was, walking and I thought, wait a minute, like why I'm walking? And I have a clear head space and an idea of how I'm gonna organize my thoughts and I'm not the first one to, and many people who know me, I have a lot of thoughts and it, I have to talk them out in order to frame them in a way where it could be understood.
Tom Sivak: And this is where it's nice to have leadership that actually did not come from the emergency management field because I'm having to articulate in more of a simpler fashion. I took out my phone and I just wrote myself an email and I just started talking and the first thing I started talking about was.
Tom Sivak: Begin with the end state in mind. What is it that we want to accomplish? What resources do I need at my fingertips when I'm writing a plan? Who do I need at the table? How does this work? I started throwing all these ideas and just talking into my phone, like writing myself an email. I then went home, uploaded it into em one now, which basically was gonna only talk to my thoughts because it's a closed system
Tom Sivak: did it in a way that was understandable. So then I took it to my family and I said, I started my wife and I said, Hey, does this make sense? She's like, yeah. [00:20:00] And I'm like, huh? This is the power of what we have today. But I think about tomorrow, those plan, you know, what is, where's AI going plan should be coming to us?
Tom Sivak: We shouldn't be going to the plans we spend the whole time. We work through the whole planning process to make sure that everybody knows who does what, when and where, and what their responsibilities are. And deconflict, when people say, that's not my job, that's not my role.
Tom Sivak: Like all that planning process is, make sure we get through that deconfliction. And then at the same time, making sure that people are trained and they know what their roles and responsibilities are and they own it. That ownership takes place in emergency management. Fast forward, as we're working through all of that, how can we make sure that we're actually simplifying it for people that don't do emergency management every day, that are called into an emergency operation center or coordination center, or called to help in a disaster to where their day-to-day business is very similar to what they do.
Tom Sivak: That they would then turn into, on a gray sky day overall. And so. [00:21:00] It's a fascinating case study. We're getting used to where AI is today. It's literally the topic of every conversation. When I talk to my kids, my one kid says, do you have a kill switch for the bots?
Tom Sivak: I'm like, yeah, it's called a plug. He's like, no, no, no. Really, are you sure there's a kill switch for the bots? And I keep reminding him, I said, Hey, humans are still behind this. This goes back to our hesitancy conversation. Humans are still the levers in writing the prompts, and we're still pulling this together.
Tom Sivak: AI today does not have that gut intuition. That's experience. You can definitely take the plans and say, bring, some courses of action. Fast forward to where it's gonna go. The plans that we've worked on, the policies we've worked on my vision is that it comes to us.
Tom Sivak: We work on these phones every single day, we have data that's out there coming to us in terms of weather events, in terms of. Situational awareness of what's happening in the news, breaking news alerts. We are a now society. How do we ingest it to make sure we can understand it so we can come up with courses of action to respond to and recover from it [00:22:00] regardless of the incident, and take away some of those complexities we're seeing over time.
Kyle King: So when you're talking, the visualization that came to my head as you know, sort of back in the. I guess maybe it was the eighties or something, you start to see, the advent of Lotus notes and the PC coming out it essentially.
Kyle King: Put everybody behind the computer this was the effect on society. With the advent of technology, then we started having, windows 95, Microsoft, office and everything else. Now everybody's behind the computer all the time.
Kyle King: And so then I wondered if a certain aspect here is that, this is the opportunity to release ourselves of that obligation. Of the constraints have been put on us because now we're basically trying to break the burden of having to sit in front of the computer because maybe there's a tool that can help you with that, whether you're talking on the phone or that you're doing things, through AI to just review and edit rather than generate.
Kyle King: And I think that's one of the fundamental shifts that we're seeing. I would offer this perspective 'cause I saw this and I'm interested in [00:23:00] your thoughts, so just bear with me for a second. I have to read it because I think this was from a company called Evry or something.
Kyle King: This sort of hits to this point and I, I do wanna get your perspective on it, but it's called the Allocation Economy. It says, and I'm reading this directly from this post that I found, the way I think about how AI will affect the economy at large is to move us from knowledge economy to an allocation economy.
Kyle King: In a knowledge economy, you are compensated based on what you know in an allocation economy, you're based on how well you can portion out the resources of intelligence. So you need vision, a taste for ideas, for language and an ability to effectively communicate what you want in words.
Kyle King: You need to know how to plan and estimate timelines, how to break up projects and distribute them among different people skilled at different tasks. You need to know when to step in and what to micromanage to ensure the details are right. All of these skills exist in the knowledge economy, and they are the skills of human managers, not just managers in business, but anyone who manages humans.
Kyle King: Showrunners, directors and [00:24:00] conductors all do the same kind of things, but human managers take up only about 10% of the workforce. And in order for everyone to effectively work with ais on a day-to-day basis, these are the exact skills that We all need to develop. So in broad strokes, this is how AI might affect creative work.
Kyle King: For many creative tasks will move up one level of abstraction from doing everything ourselves to directing what work needs to be done and how. What are your thoughts on that?
Tom Sivak: I think that you just articulated what an emergency manager does every day. You're saying these words and I'm thinking to myself we've done that. When I was at the state of Chicago, the senior emergency management coordinators were always called project managers. I did not like that. I did not like when they were like, oh, but they deal with projects. I'm like, that's great, but do they have the Six Sigma and do they have this, and do they have that?
Tom Sivak: Answer is no. But they adapted to that and knew who to call the basics, right? Bring it back onto the basics. Who to call when and where, who to ask for resources. Solving the problem that's right in [00:25:00] front of us. And the thing is, what you described is exactly what emergency managers do, but we do it by ourselves.
Tom Sivak: Many emergency management shops are one person shops that basically say, this is all I've got and I'm not getting any more help. It's hard because we need to be innovative resilience has been a big word, over the last, couple of years, across the world.
Tom Sivak: Resilience has a foothold and a stronghold. People have said, how do you measure resilience? How do you measure readiness? I believe that if we were to sit all of us in a room or on a zoom and talk, we could come up with
Tom Sivak: 30 measures of resilience, 30 measures of readiness, and then put 'em into AI and say, okay, what's the common theme? And I have a feeling we'd probably come up with the same three to seven themes that we all talk about, but we articulate it differently overall. So I believe if you look at where, people are saying, AI is going.
Tom Sivak: I can't wait for you to send that article or that post over because, emergency managers this [00:26:00] is what we do every day. So if it's what we do every day, how do we make it a forethought to get more time to build that readiness and resilience within the communities overall.
Tom Sivak: My perspective is challenge accepted for all of us in the emergency management community, we shouldn't be afraid of what this innovation has to offer. If we look across spectrums, everybody's using AI to a degree. The apps that we're using on our phones are using some aspect of ai, overall.
Tom Sivak: And we talk to the education field and you talk to the private sector and you talk to, you know, healthcare field, AI is being leveraged every day. People are like, well, I don't like that. And I'm thinking to myself. There are massive amounts of data that I know I personally can't consume or understand that's out there, that AI could simplify in a way that could be articulated to the people that we serve, and we need to be doing that.
Tom Sivak: Unfortunately, we do see that people in less disaster prone areas, they're not they, [00:27:00] or even if they're in disaster prone areas. Do they know where to go when an incident happens? Today I'm in Hawaii and last night I was talking to Dr. Randy Collins he was telling us that the way the tsunami zones are built out, is that, you know, you're in a tsunami zone and it tells you where to go if there's a tsunami, when you're leaving a tsunami zone, that's a worst case scenario. I'm here on a trip. I was like, oh, that makes sense. But how do you know that you're in a safe area?
Tom Sivak: He goes, well, that's for worst case scenario. That's not necessarily the case. If there's. A smaller, incident does the people that are literally working, day to day to put food on the table and take care of their family and their friends and home life?
Tom Sivak: Are they thinking about those types of readiness aspects? And what is our job is to make sure that we can articulate in a way to show our readiness. But also at the same time, be able to, when the incident happens, do exactly what you just said. I was talking to Rich Serino, who used to be the deputy administrator for fema, during the Obama administration, and I was so [00:28:00] excited.
Tom Sivak: I said, you know, rich, it was great to just catch up with him. He's been such a great mentor for me and I was telling him all the excitement of what we were doing at em one, and he is like, gosh, Tom. This is the solution emergency managers have needed for a very long time. This is the thing that we need to wrap our arms around on because this is actually what's gonna save us?
Tom Sivak: Every disaster has these layers of complexity that we didn't think about or we hear from the community members. That will never happen. And if we can capture that and know that's the perception of the community.
Tom Sivak: We can then go to this allocation component of how do we articulate risk? How do we articulate what readiness means to the individual community member that lives in a disaster prone area. And then also at the same time, how do we make sure that they have tools to be successful in the event that there's an incident that impacts them, their families or their communities aI could help us wrap our arms around it faster so we can focus on those [00:29:00] communities that we serve. Because at the end of the day, we're people first, and if we can focus on the people that we serve, and simplify it in a way that is understandable then we're doing our part to make sure people are ready for any type of disaster that might take place.
Kyle King: So there, I mean, there's a lot going on and that leads us to the final part of our conversation, which is the future? Sharing some experiences of this week, I'm presenting on complex crisis management and, some of the key themes that we talk about is, of course, cascading effects and the velocity of crisis and how things can get out of hand very quickly.
Kyle King: And it's going beyond any plan that you might have in our work in the international crisis management space, we link that to state stability and how that's, you know, when these complex crisis happened and that basically. Opens up opportunities for adversarial nations to exploit that launch cyber attacks and take advantage of government performance.
Kyle King: Let's just call it that way. If you're not able to effectively, deal with a crisis as a government and you lose confidence in the people, it's exacerbated by. Adversaries, or criminal organizations unless you can [00:30:00] effectively deal with a civilian crisis and emergency management, you just leave opportunities for people to exploit that.
Kyle King: The challenge is that things, are getting more and more complex, right? Systems are connected, there's casting effects. Things go very, very quickly in what we call the velocity of crisis. It moves from power to hospitals, to transportation routes, to traffic control systems.
Kyle King: All of these things just go very, very quickly nowadays, and it's impossible for one person to keep up, there has to be a mechanism to manage knowledge. And this is the biggest problem. We're still operating in silos we have our legal constraints.
Kyle King: This is what we do. I do my thing. You do your thing, and we will do our things together when we have to. You know, before we started recording, we were talking about the difference between the US and the European perspective. Many of the European are preparing for conflict, which means they are taking some drastic steps, decentralization of government, regional councils, integrated civil military planning, similar to the old civil defense days,
Kyle King: really making decisions. And it comes down to your point about, even at an ICP or an EOC, how do [00:31:00] you actually get the knowledge and information and process it when it's coming at such a speed and such a velocity that you can't effectively manage all of it by yourself, maybe you're in a small planning team or a small intelligence unit and it can be overwhelming because you're also not an expert in everything.
Kyle King: You know, energy distribution networks and, food and water security you need experts, right? Smaller communities don't have these people. All these things are coming very fast at us, and that's where I think we may need to be a little bit more forward leaning because it's ultimately just gonna get more and more complex, very quickly in the next five years, 10 years, whatever the case is.
Kyle King: And it is, it's something that I think we just have to really keep in mind because to me it's also, it's not just about the tool. It's more about how you can effectively retain and process knowledge, into an actual piece of information or intelligence that you can use to make a decision.
Kyle King: You still have, as you said, a human in the loop, so to speak. You can understand if that's good information or not. Possible vulnerability with a [00:32:00] railroad or something, and you don't have railroads in your community, you know that. And you have tools like yours, which are tailored to your environment anyway.
Kyle King: I think the future is getting into extremely complex information overload because it's already bad now. It'll just be worse in the future. And then into this space of where, again, under, under-resourced and resource constraints and needing to be able to process information much more, quickly in order to make decisions that save people's lives.
Kyle King: These are the things that we're talking about in the European sphere because it's like there's things rapidly changing drone incursions, things that we don't even think about. Rapid escalations and spikes in national security incidents. But still, it's only, it's a significant spike up to be able to have a response to a drone targeting and energy sort of power plant.
Kyle King: But then how do you come back to civilian control of that and this whole dynamic of rapid up and downs between. Normal crisis, which continues every day anyway. Despite whatever's happening in the national security space, you still have floods and fires and everything else. And these rapid spikes and being able to be on a [00:33:00] crisis all the time and never having time to recover.
Kyle King: And that will lead to one of your previous points when we started the conversation is exhaustion, right? Yes. And so when you get information, all of it all together, all at once. I think somebody made a movie about that. But you know, it's like with that title, but you, you end up in the same place,
Kyle King: you cannot physically process, mentally process, and psychologically process all the stuff that's happening and the constant stress of like rapid escalation and incursion and probing attacks and infrastructure damage and cyber attacks plus a wildfire season, plus the floods that happen after that.
Tom Sivak: Direction that we're going in. It is, you know, what does the future hold? the planning assumption should be that we know today we have complexities and disasters to begin with. A planning assumption for any disaster, regardless of what it is, is that there's gonna be adversaries that are gonna be impacting us.
Tom Sivak: Do we know the size, complexity, and scope of it are? No, we don't. Overall, but then at the same time as you're like talking about it, the misinformation, [00:34:00] disinformation, like we didn't even touch on that.
Tom Sivak: How do we trust the information that's coming at us to make a decision? And sticking with that decision, whether it's the right or wrong decision, we have to go back to our fundamental principles of what are we solving, what are we here for, which is the communities that are served, number one.
Tom Sivak: At the same time where the future is going is that we're never, I don't believe, with the layers of complexities and this constant state of response that we're in that we're ever gonna be able to get in front of it. But I do believe that with technological advances of where they are today, that we can roll alongside it, that we can anticipate what these challenges are that we're going to face.
Tom Sivak: That we watched this evolving threat environment that's happening, which we've known that's been taking, we've talked about the evolving threat environment for years. We know it's there, but what are we doing about it? I had the great honor when I was at FEMA to actually do some international programs and engage with the European Union, engage with our partners.
Tom Sivak: Across a different set of world. And, and as we're [00:35:00] hearing about conflict of what the preparations are, I was able to try and, synthesize it in my head this is what readiness looks like. This is what we need to be talking to, and being ultimately prepared in general.
Tom Sivak: Technology is gonna continue to advance. I've watched it my entire life, I grew up in a time where internet did not exist and, we still had the Plano telephone system, now we're in a technological environment where you're in Bulgaria and I'm in Hawaii,
Tom Sivak: so we're worlds apart, but we're able to connect and we are in a now environment. So we have to be able to synthesize this. I believe it's gonna help us. I believe that it's gonna be able to help us better understand the situation and bore through what as you just alluded to, the silos of excellence that we have.
Tom Sivak: We need the subject matter experts that understand how to put the power system back online to get the water systems, you know, to have those basic needs. We need everybody in the room, but we also are dealing with the other complexities of an incident.
Tom Sivak: We are problem solvers. We are the ones [00:36:00] called, to prepare on a blue and a gray sky day. We as emergency managers are supposed to know who does what, who the subject matter experts are. If we don't know who the subject matter experts are, we have that responsibility is then find them.
Tom Sivak: It was with the state of Chicago, it was, figure it out. The three words that I was always told. Figure it out. That problem solving, when we have space to think will allow us to do what's best for the communities we serve. In the end it's about doubling down on the on, you know, basically I believe, which is the most important, mission, which is people.
Tom Sivak: And if we're able to do that, then we're able to actually build up that resilience and readiness to combat whatever is in front of us. We have to be prepared for it. We have to open our arms to it. We shouldn't be scared of it. We should have open dialogue of what we're hesitant about. And then also at the same time as we're having the open dialogue, we should be able to take away that.
Tom Sivak: The nervousness that that's associated with it, the hesitancy that's associated with it, and be able to show how it, how technology, how [00:37:00] AI will be a benefit overall to be able to allow us to do what we're called to do every single day.
Kyle King: Well, on that note, Tom, thanks a lot for joining us on the podcast.
Kyle King: Really interesting discussion. Maybe we'll do a part two basically, thanks for joining us. I really appreciate the conversation. It's great to hear from you and, see some of the things you're doing if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that?
Tom Sivak: Best way is to reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can look me up, Tom Seve on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Very simple.
Kyle King: Great. Alright, thanks a lot Tom, and thanks everybody for listening to the Chrysler Lab podcast tune in next time and we'll continue our discussions around complex crisis and what we can do about it every day.
Kyle King: Alright, see you next time. Thanks, Kyle. [00:38:00]
