If the Incident Controller Needs the Duty Card to Learn the Role, You Have a Problem

Across industry, significant effort goes into developing Emergency Response Plans, Crisis Management Plans, Incident Management structures and the duty cards that sit behind them.

The documents are usually comprehensive.

The positions are identified, with responsibilities allocated. Supporting checklists are developed and escalation pathways mapped.

Then when an incident occurs, people are appointed into those positions and handed a duty card. There is an assumption buried somewhere in that process that deserves more scrutiny.

That knowing what a role is responsible for means somebody is capable of performing it.

It doesn't.

A duty card can remind an experienced Incident Controller what needs attention. It cannot teach someone how to be an Incident Controller, and there is an important difference between the two.

Duty Cards Have a Purpose

Duty cards are useful. At their best, they provide a concise prompt for somebody who already understands the function they are performing.

They can identify immediate priorities, reporting relationships, key interfaces, responsibilities and actions that should not be forgotten when workload increases, and in that sense, they perform an important cognitive function.

During an emergency, people are processing incomplete information, competing priorities, interruptions and time pressure. Having a structured prompt reduces reliance on memory.

But a duty card should support competence, not substitute for it.

It cannot teach someone how to establish command. It cannot teach them how to build situational awareness from conflicting information. Nor can it teach them when to delegate, when to escalate, when to challenge an assumption or when the safest decision is to stop an operation entirely.

Those things require something quite different.

Figure

An Incident Management Team (IMT) must expand to meet the needs of the incident.

Incident Management Is a Skill

Incident management can sometimes look deceptively simple from outside the room.

• Establish objectives
• Allocate functions
• Develop a plan
• Manage resources
• Conduct briefings
• Record decisions

The mechanics are straightforward.

The difficulty is doing all of those things while the incident continues to evolve. Information arrives late, some of it is wrong. Operational priorities compete with safety considerations.

Senior leaders want answers that do not yet exist while responders are already committed, with limited resources.

Consequences are developing faster than meetings can occur, and yet decisions still need to be made. That is why effective incident management requires more than understanding a position description.

It requires familiarity with command and control principles, decision-making under uncertainty, risk assessment, information management, communication, span of control, planning, delegation and the development of a common operating picture.

More importantly, it requires exposure.

People need opportunities to practise those skills before the first time they are expected to use them is during a genuine emergency.

The Duty Card Problem

Consider a relatively common scenario. A site experiences a significant incident and the Incident Management Team is established.

Someone is nominated as Incident Controller because they are the most senior manager available. Another person becomes Planning because they are organised, someone is allocated Logistics because they know the site. Public Information goes to the last person to walk into the IMT room.

Each person receives a duty card explaining their responsibilities and structurally, an IMT now exists. Functionally, it may not.

The Incident Controller may never have controlled an incident. Planning may never have developed incident objectives or turned those objectives into an executable plan. Operations may understand the technical response exceptionally well but have never worked within a formal incident-management structure.

The team may never have worked together.

And none of them may have experienced an exercise where information was deliberately incomplete, priorities conflicted and decisions carried consequences. Being able to fill every seat does not necessarily mean you have established capability.

Knowing the Business Is Not the Same as Managing the Incident

Organisations understandably appoint experienced operational leaders into emergency management roles, and there is considerable logic in doing so.

Those people understand the site, the hazards, the workforce and the operation, but technical expertise and incident-management competence are not the same thing.

A highly capable mining manager does not automatically become an effective Incident Controller, nor does an experienced engineer automatically understand the Planning function. A senior executive does not automatically know how to establish command under pressure.

The same applies in reverse; an experienced incident manager does not suddenly become a geotechnical engineer, metallurgist or underground mining specialist.

Effective emergency management brings these capabilities together. Subject-matter experts provide technical knowledge, and the Incident Management Team provides the structure through which that knowledge is converted into coordinated decisions and action.

Problems emerge when those two capabilities are assumed to be interchangeable.

There Is Also a Safety Question

There is another aspect of this discussion that receives considerably less attention.

Who is managing the safety of the people being asked to manage the emergency?

Under Western Australia's Work Health and Safety framework, PCBUs have a primary duty, so far as is reasonably practicable, to ensure the health and safety of workers and that other persons are not put at risk by work carried out as part of the business or undertaking.

For mining operations, the requirements become more specific.

The Work Health and Safety (Mines) Regulations require emergency plans to provide for an effective response, testing of emergency procedures, and information, training and instruction for relevant workers.

None of that means legislation prescribes AIIMS, a particular incident-management qualification, or a specific training course. It doesn't.

But it does raise an important governance question.

If your emergency arrangements depend on somebody performing a critical incident-management function, what gives the organisation confidence that they can actually perform it?

• A duty card?
• A desktop induction?
• Previous operational experience?
• Formal training?
• Observed performance during exercises?
• Competency assessment?
• Experience in real incidents?

Probably some combination of those things.

The important point is that the question should have been answered before the emergency begins.

The Questions Organisations Should Be Asking

Instead of asking whether every IMT position has a duty card, there are harder questions worth asking.

If an incident occurred tonight:

• Who would actually become Incident Controller?
• What incident-management training have they undertaken?
• When did they last perform the role?
• Have they ever performed it under realistic time pressure?
• Can they establish objectives from incomplete information?
• Can they identify when their situational picture is unreliable?
• Do they understand the difference between strategy and tactics?
• Can they establish an effective span of control?
• Can they run a structured briefing?
• Can they challenge a technically confident recommendation when the risk is unacceptable?
• Can the Planning function convert decisions into a workable Incident Action Plan?
• Can Operations safely translate that plan into activity?
• Can the team maintain an accurate common operating picture as conditions change?
• Has the organisation ever tested any of this?

Those questions tell you considerably more about emergency preparedness than whether the duty cards were updated during the last plan review.

The Real Question

Duty cards are valuable, plans and structures are essential.

But none of them create competence by themselves.

If somebody is expected to make consequential decisions during a crisis, coordinate responders, establish priorities and manage risk while information remains uncertain, handing them a card when the incident begins is too late to start teaching them the role.

The real question for organisations is therefore not:

Do we have an Incident Management Team?

It is:

Have we actually prepared the people we expect to become one?