Overview
#048 – Today I’m joined by Kristin Rollwagen, an emergency management veteran with about three decades of experience, including serving as Minnesota’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director, who now leads her own firm, Preparedness Partnership Solutions, and is an educator as an adjunct faculty member at the University of St. Thomas.
Her path into the field started with a dare. When her plans for medical school fell through, she trained as an EMT, and a classmate dared her to take a firefighting class at the local community college. That class led to roles as a firefighter EMT in Mankato, Minnesota, interim assistant chief with the Minneapolis Fire Department, 13 years building the emergency management program at Minneapolis Saint Paul International Airport from the ground up, and Homeland Security grant work after 9/11, before her two years as state director.
Highlights from This Episode
- Shift your organization from reactive to proactive; the “it’s never gonna happen here” mindset fails in a world where disasters are striking new places with greater frequency and intensity.
- Learn the five Cs of emergency management: command and control belong to the responders on scene, while the emergency manager’s job is to coordinate, collaborate, and communicate across every level of government and every discipline involved.
- Build your relationships on a “blue sky” day; the trust you earn in advance is what lets you pick up the phone during an incident and have someone arrive with the right resources before you even explain what you need.
- Train people in their roles before you exercise the plan; communication breakdowns and unclear roles appear in nearly every after-action report, and throwing people into a full exercise first sets them up to fail.
- Add an “I” for intel to the C-FLOP structure (command, finance, logistics, operations, planning); intel here simply means knowing who has the information, and leaving it undefined is a root cause of communication breakdown.
- Treat emergency management as consequence management; when a cyberattack hits a water system or the power fails on a 100 degree day with residents on medical devices, the emergency manager is the hub connecting every spoke needed to recover.
- Speak each discipline’s language and give people chances to practice; Kristin trained 800 Minneapolis police officers in incident command after the NIMS mandate, and she knew public health was getting it when she found their summer picnic organized with ICS roles.
- Start your emergency management education at the community level; CERT programs, citizen academies, and explorer programs offer low-cost exposure to the field and connect you with practitioners who teach the courses.
- Build formal credentials and join a professional association; state certification, the Certified Emergency Manager designation through IAEM, degree programs from two-year through master’s level, and FEMA’s free independent study courses.
- Look for the political dimension before accepting an appointed role, and make strategic foresight part of your practice; the next generation of emergency managers will face AI, misinformation, and larger, more intense events that one-off thinking will not prepare them for.
Memorable Quotes:
- “Public safety cannot do everything for everyone in an emergency situation.”
- “It doesn’t have to be this super secret squirrel intel. It needs to just be who’s got information?”
- “If you don’t practice it, you can’t do it in real time when you need to.”
RESOURCES MENTIONED
- Book referenced by host: Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
- Organization: Preparedness Partnership Solutions, Kristin’s emergency management consulting firm
- Framework: National Incident Management System (NIMS) and Incident Command System (ICS)
- Program: Community Emergency Response Team (CERT)
- Certification: Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) through the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM)
- Training: FEMA Emergency Management Institute Independent Study courses
- Book: The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes, and Why by Amanda Ripley
- Book: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Related Episodes
- Big Ideas in Corporate Security
- How to Be a Remarkable Student of Security
- Security Leadership: Integrity & Serving
- Mastering Security Excellence