I was brought in by a large INGO to help them create a standardized workshop for their emergency response preparedness planning. Although they had put significant resources into preparedness planning, it was very hit and miss. Plans were often unused when a crisis struck.
Their intention around a redesigned workshop was very clear, but we agreed to have an open analysis process to explore their issues around preparedness more generally. That showed that one of the main drivers of the planning not being used was that the plan and the workshop was treated as a deliverable. Completing a template and running the workshop was the measure of whether the office had prepared or not.
To change that, we redesigned the workshop so that it was no longer the place where decisions were made and a plan document written, but instead a structured annual review process. Workshop participants would identify what they were going to do in the rest of the year – including by who and when – which the Senior Management Team would then follow up on.
The plans would also become much more specific and concrete – a few action points for teams to take forward that would actually make them more ready to respond, rather than broad intentions to prepare for a possible crisis.
Finally, we could see that the workshops had become a holding place to discuss and train people on a variety of humanitarian topics. Although it was understandable why that had happened, it needed to be removed so actual planning could take place.
Alongside standard preparedness workshop sessions, we created a customizable template for a tabletop crisis simulation which each office could adapt to their own setting, just by adjusting numbers and place numbers. To roll out the whole package we held a Training of Facilitators face-to-face course for a selected group of the people responsible for running the workshops in their regions. That included pre-workshop study as well as an extremely practical course, where learners constantly practiced different facilitation techniques. 100% of participants in the course said that it substantially or enormously improved their readiness to facilitate the planning workshop.
