Crisis-ready Leadership

12 Preparedness

In Chapter 1, Emerging Threats and Hazards, we identified what we need to prepare for. In Chapter 3, The Challenge Ahead, we briefly considered some of the challenges facing a crisis leader such as emerging hazards, operating contexts, and vulnerable populations. Then, we made the case for whole community engagement in preparedness and building resiliency. In this chapter we will take a deeper dive into preparedness and the leader’s role in ensuring that their organization and community are prepared through the preparedness cycle framework.

Preparedness is defined by DHS/FEMA as “a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective action in an effort to ensure effective coordination during incident response.” [1]

The US National Preparedness Goal is “A secure and resilient nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk.” [2]

National Preparedness is defined as: The actions taken to plan, organize, equip, train, and exercise to build and sustain the capabilities necessary to prevent, protect against, mitigate the effects of, respond to, and recover from those threats that pose the greatest risk to the security of the Nation.

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

• Describe the preparedness cycle.
• Understand the leader’s role in building ...