Balancing urgent response and long-term planning in emergencies requires leaders to act decisively while thinking strategically. This means coordinating immediate needs like search and rescue while simultaneously assessing the situation to develop a recovery plan. Clear communication is vital, ensuring everyone understands their roles and the evolving priorities. Leaders must foster collaboration and be adaptable, acknowledging that emergencies are dynamic. Delegating effectively allows leaders to focus on strategic planning while empowering others to manage immediate needs. By staying calm and focused, leaders build confidence and foster resilience within the team and the affected community.

Emergency preparation starts on day one. A detailed threat analysis and contingency plans enable the incident response team, whether that be dedicated personnel, contracted security, or individual employees, to identify when an incident is occurring, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) should give a general guideline on how incidents should be handled. Over-reliance on SOPs can cause employees to not be able to think for themselves in the moment of a crisis, so training is important to communicate priorities, orders of work, and what variables may change due to different incidents occurring. No two emergencies will be exactly the same, and planning them all around the same framework can be counter-intuitive if there is not flexibility.

Na minha experiência, para manter o foco no presente e no futuro em tempos de crise, é imprescindível ter um bom alinhamento com a equipe, dividir tarefas, gerir o tempo de modo a dar foco na questão crítica, mas sem deixar de acompanhar as demais questões. Algumas ferramentas, além de acompanhamento periódico podem ajudar.

Planning effectively through collaborative efforts that enable the team to prioritize the most urgent (time sensitive) tasks as well as the most impactful whilst having the knowledge and understanding of logical sequence of integrated emergency operations and consequences of each decision and action before communicating clear instructions. These decisions can be matched against a decision making model that suits the organisation and type of crisis/emergency/disaster. It must also be informed by the situation in context and be frequently, updated by those responding at the front on the ground.