As Ottawa-Gatineau shifts from response to recovery after six tornadoes ripped through the region, there will likely be a review of how authorities responded to this event. The aim of such exercises is to identify the “lessons learned” from the incident in order to improve response and resilience in the future.
Improving Canada’s response to events like this, which resulted in severe damage in several areas and knocked out the electricity supply for more than 300,000 customers, is crucial. This may well be our new normal: more extreme weather events that have a significant impact on our communities. The challenge is how we learn from these events. Emergency management professionals need to understand what went well during the response to an incident, as well as what might need to be improved. Building a picture of what worked and what did not can be used as the foundation for improving resilience to future emergencies. These kinds of exercises are usually referred to as “lessons learned.”
Unfortunately, “lessons learned” is one of the most misused terms in emergency management.
Reviews of responses to major incidents over the last two decades show a number of repeated recommendations that were not implemented — sometimes with deadly results.
For example, the reviews of the murder of four RCMP members in Moncton in 2014 and the shooting on Parliament Hill during the same year reveal that several recommendations mirrored those in earlier reviews. Officers’ lack of access to carbines or long guns was mentioned in both reviews, for instance, yet this shortcoming had already been flagged in previous reviews.
At an event I chaired on emergency management earlier this year, a senior provincial official also noted this pattern, suggesting that lessons may not actually have been learned on the back of previous events. For example, there were a range of recommendations made after the 2005 floods in Alberta that were not acted on – such as better identification of flood-prone areas and halting sales of Crown land on flood plains – potentially exacerbating the impact of the devastating 2013 floods in the province.
Conversations with emergency management professionals across Canada have revealed that this is a challenging issue across a range of emergencies, from floods to wildfires.
Why is this? When the label “lessons learned” is used, as it often is in what authorities call “after-action reviews,” the temptation is to simply leave the lesson as is. After all, it’s already been learned, has it not? This is what I call the lessons-learned trap: the belief that lessons have been learned on the back of a disaster simply because they have been identified and labelled as such.
In reality, the issues brought up during a review should simply be labelled as “lessons” or “lessons identified.” A lesson is not truly learned until actions have been taken. This might seem like a simple argument about nomenclature but, as mentioned earlier, it is an actual problem as we see the same lessons identified time and time again. Some recent reviews are starting to take this issue into account. For example, the review of the 2016 Wood Buffalo (Fort McMurray) wildfire made a clear distinction between “lessons identified” and “lessons learned.”
While many aspects of the response to the recent tornadoes and subsequent power outages have been very good, there will always be room for improvement. As we move from response into recovery, then assess how authorities performed, it is vital that we not fall into the “lessons learned” trap. In order to maximize the value from identifying these lessons, we need to ensure that they are actually acted on and learned. Only then will we be better prepared and more resilient when — not if — the next emergency comes.
Dr. Satyamoorthy Kabilan, Vice-President of Policy at the Public Policy Forum, has expertise in national security, emergency management and public safety issues.