Inter-agency working in a hostile environment: challenges for the emergency services

This paper is concerned with a consideration of the factors that shape the relationships between risk management and the strategy processes and which serve to erode organisational resilience as a consequence. In particular, it... [ view full abstract ]

This paper is concerned with a consideration of the factors that shape the relationships between risk management and the strategy processes and which serve to erode organisational resilience as a consequence. In particular, it has a focus on the challenges that arise from the requirements around inter-agency working. It does so within the context of work on the performance of emergency services organisations in terms of the UK's resilience policy agenda and the development of effective contingency planning arrangements to deal with a diverse array of threats. Much of the academic literature highlights the widespread acceptance of the need for an effective relationship between strategy and risk management, but it also acknowledges that they are not fully integrated in practice. This is even more problematic when the strategies for individual organisations have to take account of the capabilities and competencies of other partner agencies. Failure is also dependent on a range of elements that are at work within the system and against which that ‘failure’ is judged. This symbiotic nature of failure and its relationships to wider processes around strategy sits at the core of the literature on risk and resilience. For emergency service organisations, this challenge is even more considerable due to the nature of inter-agency working and the task requirements generated by dealing with information sharing protocols prior to a crisis event. There is a case to be made, therefore, for linking these processes around risk to the wider mechanisms by which strategy is developed and operationalized (Mitroff, Pearson, & Pauchant, 1992; Power, 2005; Smith, 1992) with a goal of achieving effective performance around resilience (Fischbacher-Smith, 2014).The paper seeks to identify some of the reasons why this dislocation occurs and it sets out four core issues that are held to be important within this context. These four elements are captured by the acronym RITA in which the processes around Risk, Indeterminacy, Transformations, and Acceptability are used as a basis to consider some of the wider problems that emerge within emergency services organisation. The RITA elements are held to interact with each other to generate a level of complexity that challenges the core capabilities and competencies of the organisation and which need to be considered within the context of its strategy. The paper is based on an extend ethnography with a number of public sector organisations who have a responsibility to feed into the resilience framework. The paper argues that the effective integration of risk and strategic management require that a holistic approach be taken by organisations – a task for which they are currently ill-prepared.