Energy Resilience & Emergency Response

Overview

When the power goes down on an installation or in a community, the technical fault is rarely the hard part. The hard part is the hour after: who decides, who is told what, who is accountable, and how the place gets back to normal. Those are leadership problems, and they are what this certificate teaches.

Two graduate courses, taken in sequence.

The first examines leadership in public organizations and specifically in crisis, how decisions get made and implemented under pressure, how information is communicated when it matters most, how political leaders are held accountable afterwards, and how a community is returned to normal once the critical incident is over.

The second builds the team that does the responding. Establishing an incident response team, securing it, setting triage priorities, protecting staff from burnout during a long incident, and running the postmortem that turns one failure into a better process.

The audience Norwich built this for is energy and installation: base energy managers and public administrators responsible for facilities that depend on a grid they do not control. The coursework is the leadership and response capability that role requires.

What you will learn

By the end of the certificate you will be able to:

• Articulate a leadership philosophy, and understand how a public leader comes to embody an organization's values
• Make and implement decisions under the conditions a crisis actually imposes; incomplete information, compressed time, public scrutiny
• Communicate in a critical situation: who needs to know what, when, and through which channel
• Account for a crisis afterwards, including how political leaders are held responsible and what that means for how you document decisions
• Return a community or organization to normal operations after a critical incident, as a deliberate process rather than a drift back
• Establish an incident response team; membership criteria, team management principles, and how the team itself is protected
• Triage competing incidents and defend the priority order you set
• Sustain a team through a long response, including protecting people from burnout
• Run a postmortem that produces process change, and apply analytic tools to give public administrators real options for a decision