SARMA Day 1 - Christopher T. Geldart

For our first Session Speaker, this was not a breakout so everyone at the conference got to hear Mr. Geldart speak, and I must say I thought it was a treat. Mr. Geldart is the Director at the Office of National Capital Region Coordination for F.E.M.A. His presentation was entitled “Regional Risk: A Coordinated Effort”. I thought Mr. Geldart was a very good speaker, he had great information that was pertinent to his speech, he went a good pace so it gave me time to write things down so you all can read about it, and he obviously knew is information, any question that was asked he answered very well and the people who asked the question were satisfied with his answer.

I have about 2 pages worth of notes on his speech so I’ll see if I can’t make sense of it all to make it make sense up here, also I invited you to look at my friend’s blogs as they were both in attendance of the conference with me and taking notes furiously as well, Russ Beck and Matt Maisel.

He dove right into his material and I’ll try and keep it short and sweet but also try to convey the same message across to you that I recieved. Once again the need for a common lexicon was stressed… heavily. He also made mention of the need for information sharing, knowledge that an organization gains needs to be shared across the board. One of the major questions that he raised in his presentation was with regard to the Department of Homeland Security and wondering how do we split up funds across the states so that they can provide money to their respective FEMA organizations.

He then spoke of regional education plans on risk analysis, from here he said that we need to determine roles and responsibilities, specifically addressing the concept of the the federal government working together with the state and local officials. There is a need for a consensus for everyone to be understanding of what a job entails and what exactly we are at risk to. His next point I found to be rather exciting, he mentioned that the Chief Homeland Security Director for the State is also known as the Chief Risk Officer, not an appointed position but it needs to be an assumed role.

When addressing components of risk he gave mention to the fact that whoever is in charge needs to assess what needs to be done / what you have as opposed to just managing it and taking control over it. This is important to add this step of analysis because it will help to confirm what you already know but it will also allow you to think things through 100%, not saying that if take just a management approach to it you won’t make the right decisions the thought process is not always there though. In his requirements portion of his speech he tried to dumb things down a bit asking, what is important? what bothers the leaders with regards to risk, what keeps them up at night that kind of thing. He then followed it up with outcome do we want to have and then pushing the envelope asking how does this portray us? We don’t want to anything that makes us seem irrational however we need to be well thought out in what we do.

Wrapping things up in his speech he talked about risk assessment. In this section he mainly focuessed on what are the threats or consequences to either decisions we make or what we face, what are the likelihoods or what is more probable to happen when we analyze the risk. Under risk management, which was kind of a follow up and summed everything up that he had spoke about he asked how do we make whats bad seem not so bad, and what can we do that is most effective (least amount of spending or something that will give us a high cost benefit analysis).

This was one of the few speakers whom I was able to copy down some of the questions asked and get answers so here they are:

Q: “How do we make sure people comply, specifically in all forms of government”

A: There needs to be governance, participation and recognition, in other words it needs to be “spider-webbed” down from the national part of the government to the state and then further down into the locality if necessary.

Q; “How will success be measured?”

A: In his honest opinion he said of he receives one useful recommendation for this plan that it is success, it is a personal goal.

Q: “How will you compile things learned and then share them through the industry?”

A: Everything is going to spread out through the FEMA system that is already in place.

I found Mr. Geldart’s speech to be very informative it talked about where the Risk Management industry needs to move to and I felt that people followed along with his plans easily, compared with the other plans that people brought up it seemed like one of the simpler ones to implement.