Emergency preparedness: when readiness is put to the test

The incidents keep coming. Sometimes one at a time — contained, manageable, resolved before the next begins. Often, concurrent and overlapping, each one pulling on the same stretched workforce and the same fractured attention.

Plans exist. Exercises have been run. 

And yet when a critical event arrives — moving faster than the briefings, involving partners who have never operated together under pressure — the gap between what was prepared and what is possible becomes visible in real time. 

Three  gaps are especially consequential.

Gap 1: Response network preparedness

Whether the emergency response network is connected, tested, and able to function together under pressure before the event arrives. 

A 2025 nationwide survey of state emergency management directors in North America found that only 25% believe their employees have the necessary skills to effectively manage emergency conditions, with decision-making under pressure and interagency coordination identified as the top gaps (Deloitte-NEMA National Risk Study, 2025). The European Commission’s 2025 report on disaster risk management found persistent gaps in preparedness and cross-sector coordination across EU member states (European Commission, COM(2025) 561).

Gap 2: Multi-level coordination

Whether situational awareness reaches every level of the organisation simultaneously, and whether escalation paths work under pressure. 

The distance between having agreements on paper and functioning together in a live event is built through practice, and most emergency response networks practise it far less than the risk environment demands. The ability to maintain shared situational awareness as the situation unfolds as well as fully coordinate actions in real-time are among the most significant challenges.

Gap 3: Training and exercise capability

Whether exercises are frequent enough, realistic enough, and whether findings close into improvements. 

This includes whether training builds the confidence, teamwork, and  coordinated decision-making that a live event demands. A 2024 review in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management identified ‘stress and fatigue’ as well as  ‘interoperability’ under pressure among the challenges in emergency management decision-making. These are not gaps that better planning closes. They are the conditions of response — and they are addressed through training that replicates realistic conditions, builds pattern recognition, and prepares responders to act decisively when it matters.

The Incident Manager holds all three simultaneously: accountable upward to leadership who needs oversight without operational detail, downward to responders who need clear tasking without delay, and laterally across an emergency response network that may never have been tested at full scale.

Three incidents. Three kinds of failures.

The evidence from recent major incidents points to three consistent gaps. Each one represents  a potential breaking point — and each   bears directly on  the Incident Manager’s abilities to coordinate a response and recover effectively..

Exercise findings without follow-through: Manchester Arena, May 2017

A suicide bomber killed 22 people as 14,000 concertgoers left the arena following an Ariana Grande concert. The multi-agency response involved Greater Manchester Police, North West Ambulance Service, Manchester Fire and Rescue, and a network of supporting agencies. The Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Principles ( JESIP) existed precisely for this scenario.

The Manchester Arena Inquiry, a statutory public inquiry published in 2022, found that JESIP ‘substantially failed in all organisations’ on the night. The Force Duty Officer role at Greater Manchester Police had been identified as a coordination bottleneck during Exercise Winchester Accord: a preparedness exercise run before the attack. The gap was documented. No action was taken. When the event arrived, the bottleneck was still there.

The lesson is not that exercises are not useful . It is that an exercise without a closed loop — a finding that becomes a documented action, assigned, tracked, and verified — is a false assurance. Martyn’s Law, the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act now on the statute book, exists in part as the legislative response to that failure: the formal recognition that preparedness for public venues and events cannot remain aspirational.

Strategic blindness, operational silence: Ahrtal floods, Germany, July 2021

Extreme rainfall caused catastrophic flooding across the Ahr valley, killing over 180 people and causing an estimated €30 billion in damage. Even though forecast data and warnings were available, the information did not flow well. Post-event reviews criticized delays in activating and coordinating elements of the disaster-response system, alongside broader shortcomings in warning dissemination and crisis management. 

Missing information emerged as a top problem reported by 51% of emergency responders surveyed after the event. Other reported issues included misinformation, issues with alerts, communications failures, and overall challenges in coordination, especially among organisations. 

Such findings are consistent with the challenges many organisations face with coordination during an incident. ‘At the operational level there is a notch better cooperation than what we tend to manage at strategic level,’ observed Rune Bratland, Head of Emergency Preparedness at Eviny, at the NSR webinar hosted by RAYVN in May 2026. ‘My experience is that this is often harder to achieve, with arguments around lack of time.’ Many organisations face operational challenges, when the strategic level has no real-time picture of the unfolding situation and the operational level cannot share what it knows fast enough to matter.

Centralised decisions, operational collapse: Southwest Airlines, December 2022

A winter storm swept the United States in the days before Christmas 2022. Every major airline was disrupted. Only Southwest cancelled nearly 16,700 flights over ten days — roughly 70% of its schedule at peak — leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded and costing over $800 million in penalties, refunds, and reimbursements.

The weather triggered the disruption. The operational collapse came from the system’s inability to recover once situational awareness degraded. As cancellations cascaded, the Network Operations Center gradually lost track of where crews and aircraft were. Schedulers resorted to calling individual crew members by phone to establish basic situational awareness. Decision-making authority had been centralised away from frontline staff — the people with the clearest view of operational reality — into a hierarchical structure that was operating blind. 

Just weeks before the collapse, Casey Murray, the president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, had warned: ‘I fear that we are one thunderstorm, one air traffic controller event, one IT router failure away from a complete meltdown.’ The warning was documented, but the insight was not acted upon. When the event arrived, leadership believed they were managing a recovery while the situation kept deteriorating because the information reaching them was incomplete, filtered, and arriving too late to act on. The DOT imposed a $140 million civil penalty. In the years that followed, Southwest invested $112.4 million in upgrades to its Network Operations Control systems, including tools designed to improve crew and aircraft recovery during disruptions. 

Each of these cases highlights  the requirements for delivering an effective, fully coordinated response: incident management that is rigorous enough to close known gaps, cohesive enough to hold the response network together under pressure, and practiced enough that it works when ane incident strikes.

Where does your organisation sit?

To overcome a siloed approach to incident management, the Incident Manager needs to be able to coordinate both vertically and laterally.

Level	What the gap typically looks like	What good looks like
Strategic	Executive leaders rarely exercise jointly with counterparts in partner organisations. When a crisis arrives, the strategic level is the last to have a clear picture and the first to demand one. Briefings arrive filtered and late.	Senior leaders exercise joint decision-making with counterparts before the event. Real-time situational awareness calibrated to their role means they can act within the decision window rather than wait for a briefing.
Operational	Coordination runs through individual relationships and ad hoc channels. When a key person is unavailable, cooperation breaks down. Information moves sequentially between levels, arriving late or incomplete.	Coordination runs through shared infrastructure any qualified team member can operate. Information reaches all levels simultaneously, calibrated to each role. Cooperation survives turnover and absence.
Tactical	Frontline responders depend on whatever tools and protocols are available on the day. Joint principles are known but not consistently practised under realistic conditions. Hesitation ensues when an incident occurs.	Frontline coordination is exercised regularly through the same infrastructure used in live incidents. Platform familiarity means responders act without hesitation. Tasks are clear from the first moment.

Sources: Manchester Arena Inquiry Volume 2, 2022; Ahrtal post-event surveys 2021–2024; NSR webinar hosted by RAYVN, May 2026.

The human factor in incident management

There’s another factor to consider  beyond the structural failures arising from these gaps in coordination. In each of the three examples we’ve mentioned, people with good intentions and real capability were operating in conditions that made it harder than it needed to be to see what was happening, decide what to do, and act on it in time. That is the human reality of managing a critical event under pressure — and there are particular social and psychological dimensions that can make all the difference .

Zone of delusion

Chris Scott, Crisis and Emergency Response Manager at CHEMTREC, who has spent over 30 years leading chemical, terrorism, and major incident responses across five continents, calls one of the most significant challenges the zone of delusion: the state where pressure becomes so overwhelming that people start to believe they are performing well when in fact they are not.  Under acute stress, activity in the amygdala can overwhelm the prefrontal cortex, so that reasoning, planning, and impulse control become less effective. Decisions shift from deliberate and consultative — where most people’s best judgment lives — toward fast and reactive. ‘Strong but wrong’ is the way Scott describes it. And this very human factor can happen to anyone, no matter what position they hold: ‘There is nothing commensurate between a person’s hierarchical position in an organisation and their ability to effectively manage crisis,’ Scott observes. This is why the Incident Manager’s role is so important in keeping everyone focused under pressure.

Flight, fight, and freeze

Most commonly, the first response to a sudden critical event is not fight or flight but rather freeze. Brynjar Gunnarskog, Head of Crisis Management at MOLO BHT and a clinical psychologist specialising in post-traumatic stress and crisis response, explains the mechanism: when the brain searches for data on how to handle a situation it has never encountered before and finds none, it locks. This is not weakness. It is a biological response to the absence of experience that can be drawn on. 

For the Incident Manager, this means that he or she needs preparation, experience, and support to  so that the right response can be identified and executed immediately when an incident arises. Specifically, an Incident Manager requires a clear picture of what is happening, unambiguous roles, and the confidence that comes from  preparedness in realistic conditions to build experience .

Communication breakdown

Any breakdown in communication can undermine effective response and recovery.  . Scott names it as the single biggest contributing factor in any incident — not always the root cause —  consistently the point where a manageable situation becomes unmanageable. Without shared situational awareness, each person bases  their response on individual perception rather than collective understanding. That gap fills with confabulation: filling in information gaps with best guesses or making decisions based on what people think is happening rather than what is actually unfolding. 

Information gaps 

Every incident has information gaps. The question is whether the response network closes them fast enough to enable good decision-making. Scott describes what the right infrastructure provides: ‘It is something that calms me down, slows me down, can centralise all the information I need, and I can see it all.’  This is what he calls a virtual prefrontal cortex: the rational layer that holds when the instinctive response to freeze or fill in the gaps would otherwise take over. Both preparedness and a well-designed critical event management solution can help manage these very human responses to incidents when working under pressure.

How to close the gaps

For emergency preparedness, training, coordination, and a response practice that acknowledges the human element are needed. Capability that is genuinely exercised — through the same system used for live incidents — generates a record that informs improvements in preparedness and incident management. 

Coordination across the emergency response network needs to be supported by shared situational awareness as the incident unfolds, with the right tools and communications to keep everyone on task regardless of where they sit in the structure. And a frictionless UX experience enables responders and the network to stay focused entirely on response and recovery together.

RAYVN has been continuously developed around incident response and preparedness requirements, most recently with the launch of a modernised user experience designed to help teams move faster and stay oriented during critical events. This development process drewon customer feedback; field observation of Emergency Managers using the platform under realistic conditions; listening to what frustrated responders, slowed them down, or simply did not work; and co-design with super users from large municipal government, energy, aviation, and specialist risk consultancy. The result is RAYVN offers a solution built around what practitioners actually experience and need to coordinate a response in real-time. .

‘When a critical event unfolds,’ said Erik Skaara, RAYVN’s co-founder, who comes from an emergency response background, ‘people don’t rise to the occasion — they fall to the level of their preparation. What makes the difference is whether a team can come together quickly around a shared picture of what’s happening, and act on it. Every second spent searching for information is a second not spent on the response.’

Because each and every decision matters.

Coordination gap identifier

Eight questions that surface where your emergency response network is most at risk — across response network preparedness, multi-level coordination, and training and exercise capability.

Question 1 of 8 1 / 8

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