Adding Value to Emergency Management Consulting

Introduction

Toward the end of graduate school, I started to think about setting up a small consulting firm with three to five people. Around the same time that I was becoming aware of the form and function of the typical emergency management consultancy, I was also becoming enthralled with theoretically driven boutique IT firms. I started to imagine an emergency management consultancy that leaned more toward helping people think about problems and consider how they will address them than designing exercises, training programs, and plans. The conceptual thinking phase feeds into and enriches the design processes that produce concrete artifacts such as plans and exercises that are vital elements of emergency management.

I have not yet seen a consultancy like the one described above that is largely dedicated to how the problems facing emergency managers are thought about and handled. If such a firm does exist, I would love to learn about it.

A Call to Action

Now that emergency management fi…