Psychology of Incident Command

The course is delivered by Chris Scott and Gareth Black, CHEMTREC’s crisis management consultants with a fascinating history spanning across 45 years of experience in their field, this is coupled with a minimum of master’s degrees in crisis and disaster management and are considered pioneers in their field of specialization.

This highly interactive, discursive, relaxed and somewhat informal session sets out to explore the relationships between the world in which we now live and the difficulties of high-pressure situations such as incident command and crisis management. We will explore why mistakes are made and how they are most commonly derived from pressure, often self-induced - to perform to high standard and suffer from ‘cognitive tunneling’ too focused on the task in hand without due care and consideration for the wider ‘strategic’ thinking. We will explore and understand why we default to lazy thinking aka intuitive thinking.

The course sets out to explore why, as humans, some people relish the opportunity to ‘flick a switch’ and step into the incident management arena, whilst for others, it may be a skill that stretches their cognitive capacity beyond reasonable capability.

Have you ever wondered why some people seem better at commanding incidents or dealing with high pressure situations than others? Is it a natural acumen that humans possess, or can we learn to be good at it?

Psychology of Incident Command – An exploration of stress factors and their effects on incident command

• To discuss and recognize the psychological indicators of stress factors and emotional responses and its potential impact on our day-to-day business and beyond.
• Striving for excellence in our work – curse of the strong?
• Understanding statistics of the impacts of stress in high pressure environments.
• Incident Command – Why some people thrive and others struggle to survive?
• An exploration of non-technical skills – the key to unlocking next level incident command.
• How do minimal stress factors impede and impact our ability to utilize non-technical skills?
• Learning to balance mice, not elephant

Learn more about the role of CHEMTREC's Crisis Management Consultants here.