Transforming Emergency Management in Colorado & the Work of Paul Cilliers

Today I was fortunate to spend a couple of hours with a group of like-minded individuals working to find our way through the task of transforming Colorado's emergency management system from bureaucracy to complex adaptive system. When completed, the group will make formal recommendations to the State regarding what action to take. The second meeting on many more, the group had already made significant progress.

Constraints

The meeting today was largely centered on gathering information to map the present disposition of the emergency management system across the state. This materialized as a series of questions that might be asked in a survey and distributed around Colorado. I contributed by bringing into question the nature of constraints and proposing that we figure out what type of system emergency managers around the state are presently utilizing. The following excerpt from Cilliers (2010) offers a clear connection between constraints and system types:

A system does not have the capac…