[00:00:00] Kyle King: there's something we haven't fully grasped about modern crisis. What if we've been exposed to a completely new dynamic that we have simply have not considered before? And I'd like to introduce the concept of the velocity of crisis. A term that has yet to appear in current literature around emergencies and disasters.
[00:00:17] Kyle King: And we see similar terms such as [00:00:20] systemic risk, but nothing captures the intent of what we're discussing about velocity. Governments, organizations and communities all expect rapid response times when incidents occur. There's a collective expectation of quick emergency assistance. One, we've been messaging for decades.
[00:00:36] Kyle King: We even regulate it fairly well in terms of how many minutes [00:00:40] of response time are needed to get an ambulance or a firetruck. But here's the problem. When we look through the lens of velocity and cascading systems, not every piece of infrastructure has a rapid response capability. That distinction isn't semantic.
[00:00:54] Kyle King: It's the difference between working against the dynamics of a crisis and learning to work with [00:01:00] them.
[00:01:04] Kyle King: Hi everyone and welcome to the Crisis Lab podcast. I'm Kyle and I'll be your host today. We will cover another one of our articles that we have published on LinkedIn And this time we're gonna talk about the velocity of crisis and what. We consider to be the speed gap, and that's really killing our [00:01:20] communities.
[00:01:23] Kyle King: if you pick any disaster and read the after action, review the recommendations, follow a fairly predictable pattern. Improve response times, enhance coordination, speed, deploy resources faster. Page after page largely emphasizes speed. How [00:01:40] quickly can we move decide and act when we're faced with an impending disaster or as a result of a disaster?
[00:01:46] Kyle King: But Remember physics class? Neither do we. And it shows in physics, speed measures how fast something moves, and velocity measures both speed and direction. The distinction seems elementary. Yet [00:02:00] when we add the metric of velocity, we find that modern disasters and crises now escalate faster than our existing institutional response systems can adapt.
[00:02:09] Kyle King: And so traditional emergency management isn't oriented toward velocity. We continue to think about responding to one complex incident at a time, and that takes up most of our focus, but [00:02:20] we're not necessarily prepared for multiple systemic failures quickly, overwhelming resources. And since we don't want to acknowledge system failure.
[00:02:28] Kyle King: We often orient around the idea that the odds of something like this happening are relatively low. We structure our exercises around predictable responses or bread and butter responses, with [00:02:40] maybe some complexity thrown in but the world has changed and emergency management is still trying to catch up through the bureaucratic silos and decision making process. This isn't about moving faster, it's about understanding how crises actually move. What does the velocity of crisis look like? Nature's journal in 2025, special issue [00:03:00] on cascading disasters found that disasters are no longer defined by natural extremes.
[00:03:04] Kyle King: Instead, they're increasingly the product of complex interactions among multiple hazards and entrenched social vulnerabilities and sy. Systemic governance failures. Now think about what that means. We're no longer managing single hazard events. We're confronting compounding [00:03:20] disasters that amplify each other, accelerating through interconnected system failures faster than response protocols can really adapt to.
[00:03:28] Kyle King: So if we take the Spain and Portugal outages of April, 2025, when the grid failed, the crisis didn't simply happen fast. It moved through systems following a completely and [00:03:40] rather predictable. Sequence traffic lights stopped functioning first and the hospital backup generators kicked in. Communication networks stuttered and failed, and airports delayed flights.
[00:03:50] Kyle King: Each failure created the exact conditions needed to accelerate the next Dr. Susan Cutter from the University of South Carolina captured the acceleration problem, [00:04:00] the more complexity you have in a system, unless there are tremendous redundancies, which isn't always the case in this case with water.
[00:04:07] Kyle King: You will have secondary and tertiary effects. The interval between disasters is shortening, or in some cases disappearing altogether. Now, Authorities tried to respond faster, but they were chasing the crisis rather than [00:04:20] anticipating its trajectory. The velocity of cascading infrastructure. Failure operates at infrastructure speeds, not administrative speeds, and that is the core mismatch we're dealing with.
[00:04:31] Kyle King: So why do systems fall like a house of cards in a hurricane? Well, A SCE studies on cascading infrastructure failures found that around [00:04:40] 3.69% of simulations. Lead to large cascading failures across power and water systems. These failures compromise entire systems in a very short time through sudden spikes across all nodes.
[00:04:54] Kyle King: These aren't necessarily random events. They follow predictable velocity patterns, building gradually until [00:05:00] reaching critical mass and then accelerating exponentially. \
[00:05:03] Kyle King: The 2021 European floods illustrate this quite well, despite European flood awareness system alerts issue days ahead. 35% of respondents in North Ryan West failure and 29% in Rhineland Palatinate received no warning because the system couldn't process and [00:05:20] disseminate information fast enough for flash flooding conditions.
[00:05:23] Kyle King: The system. It wasn't simply overwhelmed by volume, it was overwhelmed by the velocity of information processing requirements moving through interconnected warning systems. And so this isn't necessarily a capacity problem, it's a velocity problem disguised as a capacity problem. [00:05:40] And so the question becomes, if traditional response systems can't match velocity of a crisis, then what can.
[00:05:47] Kyle King: So what happens when speed isn't enough? And while human-centered response systems consistently fail to match the velocity of a crisis, technology solutions can bridge this gap by working with the physics of how a crisis can actually [00:06:00] spread through these interconnected systems.
[00:06:02] Kyle King: Consider California's Alert California program, which has demonstrated early wildfire detection capabilities. Alerting authorities and enabling faster firefighter response and evacuations. The system represents decades of evolution from basic camera networks to sophisticated AI enabled detection systems.
[00:06:19] Kyle King: [00:06:20] There's the crisis controls Craig AI assistant, which shows significant improvement in engaging incident responders and managers. While Everbridge is critical event management platform can rapidly orchestrate SOPs, communications and action plans during a crisis, research indicates. That organizations using automated critical event management platforms can [00:06:40] resolve incidents significantly faster and reduce downtime costs compared to manual approaches.
[00:06:45] Kyle King: These systems succeed because they don't just move faster. They coordinate responses before a cascading event can occur rather than trying to catch up after it's already overwhelming human decision making capacity. So [00:07:00] how do we actually work with the velocity of crisis? And the most effective interventions don't just respond to current conditions.
[00:07:06] Kyle King: They take proactive measures across all systems and infrastructure that could be impacted rather than waiting to see if they are impacted. The real difference is shifting from our traditional approach of resolving one problem and then [00:07:20] recovering to taking preventative measures that get ahead of velocity.
[00:07:24] Kyle King: This may mean cutting power early to neighborhoods, shutting off water systems in advance, or implementing other protective protocols as preventative measures rather than reactive ones. And this requires understanding three velocity principles that represent governance challenges, not just emergency [00:07:40] management issues, and implementing them as part of an awareness of velocity and design and planning.
[00:07:47] Kyle King: First velocity is predictable across systems. Since everything is interconnected, we can map out systems and structures and understand cascading effects well in advance. The velocity and mapping of infrastructure systems exist, [00:08:00] but it's not matching our decision making models. If we can use technology to support decision making, then we can start to get ahead of velocity.
[00:08:07] Kyle King: This means anticipatory positioning, not just positioning resources based on predicted trajectories rather than current conditions, but also making anticipatory decisions to get ahead of velocity based on data [00:08:20] and information. Second intervention points have windows. If we can get into predictive analytics, we can have windows in time where we can catch up to the velocity of a crisis and head things off.
[00:08:34] Kyle King: There are specific moments when interventions can redirect a trajectory and so miss that window [00:08:40] and you're chasing the crisis, hit it correctly and cascading failures can be prevented before they gain momentum. And this translates to cascade interruption. Planning for the interruption of velocity by identifying critical nodes where crisis velocity can be slowed down or redirected.
[00:08:57] Kyle King: Our goal should be controlling their [00:09:00] trajectory through existing systems and infrastructure and redirecting rather than trying to stop disasters, and that's likely impossible. Third, we have automation which matches physics, and so this gives us a window of opportunity to make decisions that while they may not seem connected to the outside or to the public even.
[00:09:19] Kyle King: [00:09:20] Are able to get ahead of the velocity of a crisis. And so human decision making operates at human speeds. The velocity of a crisis operates at system speed, so this means deploying automated triggers that can activate certain responses at system speed rather than administrative speed, especially if they are pre decisions or discussed and [00:09:40] agreed protocols that are in place.
[00:09:41] Kyle King: And so this requires infrastructure investment in real time data processing, which enables continuous monitoring. Decision making speed. Now, all of this requires orchestration as many decisions and preparatory actions taken in advance or pre-agreed as much as possible [00:10:00] so that automation can help while leaving the more consequential and complex decisions for the human level decision making.
[00:10:08] Kyle King: Maintaining that sort of human in the loop type of response. So what is the future of emergency management when we have to compensate for velocity? Emergency [00:10:20] management as a field must change from largely reactive human-centric decision making model to one that's augmented by technology and those technological approaches that can operate and expedite decisions and pre decisions in order to interrupt the velocity of a crisis.
[00:10:34] Kyle King: And so the key point. Is that technology adaptation, pre-agreed [00:10:40] decisions and interruption methodology is going to help shape the future. And we're not talking about eliminating human judgment and decision making. We're enabling human decision makers to operate at speeds that modern crises now demand.
[00:10:55] Kyle King: So the real question is, are we ready to stop running behind and start getting ahead? Emergency management as a [00:11:00] government function faces transformation comparable to the technology and innovation disruption of other professions. Everyone who's been watching the news can see that velocity's overwhelming response capability from LA fires to Texas power outages to floods across multiple states.
[00:11:14] Kyle King: It's always a story of overwhelming response and connected systems. And [00:11:20] the velocity of crisis challenge isn't just about building faster response systems. It's about building systems that understand. Where the crisis is traveling and where it's going to, and how can we mitigate the acceleration as part of the response?
[00:11:34] Kyle King: And we have smart cities. How far are we from having smart emergency management [00:11:40] in a world of compounding, cascading, and persistent disasters with perpetual recovery? Success won't belong to those who respond fastest to the current conditions. It will belong to those who can understand velocity and implement systems that allow them to mitigate the velocity of a crisis as part of their response.
[00:11:58] Kyle King: The physics haven't changed. [00:12:00] Our understanding of them can, and maybe that understanding is enough to transform everything else that follows.
[00:12:07] Kyle King: Thanks for tuning in the Crisis Lab podcast. And we hope that today's episode is provided you with some new insights and perspectives to help you better navigate the challenges of your field.
[00:12:14] Kyle King: And remember, each episode for us is at least a step forward and then towards mastering the complexities of [00:12:20] crisis management. And we're here to share the knowledge along the way. So thanks again and we'll see you in the next episode.
