[00:00:02] Kyle King: So something stranger happens when you reach senior levels in this field. The formal development infrastructure that carried you through your first decade simply, somewhat just disappears. You master your core discipline, and then the profession offers you a choice. Once you start to reach the top, it's [00:00:20] become a generalist, quote unquote leader, or remain trapped in, let's say, operational or tactical level expertise.
[00:00:27] Kyle King: But what happens when you reach that 15 to 20 year mark in your career? Your leading organizations, yes, but you are still managing a complex crisis. You need more strategy than technical and [00:00:40] operational training provides, but you also need more depth than just leadership and management. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Crisis Lab podcast, and I'm Kyle and I'll be your host.
[00:00:53] Kyle King: And today I want to talk a little bit about what we call the Professional Development Paradox. And so why I believe senior [00:01:00] leaders are intellectually starving. Now to start off with, I think the math just doesn't work anymore. I think that learning cycles take up to 15 years, and the evolution of a crisis is happening in months.
[00:01:17] Kyle King: And so professional development as we see it [00:01:20] today, isn't just inefficient. It's somewhat actively dangerous to the communities that we serve. And so I've noticed something shifting across the profession over the last 18 months or so. We seem to be taking on increasingly complex challenges while receiving more public scrutiny and criticism than ever before.
[00:01:39] Kyle King: In many [00:01:40] ways, we still have to focus on the fundamentals. All disasters are local response starts at the community level, but we are simultaneously managing scenarios that cascade across sectors in a rapidly changing world. And this is something that no one has prepared us for. Emergency management people are often praised for [00:02:00] being ultimately flexible, dealing with uncertainty and creating order out of chaos.
[00:02:05] Kyle King: And these are supposedly our core strengths. But as I see things now, I often wonder if we're dealing with a type of self-imposed chaos. Look at the pattern that's emerged after Hurricane Helene, after the Los Angeles fires, after every [00:02:20] cascading crisis that reveals new breakdowns in our systems, we conduct the same ritual.
[00:02:26] Kyle King: After action reviews, identify lessons learned. Organizations slowly adapt policies, industry standards eventually shift and become professionalized and academic programs finally incorporate new approaches into the [00:02:40] curriculum. But what is that timeline? My estimates is it's roughly 15 years from the time that we have some type of operational learning to training the next generation of professionals.
[00:02:53] Kyle King: Meanwhile, cyber physical attacks compound into supply chain failures that trigger social unrest within [00:03:00] weeks, not years. Climate security and climate driven disasters arrive with unprecedented complexity. While our professional development models that we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis still assume that we have decades to perfect our response.
[00:03:14] Kyle King: This enters into what we call the post mastery vacuum. [00:03:20] So something stranger happens when you reach senior levels in this field. The formal development infrastructure that carried you through your first decade simply, somewhat, just disappears. You master your core discipline. For example, emergency management, business continuity, security operations, or even crisis communications.[00:03:40]
[00:03:40] Kyle King: And then the profession offers you a choice. Once you start to reach the top, it's become a generalist, quote unquote leader, or remain trapped in, let's say, operational or tactical level expertise. And here's the paradox. The systems we use for training and professional development are very structured in the beginning because they cover the [00:04:00] fundamentals of what we need to know.
[00:04:01] Kyle King: Earlier in your career, you have fixed and finite responsibilities until you grow and mature. Then you start working within spaces that are less defined and have less structure. Eventually things become so abstract that. Professional development assumes you just need to focus on leadership and that your [00:04:20] responsibility for doing the work should be delegated.
[00:04:23] Kyle King: So there's nothing wrong with leadership as a principle. It needs to be developed as you grow in responsibilities and maturity and start leading organizations. With progress comes responsibility. But there's a large assumption being made in professional development that once you become a senior professional, [00:04:40] you no longer need to continue exploring new ideas that you no longer need to be bothered with the technical and just need to focus on leading organizations.
[00:04:50] Kyle King: After months of research and countless discussions with senior professionals around the world, I have discovered there are really only sort of two categories of professional development, the [00:05:00] technical, and then the leadership and the fundamental skills you need to do your job in your chosen profession, and then leadership or how to lead the profession once you've reached a level of seniority.
[00:05:11] Kyle King: But what happens when you reach that 15 to 20 year mark in your career? You're leading organizations, yes, but you're still managing a [00:05:20] complex crisis. You need more strategy than technical and operational training provides, but you also need more depth than just leadership and management. Research from Argonne National Laboratories Comprehensive Emergency Management Survey reveals somewhat the scope of this problem among thousands of professionals that they've [00:05:40] surveyed.
[00:05:40] Kyle King: Training and education challenges affect agencies at every level. While human resources issues including burnout, low pay and difficulty hiring, qualified staff represent nearly half of all significant challenges that are facing these agencies. More telling, many agencies lack the capacity for strategic planning because they're [00:06:00] consumed by immediate operational and compliance demands.
[00:06:04] Kyle King: So in fact, senior professionals find themselves intellectually starving. So here's a question I've started asking people in dozens of different interviews that I've done. When was the last time that you were actually intellectually curious about something? [00:06:20] And for me, the responses were astonishing, most involved.
[00:06:24] Kyle King: Genuine self-reflection, and what I've found is that people are struggling to be intellectually curious about the same profession they've been in for the last 15 or 20 years. That motivation, that curiosity, that spark we all miss to a certain extent is no [00:06:40] longer in the mechanics of doing the job itself.
[00:06:43] Kyle King: This gets us into what I call the silo trap, and so the patterns I documented in a previous article on the burden of criticism and the same old answers won't solve new problems. Aren't just about emergency management's, institutional failures, so to speak. They're symptoms of a broader [00:07:00] professional development crisis affecting every field dealing with complex challenges.
[00:07:04] Kyle King: And so we've created a professional ecosystem that rewards narrow expertise to be a really true functional expert. While modern problems demand integrated solutions, emergency managers understand disasters but struggle with economic [00:07:20] cascades of these events. Business continuity professionals, for example, excel at operational recovery, but miss the societal resilience factors that influence the community they're operating in.
[00:07:30] Kyle King: And cybersecurity experts identify technical vulnerabilities while overlooking human system failures. Each profession has developed sophisticated internal knowledge [00:07:40] management systems, detailed certifications, advanced degrees, specialized conferences, and technical journals, and these create deep competency within these domains while inadvertently building walls between them and others.
[00:07:53] Kyle King: The more expert you become, for example. The more difficult it becomes to engage meaningfully with adjacent fields. And [00:08:00] so the survey data from Argonne Laboratories confirms this. The agency struggling with quote stakeholder confusion about the role of emergency management represent 27% of all respondents, and that's evidence.
[00:08:11] Kyle King: I would think that even within emergency management, professionals can't clearly communicate their value across organizational boundaries. If we can't bridge silos within [00:08:20] our own field, how can we expect to integrate with other disciplines when a complex crisis actually demands it? This is where I would offer the idea that we can question what mastery actually means.
[00:08:33] Kyle King: And the deepest problem with current professional development, in my view, lies in how we misunderstand mastery itself. We treat [00:08:40] expertise as a destination, a set of competencies to acquire and maintain rather than a platform for continuous intellectual growth. True mastery, in my mind, is complex.
[00:08:52] Kyle King: Especially in complex fields requires what learning sciences and researchers like Hatano and Iki [00:09:00] call adaptive expertise, the ability to apply deep knowledge to novel situations while remaining open to fundamental reframes. When the circumstances require it and then demand it. True mastery in complex fields requires what learning scientists, researchers, hatano and iki call adaptive expertise.
[00:09:19] Kyle King: The ability [00:09:20] to apply deep knowledge to novel situations while remaining open to fundamental reframes of that knowledge when the circumstances demand demanded. But most professional development stops at routine expertise, which involves mastering procedures to become highly efficient and accurate. But limits the overall [00:09:40] innovation when facing unprecedented challenges.
[00:09:42] Kyle King: This difference becomes critical when senior professionals face these types of challenges. The LA fires weren't just bigger versions of previous fires. They represented new intersections of climate, infrastructure and societal factors that required thinking beyond any single discipline's, traditional boundaries.
[00:09:59] Kyle King: Hurricane Helene's [00:10:00] impacts. Couldn't it be managed through standard emergency management protocols because they triggered cascades across sectors that no individual profession fully understood or could contend with. And yet, our professional development systems continue producing routine experts equipped for yesterday's problems while leaving them intellectually [00:10:20] isolated when facing tomorrow's challenges.
[00:10:23] Kyle King: This starts to get into what I call the leadership mirage. And so when senior professionals seek something more than recurring tactical training, which is largely driven by certification requirements or CEU mandates, the alternative is executive level programming focused on leadership [00:10:40] policy and hearing from, for example, ambassadors, governors, and politicians.
[00:10:45] Kyle King: But there's a hole in the middle, a blind spot. Most leadership development focuses on management skills. Communication, delegation, strategic planning, organizational culture. These are valuable capabilities, but they're not [00:11:00] the same as the intellectual development. Senior professionals actually need to handle a complex interdisciplinary challenge.
[00:11:06] Kyle King: Leadership development assumes the problems of organizational. How to manage people and processes better. It rarely addresses the intellectual challenges of integrating knowledge across domains, questioning fundamental assumptions that we've been [00:11:20] making or developing new frameworks for unprecedented situations.
[00:11:23] Kyle King: And the result is that we have senior professionals with a enhanced management capabilities. But the same siloed thinking patterns that created their initial expertise. They become better at executing within their domains, while remaining limited in their ability to think across multiple domains. [00:11:40] And actually it's probably a bit more nuanced than that.
[00:11:44] Kyle King: The best senior professionals instinctively seek intellectual engagement outside their core discipline. They read widely, they engage with adjacent fields and build informal networks that span these professional boundaries we've been talking about. But they do this despite [00:12:00] their formal professional development models that they're using.
[00:12:02] Kyle King: They're not doing it because of the professional development system that they're operating in. And this is where we have the convergence problem. And what we're witnessing is a convergence of multiple forces that creates a perfect storm for senior professionals. It's increasingly complex crisis requiring [00:12:20] interdisciplinary approaches.
[00:12:21] Kyle King: Heightened public scrutiny of how we manage emergencies and disasters and missing professional development architecture, specifically designed for senior professionals who need this type of strategic knowledge and influence to shape the environment they're operating in. Instead, senior professionals are largely [00:12:40] left on their own to figure it out.
[00:12:44] Kyle King: This convergence explains why the current professional development model is no longer fit for purpose. Senior professionals with 15 to 20 years of experience don't need the same recurring, tactical, and operational training that certification requirements push them towards. When they [00:13:00] seek executive level development, they find programming focused on leadership principles rather than the intellectual infrastructure needed.
[00:13:07] Kyle King: To navigate these increasingly complex interdisciplinary challenges and what senior professionals need, and what current development models fail to provide is that intellectual infrastructure that supports current [00:13:20] continuous learning across these disciplines, while also maintaining the depth within their areas of expertise that they need and that they also can reflect upon.
[00:13:29] Kyle King: This infrastructure should include regular exposure to perspectives from adjacent fields. Other professions, other professionals and structured opportunities to test [00:13:40] ideas against their peer expertise and frameworks for integrating these insights across every domain. And so it should challenge your assumptions.
[00:13:48] Kyle King: It should introduce new approaches and create a space for the kind of intellectual risk taking that innovation actually requires. And most importantly, it should recognize that senior professionals need intellectual [00:14:00] peers, not just instructors. The traditional educational model of expert to student knowledge transfer becomes inadequate when dealing with people who have already achieved expertise.
[00:14:12] Kyle King: Senior professionals learn best through dialogue, debate, and collaborative problem solving with their equals, with their peers, and especially [00:14:20] the intellectual equals that they often seek.
[00:14:23] Kyle King: And this is why we've built the forum. So this analysis led directly to us creating the forum at Crisis Lab, a strategic operating environment. Designed specifically for senior professionals who are seeking this type of intellectual peer engagement beyond their established [00:14:40] expertise. The form addresses the post mastery vacuum by creating a structure, opportunities for this type of dialogue, for this type of strategic thinking and collaborative problem solving among professionals with that 15 to 25 plus years of experience.
[00:14:56] Kyle King: And so rather than traditional training, it provides ongoing intellectual [00:15:00] infrastructure. Such as monthly office hours and peer circles, strategic briefings, thought leadership opportunities, and access to international experts, and the model that we're using recognizes that senior professionals don't need more courses by themselves.
[00:15:14] Kyle King: They need intellectual community. They need spaces where their experience is valued while [00:15:20] their thinking is challenged. They need exposure to adjacent disciplines and approaches, and they need the kind of intellectual stimulation that keeps them curious and adaptive in a rapidly changing environment.
[00:15:32] Kyle King: Most importantly, the forum creates infrastructure for the kind of cross-sector collaboration that a modern crisis actually demands [00:15:40] when the next complex emergency arrives, and it will. The professionals responsible for coordinating these responses need existing relationships, shared frameworks and tested approaches for thinking beyond their own individual domains and boundaries.
[00:15:54] Kyle King: What does this mean for you? And so this binary choice between tactical training and leadership [00:16:00] development leaves us in a critical gap, right? Where senior professionals like you often need the most support. So when was the last time you were intellectually curious about something in your field? If that question makes you pause, you are experiencing what many senior professionals face intellectual starvation in the middle of successful careers.[00:16:20]
[00:16:20] Kyle King: And so the question isn't whether you need continued development. The accelerating pace of change is making that blatantly obvious. The question is whether you're willing to seek the intellectual infrastructure designed for where you are and not where you were a decade ago. This means looking beyond your established professional [00:16:40] community for peer engagement, it means accepting that mastery in one domain should be a platform for learning across multiple domains.
[00:16:48] Kyle King: It means recognizing that the most valuable professional development for senior leaders happens through dialogue with their intellectual equals not instruction from designated experts. And the hardest part [00:17:00] isn't finding the time or resources for continued development. It's admitting that the existing approaches are not sufficient for the challenges that we face.
[00:17:09] Kyle King: So how are you building the intellectual infrastructure needed to stay focused, to stay curious, adaptive, and effective in an increasingly complex [00:17:20] world?
[00:17:20] Kyle King: So that's all we have for today for the Crisis Lab Podcast. Hope you enjoyed that article. You can find out more about the Forum at Crisis Lab by going to our [email protected]. Thanks again, and we will see you next time. [00:17:40]
