Emergency follow-up: Recovery & aftercare & learning

Even when all digital systems and infrastructure are up and running again, digital attacks are fought off, there will be most probably still emotional and other impacts to be dealt with, right after the emergency or crisis is over or even in the longer run.

Emotional care

To deal with the emotional (traumatic reactions, burnout, exhaustion, internal conflicts etc.) and organisational impacts (eg. re-establishment of trust in digital infrastructure and responsibilities etc.), needs caring and professional handling.

On the emotional and psycho-social side it is extremely important not to individualize the impacts (just providing funding support for therapy or alike) but to take collective care and to take collective responsibility and steps to care and process as a team, what has happened and what the (ongoing) impacts are.

Funding for aftercare

For this we need either to budget funds in advance or create access to funding networks for post-emergency support.

Learning and knowledge management

While it is hard to learn during emergencies - our nervous system focuses on survival - we should take ample time and effort to digest and process, what lead up to the emergency or crisis, how our responses worked or not, what side effects happened, how they were mitigated, and what we want to improve for handling future incidents. It makes sense to review all documentation after the emergency, get additional feedback from all involved (directly like from the affected, the Emergency Response Team, the partners involved but also indirectly like from team members who had to take over addtional tasks to free the back off the Emergency Response Team members or alike).

Important steps to finalize the learning process are

• Creating implementation plans for all improvement steps towards our Digital Security and Risk Management
• Reviewing and updating all relevant documents of our Digital Security and Risk Management