Not visible in a performative sense. Visible enough to be reviewed. Visible enough to be communicated. Visible enough to be shared, supported and updated when life changes.

From the beginning, P-CEP was developed as a process tool. It was built to move from everyday life, support needs and local risk into tailored action, communication, review and, ultimately, wider change. Step 4 carries that purpose forward. It asks some deceptively simple questions:

• What needs to be documented?

• Who needs to know?

• What is still “not yet”?

• What conversation needs to happen next?

By the time learners reach Step 4 in the P-CEP Facilitator Course, they have already worked through earlier parts of the process. They have reflected on their own preparedness, explored everyday life and support needs, considered local risk, and identified practical actions. Near the end of the course, they are then invited to use My P-CEP Plan for themselves.

That is deliberate.

I ask them to experience it from the position of the person using the tool. They complete their own plan. They work through the P-CEP Actions Review. They reflect on how they might introduce the tool to someone else.

Learner reflections give me a window into how Step 4 is experienced in practice. The design intent was always to make preparedness visible, reviewable, communicable and connected to action. What I can see through their responses is how that intent becomes real when people use the tool themselves.

A shorter tool, shaped carefully

Across P‑CEP implementation, there have been several requests to “make it shorter.” Some people needed a shorter way to document, review and communicate their plan. Others continued to value the depth of the full P‑CEP Workbook, with its stories, prompts, examples, guidance, tips and space for deeper reflection.

That feedback made sense. The Workbook still matters. But people also needed something easier to carry, less expensive to print, easier to revisit, and easier to use when the task was to capture and share the key parts of a plan with others.

So yes, in one sense, My P‑CEP Plan responds to a very straightforward request: a shorter workbook.

But that is only one part of the story.

For me, the challenge was to create a shorter tool that still carried the depth and integrity of the four-step P‑CEP process. The request for something shorter was practical. The response had to be principled.

My P‑CEP Plan emerged through co-design, peer leadership, implementation experience, learner feedback and ongoing refinement. Earlier versions were shaped with peer leaders with disability, embedded in training, tested in practice, and revised as lessons emerged from learners, facilitators, communities and implementation partners.

It did not emerge as a quick checklist or a stripped-down handout. It developed as a more direct and usable tool that still asks the real questions of preparedness:

• What matters to me?

• What are my strengths and support needs?

• What emergencies could affect me?

• What actions have I taken?

• What is still “not yet”?

• Who needs to know?

• What needs to be communicated?

• What needs to be reviewed?

What learners are showing me now is that a shorter tool can still carry demanding work.

Shorter does not make the work small

I expected some learners to respond with relief. Some did. They found My P-CEP Plan clearer, more approachable and easier to work with than the full Workbook.

But many noticed something else.

Even in a shorter format, the plan asked them to confront details they had not considered, supplies they had not gathered, people they had not told, and actions they had not yet taken.

One learner wrote:

“The tricky part was thinking my plan would be simple, it was more detailed than I expected.”

Another reflected:

“It covered things I hadn’t thought of.”

That matters, because it tells us something important about the design. My P-CEP Plan may be shorter than the Workbook, but preparedness itself is still layered, relational and grounded in real life. The lighter format lowers one barrier. It does not flatten the work.

There is a tension here that feels worth naming. People often want a tool that is more usable and less burdensome. Of course they do. But the object of preparedness remains complex. It sits in routines, relationships, health, support, risk, communication and judgment. A shorter tool can make entry easier. It cannot make preparedness itself simple.

And in some ways, that is exactly what Step 4 helps reveal.

Seeing what is already there

One of the more encouraging things learners noticed is that My P-CEP Plan helps people see what they have already done.

That is so important. Preparedness can quickly turn into a story of unfinished tasks. The plan can interrupt that. It can make existing strengths, routines and actions more visible.

One learner said:

“I really got to understand more of the actions that I’ve already taken rather than not.”

Another wrote:

“Going through the tool helped me recognise the work I have already done, and although I have more work to do, I felt proud of the time and care I have put into planning.”

Another noticed both strengths and next steps:

“Using My P-CEP Plan helped me identify what I already do well, and my next actions to update my plan.”

That is part of the value of Step 4. It gathers what has been learned across the process and gives people a clearer view of what is already in place.

The plan does not have to begin with failure. It can begin with recognition.

For some learners, that recognition supports confidence. It validates effort. It reminds people that preparedness may already be underway, even if it is incomplete or informal.

Seeing what is “not yet”

Step 4 also reveals what is not yet in place.

By this point in the course, learners have more language, more experience and a more grounded understanding of the four-step P-CEP process. They are often in a better position to assess their own preparedness than they were earlier on.

Some of their reflections were strikingly direct.

One learner wrote:

“I am less prepared than I thought!”

Another said:

“I had not considered all the practical details.”

Another reflected:

“There are still a few things I need to consider.”

And one learner connected that realisation back to an earlier self-assessment:

“It made me realise that when I rated myself a 5 in the earlier module for preparedness, I maybe overshot just a bit.”

I read those reflections as learning becoming more honest.

There is a real difference between knowing about preparedness and having a plan that is documented, communicated, reviewed and usable. There is also a difference between feeling prepared and being able to show what is ready, what is shared, what still depends on others, and what remains unfinished.

One learner named this very plainly:

“Knowledge doesn’t always translate into action.”

That line captures a great deal of what Step 4 makes visible.

It also speaks to a useful kind of preparedness humility. Step 4 creates some friction between general confidence and demonstrated preparedness. That friction is not a flaw in the process. It is part of the learning.

And sometimes it is confronting.

Making preparedness visible can be clarifying, but it can also expose things people had not fully seen before: a gap in supplies, a support person who has never actually agreed to help, a communication plan that exists mostly in someone’s head, or a next step that depends on services or relationships beyond the individual’s control.

The Actions Review creates a learning loop

At the end of My P-CEP Plan, learners complete the P-CEP Actions Review. This section does more work than might first appear.

It asks people to look across the four steps and notice what is ready, what is “not yet,” and what small action could come next.

One learner wrote:

“The actions review section opens up a whole new conversation, especially if you tick not yet.”

They continued:

“This body of work would be work in progress, but identifies where the gaps lie and what needs to be done to be personally prepared.”

Preparedness is not static. Health changes. Supports change. Services change. Living arrangements change. Risks change. So, plans need to be revisited.

The Actions Review turns the plan into a learning loop. It gives people somewhere to return to. It creates a structure for noticing change, reassessing priorities and deciding what needs attention next. It also gives “not yet” a constructive role.

“Not yet” is not failure. It is information.

At one level, the review asks a practical question: what still needs attention here?

At another level, it can reveal something broader. Not every “not yet” is an individual task. Sometimes what becomes visible is a missing agreement, a service gap, an unclear role, or support that has never been properly coordinated. The question then shifts. What supports are ready? What barriers remain? Who has responsibility to act?

That broader connection matters. P-CEP was developed to support individual preparedness, but also to reveal what may need to change around the person. Step 4, and especially the Actions Review, helps make that linkage clearer.

Step 4 is about communication as much as documentation

Step 4 raises a question that looks simple on the page:

Who needs to know?

This is where documentation and communication meet.

A plan that stays in someone’s head cannot easily be shared, reviewed or supported by others. Step 4 helps move preparedness from something informal, partial or privately held into something that can be communicated with the people who need to know it.

Learners noticed this very clearly.

One wrote:

“I realised I hadn’t clearly communicated my plan with many others, which is critical in an emergency.”

Another said:

“The tricky part is that I don’t know who I would communicate this plan to as I do live pretty far away from relatives and friends who might need to be aware of it.”

Another reflected:

“I also noticed that many of my strongest supports live in another state, and that I need to be more intentional about getting to know my neighbours.”

These are not side issues. They go to the heart of preparedness.

Who knows the plan?
Who knows what matters?
Who knows what support is needed?
Who knows what to do?
Who has agreed to help?
Who is trusted?
What should remain private?

For some people, Step 4 reveals not only what should be communicated, but the fact that their support network is distant, uneven, thin, or still largely assumed rather than clearly negotiated.

It also surfaces a quieter tension that is easy to miss. People often know a great deal about who they trust, who they rely on, who should be involved, and who should not. Yet formal systems can sometimes make this more complicated than it needs to be. Trust, boundaries and choice are not always well handled in planning processes.

Step 4 gives that knowledge somewhere to go. It asks what needs to be shared, with whom, in what form, and on whose terms.

The plan as a conversation object

Learners often described My P-CEP Plan as something to introduce, discuss, adapt and work through slowly.

That tells me something important.

It is not only a form. It is a conversation object.

It gives people something to look at together. It makes the conversation more concrete. It can hold the plan, but it can also hold uncertainty, questions, unfinished actions, different priorities and next steps.

One learner said:

“I would introduce the plan as a conversation tool rather than a form to complete.”

Another reflected:

“Some people really like structure and some do not.”

Another wrote:

“When supporting participants I would focus on the open-ended questions rather than the assessment tool, as those are the ones who spark conversations and engagement.”

That flexibility matters. The tool does not have to be used in one rigid way. Some people will want to fill it in. Some will want to talk first. Some will want examples or visual prompts. Some will work through one section at a time. Some will return to it over several conversations.

The plan becomes a shared object for thinking, checking, explaining and acting.

That is part of what co-designed tools can do. They do more than carry information. They help make tacit knowledge, assumptions and unfinished actions discussable. They give people a way to orient to the same issue together and work out what needs to happen next.

If you have read my earlier piece, Building Systems That Learn, you will recognise this as part of the methodological thread running through my work. I am interested in how co-designed tools and artefacts can mediate shared learning and support change. Step 4 is another example of that.

Step 4 can support self-advocacy and boundaries

When a plan becomes visible, it can also become a tool for self-advocacy.

It can help a person say:

• This is what matters to me.

• This is what I need.

• This is who I want involved.

• This is what I still need help with.

• This is what others need to understand.

It can also help a person set boundaries.

• Who should know?

• Who should not?

• What information is necessary?

• What information is private?

• What role does each person have?

One learner described the facilitation stance this way:

“Confirming that it’s their plan, their pace and I’m here support however they want that.”

Another said they would:

“work through it at their pace, focus on their priorities, and break actions into small, achievable steps.”

Another said they would ask:

“what feels realistic for them and how they would like to work through the plan.”

This is the stance Step 4 needs.

It is not only about getting the plan written down. It is about supporting the person to communicate what matters in a way that respects their choices, relationships, privacy and readiness.

A visible plan does not remove power imbalances on its own. But it can give the person a clearer basis for expressing preferences, limits and support needs.

Step 4 asks: What is the plan? It also asks: Who needs to know, what do they need to know, and who decides that?

Learners’ own experience shapes how they will facilitate

This is one reason learners are asked to use My P-CEP Plan themselves before they introduce it to someone else.

Their own encounter with the tool helps them understand what it may feel like to work through it. They notice where it is useful, where it is detailed, where it may feel exposing, and how much pacing matters.

One learner wrote:

“It was helpful to step into the process as both a practitioner and a participant.”

Another said:

“I would introduce this in a simple way, perhaps even sharing my experience working with it.”

Another reflected:

“I’d have the conversation about what I’m studying and what I found in my own unpreparedness.”

Learners also described how they would support others through the plan:

“Set up regular meetings and tackle it in bite-sized chunks.”

“I’d focus on one section at a time and go at the person’s pace, rather than trying to complete everything in one go.”

These reflections show that learners are not only absorbing the four steps conceptually. They are learning what the process feels like.

That matters for facilitation. If learners have felt the surprise of discovering gaps, they may introduce the tool more gently. If they have noticed how comprehensive the questions are, they may pace the process differently. If they have realised they have not communicated their own plan, they may better understand why Step 4 can feel personal.

Their experience becomes part of their preparation to support others.

It also reminds me that the value of the plan depends on the facilitation around it: pacing, trust, explanation, adaptation, and permission to leave some things as “not yet.”

What learners show about the design in practice

Learner reflections show how people encounter the tool when they use it themselves: the confidence that comes from recognising what is already in place, the humility of seeing what remains “not yet,” and the surprise that a shorter tool can still carry substantial work.

They also make clear that communication is not secondary to preparedness. It is part of preparedness. Documentation can become conversation. A plan can become a way to clarify who needs to know, what they need to know, and what the person wants to share. In this way, self-advocacy and boundaries sit inside the planning process, not outside it.

When preparedness becomes visible, some of the tensions around it become visible too: the gap between confidence and evidence, the reality that brevity does not remove complexity, and the fact that some next steps sit beyond the individual and point outward to supports, services and systems.

My P-CEP Plan helps move preparedness from something held privately or informally into something that can be seen, discussed, reviewed and shared.

That is where documentation, communication and self-advocacy start to connect.

A plan that stays in someone’s head cannot easily be supported by others. Once it becomes visible, it can become a tool for shared action.

Preferred citation: Villeneuve, M. (2026). When preparedness becomes visible. Sydney: Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney. https://vilicusrecusandae242061.substack.com/publish/post/207083085

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This is part of a series of articles about the P-CEP Short Course and what I’m learning from my learners. Look for other/future issues as I continue to engage with my learners, drawing from de-identified course discussions involving 178 learners enrolled between March - June 2026.

Are in you interested to know more about our University of Sydney Short Certificate Course? https://short-courses.sydney.edu.au/course/PCEP3

By this point in the process, the P-CEP facilitator and the person have already explored everyday life, strengths, support needs, local hazards, and current preparedness. Step 3 asks a practical question: given what we now understand, what could help this person manage their support needs in an emergency?

It is a simple question on the surface. In practice, it opens up a rich conversation.

Because the answer has to fit the person’s life.
Their routines.
Their supports.
Their risk situation.
Their preferences.
Their mobility, communication, health, transport, animals, home, relationships, resources, and readiness.

The word brainstorming best describes what needs to happen at P-CEP Step 3.

It is plain language, and that matters. It invites the person into the process from the beginning. It creates room for shared thinking. It supports choice. It lets ideas emerge before decisions need to be made.

That language is there for a reason.

In earlier implementation and evaluation work in Victoria through the Emergency Planning Advice Service (EPAS) program, one of the clearest lessons was that brainstorming was not a side activity. It was the mechanism through which person-centred preparedness actually happened. The value was not simply that people received information, advice, or a workbook. It came through structured, collaborative problem-solving conversations supported by the Capability Wheel and the P-CEP process.

One service recipient put it very plainly:

“The biggest value was having people to brainstorm with.”

That insight has been influential in my thinking and helped shape how we frame Step 3 in the P-CEP Facilitator course.

The facilitator’s role here is to think with the person about what might help, what seems possible, what may feel too much right now, who could be involved, and what first step feels manageable.

For many people, this is where P-CEP starts to feel different.

Preparedness conversations can easily become information heavy. This is still how some people imagine the work if they have not engaged deeply with P‑CEP or undertaken facilitator training. The conversation can move quickly to risks, recommendations and general preparedness actions. For people with disability, this can become another not-so-subtle form of exclusion. The process becomes too large, too fast, and too generic. The facilitator may feel overwhelmed by the person’s support needs and begin to lead with advice rather than curiosity. The person who most needs preparedness support can then be left out of shaping the plan.

Step 3 asks for something more grounded. It asks us to work alongside the person and develop ideas that make sense in the context of their actual life. It invites us to learn from what they know, share what we know, and use that exchange to shape preparedness actions that fit.

I have written before about why time spent in Step 1 matters. That same theme returns here. The quality of brainstorming in Step 3 depends on the quality of understanding built together earlier in the process.

In the P-CEP Facilitator course, learners practise Step 3 through case studies before they facilitate these conversations with others. This is deliberate. The cases are scaffolded. Learners begin with more guidance, then work with less, then move into more complex situations where support needs, risk, reluctance, previous experiences, and system gaps start to stack together.

At Step 3 of the facilitator course, our learners are generating ideas and identifying possibilities. The deeper facilitation work is helping those possibilities become actions that the person can carry forward.

One learner captured that beautifully:

“Completing the step showed me the value of turning broad concerns into practical actions.”

That is where Step 3 begins to come alive.

The Capability Wheel helps learners organise complexity

Across the course case studies, learners regularly use the Capability Wheel to organise their thinking. They identify priorities across communication, transport, health management, personal support, living situation, assistive technology, social connectedness, and care for animals.

This matters because the situations are complex.

Jenny’s flood planning involves insulin refrigeration, continence supplies, trusted neighbours, transport, evacuation location, and whether support could continue if she had to leave home.

Lisa’s bushfire planning involves early warnings, cats, accessible shelter options, home preparation, sentimental items, an accessible home environment, and distress linked to a previous evacuation.

Nick’s situation involves chronic health conditions, no working smoke alarm, clutter affecting mobility, limited support, assistive technology, transport changes, social isolation, and care for Blackie the cat.

The Capability Wheel gives learners a way to break these situations into parts they could think with.

One learner said:

“Using the Capability Wheel made it easier to organise my thinking and not miss anything important.”

Another wrote:

“I found it helpful to use the Capability Wheel because it broke planning into smaller areas and made it easier to think about.”

This is one of the things I value most about the Capability Wheel. It gives facilitators and participants a way to notice the different parts of everyday life and how those parts may be disrupted in an emergency. It helps people hold complexity without losing the detail that matters.

Learners are also beginning to see that the areas of the wheel do not stay neatly separate in practice. Communication, transport, health, equipment, support, and social connection are closely linked in real life. A difficulty in one area often affects several others.

As one learner reflected:

“Sometimes certain supports can fit into many areas of the Capability Wheel, and it’s learning to adapt and interchange what the client requires.”

That is an important insight. Frameworks help us organise our thinking. The doing reminds us that real life has overlap, fuzzy edges, and interaction between different parts of our everyday supports.

Learners are moving beyond general preparedness advice

One of the most encouraging aspects of the learner responses is the extent to which participants are tailoring preparedness actions to the person and the situation.

In Jenny’s case, evacuation was not treated as a single task. Learners considered where Jenny would go, whether that place would meet her needs, how her insulin would remain cold, whether continence supplies would be available, whether neighbours could check in, whether her bus driver or transport provider could help, and whether her daughter was a realistic support.

In Lisa’s case, learners recognised that early warning systems had to fit how Lisa actually receives information. A smartphone app may have limited value if internet access is unreliable and the person prefers radio or neighbour contact. Learners suggested battery-powered radios, neighbour alert arrangements, written instructions, support to practise phone alerts, and clear early evacuation triggers.

In Nick’s case, many learners recognised that the first step might need to be smaller. A working smoke alarm. One clear path from bed to exit. One medical check-up. One conversation about the continuity of community health support. One cat carrier for Blackie.

This is tailored action in early practice. Learners are moving toward the person’s context, supports, risks, and preferences. They are thinking in ways that make preparedness more workable.

That shift matters for graduates of the short course, for organisations supporting this work, and for those interested in how P-CEP grows in practice. Preparedness becomes more useful when it connects with everyday life in this level of detail.

That is also what earlier evaluation work found. Brainstorming helped move preparedness beyond awareness raising. People were not only hearing about risk. They were reflecting on how life works now, what changes in an emergency, what barriers appear, and what options might help. That is where action starts to take shape.

Brainstorming keeps the person in the process

Because learners are working with case studies, the brainstorming can sometimes sound more decisive on paper than it would in a real conversation. That is part of the learning context. It also reveals something important about Step 3.

Generating ideas is only one part of the work.

The next part is helping the person consider those ideas, weigh what fits, and decide where they want to begin. That takes restraint, listening, and care.

One learner named this directly:

“I definitely have a tendency to want to solve the problem for the person.”

Another reflected:

“I appreciated the reminder that we are there to guide them, not to tell them, and that them maintaining their agency in this process is very important.”

This is why the language of brainstorming matters so much. It opens up possibilities without forcing immediate decisions. It gives the person room to say:

• That might work.

• That would not work for me.

• I want to think about that.

• I would need help with that.

• I would rather start somewhere else.

• I do not want that person involved.

• I could try this first.

That is the kind of facilitation I want learners to keep developing.

One learner described this beautifully from a real conversation:

“I had to be very mindful that the person was open to hearing what I knew and who could support, and allow it to be from them, not because ‘I’ needed it to happen because I could see the need as high.”

That sentence says a great deal. It recognises urgency, knowledge, and the importance of letting the action belong to the person.

Earlier implementation work showed something similar. Brainstorming in P-CEP was not about giving better instructions. It was about people thinking together, comparing everyday life with changed conditions, noticing what would still work, seeing what might fall away, and generating options from there.

Brainstorming creates shared learning

One of the strongest findings from that earlier work was that brainstorming did not only benefit the person receiving support.

Everyone learned.

The person thought differently about communication, evacuation, power outages, transport, pets, and preparedness actions. Facilitators learned too. Assumptions were tested. Gaps became visible. Through brainstorming together, the meaning of the action becomes clearer: what matters, who can help, and what the person is ready to do next.

One real-world practice example shows why support fit matters. A facilitator initially assumed that aged care services could help transport a person who needed support to evacuate. But when this was explored with the person and their aged care provider, the limits of that assumption became clear. The care workers were not permitted to drive back into the area on extreme fire danger days. They were also not expected to act as first responders.

That kind of issue is easy to miss if preparedness stays general. It becomes visible when people think it through together.

Real conversations require pacing

Learners also noticed the difference between reasoning through a case study and sitting with a real person.

One wrote:

“I think I would need to really focus on pace and not moving too quickly.”

Another said:

“I would have to be careful to go at the person’s pace. The balance between going gently, being productive, and talking about the ‘hard things’ will be a challenge.”

Another reflected:

“I think the pace would be much slower with a person rather than a case study. I’d be calling on my active listening and empathy skills much more, I’d be giving them time and space to consider their answers, and it would likely take multiple sessions to come to any kind of actionable items.”

This is important learning.

Preparedness planning may look straightforward when it is written as a task in a workbook. In conversation, it can touch fear, previous trauma, grief, embarrassment, reluctance, social isolation, financial pressure, family strain, or concern about losing independence.

Learners are beginning to recognise this. They are seeing that Step 3 calls for time, trust, flexibility, and judgement. That matters in practice. It also matters for organisations supporting facilitators to grow their confidence over time. The course builds foundations. Experience deepens the craft.

Support availability is not the same as support fit

Learners were adept at identifying a range of possible supports. They named family, neighbours, friends, bus drivers, support workers, GPs, pharmacists, vets, fire services, local councils, community transport, and disability or aged care providers.

That matters because preparedness is often shared across relationships, routines, services, and local networks.

Step 3 asks us to look more closely as well. It asks whether a support fits the person and the situation.

Support fit includes questions like:

• Does the person trust this support?

• Is this support willing?

• Is this support available in an emergency?

• Can this support do what is being asked?

• Does the person want this support involved?

• Is the role clear?

• Is there a backup?

• Would this support still work under emergency conditions?

This came through strongly in the learner reflections.

In Jenny’s case, several learners noticed that her daughter lived nearby and yet may not have been the best primary support after what happened in the previous flood. In Lisa’s case, neighbours and friends may be valuable, though the plan still needs to check who can provide warnings, transport, pet support, or a place to stay. In Nick’s case, his community health nurse is central, and learners questioned what would happen if that person or service was unavailable.

One learner named a broader concern:

“I was unsure how to support someone experiencing social isolation, especially when the person may not want to connect with neighbours or build new support networks.”

Another wrote:

“The thing I am feeling stuck with is how to support someone who is not getting enough supports from the systems they rely on, and how to help them advocate for themselves or have someone advocate for them.”

These reflections show that learners are paying attention to the practical quality of support. A support strengthens preparedness when it helps create a real opportunity for the person to act, choose, stay safe, and maintain dignity in the circumstances they are facing.

Earlier implementation work showed this as well. Once brainstorming includes support workers, case managers, carers, or family members, the planning often moves beyond the individual and into the systems around them. Organisational policies, transport rules, access arrangements, and service limitations all come into view. This is one reason Step 3 can surface issues that later need to be addressed through Step 4, referral pathways, organisational change, or local government support.

Moving beyond items to function

Learners are also beginning to identify disability-specific and chronic condition preparedness needs with more confidence. They named insulin, medications, continence supplies, powered wheelchairs, prosthetics, glasses, generators, radios, smoke alarms, cat carriers, medication lists, and accessible transport.

These items matter. They often become the concrete things people can plan around and act on. They help make preparedness visible.

The next layer is to ask what each item makes possible.

Insulin connects to refrigeration, food access, timing, stress, pharmacy access, and medication monitoring.

A wheelchair connects to mobility, power, terrain, transport, destination accessibility, personal assistance, and maintenance or repairs.

A radio connects to trusted information, early warning, decision-making, internet reliability, hearing, and confidence but may not be accessible for some people.

A cat carrier may affect whether someone feels able to leave early enough, especially if the cat has used it before an emergency so it does not become another stressor.

This is where Step 3 becomes more tailored and practical. The planning is not only about packing or purchasing. It involves understanding what supports everyday functioning, what could interrupt that, and what might help keep life working during an emergency.

One learner wrote:

“The assistive technology such as wheelchairs and large aids I would like to learn more about those things.”

Another reflected:

“I initially felt stuck when thinking about medical/health management but then realised that we do not have to plan for that alone. Healthcare providers, pharmacists, and subject matter experts can help inform those parts of the plan.”

That is an important facilitation insight. The facilitator does not need to know everything. They do need to ask good questions, notice where more expertise is needed, and keep the person’s needs and preferences at the centre of the conversation.

Learners are sitting with the hard parts

One of the things I value in these reflections is that learners are not smoothing over the complexity of the work. They are naming where the hard parts are.

They are thinking about assistive technology, medication management, financial barriers, transport, language access, systems pressure, and limited support networks. They are thinking about people who feel reluctant, overwhelmed, or tired of dealing with systems. They are thinking about trauma-informed preparedness support.

One learner wrote:

“One question I am still considering is how to support people who are reluctant to discuss emergency risks or who have had traumatic experiences during previous emergencies.”

Another said:

“There is a lot of information, a lot of emotions that are stirred up, fear, loneliness, gaps in their life that come from getting to know them and for them to trust you.”

The balance between safety and choice also came through strongly. One learner wrote:

“At times, I felt unsure about balancing safety recommendations with respecting a person’s choices and preferences.”

These are important questions. They show that learners are seeing Step 3 as skilled facilitation.

Humility matters here too.

A person may not want the support that seems obvious to someone else. A support may be available but still feel unsafe, unrealistic or unworkable. A service may exist but not be accessible when it is needed. A plan may look strong on paper but fall apart in daily life. This is why Step 3 cannot be done as a list of solutions. It has to be worked through with the person, in the context of their life.

These are the conditions that shape Step 3.

Learners want more practice

Several learners named the need for more practice.

One wrote:

“At this point, I think I need to begin having these conversations with people in order to build more confidence.”

Another said:

“Would be great to have a physical training day or interactive so that you could see how the same questions/wheel stages could have so many different angles and ways of doing it.”

Another reflected:

“To feel more confident, I would benefit from seeing the P-CEP workbook used in a real-life setting.”

These reflections give me something important to work with. They show what the course is already helping learners do, and what comes next in building facilitation capability.

The P-CEP Facilitator Sydney Short Course is designed to help learners build foundational understanding, make their own plan, and prepare to facilitate preparedness with others. These reflections suggest that the course is doing important groundwork. They also show clearly that facilitation capability continues to grow through practice, reflection, peer learning, supervision, and further training.

That matters for graduates who are continuing to build confidence. It matters for organisations and leaders who want to support this practice to grow. If we want strong person-centred preparedness facilitation, we need to value the ongoing development that sits alongside the certificate course.

What learners are teaching me about Step 3

What I am learning from learners is that Step 3 reveals the craft of P-CEP facilitation.

Learners are already doing important work. They are using the Capability Wheel to organise complexity. They are identifying priority areas. They are generating practical ideas. They are breaking broad concerns into possible first steps.

They are also showing where the deeper learning continues. Slowing down. Staying with the person’s pace. Resisting the urge to carry the plan for them. Working with reluctance. Recognising system barriers. Thinking about support fit. Bringing in other expertise when needed. Helping people shape actions they can actually live with and carry forward.

The earlier implementation findings reinforce this. Effective P-CEP facilitators are not simply passing on information. They are facilitating collaborative thinking. They are listening, probing, exploring assumptions, incorporating multiple perspectives, and helping people troubleshoot barriers while keeping the person at the centre.

This is exactly the learning that matters.

Step 3 is where preparedness starts to become meaningful in a very grounded way. It grows through brainstorming together. It grows through fit. It grows through manageable next steps.

That is what I hope our learner P-CEP facilitators take into practice.

And it is what I hope organisations, services, and decision-makers continue to support. Because when brainstorming is done well in P-CEP, it does more than strengthen one person’s preparedness. It can also reveal the service gaps, system barriers, and community conditions that need attention around them.

Preparedness becomes stronger when it is connected to the person’s real life, supported by people and organisations who understand the work, and built in ways the person can carry forward.

Preferred citation: Villeneuve, M. (2026). Brainstorming Preparedness Together: What Step 3 Is Teaching Us. Sydney: Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney.

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I will continue a series of articles about the P-CEP Short Course and what I’m learning from my learners. Look for other/future issues as I continue to engage with my learners, drawing from de-identified course discussions involving 178 learners enrolled between March - June 2026.

Are in you interested to know more about our University of Sydney Short Certificate Course? https://short-courses.sydney.edu.au/course/PCEP3

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It is another to ask: How prepared am I, really?

In the P-CEP Facilitator Course, learners are asked to do exactly that. Before they facilitate preparedness with others, they are invited to locate themselves in the process. What follows is often honest, sometimes uncomfortable, and always instructive.

Their reflections have been reminding me why this matters.

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One of the intentional design features in the P-CEP Facilitator Course is that learners are asked to turn the preparedness question back on themselves.

Many people come into the course because they want to support others. They may work in emergency management, disability advocacy, health, aged care, community services, local government, policy, support work, transport, or community development. Some bring lived experience of disability, disaster, caring, or volunteering. Some are also using the process to think about their own preparedness in relation to disability, chronic health conditions, caring roles, communication needs, or support dependencies in their own lives.

P-CEP is a person-centred approach to emergency preparedness. It helps people think through their support needs, relationships, routines, resources, and practical arrangements before a disaster or emergency. In the University of Sydney P-CEP Facilitator Course, learners are not only introduced to the approach. They are invited to locate themselves within it.

At different points in the course, I ask them to pause and consider a simple question:

How prepared am I?

That question sits within a broader understanding of preparedness as a process. In P-CEP, people may be at very different points. Some have not thought much about emergency preparedness. Some are aware of the need but have not acted. Some have started to organise supplies, plans, or conversations. Some have taken concrete action. Some are maintaining, reviewing, and updating what they already have in place.

In the course, learners use a simple preparedness scale to locate where they are at that point in time. The purpose is not to rank people or judge readiness. It is to self-assess their starting point.

Later, I ask them to choose one preparedness action for themselves and break it into smaller, manageable steps.

This is part of the pedagogical design. Learners are invited to experience preparedness as a process while they are learning how to facilitate preparedness with others.

Their reflections show why that matters to person-centred emergency planning.

They are learning preparedness from the inside. They are noticing where preparedness remains in the realm of intention, where action depends on other people, where self-assessment can feel exposing, and how much easier it becomes to take action when one large task is broken into a first step.

That experience matters for P-CEP facilitation. It helps people approach preparedness with more realism, patience, and care.

Preparedness often lives in the head

When learners assessed their own preparedness, many located themselves somewhere in the middle of the scale.

They had thought about emergencies.
They had some supplies.
They had ideas about what they might do.
They knew some local risks.
Some had acted during previous events.

Yet many also recognised that their preparedness was still partly informal, unshared, or unfinished.

One learner wrote:

“I think I have a lot of planning in my head.”

Another reflected:

“My thoughts of ‘I could do this, or I have this if needed’ is ok but I actually should put things together in one place.”

Another captured that in-between space with humour and honesty:

“Probably 3 really. With fantasies of 4.”

This is one of the most important things learners notice. Preparedness can feel present because we have thought about it. We may have imagined what we would do, assumed we would cope, or taken comfort in knowing a few key things. But thoughts, intentions, and fragments of planning do not always amount to arrangements that are communicated, maintained, and ready to use.

That insight matters. Preparedness knowledge does not automatically become personal preparedness. Nor does lived experience automatically produce a plan that is current, shared, complete - or tailored to the persons needs and risk situation.

If facilitators have felt that gap in their own lives, they may be better placed to understand why others also sit between awareness and action.

Self-assessment can feel personal

The preparedness scale is simple. The reflection it prompts is not.

For some learners, assessing their preparedness felt reassuring or motivating. For others, it brought discomfort.

One learner wrote:

“It feels rather confessional given where I work.”

Another said:

“It feels a bit irresponsible actually… It has made me want to get on with the actual planning and be more proactive.”

Another described what happened when the conversation moved into the household:

“At first it had us both feeling a little vulnerable and potentially not prepared.”

These reflections remind us that preparedness self-assessment is not only practical or cognitive. It can stir up embarrassment, responsibility, concern, relief, exposure, motivation, or a dawning sense of what has been left unattended.

That is worth paying attention to.

When people are asked about preparedness, they may be asked to look directly at gaps in their lives, their supports, their routines, their relationships, or their confidence about what would happen in a crisis. That can feel deeply personal. It may touch on dependence, responsibility, fear, previous experiences, health needs, family dynamics, or uncertainty about who would help.

If this feels vulnerable for learners who have voluntarily joined a facilitator course, it may also feel vulnerable for the people they later support.

The Capability Wheel brings preparedness into everyday life

One of the strengths of P-CEP is that it does not treat preparedness as a generic task sitting outside daily life. The Capability Wheel helps locate preparedness within the practical realities of how people live, including the support needs that shape what is possible in an emergency.

It invites attention to areas such as communication, transport, health management, assistive technology, personal support, living situation, social connectedness, and care for animals.

This matters because preparedness becomes more manageable when it is grounded in ordinary life.

Learners can identify one area that needs attention.
They can connect that area to an everyday routine, support, or dependency.
They can see where something is already in place.
They can also see what is missing.

The Capability Wheel helps break preparedness down without flattening complexity. It keeps the work connected to real arrangements: medication, mobility, technology, power supply, transport options, household relationships, support people, communication needs, pets, and place.

This is where a broad question starts to become workable.

Instead of asking, “Am I prepared?” in a general sense, learners begin asking more specific questions.

Do I have my emergency contacts written down?
Do other people know the plan?
Do I have enough medication?
What happens if the power goes out?
Can I evacuate with my pets?
Who would help if my usual supports were unavailable?
What backup do I have if equipment fails?
What is the first step I can take?

That shift is significant. It brings preparedness out of abstraction and into daily life, which is where facilitation also needs to begin.

When preparedness needs to be tailored

This becomes especially clear when learners identify actions connected to disability, chronic health conditions, communication access, mobility, or assistive technology. The action is rarely generic. It has to fit the person’s body, routines, equipment, household, support network, and local context.

One learner focused on medication continuity:

“Making sure that I have my medications that I need every day and ensuring that I had enough for an extended period of time if I was cut off from the town where I would normally get it.”

Another learner identified Type 1 diabetes as the key health management issue:

“Health Management — I am a Type 1 diabetic. First step — ensure I have at least one week supply of insulin at home.”

A third learner described preparedness in relation to managing with their powered wheelchair across several Capability Wheel areas: transport, assistive technology, and personal assistance. Their action steps included backup batteries, another source of power, and a backup mobility option if the chair could not be used.

These examples show why P-CEP is not generic preparedness advice. For some people, preparedness means thinking through medication access if roads are cut. For others, it means insulin storage and continuity of supply. For others, it means what happens if a power outage affects a wheelchair, communication device, or other essential equipment.

Other learners identified communication planning for family members, including a Deaf family member living elsewhere, showing that preparedness may also involve access, coordination, and support beyond the immediate household.

This is where the Capability Wheel is especially useful. It helps preparedness move from broad advice to action that is specific, functional, and grounded in support needs.

One action becomes possible when it is made small

Later in the course, learners are asked to choose one preparedness action for themselves and break it into smaller steps.

Their responses were practical and specific.

Some chose communication actions, such as making an emergency contact list, saving it on a phone, printing a copy, sharing it with a trusted person, and setting a reminder to review it.

Some chose health management actions, such as checking medication supplies, speaking with a doctor or pharmacist, preparing prescriptions, packing essential items, or creating a quick-reference guide for health needs.

Some chose evacuation and grab bag actions, such as getting a bag, making a checklist, adding documents, gradually packing food and water, or creating a system to rotate supplies.

Many chose actions related to animals, including food, crates, carriers, pet-friendly accommodation, backup carers, veterinary records, and helping animals become more used to transport.

Others focused on assistive technology, backup power, fire safety equipment, household roles, or family conversations.

What stood out was not only the content of the actions. It was the way learners made movement to the next level of preparedness possible.

One learner wrote:

“One step I took was to write it down on my ‘to do’ list.”

Another said:

“The first small step I need to take is talking to my family about our strengths and support needs.”

Another reflected:

“I think what would make this action easier to complete is to just start with what I got and to not overthink the go-bag in the beginning.”

These are small moves, but they matter.

Writing it down.
Getting the bag.
Starting the conversation.
Checking what already exists.
Calling the doctor.
Printing the list.
Setting the reminder.

This is how preparedness starts to move from intention into practice.

For facilitators, there is a lesson here. Large, important tasks can remain stalled for a long time when they are vague, emotionally loaded, or dependent on too many decisions. A first step creates traction.

Preparedness becomes relational very quickly

When learners turned the preparedness question back on themselves, their reflections quickly moved beyond the individual.

They wrote about partners, children, adult children living elsewhere, neighbours, animals, spouses, support workers, doctors, pharmacists, vets, electricians, travelling companions, and backup carers.

One learner wrote:

“I need to have a family plan that includes my daughters… one who is Deaf and one with a young child, who live elsewhere in the city.”

Another said:

“Talking to my husband first and committing to a time to have the conversation would make it easier.”

This is important because preparedness is often framed as a personal responsibility. Make a plan. Pack a kit. Know your risk. Be ready.

Yet when learners looked closely at their own preparedness, it almost always involved other people. Who needs to know? Who can help? Who depends on me? Who do I depend on? Who has information I need? Who would be affected if I were unprepared?

The Capability Wheel makes this visible because everyday capability is rarely isolated. Communication, transport, medication, care arrangements, assistive technology, social connectedness, and living situation all sit within relationships and systems.

Preparedness grows through those relationships. It is shaped by trust, shared understanding, communication, and practical coordination.

That matters for facilitation. It helps shift the focus from telling people to prepare toward understanding the conditions that make preparedness easier or harder to act on.

Learners are also learning what gets in the way

These reflections reveal some of the practical and emotional barriers that shape preparedness.

Some learners named overwhelm. The task felt too big. There were too many options. They were unsure what to buy, where to start, or how much was enough.

Some had supplies, but they were not gathered or maintained.

Some had plans, but they were not written down or shared.

Some had prepared for a previous event, then stopped reviewing the plan once the immediate urgency had passed.

Some had moved house, changed circumstances, or needed to think differently about who was nearby.

Some realised that their own preparedness affected their capacity to support others.

These are the real conditions in which preparedness either moves or stalls.

For learners who will go on to facilitate P-CEP with others, this is useful knowledge. It helps make sense of inaction without reducing it to apathy or denial. Delay may reflect competing priorities, emotional discomfort, uncertainty, a lack of support, too many decisions, or difficulty translating a broad goal into a concrete action.

Recognising that can make facilitation more patient and more effective.

What this means for facilitation

The value of this exercise is that learners may become more prepared themselves. The deeper value lies in what they come to understand about preparedness as a lived process.

They notice:

• the gap between knowing and doing

• the discomfort of identifying what is missing

• the role of household and support networks

• the importance of writing things down

• the usefulness of reminders, checklists, and visible prompts

• the way preparedness is woven into daily routines

• the need to tailor action to health, disability, communication, mobility, and support needs

• the relief that can come from choosing one small action

• the value of support from other people

This shapes facilitation.

A facilitator who has noticed their own unfinished planning may respond differently when someone says, “I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t done it yet.”

A facilitator who has felt exposed by self-assessment may be more sensitive when another person feels embarrassed, defensive, or overwhelmed.

A facilitator who has had to think through insulin supply, powered mobility, medication continuity, support people, pets, or communication access may better understand why preparedness needs to be tailored rather than standardised.

A facilitator who has struggled to decide where to begin may better appreciate the power of helping someone identify one practical next step.

This is one of the reasons I built this activity into the course design rather than as a side exercise. Learners are moving between learning the P-CEP process, locating themselves within it, and reflecting on what it takes to act.

That kind of reflexivity produces insight. It helps people understand preparedness in a way that content alone cannot provide.

What learners are teaching me

What I am learning from learners is that this design choice matters.

When they turn the preparedness question back on themselves, they make visible things that are easy to miss in more formal teaching.

They show how easily preparedness can remain in the head.
They show how self-assessment can feel exposing.
They show how much depends on other people.
They show how useful it is to break a large task into everyday domains and manageable steps.
They show why preparedness has to account for support needs, not just standard household advice.
They show how action often begins with something modest and concrete.

For me, this is one of the clearest reminders that preparedness is not simply a message to deliver or a checklist to complete. It is a process people have to locate within the realities of their own, everyday lives.

Preferred Citation: Villeneuve, M. (2026). Turning the preparedness question back on ourselves. Sydney: Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney. https://vilicusrecusandae242061.substack.com/publish/post/204587962

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I will continue a series of articles about the P-CEP Short Course and what I’m learning from my learners. Look for other/future issues as I continue to engage with my learners, drawing from de-identified course discussions involving 178 learners enrolled between March - June 2026.

Are in you interested to know more about our University of Sydney Short Certificate Course? https://short-courses.sydney.edu.au/course/PCEP3

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It is everyday life.

Step 1 begins with the routines, relationships, capabilities, supports and arrangements that help life hold together. It asks what is already working, what support is already in place, what matters to the person, and what might become difficult if circumstances change.

Teaching this step has kept reminding me of something important.

It is one thing to understand the principle. It is another to facilitate the conversation well.

In the P-CEP Facilitator Course, learners are invited to try a short Step 1 conversation with someone they know. They use the Capability Wheel, ask some open questions, and practise staying with everyday life rather than rushing ahead. These are first attempts. They are often short conversations, typically with someone already known to the learner, and reflected on in a course setting. That is part of what makes them useful. They show facilitation in its early, imperfect, revealing form.

They also show something else.

My learners take this work seriously. They want to do it well. They want to do it in ways that are respectful, person-centred and useful. They also come from very different practice contexts. Some bring deep experience from disability, health, community services, education, aged care, advocacy, or emergency management. Many already have highly developed relational skills in their own sector. What P-CEP asks them to do is to bring that skill into a framework with its own logic, pace and purpose.

What I am learning from their reflections is where the framework meets real-life facilitation, where tensions arise, and what learners need from both the Capability Wheel and my teaching of it.

Their reflections reinforce this point: Step 1 is where facilitation begins.

The Capability Wheel gives learners a way in

The Capability Wheel is one of the most recognisable and valued parts of P-CEP. It breaks preparedness down into everyday areas of life, capability and support. For new facilitators, it gives shape to a conversation that might otherwise feel difficult to begin. It offers a visual scaffold, a set of prompts, and a way of making preparedness more concrete.

One learner described it like this:

“The Capability Wheel is a practical tool and good for prompts without being prescriptive.”

Another wrote:

“The P-CEP Capability Wheel was great, it is very visual and easy for my person to understand.”

And another reflected:

“I used the wheel diagram to prompt a response and provide a visual stimulus rather than verbal prompts.”

These comments show why the wheel works. It gives learners something to hold onto while they are still finding their feet as facilitators. It opens the conversation without dictating it.

At the same time, learner reflections make clear that the wheel works best when it is held lightly. It is there to support the conversation, not dominate it. Learners value the structure, but they also begin to realise that structure can become pressure if it is used too rigidly or too quickly.

That is one of the tensions I want to keep exploring in my teaching. How do I teach the wheel as a practical scaffold without encouraging people to treat it like a checklist? How do I help learners feel supported by the structure without feeling compelled to get through it?

The Capability Wheel is useful because it helps learners begin. Good facilitation is what keeps that beginning person-centred.

Everyday life opens the conversation

One of the clearest things in the reflections was how often the conversation became easier once it began with everyday life.

Learners did not begin by asking, “What is your emergency plan?” They started with ordinary things. Daily routines. Family. Transport. Communication. Health. Living arrangements. Who helps. What is already in place. What the person depends on and what they manage well.

One learner wrote:

“The conversation went well because it felt natural once we started talking about everyday routines, strengths and support needs.”

Another reflected:

“He shared his daily routine, transport needs, support networks, etc.”

And another said:

“I found out a lot more about Mum and her level of support than I thought I knew.”

That last reflection stays with me. Even in familiar relationships, there is more to learn. What appears ordinary can hold a great deal of preparedness information, but it can also reveal hidden arrangements, uneven support, or assumptions that have gone untested.

In one learner’s first conversation, what began as a simple discussion about routine, transport and family contact gradually revealed where daily life might become fragile in an emergency. The facilitator did not need to force the conversation towards a plan. By staying with ordinary life, the person was able to identify what already worked, who mattered, and where there might need to be more thought or follow-up.

This is where Step 1 does its work. It grounds preparedness in recognisable life.

But everyday life is not just descriptive. It is relational and political. It holds dependency, privacy, vulnerability, family dynamics, unequal support, ambivalence about help, and sometimes fear of judgement or intrusion. A conversation about routine can quickly become a conversation about dignity, control, who knows what, and who gets to decide.

That is one reason beginning with everyday life is both simple and skilled.

Starting with strengths changes the tone

Learners also noticed the difference it made when they started with strengths rather than gaps.

One learner wrote:

“I found that beginning with what already works well helped make the conversation more relaxed.”

Another said:

“We focused on his strengths rather than focusing on emergencies, then introduced the Capability Wheel, so it felt like a conversation rather than an assessment.”

And another reflected:

“I learned to help people begin from a strength… gently guiding the conversation away from heading straight to a gap.”

This is not just a useful communication strategy. It says something about the orientation of the whole process.

Starting with strengths does not mean pretending risk is irrelevant. It means recognising that a person’s life is already full of capability, knowledge, support and adaptation. If Step 1 starts by looking only for deficits, it distorts the person before the conversation has even begun.

A strengths-first conversation changes the atmosphere, but it also protects agency. It allows the person to begin from what they know, do, manage and value. Agency is not something added later, once a plan has been developed. It is present in the conversation itself, in how the person is approached, listened to, and invited to describe their own life.

That has implications for teaching too. Learners are not just learning to ask better questions. They are learning that facilitation skill matters because it is how agency is recognised, protected and supported in practice.

Learners felt the pull to rush

One of the strongest lessons in the reflections was the urge to move too fast. To cover the whole wheel. To identify gaps. To solve problems. To move towards planning.

One learner wrote:

“It is good advice not to move too fast to planning. That is the tendency: to rush to solutions and the plan.”

Another reflected:

“There is a tendency to rush because of all the elements, and it may be better to restrict to just one.”

And another said:

“It was also hard not to jump to the next step rather than just keep the conversation current and relaxed.”

The P-CEP framework has momentum. Once people can see where the conversation might lead, it is very tempting to go there. Learners want to be helpful. They want to make things safer. They want to do something practical. But rushing is not only a pacing problem. It can become an agency problem.

If the facilitator moves too quickly, the person may not have had time to name what matters in their own terms. Their everyday arrangements may not yet be visible. The facilitator may start solving what they think the issue is, rather than what the person actually needs or wants to address.

Step 1 asks for restraint. It asks facilitators to pause long enough for the person’s life to come into view. I think this is one of the places where teaching matters most. Learners need permission not to rush. They need to know that staying with one part of the wheel, following one line of conversation, or leaving things incomplete is not failure. It may be exactly what person-centred practice requires.

Step 1 asks facilitators to hold the structure lightly and the person carefully.

Listening without assuming

Another strong thread in the reflections was the discipline of listening without filling in the answers, especially when the facilitator already knew the person well.

One learner wrote:

“Listening without making assumptions helped the other person feel comfortable sharing their thoughts.”

Another said:

“I knew a lot about what the answers might be… but didn’t make any assumptions or prompt him to answer in a particular way.”

And another reflected:

“It was interesting how much more detail was given when the person was given the space to talk through each of the points on the Capability Wheel at their own choosing.”

This too goes to the ethical centre of facilitation.

Assuming is not only a listening problem. It can displace the person’s own account.

Many first practice conversations happen with friends, relatives, colleagues, or people already known to the learner. Familiarity can help. But it can also make it harder to stay open. The facilitator may think they already know the routines, the supports, the likely answers.

Step 1 asks the facilitator to listen again because person-centred practice depends on the person having space to name their own life in their own words. That is where hidden dependencies, overlooked strengths, fragile support arrangements and different priorities can emerge.

Facilitation means adapting

Learners also recognised very quickly that there is no single correct way to facilitate Step 1.

The approach has to shift depending on the person, the setting, communication preferences, emotional readiness, disability, age, support network, privacy concerns, language, relationship and context.

One learner put it simply:

“It’s about adopting the delivery and style to the individual.”

Another reflected:

“It all depends on the capacity of the person, because as we know it’s their plan.”

Others identified changes they would make next time. More privacy. More time. A narrower focus. More preparation. A different pace. Different supports in the room.

What I find striking here is that learners are not just learning to use the tool. They are learning to facilitate with this person, in this context, at this moment.

It is also where their existing professional strengths come into view. Many learners already know how to build rapport, notice distress, adapt communication, or work alongside people in complex circumstances. The P-CEP conversation gives those skills a new setting, but not an entirely new purpose.

This matters for teaching. Learners do not arrive empty. They bring skill, judgement and values with them. The task is not only to teach the framework, but to help them connect it with what they already know about respectful, responsive practice.

Step 1 can surface emotional and relational complexity

One of the most important things in the reflections was that everyday life did not always open into a smooth, easy conversation. Sometimes it surfaced overwhelm. Sometimes defensiveness. Sometimes discomfort, negativity or resistance. Sometimes a strong wish not to disclose.

One learner wrote:

“My person was a bit overwhelmed because they started to realise how underprepared they were.”

Another reflected:

“I would focus more on the positives… as she did start to have a negative mindset so I needed to be empathetic with that as well.”

And another described a much harder interaction:

“He didn’t take well to it… most of the questions on the wheel were answered with ‘none of anyone’s business that.’”

These reflections matter because they expose tensions between the framework and real-life facilitation that I want to keep paying attention to.

Step 1 begins with everyday life, but everyday life is not neutral territory. It can reveal dependence, fragile support, family strain, reluctance to accept help, distrust of systems, fear of being judged, or strong commitments to privacy and autonomy.

That does not mean the process has failed.

In one learner’s reflection, a family member strongly resisted many of the questions and treated them as intrusive. The learner realised they already knew some of the likely answers, but deliberately chose not to fill them in. That restraint matters. It shows an understanding that forcing completion risks undermining person-centred practice itself.

A P-CEP conversation cannot be forced without contradicting its own values.

Sometimes the task is not to complete the wheel. Sometimes it is to preserve trust, respect privacy, notice readiness, and leave open the possibility of another conversation later. That too is facilitation. That too is learning. This is where the ethical demands of Step 1 become very clear. Pacing, restraint, listening, responsiveness, and respect for what a person does not wish to disclose are not secondary skills. They are central.

What learners are teaching me about facilitation

I have written elsewhere about why Step 1 begins with everyday life. What these learner reflections add is something different.

They show me what happens when that principle meets practice.

They show where learners find the Capability Wheel useful and where they feel its pressure. They show the pull to rush, the temptation to assume, the value of starting with strengths, and the reality that some conversations bring up far more than practical information. They show how quickly facilitation becomes ethical work.

They also keep me grounded. If P-CEP is to remain useful, it has to keep making sense in real conversations with real people, across diverse practice contexts. Learner reflections help me see what the framework makes possible, what it makes difficult, and what learners need from my teaching in order to use it well.

What strikes me most is that learners often recognise these ethical demands very quickly. They want to avoid turning the conversation into an extraction exercise. They care about agency. They care about getting the pace right. They notice when they are tempted to over-direct, over-assume, or move too quickly.

That alignment of values matters, and it gives me confidence in the seriousness with which they approach the work.

It also sharpens the challenge for teaching. Facilitation cannot be taught only as process knowledge. Learners need a structure, yes. But they also need opportunities to practise, hesitate, reflect, repair, and notice what happens when a person responds in an unexpected way. That is where facilitation capability develops.

In that sense, learners are not only learning P-CEP. They are helping teach me what teaching P-CEP needs to attend to.

Step 1 as the beginning of facilitation practice

Step 1 is the beginning of the P-CEP process, but it is also the beginning of facilitation practice.

The Capability Wheel gives facilitators a way in. It helps make everyday life visible. It gives shape to a conversation about strengths, routines, relationships and support. It makes preparedness more concrete and accessible.

But what learners keep showing me is that the deeper learning lies in how that conversation is held.

With patience.
With flexibility.
With curiosity.
With restraint.
With respect for agency.

Good P-CEP facilitation is not about getting through the wheel. It is about creating the conditions for the person’s life to come into view in a way that honours their knowledge, choices, privacy and priorities.

That is where preparedness begins.

Preferred Citation: Villeneuve, M. (2026). Beginning with everyday life. Sydney: Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney. https://vilicusrecusandae242061.substack.com/publish/post/204259011

I will continue a series of articles about the P-CEP Short Course and what I’m learning from my learners. Look for other/future issues as I continue to engage with my learners, drawing from de-identified course discussions involving 178 learners enrolled between March - June 2026.

Are in you interested to know more about our University of Sydney Short Certificate Course? https://short-courses.sydney.edu.au/course/PCEP3

That diversity matters. It makes for a richer learning environment but also tells us something important about implementation itself. P-CEP cannot be carried by one profession, one organisation, or one sector. The work is inherently distributed. Different people are positioned to do different parts of it. Some are close to individual planning conversations. Some are close to organisational routines and service systems. Some are close to trusted community relationships. Some are working in policy, governance or emergency management structures. Some bring lived experience, peer leadership and advocacy. Some bring practical knowledge of support, care, communication, access, transport and everyday life.

The diversity of the course cohort is therefore not incidental. It reflects the nature of P-CEP implementation itself. If person-centred emergency preparedness depends on people, services, supports, community networks, organisations and systems working together, then implementation necessarily crosses those boundaries too.

The P-CEP Facilitator Course was co-designed in response to an early implementation need. People could see the value of person-centred emergency preparedness, but they wanted support to understand the process, build confidence, and work out how to use it responsibly and meaningfully in their own settings. In that sense, the course is not only a place to learn P-CEP. It is part of the implementation pathway. It provides a shared language, a practice framework, and a space in which differently located learners can begin to recognise what kind of implementation work they are already positioned to do.

What is becoming visible through the course is not one singular pathway of adoption, but several recurring forms of implementation work. Learners are not simply acquiring knowledge about P-CEP. They are locating it in their own values, communities, organisations, responsibilities and intended actions. Their reflections suggest six modes of P-CEP implementation work already underway.

These are not stages. They are not types of people. They are not a hierarchy. They are modes of work, and they often overlap.

1. Integration work

Integration work asks a practical question: how does P-CEP become part of ordinary practice rather than something separate from it?

This mode appears when learners begin identifying where preparedness conversations can sit within work they already do. For some, that means community engagement. For others, it means support conversations, workshops, care planning, outreach, onboarding, emergency preparedness education, behaviour support, or local planning processes. The issue is not simply whether P-CEP is valuable. It is whether it can be woven into the rhythms of practice that already structure everyday work.

One learner described this clearly:

“I will embed P-CEP by incorporating preparedness conversations into community engagement activities, workshops, planning discussions, and individual support opportunities.”

That is what integration work sounds like. It is not adding preparedness as a detached extra, to be attempted when time and enthusiasm allow. It is looking for where P-CEP can live on Monday morning, in the actual settings where people already talk, plan, support, review and decide. When that does not happen, P-CEP can remain fragile, overly dependent on individual commitment or short-term project energy. When it does happen, preparedness becomes more durable because it is connected to relationships and routines that already exist.

Integration often reveals the next issue very quickly. Once P-CEP is embedded in practice, it becomes obvious that no one person or service can hold the whole task alone.

2. Collaboration work

Collaboration work asks: who else needs to be involved?

P-CEP is person-centred, but it is not person-isolated. A person’s preparedness depends on the network around them: family, carers, support workers, services, peers, community organisations, local institutions, councils, emergency services and others who may play a role before, during or after an emergency. Learners across the course repeatedly identify the need to work through relationships rather than assuming that one worker, one facilitator or one organisation can carry implementation by itself.

One learner framed this in terms of the everyday work of sharing, linking and extending opportunity:

“Every conversation and resource I can share with Support Coordinators and Service Providers means more participants are given the opportunity to have a meaningful and useful P-CEP plan.”

That reflection captures something important. Collaboration work is not only about formal partnerships, although those matter. It is also about referral pathways, trust, local knowledge, shared responsibility, and recognising who is best placed to begin particular conversations. In some contexts, the trusted relationship may sit with a disability advocate, a neighbourhood centre worker, a support coordinator, a clinician, a peer worker, a family member, or a local emergency management practitioner. Collaboration work is about building the connections that allow preparedness to become distributed rather than isolated.

Where collaboration is weak, P-CEP can become over-reliant on a single enthusiastic actor. Where collaboration is stronger, implementation begins to move through a network.

3. Organisational positioning work

As soon as people begin integrating P-CEP into existing practice and working across relationships, another question emerges: where does this work sit inside organisations, roles, policies and systems?

Many learners are not only asking how to use P-CEP with individuals. They are also asking how to locate it within the authority structures and operating arrangements around them. Is it part of community engagement? Is it part of onboarding? Is it connected to emergency preparedness education, support coordination, organisational emergency planning, policy implementation, or staff capability development? Who leads it, who authorises it, who supports it, and how is it resourced?

One learner described this mode in direct organisational terms:

“I am supporting emergency management to adapt and implement the P-CEP model into their emergency preparedness processes.”

That is a useful example because it shows implementation as positioning work, not simply practice enthusiasm. P-CEP may begin with a motivated person, but unless it is recognised inside organisational structures, it can remain precarious. It may be seen as optional, peripheral, or dependent on whoever happens to care enough to keep it moving. Organisational positioning work is therefore about legitimacy as much as logistics. It is the work of making P-CEP visible, authorised, supported and durable.

This matters across many settings. Service providers may need to decide where P-CEP sits in intake, review or staff development. Councils may need to decide whether it belongs in community resilience work or emergency management planning. Policy actors may need to consider how it aligns with broader commitments. Different organisations will answer those questions differently, but they cannot avoid them if implementation is to last.

4. Engagement and agency work

If organisational positioning asks where P-CEP sits, engagement and agency work asks who is shaping it and on whose terms.

This is central to P-CEP. Preparedness is not person-centred simply because a plan exists. It becomes person-centred through the way the conversation is held, the way decisions are made, and the extent to which the person is supported to identify what matters to them, what they need, what support arrangements they trust, and what they want others to know or do. Across the course, learners regularly describe P-CEP in terms of dignity, autonomy, choice, voice, confidence, rights and control. They are also alert to the long history of disabled people being treated as passive recipients of emergency information rather than as people with knowledge, preferences, capabilities and authority in their own lives.

One learner put the challenge plainly:

“For too long things have been done to disabled people in emergencies, not led by us. It is important that disabled people have agency in emergency management.”

That sentence carries moral weight, but it also carries practical implications. Engagement and agency work is not just about asking for input. It is about how preparedness is built. Who is listened to? Who decides what matters? Who identifies the risks and supports? Who owns the next steps? These are not secondary questions. They go to the integrity of the work.

This is also where the limits of a resource-only approach become clearer. Easy Read materials, translated information, plain language, visual supports and accessible tools are all important. But resources do not create agency on their own. A person may receive accessible information and still be left outside meaningful decision-making. Ownership is built in the conversation itself: in pacing, listening, prompting, supported decision-making, trust-building, and respecting the person as the expert in their own life.

Agency and accessibility are connected, but they are not the same thing. A person can receive information in an accessible form without being genuinely supported to shape the preparedness process. P-CEP asks more than whether information can be delivered. It asks whether the person is leading, shaping and owning the planning in a way that is meaningful to them.

5. Equity and access work

Preparedness advice often assumes that people can access information, act on guidance, travel when they need to, draw on support, maintain communication, and make use of the resources that emergency planning assumes are available. Learners across the course keep showing that these assumptions do not hold evenly. This is where equity and access work becomes unavoidable.

Equity and access work asks what needs to change so that P-CEP can work for people facing additional barriers, and so that the work does not quietly reproduce the exclusions it is trying to address. Learners identify many communities who may benefit from P-CEP, including disabled people, older people, people with chronic health conditions, carers, people in rural and isolated areas, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, people with communication barriers, people with limited digital access, people experiencing homelessness, and people whose access to services or transport is already fragile.

One learner captured the broad challenge this way:

“Many vulnerable community members face barriers to accessing information, resources, or support, and P-CEP provides a framework for working alongside communities to better understand their needs.”

I want to leave this mode somewhat open, because this is an area we are still deepening in research and practice. Even so, some things are already clear. Equity and access work goes beyond adapting documents. It includes understanding local conditions, recognising structural barriers, working with trusted organisations, noticing when preparedness advice assumes resources people do not have, and paying attention to what access actually means in different communities. Sometimes that means cultural and communication access. Sometimes it means language, literacy, transport, housing, service continuity, social isolation or local infrastructure. Often it means several of these at once.

This mode matters because risk is not produced by individual vulnerability alone. It is shaped by whether people can access support, information, communication, transport, safe places, trusted relationships and responsive systems. If P-CEP is to be useful across diverse contexts, it must stay attentive to those uneven conditions.

6. Systems learning work

P-CEP begins with the person, but if we take the conversations seriously, they reveal more than individual preparedness needs. Over time, recurring patterns become visible. The same transport barriers appear again. The same communication gaps. The same inaccessible assumptions in emergency planning, the same service fragmentation, the same uncertainty about roles, the same mismatch between emergency arrangements and how people actually live.

Systems learning work asks what these conversations reveal about wider gaps, and how that learning can inform change beyond the individual plan.

One learner saw this potential very clearly:

“If there was a way to de-personalise and aggregate data coming out of P-CEP efforts, emergency management could look at gaps that seem to be universal problems and use that data to advocate and justify funding and programming.”

This is one of the most important implementation moves in the whole set. Without it, individuals can be left holding problems they cannot solve alone. Plans may end up documenting repeated structural failures without creating any pathway for those failures to be addressed. With systems learning, however, P-CEP becomes a source of practical intelligence. It can inform organisational preparedness, local planning, policy advocacy, disability inclusive emergency management, and broader disaster risk reduction work.

The point here is not to move away from the person. It is to recognise when the same barriers are being surfaced often enough that they should no longer be treated as individual issues. A person-centred conversation can, in that sense, become a systems-facing source of evidence.

Working across the modes

These six modes are not a sequence. People may enter P-CEP through any one of them, depending on where they are located and what responsibilities they hold. An emergency management practitioner may first encounter P-CEP through community readiness, accessible communication or recurring planning gaps. A support worker may approach it through everyday relationships and planning conversations. A policy advisor may begin with organisational positioning and implementation pathways. A community development worker may start from trust, access and local context. A disabled person or advocate may begin by asking whether emergency planning is genuinely led by disabled people at all.

Different roles tend to make different aspects of implementation more visible. Emergency management practitioners often notice integration, collaboration and systems learning. Disability advocates, disabled people’s organisations and learners with lived experience often foreground agency, rights, equity and the consequences of exclusion. Health, aged care and support roles are frequently close to continuity of care, trusted relationships and the practical realities of daily support. Community organisations often see the access barriers and local conditions that formal systems can miss. Policy and government actors may be especially attentive to legitimacy, authorisation, alignment and system-level uptake.

These are not fixed alignments, and no role maps neatly onto a single mode. The point is almost the opposite. No one role holds all six modes of implementation work. That is one reason P-CEP implementation depends on a multidisciplinary learning community rather than a single profession or sector.

The useful question is therefore not which mode is best. A better question is: which modes are visible in our current P-CEP work, and which need more attention?

A stronger implementation environment needs all six. It needs integration so P-CEP becomes part of everyday practice. It needs collaboration so responsibility is shared. It needs organisational positioning so the work is recognised and sustained. It needs engagement and agency so people lead their own preparedness. It needs equity and access so implementation does not reproduce exclusion. And it needs systems learning so recurring barriers can inform broader change.

If there is a maturity dimension here, it may not lie in moving neatly through stages. It may lie in the growing capacity to recognise these modes, connect them, and work across them deliberately.

The course as an implementation pathway

Seen this way, the P-CEP Facilitator Course is not simply transferring knowledge from experts to learners. It is supporting a process through which people begin to locate P-CEP in practice. Learners come into the course because they already hold part of the P-CEP ecosystem. Some hold emergency management responsibilities. Some hold disability rights and advocacy knowledge. Some hold trusted community relationships. Some hold organisational authority. Some hold frontline support roles. Some hold policy influence. Some hold lived experience, family experience, local knowledge, or community leadership.

The course gives that diversity a common point of reference. It helps learners build confidence with the process, test the language, reflect on where P-CEP could sit in their own context, consider who might benefit, and begin identifying what implementation work is actually theirs to do. In that sense, the course does more than teach the steps of a planning approach. It functions as one pathway through which a multidisciplinary learning community begins to translate P-CEP into situated practice.

That matters for a Community of Practice as well. If implementation is distributed, then people need more than access to a resource. They need shared language, examples, reflection, connection across roles, and a way of seeing how their part of the work relates to others. The course helps to make that visible.

Questions for practice

For those working with P-CEP, these six modes may offer a useful set of questions:

• Which mode are you currently working in most strongly?

• Which modes are already visible in your organisation or community?

• Which mode is missing, fragile or underdeveloped?

• Who else holds a part of the implementation work that you need?

• Where might you be treating a practice issue as if it were only a resource issue?

• How are disabled people shaping and owning the preparedness process?

• What are individual P-CEP conversations revealing about wider organisational, community or system gaps?

P-CEP implementation begins where people are located. The work is to recognise those locations, connect them, and support the forms of practice that make person-centred emergency preparedness real. If we only look for implementation in formal roll-out, organisational endorsement, or the existence of a tool, we will miss where much of the real work has already begun.

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The P‑CEP Facilitator Course is a University of Sydney Certificate Short Course designed to support a multidisciplinary learning community to understand, facilitate and embed Person‑Centred Emergency Preparedness in practice. Learner reflections included here are drawn from de‑identified course discussions involving 178 learners enrolled between March - June 2026, as part of routine course review and improvement. https://short-courses.sydney.edu.au/course/PCEP3

Learn more about P-CEP, the P-CEP Course Evaluation, Implementation Stories and more here: https://collaborating4inclusion.org/pcep/

Preferred Citation: Villeneuve, M. (2026). Six modes of P-CEP implementation work. Sydney: Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney. https://vilicusrecusandae242061.substack.com/publish/post/204225432

Person-Centred Emergency Preparedness (P-CEP) begins there.

P-CEP was developed with and for people with disability in response to a serious problem: people facing disproportionate risk in emergencies were too often being offered preparedness approaches that were generic, lightly tailored, or not tailored at all. What was missing was not only better information or more planning tools, but a way of working that started from people’s real lives, recognised how support operates, and made preparedness meaningful in context. Although this work began in disability, what it reveals is relevant much more broadly, particularly wherever people rely on others, services, equipment, routines, or place-based knowledge to remain safe.

Over time, this work has made it increasingly clear that preparedness is rarely absent because people do not care or have not been told what to do. More often, it is absent because everyday support, risk communication, and system response have not yet been brought into alignment.

Rather than treating preparedness as something that can be applied to people, P-CEP approaches it as something that must be worked through with them, in ways that reflect how their lives are organised and how support is provided, received, and coordinated. P-CEP works as a mechanism because it converts tacit, distributed, everyday support arrangements into interpretable preparedness knowledge, then into prioritised action, and finally into communicable unmet need and shared responsibility.

This articulation is grounded in repeated implementation of P-CEP across disability, ageing, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and contexts of unstable housing, as well as facilitation, peer-led work, workbook development, and cross-sector partnerships with services, emergency management, and local government. It reflects what has been learned through use: not only what the process enables, but what it reveals.

As this work developed, it became increasingly important to distinguish the mechanism from the resources that support it. Workbooks, tools, templates, and training can all be valuable. But they are not what produces preparedness. Preparedness is produced through a structured process that starts with everyday life, moves through risk interpretation, shapes action in real conditions, and then identifies where responsibility must be shared.

P-CEP is both a conceptual model and a practice approach. It has been shaped through repeated use across different settings, often where the limits of more general preparedness approaches became quickly apparent. What follows is an articulation of that process: a way of connecting everyday life with emergency conditions, and of progressively revealing both what preparedness makes possible and where its limits lie.

Step 1: Reconstructing preparedness through everyday life

The starting point is not risk. It is everyday life.

Preparedness begins here, not with hazards or plans, but with how people live. It begins with routines, relationships, and the supports that make daily life possible. When conversations begin at this point, they stay close to what is already known: what helps someone feel safe, what they manage independently, where they rely on others, and how those arrangements hold together over time.

Starting here produces a different kind of understanding. Rather than describing people in terms of categories or risk groups, it becomes necessary to attend to how support is actually organised. Across different settings, this has consistently shown that support is rarely singular or self-contained. It is distributed across people, services, places, and routines. Some elements are stable. Others depend on timing, availability, trust, or coordination. Still others are informal and easily overlooked, yet critical in practice.

Across repeated implementation in different contexts, this work has also shown that the conditions required for preparedness are often already uneven. Particularly where people live with disability, chronic health conditions, or unstable support arrangements, preparedness cannot be separated from the realities of everyday care and support. What first appears to be a preparedness issue often turns out to be something more fundamental: gaps in everyday support that shape what is possible before any emergency planning begins.

This has been one of the clearest lessons of P-CEP. People cannot be expected to manage in an emergency if they are not managing in everyday life.

In one case, a man living with chronic health conditions and significant mobility impairment appeared to need support with bushfire planning after a major fire event. But as the conversation began with everyday life, it became clear that his formal supports had already fallen away, his health needs were increasing, and he was largely coping alone. The immediate issue was not planning for the next disaster. It was that preparedness was being asked to sit on top of support arrangements that were already failing. Reconnecting everyday supports became a necessary step before future emergency planning could be meaningful.

This is also where the process can become more complex than expected. As everyday life is explored in detail, it may reveal reduced or fragile support, disconnection from others, uncertainty about who would be there if something changed suddenly, or the cumulative effects of loneliness, grief, or loss. These are not side issues. They are part of the conditions within which preparedness has to be worked out.

Holding this requires a particular kind of practice. It is not resolved through quick solutions. It involves recognising what is being revealed, staying with it, and helping people move through small and meaningful steps where possible. That is one reason P-CEP cannot be reduced to tools alone.

It also does not mean the preparedness process stops when unmet everyday needs come into view. More often, it means preparedness must proceed alongside efforts to reconnect, strengthen, or coordinate support, sometimes with others better placed to respond. In this way, preparedness stays grounded in reality rather than floating above it.

At the same time, Step 1 introduces an important shift in how people are understood. In many emergency management approaches, people are categorised through diagnosis, impairment, or assumptions of vulnerability. Across this work, it has become clear that these classifications do not provide a meaningful basis for action. Knowing a diagnosis does not tell us what support is required in a specific situation, nor how that support should be coordinated.

What proves more useful is a focus on functional capability and support needs as they operate in everyday life. The P-CEP capability framework helps structure this reflection: how people communicate, manage health, move through space, use equipment, and coordinate support. This has practical value. It allows preparedness to be framed in ways that are specific and actionable, and it gives others, including emergency personnel and service providers, a better basis for engagement.

By the end of this step, preparedness has already been reframed. It is no longer an individual attribute or a response to abstract risk. It is grounded in lived systems of support, understood as distributed and interdependent. It is into this context that risk is introduced.

Step 2: Translating risk into lived, interpretable experience

Risk enters after this.

It enters a space already shaped by everyday life. The conversation shifts from what is stable to what might change, and from how life is organised to how it could be disrupted. Rather than being introduced as abstract information, risk is worked through in relation to what has already been made visible.

In practice, this has required a different approach to risk communication. Across contexts, it has become clear that people do not always have access to, or confidence in, the information they are expected to use. This includes both individuals and those supporting them. Risk information that is technical or generalised does not automatically translate into meaningful understanding, especially when it is disconnected from the conditions of everyday life.

For that reason, Step 2 treats risk as something to be interpreted, not simply delivered. People draw on local knowledge, past experience, and their understanding of place to make sense of what different conditions would mean for them. Risk becomes meaningful when it can be located within everyday life: when people can recognise what would change, how quickly it might change, and what decisions would need to follow.

In this sense, understanding risk is not only about understanding a hazard. It is about understanding what that hazard would disrupt in relation to communication, care, mobility, medication, equipment, transport, timing, and continuity of support. Public warnings become more useful when they can be translated into these lived consequences.

This also brings the limits of existing approaches to risk communication into sharper view. Preparedness cannot assume that information will be equally understandable or equally usable across different lives and contexts. Accessibility is not an added feature here; it is a condition of preparedness itself. Information has to be available, interpretable, and adaptable in ways that reflect the diversity of how people live and receive information.

At this point, risk interpretation becomes a shared task. It draws in those responsible for producing and communicating risk information, including emergency services and government. Their role begins to shift from issuing general guidance to engaging with what that guidance means in particular situations. In some settings, this has supported a real change in practice, with emergency-sector partners moving towards more tailored, more dialogic, and more usable forms of risk communication shaped by support needs and functional capability.

One of the important things Step 2 does is create a bridge between lived systems and formal emergency systems. It makes risk personally and operationally legible, so that decision-making is not based on hazard information alone, but on what that information means for care, movement, communication, and support under changing conditions.

By the end of this step, risk is no longer entirely external or abstract. It has become something people can reason with. They can locate themselves within it, and decisions begin to take shape accordingly.

Step 3: Prioritising and shaping action within real conditions

From here, the work shifts again. The question is no longer only what risk means, but what holds, and what does not, when those meanings are taken seriously.

Across applications of the P-CEP process, one thing has become very clear: planning cannot be approached as a comprehensive exercise. Attempts to plan for everything tend to overwhelm and stall progress. Instead, the work turns towards prioritisation. Attention goes to what matters most, what needs consideration first, and what can realistically be addressed within current conditions.

This involves a kind of calibration. Preparedness is shaped in relation to how life is already organised, the supports that are available, and the constraints within which people are operating. The actions that emerge are therefore specific and situated. They are grounded in what is possible, rather than lifted from general recommendations.

What gets prioritised will differ across lives and contexts, but often includes continuity of essential support, communication access, medication and health management, movement and transport, trusted contacts, and the timing of key decisions. For those supporting the process, these domains can help structure conversation without assuming that preparedness follows the same order for everyone.

One of the things that becomes clear here is that this work does not depend solely on external expertise. People whose lives already involve navigating complex support arrangements often bring highly developed capacities for adaptation, coordination, and problem-solving. These capacities become more visible as they work through preparedness in ways that extend what they already do.

This shifts how planning is understood. Rather than being prescribed, it is shaped. People develop strategies that reflect their own circumstances, adapting existing routines or creating new approaches where needed. When this work takes place in peer or group settings, it tends to generate multiple pathways rather than a single model. Different strategies are explored, shared, and adapted, reflecting the diversity of lives involved.

The P-CEP Workbook sits within this context. It captures these forms of practice as they occur: sometimes partial, sometimes evolving, often shaped under real constraints. That is part of its value. It shows planning as it happens in life, rather than as an idealised end point.

Another important insight from this work is that the process cannot be learned abstractly. Those supporting preparedness need to work through it themselves. Doing so reveals where decisions are straightforward and where they are constrained. It brings into view the points at which preparedness is possible, and where it depends on others. That experience has proven critical in making the process genuinely usable.

By the end of this step, preparedness has taken shape in a grounded way. Priorities are clearer, actions are identified, and there is stronger alignment between needs and supports. At the same time, something else begins to emerge: the limits that remain, not as theoretical concerns, but as practical constraints encountered in trying to make planning work.

Step 4: Where preparedness exceeds the individual

It is from this point that the process shifts most significantly.

Across different implementations, a consistent pattern has appeared: even after careful and thoughtful planning, there remain aspects of preparedness that cannot be resolved within the individual or their immediate network. These are not signs of poor planning. They reflect the way support and responsibility are organised around people.

These limits become visible as people try to make preparedness workable. They are expressed in practical terms: support may not be available, coordination may be uncertain, responsibilities may be unclear. What is different at this stage is the precision with which these needs can now be named. They have been revealed through the process itself.

In another case, the planning process identified a clear dependency on daily support and accessible transport if evacuation became necessary. The person could describe what was needed, when it would be needed, and what would happen if it were not available. What remained unclear was who would ensure that support if regular workers could not attend and ordinary transport options had broken down. At that point, the work shifted from planning alone to communication and advocacy: making the need visible to providers and others who might hold responsibility. Importantly, the P-CEP process had not failed. It had exposed the point at which preparedness depended on action beyond the individual.

This is also the point at which the process often stalls. Plans are frequently held privately, with the assumption that having thought things through is enough. P-CEP makes clear that it is not. Preparedness cannot extend beyond the individual unless it is communicated.

Sharing the plan, and the gaps within it, becomes essential. It is through communication that roles can be clarified, expectations aligned, and coordination initiated. This applies across relationships: family, peers, services, organisations, and emergency actors. Preparedness becomes something held collectively rather than individually. Sometimes this communication also becomes a form of advocacy, ensuring that support needs are recognised, understood, and acted on by those better placed to respond.

Once these needs move beyond the immediate planning conversation, they encounter existing systems. It is here that further limitations often become visible. Pathways for response may be unclear, responsibilities dispersed, and coordination uneven. In these circumstances, preparedness cannot be completed at the level of the individual.

This is not a failure of the process. It is one of the things the process is designed to reveal.

Across contexts, the kinds of needs identified in this way align strongly with broader efforts to strengthen Disability Inclusive Emergency Management. What P-CEP contributes is a way of grounding these needs in lived experience and making them visible in forms that can be communicated and acted upon.

When this communication happens intentionally, something else becomes possible. The process can generate aggregate insight. Patterns in unmet need, support gaps, coordination barriers, and accessibility failures do not remain confined to individual plans. They can inform improvements in local emergency management, including communication, transport pathways, evacuation arrangements, temporary accommodation, relief settings, and the routing of accessible support. In this sense, Step 4 does more than expose the limits of individual preparedness. It creates a pathway from lived need to system learning.

The process does not produce system change on its own. But it does create conditions in which system change becomes harder to ignore and more possible to act on.

By this point, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that preparedness cannot be completed through individual action alone. It depends on responsiveness, coordination, and forms of shared responsibility that extend beyond existing arrangements. This is where the limits of preparedness as an individual responsibility come fully into view.

Conclusion

Across different contexts, P-CEP continues to be taken up and worked through by a wide range of actors. What remains consistent is not the use of a particular resource, but the structure of the process itself: beginning from everyday life, interpreting risk in context, shaping action in relation to real conditions, and identifying where preparedness depends on others.

These patterns have been observed across peer-led groups, service settings, and collaborations with emergency management and local government. They show a dynamic model enabling a way of working that continues to develop through use.

P-CEP can therefore be understood not simply as a preparedness approach, but as a structured mechanism for revealing how preparedness is made, where it is constrained, and when it must become shared. Its contribution lies not only in helping people prepare, but in making visible the lived conditions, relational dependencies, and system responsibilities that preparedness depends on.

Preparedness, in this sense, is not delivered.
It is worked through, together and over time.

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Preferred Citation: Villeneuve, M. (2026). Person-Centred Emergency Preparedness. Sydney: Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney. https://vilicusrecusandae242061.substack.com/publish/post/203944384

Here’s a handy P-CEP Step infographic with some key information from this article to use as a reminder. Download it and share.

Consider using this quick overview: What is P-CEP?

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For most of my career, I have worked in systems full of committed people trying to do better. There have been strong policy intentions, capable professionals, and people with lived experience pushing hard for change.

And yet, the same problems persist.

Services remain fragmented.
Roles are unclear.
Responsibility is distributed, but not aligned.
People, particularly people with disability, are still too often excluded from the systems that shape their inclusion, safety, and wellbeing.

These outcomes were not simply the result of individual failure, lack of care, or lack of knowledge. They were being produced through how activity was organised across systems, across sectors, organisations, roles, tools, and levels of governance.

If we want different outcomes, we have to work with that reality. We have to engage the system as it is actually enacted in practice.

Naming the method

My work first took shape in inclusive education contexts. For over 15 years, it has developed further in inclusive emergency management, disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction, and, increasingly, climate adaptation, where outcomes depend on coordination across many different systems.

Over nearly two decades, I have developed and applied a way of working grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research. I am now naming my extension of this work more explicitly as Distributed Developmental Work Research, or DDWR.

At its simplest, DDWR is a method for helping complex systems learn.

More specifically, it is an interventionist methodology for understanding and transforming outcomes produced across multiple interacting activity systems, rather than within a single organisation or service. It applies and extends Developmental Work Research into settings where responsibility, knowledge, and action are spread across sectors, organisations, and levels of governance.

This matters because many of the outcomes I care about, inclusion, safety, continuity of support, meaningful participation, are never produced by one actor alone. They emerge through the interaction of many parts of a system, each carrying different roles, constraints, assumptions, and forms of authority.

Developmental Work Research gave me a foundation for understanding how change happens when people can recognise contradictions in their own work, reflect on how those contradictions have developed, and begin to reorganise activity around a shared object. That foundation has stayed with me. What changed over time was the scale and setting of the work.

The systems I was working in did not sit neatly inside one workplace, one team, or one organisation. The learning had to travel. It had to hold across difference. It had to keep moving.

That is where DDWR comes from.

What “distributed” means

In DDWR, “distributed” means more than many people being involved.

The problem is distributed. Responsibility is distributed. Knowledge is distributed. Authority is distributed. Contradictions are distributed. The capacity to change the system is distributed too.

No single actor holds the whole picture. No single organisation can solve the problem alone.

This is foundational to how I think about method. It connects closely with ideas from distributed cognition, where understanding is not treated as something contained within one mind, but as something held and managed across people, tools, representations, and environments.

That has been deeply important in my own work. In complex systems, people cannot act on what they cannot hold. When knowledge is fragmented across actors and settings, it has to be gathered, interpreted, synthesised, and made usable. It has to be held through tools, shared frameworks, representations, and relationships that help people work across networks of actors operating in very different ways.

When responsibility for outcomes is distributed across systems, transformation requires a distributed method of learning.

Why I needed a different way of working

Many approaches to systems change simplify complexity in order to act. They focus on one organisation, one program, one policy setting, or one stakeholder group at a time. Sometimes that is useful. Often it leaves the main dynamics untouched.

In the areas where I work, outcomes such as inclusion and safety are produced through the interaction of many systems. Emergency management, disability services, health, community networks, local governance, policy, and lived experience all shape what happens. Each part works with its own rules, tools, timeframes, obligations, and blind spots.

From inside one part of the system, it can be hard to see the whole.

What looks like failure in one place may be a rational response to pressures elsewhere. What appears to be a gap in practice may actually be produced by a deeper misalignment in roles, tools, or expectations across the system.

That is why I have worked consistently with activity systems rather than isolated actors. My focus has been on how work is actually organised across:

• people

• roles

• tools

• rules

• organisations

• relationships

• and shared goals

I have always been more interested in enacted practice than formal design. Policy matters. Organisational structures matter. Intentions matter. But outcomes are shaped in the doing.

Making systems visible

A central part of this work has been making systems visible to themselves.

I do not begin by arriving with conclusions. I work to understand practice in context and to construct representations of how the system is functioning as people actually experience and enact it. That draws on lived experience, practice knowledge, research evidence, observation, dialogue, and sustained engagement over time.

Within these representations, I surface contradictions.

I use that term in a specific way. I do not mean general tension or disagreement. I mean structured misalignments within and between elements of activity systems as they are enacted in practice. Misalignments between policy and implementation. Between roles and expectations. Between tools and outcomes. Between responsibility and authority. Between what one part of the system assumes and what another part can realistically do.

These contradictions are often historically embedded. They have developed over time. They shape the conditions in which people work, often without being fully visible to those inside them.

My research revealed the same pattern.

Each part of the system may be acting logically within its own role.
And still, the system as a whole fails to produce the outcomes it claims to value.

That is hard to grasp when you are inside the work and managing your piece of it. It becomes easier to see when the system is reflected back in a form people can recognise.

Mirror data, and what it makes possible

This is where Developmental Work Research has remained a strong influence on my research practice.

A central mechanism in my work has been the use of mirror data. I do not use mirror data as simple feedback. I use it to reveal contradictions in how activity is organised and experienced across systems.

Mirror data can take many forms. Stories. Forum findings. Interview material. Cross-study synthesis. Lived experience accounts. Structured summaries of policy and practice. Developmental tools. Representations of how different parts of the system interact around a shared outcome.

The form matters less than the function.

What matters is that the material is deliberately structured so people can recognise themselves and the system they are part of. Recognition is crucial. Without it, people tend to defend their role or dismiss the analysis as belonging to someone else. With it, something opens.

People begin to see how their own work sits within a broader pattern. They can see why actions that make sense locally may still contribute to fragmentation at the system level. They can also see that the issue does not belong to one organisation alone.

In Developmental Work Research, mirror data forms part of what Engeström describes as double stimulation. People encounter material that makes a contradiction visible, then work with concepts, tools, or structures that help them respond to it differently.

That logic has been central to my work from the beginning. Over time, I carried it into more complex and distributed settings, where the contradictions were spread across systems rather than contained within a single workplace.

From bounded intervention to distributed learning

Classic Developmental Work Research has often been used in more bounded organisational settings. My work has retained its contradiction-driven and interventionist core, while extending it into contexts where participants do not share a single workplace, chain of command, or organisational object.

In these contexts, mirror data cannot stay local. It has to move.

Insights need to circulate across communities, services, emergency systems, governance settings, education spaces, partnerships, and policy environments. They need to remain intelligible across contexts. They need to support learning among actors who bring different responsibilities, different languages, and different degrees of power.

That changes the methodological task.

It is no longer enough to facilitate reflection within one setting. The work involves building forms of understanding that can travel across distributed systems without losing meaning. It involves carrying learning from one context into another. It involves helping people recognise that they are working on a shared object even when they stand in very different places in relation to it.

Learning across boundaries

This work depends on learning across boundaries because the problems themselves are produced across those boundaries.

Throughout my work, I have deliberately brought together:

• people with lived experience

• practitioners and service providers

• organisations

• community actors

• policy and decision-makers

I have done this because these perspectives are all necessary if we want to understand how outcomes are produced and what it will take to shift them.

This creates the conditions for two forms of learning.

The first is horizontal learning, across sectors, services, professions, and organisations. People begin to understand one another’s roles, constraints, and contributions. They can see where assumptions break down and where coordination becomes possible.

The second is vertical learning, between practice and governance. Insights move from practice toward policy, and from policy back into practice. Those responsible for governance gain a clearer view of implementation realities. Those working in practice gain a stronger understanding of the wider system shaping what they can and cannot do.

Neither form of learning happens automatically. It takes structure, translation, and time. It also takes work to build enough shared understanding for participation to be meaningful.

That has been especially important in disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction. People with disability are supported to understand emergency systems and risk contexts. Emergency managers and policymakers are supported to understand disability, inclusion, and lived experience. Shared inquiry becomes possible because participants are able to enter the work as informed contributors.

The ecology and the engine

Over time, I have come to think of this work as involving both an ecology and an engine.

The ecology describes the distributed system through which learning and action occur. It includes forums, workshops, partnerships, advisory structures, education programs, tools, governance processes, communication channels, and ongoing relationships. It shows where insight was generated, how it moved, where it was taken up, and how different parts of the work connected.

The ecology explains where things happened and how they connected.

But it does not fully explain how the system moved.

The engine is the analytical, relational, and interventionist work that enables the ecology to function and evolve. This is where my methodological expertise and intentional design sit. It includes:

• analysing activity systems

• identifying contradictions

• synthesising diverse forms of knowledge

• constructing mirror data

• revealing system dynamics in ways participants can recognise

• structuring spaces for collective reflection

• designing mediating tools

• carrying learning across contexts

• and sustaining movement over time

This part of the work is often less visible from the outside. It can look as though insight simply emerged and travelled. It did not. It had to be assembled, interpreted, shaped, and reintroduced into the system in ways people could use.

DDWR operates through the generation and circulation of insight, but also through the deliberate revelation of contradictions, the active synthesis and mediation of knowledge, and sustained leadership over time. That is what helps systems recognise themselves, build shared understanding, and progressively transform their own practice.

Tools that carry the work forward

A defining feature of my work has been the co-design of tools as mediating artefacts within activity systems.

These tools matter because they help people think, interpret, coordinate, and act. They do practical work in the present, and developmental work over time.

They support people to make sense of what they are seeing. They help stabilise shared understanding. They structure reflection. They guide action. They make room for self-assessment, progression, and ongoing learning. In distributed systems, they also help hold knowledge across settings and over time so that understanding does not disappear once a workshop ends or a project closes.

This is part of what I think of as a shared knowledge infrastructure.

In my work, continuity has never depended on facilitation alone. It has also depended on creating tools, syntheses, and structures that allow the outputs of collective work to remain accessible, interpretable, and usable over time. Knowledge can then be revisited, extended, and taken up in new contexts.

That matters for transformation. It also matters for practice right now.

The most useful tools in this kind of work do two things at once. They help people engage more effectively in the work in front of them by clarifying roles, improving coordination, and supporting better decisions. At the same time, they support longer-term development by embedding reflection, self-assessment, and progression within practice itself.

That dual function has been central to how I design.

Why time matters

This work takes time. More than most systems are set up to allow.

Expansive learning does not happen because people are exposed to information once. It develops as participants encounter representations of their own practice, recognise contradictions, make sense of how those contradictions have developed, and begin to reorganise activity around shared outcomes.

Even then, systems do not move all at once.

Some actors are ready earlier than others. Some can see the contradiction but do not yet have the authority or tools to respond. Some parts of the system resist. Disasters and crises expose what had previously remained hidden. Tools evolve through use. Insights deepen as they are tested.

There is nothing smooth about this.

I have never experienced this work as a neat sequence of intervention, uptake, and resolution. It has involved setbacks, uneven readiness, repeated explanation, and a great deal of persistence. It has also involved carrying learning forward when projects ended, when funding shifted, or when systems were not yet ready to act on what had become visible.

That longitudinal commitment has shaped the method as much as any theory has. I do not move on once an intervention is complete. I continue to support reflection, test new approaches, build tools, and work with actors and systems that are often moving at different speeds.

Without continuity, systems forget quickly. With continuity, they begin to accumulate understanding.

My role in the work

As I name this method more explicitly, I also need to be clearer about the role I have played within it.

My role has never been limited to generating knowledge. I have worked to help systems recognise themselves.

That has involved analysis, of course. It has also involved a great deal of epistemic, relational, and interventionist labour. Listening across fractured perspectives. Synthesising complexity without flattening it. Deciding what contradictions to surface and when. Structuring environments where people can engage difficult truths without collapsing into blame or defensiveness. Building enough shared understanding for meaningful participation. Creating continuity across projects and contexts. Designing tools that can carry the work beyond my direct involvement.

None of that has been incidental. It has been part of the method.

I say this carefully, because I do not want to overstate my role. But I also do not want to disappear the labour involved in helping distributed systems learn. Work like this requires intentional design and sustained stewardship, especially in the early stages when a shared object is still emerging and the system cannot yet carry the learning on its own.

Why I am articulating this now

Although this work matured in inclusive emergency management and disaster risk reduction, I believe it has relevance wherever outcomes are produced across fragmented systems striving to collaborate for inclusion.

For much of this work, the method has remained implicit.

The people I work with have not needed theory language in order to participate. They have needed support to understand systems, reflect on practice, work across boundaries, and change how things are done.

But over the years, I have been asked the same question again and again.

How did you do that?

That question has stayed with me. It feels like the right time to share this, as the work has developed to a point where its patterns and effects are clear.

What I am doing now is making this methodological practice more explicit. Not because it has only just come into being. It has been enacted over many years, across many contexts, through sustained work. It has reached a point where it can be named, examined, taught, and adapted by others.

Importantly, I want to articulate my methodological insights to show how exclusion is produced across systems and to translate those system contradictions into coordinated change toward inclusion.

I am also articulating it now because the effects of this work are visible in practice. Over time, it has contributed to tools being taken up, capability being built across sectors, and policy and governance changes that begin to embed inclusion more durably within systems. I will unpack these specific developments more fully in later writing.

This piece is a starting point. There is more to share in what follows including the:

• role of mirror data

• movement from contradiction to double stimulation

• design of tools as mediating artefacts

• function of shared knowledge infrastructures

• relationship between distributed cognition and system learning

• long arc of intervention across distributed systems.

For now, what matters is this:

Naming the method makes it possible to see it more clearly.
And once we can see how a system learns, we are better placed to help it change.

Preferred Citation: Villeneuve, M. (2026). Building systems that learn. Sydney: Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney. https://vilicusrecusandae242061.substack.com/publish/post/203808475

Learn more about my research at Collaborating4Inclusion

When emergencies disrupt everyday life, we often ask whether individuals are prepared. Do people have a plan? Do they know where to go, what to take, who to call?

These are important questions. But they are not enough.

For many people with disability, chronic health conditions, or other support needs, safety in emergencies depends not only on personal preparedness, but on whether the organisations they rely on can continue to function. Can support workers still reach people? Can services adapt quickly? Can essential care, communication, coordination, and everyday assistance continue under disrupted conditions?

This is where my research on Organisational Emergency Preparedness (OEP) began to take shape.

Over the past several years, I’ve been studying how community-based health, disability, and social care organisations contribute to emergency preparedness and service continuity. What began as a question about how frontline providers help people prepare gradually opened into a larger one: what makes continuity possible, equitable, and inclusive when disruption affects both people and the services they depend on?

Across this work, one finding has become increasingly clear: service continuity is not simply an operational issue. It is a condition of inclusion.

And yet, too often, continuity is treated as something organisations improvise during crisis rather than something systems actively build before disruption occurs.

The missing middle in emergency preparedness

Emergency management frameworks tend to focus on a familiar set of actors and responsibilities: individuals and households, emergency services, governments, hospitals, and critical infrastructure. These all matter. But there is a “missing middle” that is often under-recognised in preparedness thinking: the community-based organisations that support people in everyday life.

These organisations sit at the intersection of care, coordination, and lived reality. They provide disability support, health and social care, community services, case management, outreach, and practical assistance. They are often the organisations people trust, know, and depend on long before a disaster occurs.

That means they are not peripheral to preparedness. They are often the means through which preparedness is made possible.

But the field has not always conceptualised them that way. Community-based organisations are often expected to support preparedness and continuity without a clear model for what that responsibility involves, how it should be embedded in practice, or what kinds of system support are needed to make it sustainable.

That gap has shaped my OEP research stream.

What the research showed

Across five linked studies — including evidence reviews and national surveys of frontline providers and community organisations — I found a remarkably consistent pattern.

First, frontline providers are critical enablers of preparedness. Because they work through trusted, ongoing relationships, they are often well placed to identify risks, support planning, coordinate resources, and help people think through what preparedness means in their own circumstances. Preparedness is most effective when it is done with people, not for them.

But there was a catch. Providers’ ability to support others depended heavily on their own preparedness, confidence, training, and role clarity. Those who felt more prepared themselves were more likely to engage clients in preparedness planning. Those who lacked training or practical tools were far less likely to do so consistently. In other words, preparedness was not just a task to be added on; it was relational, capability-dependent, and shaped by the conditions of everyday practice.

Second, organisations carry dual responsibilities. They are expected to maintain service continuity during disruption while also supporting the preparedness of the people they serve. That dual role matters enormously, especially in community care contexts. But it is not always clearly recognised or operationalised.

Many organisations could identify risk. Fewer had embedded planning, drills, coordinated preparedness activities, or active client engagement into routine systems. Preparedness often sat at the edges of core business, treated as important but still somehow “extra.” This created a familiar tension: the policy expectation was there, but the organisational conditions to enact it consistently often were not.

Third, service continuity is commonly reactive rather than proactive. In the international literature, organisations were found to implement a wide range of strategies during emergencies: flexible staffing, telehealth, informal coordination, modified roles, infrastructure workarounds, wellbeing supports, emergency planning, and resource reallocation. These efforts were often creative and adaptive. They showed that organisations do a great deal to keep going under pressure.

But they also revealed something else. Much of this continuity work happens during response and recovery, not because systems had adequately prepared for it beforehand. Continuity is frequently achieved through improvisation, staff commitment, and local adaptation rather than through structured, rehearsed, well-supported preparedness.

Finally, system conditions shape what organisations can actually do. Funding arrangements, governance, workforce pressures, fragmented communication, weak coordination structures, limited guidance, and uneven partnerships all affect preparedness and continuity. Many of the barriers organisations face are not internal failings; they are the result of broader system misalignment.

This matters because it changes the way we understand the problem.

The problem is not a lack of effort

One of the strongest messages to emerge from this program is that community-based organisations are not passive or negligent. On the contrary, they are often highly adaptive. They make continuity happen under difficult conditions. They fill gaps. They stretch. They improvise. They rely on relationships, local knowledge, and staff commitment to support people through disruption.

But adaptation should not be mistaken for preparedness.

When continuity depends too heavily on improvisation, the burden falls unevenly. Staff absorb the strain. Organisational risk increases. And the people who rely on services are exposed to variability in what can actually be sustained.

This is why I came to see service continuity not as a narrow organisational issue, but as a multi-level, co-produced, system-dependent outcome.

Continuity is shaped by the alignment — or misalignment — of at least four interdependent domains:

1. service recipient preparedness and support needs

2. workforce capability and preparedness

3. organisational systems and planning

4. system-level governance and coordination

When these domains are aligned, continuity is more likely to be reliable and equitable. When they are not, continuity becomes fragile.

That insight has been central to the conceptual progression of this work.

From preparedness as responsibility to preparedness as practice

A lot of emergency preparedness language still assumes that preparedness is something individuals, organisations, or systems simply “have” or “do not have.” It is treated as a capability, a checklist, a plan, or a compliance requirement.

My research has pushed me toward a different view.

In community-based service settings, preparedness is not reducible to a plan on a shelf. It is something enacted through relationships, routines, coordination, capability, and decision-making under real-world constraints. It is shaped by what usually happens, not just by what an organisation intends to do.

That shift matters.

It means preparedness is not only about formal plans or emergency protocols. It is also about whether staff know their role, whether systems support them to act, whether organisations can articulate what they can sustain during disruption, whether people’s support needs are understood in context, and whether coordination with other services and emergency systems is workable.

In that sense, preparedness is less a static state than an ongoing practice of alignment.

This is also where methodology has mattered in my work. I have approached this research program through knowledge-to-action and co-production, moving iteratively between evidence synthesis, stakeholder dialogue, empirical study, and tool development. People with disability, frontline providers, organisations, government, and emergency services have all helped shape the questions, test the concepts, and refine the practical outputs.

This has been important not just for relevance, but for concept formation itself. Organisational preparedness became clearer as a construct because it was worked through in dialogue with practice.

Why Organisational Emergency Preparedness emerged

OEP emerged from a repeated encounter with the same problem: preparedness was expected, but not clearly operationalised. Organisations were responsible for continuity, but often lacked a structured way to describe, assess, or communicate what preparedness looked like in practice.

That is the gap OEP is designed to address.

The Organisational Emergency Preparedness (OEP) self-assessment is not simply an audit of whether an organisation has a plan. It is a structured reflection process, guided by an evidence-informed tool, that helps organisations examine not only whether plans exist, but how well they reflect real operating conditions, support continuity, and are enacted in practice. In that sense, OEP helps make preparedness visible where it actually matters most.

It asks organisations to consider questions such as:

• What do we usually do to maintain services and supports during disruption?

• How do we support people to prepare in ways that work for them?

• Where is practice established, uneven, or dependent on individuals?

• What gaps, risks, and constraints shape outcomes?

• What can we realistically sustain under disrupted conditions?

• What have we learned from past experience?

What distinguishes OEP is that it focuses on real practice rather than aspiration, and on capability and constraint together. It integrates two responsibilities that are often treated separately: service continuity and person-centred preparedness support.

This is especially important in inclusive disaster risk reduction. If we want emergency management to be inclusive, then we need to understand not only what individuals require, but also whether the organisations that support them are prepared to continue operating, adapting, and coordinating when disruption occurs.

The next phase of the work

The next phase of this program, through my ARC Fellowship, takes up a question that now feels both practical and conceptual: what happens when organisational preparedness becomes visible?

More specifically, how can OEP help organisations, and the systems around them, understand what they can sustain, where the risks are, and how preparedness information might support planning, prioritisation, coordination, and decision-making?

This marks another shift in the research.

Earlier work was focused on defining the problem and building the conceptual foundations. The Fellowship moves from preparedness as a set of interdependent domains toward preparedness as a decision-support and learning process. The question is no longer only what preparedness is, but how it can be interpreted and used in practice.

That matters because alignment cannot be assumed. It has to be made visible, discussed, negotiated, and worked with over time.

Why this matters now

Disasters are becoming more frequent, more complex, and more prolonged. At the same time, community-based services are being asked to do more with constrained resources, stretched workforces, and uneven system support.

In this context, preparedness cannot remain a vague expectation or an afterthought.

If continuity is essential to safety, health, and wellbeing for people who rely on support, then organisational preparedness must become more visible, more structured, and more actionable — not only within organisations, but across the systems that shape what they can do.

That is the central contribution of this research stream so far.

Preparedness is not just personal. It is organisational, relational, and systemic.

And if we are serious about inclusive emergency management, we need to pay much closer attention to the organisations people depend on every day — not only in the moment of crisis, but long before it.

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I’ve also prepared a fuller research synthesis of this Organisational Emergency Preparedness stream, which maps the evidence base, the five linked studies, and the development of OEP in more detail. I’ll share that separately as a reference document for those who want the full research architecture.

Preferred citation
Villeneuve, M. (2026). Service continuity is a condition of inclusion. Sydney: Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney.