PACE Planning

PACE Planning

As we all know, planning is why we got into emergency services in the first place.   While we tend to shoot from the hip, planning is essential to successfully completing our mission safely and effectively.  PACE Planning is a model to provide for alternatives and external influences on our actions.  Drawn from military communications, PACE Planning can be easily adapted to fit any planning process and provides a template that can provide redundancy and preparation for contingencies. 

The model emphasizes the development of four strategies designed to address a particular aspect of plans development.  The Primary plan addresses what is to be done if everything goes as expected.  The Alternate plan provides an option to meet the original objective while Contingency plans provide options for addressing predictable external influences.  Finally, Emergency plans answer the question, what do we do if there is an emergency.

To learn more about PACE Planning and how to incorporate it into your organization, consider taking the National Fire Academy’s Planning for Unusual Events and Catastrophic Incidents course or submit a research request to the National Emergency Training Centers Library.  The research librarians will collect a selection of materials to guide your research and provide a list of additional materials that you can request.