Every January, I make the same quiet promises to myself:
This is the year I will stop being so hard on myself.
This is the year I will spend less time on my phone.
This is the year I will not let work bleed into every corner of my life.
This is the year I will better control my spending.
And every year, I mean it.
By February, life usually reminds me who is actually in charge. It is not that I do not care. It is that wanting change and building the structures that sustain it are very different things. I do not fail my resolutions because I do not understand them. I fail them because my systems stay exactly the same.
Over the years, I have started to notice how closely that mirrors what we do in emergency management.
Because every January, we make the same promises there too.
This is the year we finally fix interoperability.
This is the year mitigation moves to the front of the line.
This is the year behavioral health becomes fully integrated into response and recovery.
This is the year we solve staffing.
This is the year we stop relying on heroics and start building durability.
We mean every one of them.
And we have been making these exact same resolutions for decades. Not because emergency management lacks insight. Not because we are indifferent to the work. But because meaning something, even deeply and passionately, is not the same as building the systems required to sustain it. Intentions alone do not change institutions, especially reactive ones.
Emergency management lives in a permanent state of urgency. The next incident always arrives before the last lesson has fully settled. Funding follows headlines, not warning signs. Leadership turns over, priorities reset, and institutional memory fades. When we do our jobs well, nothing dramatic happens, and invisible success is difficult to defend in a budget meeting.
So we make the same promises again.
In many ways, our entire profession risks becoming a giant Charlie Brown moment, lining up every year with full hope that this time things will work out, only to feel it pulled away by Lucy at the last second.
The Comforting Myth of Willpower
At some point, it becomes tempting to assume the problem is willpower. That if we just cared more, pushed harder, stayed later, sacrificed one more night of sleep, this would finally be the year it all changes.
But that assumption quietly absolves the system.
The truth is harder and kinder at the same time. We are not failing because we lack commitment. We are failing because we keep framing structural problems as personal promises.
Emergency management is not unique in this. Every January, millions of people swear this will be the year they finally go to the gym, eat better, sleep more, put the phone down, be more present. And by February, most of those intentions have quietly dissolved, not because people are lazy, but because the shape of their lives did not change with the calendar.
We do not rise to the level of our aspirations. We default to the level of our systems. That is true for individuals. It is even truer for institutions. Which means the most honest question is not why do we keep failing our resolutions. It is why do we keep making resolutions that require exceptional effort to maintain.
Hope Built on Heroics Is Not a Strategy
If fixing interoperability requires herculean coordination, unpaid overtime, and perfect alignment across competing agencies, it will not last. If prioritizing mitigation requires each new director to be a personal crusader, it will fade the moment leadership changes. If protecting responder mental health depends on individual supervisors being unusually empathetic rather than on institutional design, it will always be fragile.
Hope built on heroics is not a strategy.
So what would it look like if we treated emergency management resolutions the way we treat actual preparedness, less as declarations of intent and more as habits embedded into daily operations.
Shrink the Promise Until It Is Hard to Fail
It would start with shrinking the promise until it becomes difficult to fail.
Fix interoperability is inspiring. It is also overwhelming and vague. But run one cross agency communications drill every quarter with no observers and no PowerPoint is measurable. It lives on a calendar. It produces friction, learning, and muscle memory. And once it exists, it is easier to repeat than to abandon.
Prioritize mitigation is a value statement. Fund one mitigation project before approving the next response focused capital purchase is a structural shift.
This is not a call to lower ambition. It is a call to lower the failure rate. Durable change usually begins at a scale small enough to survive real life. Better to accomplish something small yet important than to fail in pursuit of something large but unsustainable.
Attach Resolutions to Time, Not to Hope
Most institutional promises fail not from malice, but from drift. January intentions dissolve into March urgencies, and by August no one quite remembers what was supposed to be different this year. A resolution without a date is just a wish with better branding.
If a goal matters, it belongs on an actual calendar, ideally the organization’s strategic calendar.
- A scheduled follow up to anafter actionreport with named owners
- A budget cycle commitment instead of a post disaster aspiration
- A public annual briefing on mitigation progress, not just response statistics
Time does what motivation cannot. It returns, again and again, regardless of how we feel. And calendars do what ideas cannot. They hold us accountable.
Stop Designing Systems That Require Chronic Sacrifice
If keeping a resolution requires:
• Routine unpaid overtime
• Persistent understaffing
• Emotional exhaustion treated as normal
• Burned out people carrying institutional gaps
…it is not a resolution. It is borrowed time.
Sustainable change does not come from asking exhausted professionals to keep giving more. It comes from making doable, meaningful, measurable, and visible actions through the path of least resistance.
That is not a cultural issue. It is a design issue.
Learn to Measure What Does Not Happen
Emergency management struggles with success because our best outcomes are quiet, evacuations that never become rescues, power outages that do not last days, shelters that remain half empty because neighborhoods remained intact. Prevention feels hypothetical in a world that rewards visible response.
But absence is not nothing. Absence is the evidence of what worked. If we only measure what breaks, we will always build for repair instead of for endurance.
Resolutions That Can Survive the Year
None of this guarantees that next year will be different. Disasters will still disrupt plans. Funding will still surge and recede. Politics will still intervene. Burnout will still test our capacity.
But this approach does something important. It moves hope out of the realm of personality and into the realm of practice. It moves the ball forward, even if only by inches.
We will still make the same big resolutions next January. That is human. That is hopeful. It is also necessary. Large promises remind us of who we are trying to become.
But if we genuinely want this year to be different, we have to stop relying on intention alone. We have to build mechanisms, maybe even boring, durable, unglamorous structures, that carry progress forward even when attention drifts and energy fades.
If we set the bar too high, we risk missing the ball altogether, like Charlie Brown when Lucy always pulls it away at the last second.
Conclusion
I do not write this as someone who has cracked the code on resolutions. I have not. I still overcommit. I still get pulled into urgency. I still believe, more often than I would like to admit, that I can fix structural problems with personal effort if I just try hard enough.
But I am learning to be more honest about what actually helps.
Small systems beat big intentions. Calendars beat motivation. Design beats willpower.
So this year, my personal resolution looks a lot like the professional one I am advocating for here, not a grand reinvention, but a few repeatable choices I am far less likely to abandon when the year gets loud and complicated, as it always does.
This is the year I will stop being so hard on myself.
This year I have scheduled therapy every other Thursday at 5:00 pm.
This is the year I will spend less time on my phone.
This year my best friend and I scheduled one Saturday a month to be phone free.
This is the year I will not let work bleed into every corner of my life.
This year we have scheduled a Mission Trip to Columbia and a Tennessee vacation.
This is the year I will better control my spending.
This year we only go to Starbucks on Sundays and review all purchases monthly.
We may make the same big promises again next January. There is nothing wrong with that. Hope is not the problem. The solution is changing the approach to smaller, meaningful, measurable, and visible actions that have structure and accountability. And, on our calendars.
It is the least we can do for ourselves, our organizations, and of course, Charlie Brown.
Dan Stoneking is the Owner and Principal of Stoneking Strategic Communications, the Author of Cultivate Your Garden: Crisis Communications from 30,000 Feet to Three Feet, the Founder and Vice President of the Emergency Management External Affairs Association, and an Adjunct Professor in the Communications Department at West Chester University