What if one of the most important skills in disaster management is knowing when not to be the loudest voice in the room?

In this solo episode of But We Had A Plan, Jess digs into localisation, co-creation, and the uncomfortable question beneath both: Who actually gets to decide?

Drawing on lessons from humanitarian response and disaster management, Jess explores why the people closest to risk are often also closest to the solutions, and why communities are still too often consulted only after programmes, priorities and definitions of success have already been decided.

From ants predicting drought to funding flows, local leadership, indigenous knowledge and community-led resilience, the episode asks what meaningful localisation really requires of humanitarian and international actors.

It also looks at why localisation remains difficult nearly a decade after the Grand Bargain, including questions of funding, risk, short project cycles, whose expertise we value, and whether organisations are genuinely willing to share power.

Because co-creation is not asking communities to validate a solution we already designed, and localisation is not giving people more responsibility while keeping the money, authority and decisions somewhere else.

Sometimes building better resilience starts with something much simpler: Just shut up…and listen.

What if the real measure of good disaster management isn’t how well we respond to catastrophe, but how much catastrophe we prevent in the first place?

In this episode of But We Had A Plan, Jess sits down with Drew from Logista Response for a wide-ranging conversation about disaster logistics, preparedness, prevention and what it really means to make bad days smaller.

A major focus of the discussion is the logistics behind response: getting the right people, resources and information to the right place at the right time. Jess and Drew unpack why even well-resourced systems can struggle when responders do not know what is available, where it is, how quickly it is being used, or which site needs it most. They also explore what happens when disaster teams are expected to adapt tools and processes that were never designed for the complexity of emergency operations.

They also tackle one of disaster management’s most persistent myths: the idea of the “natural disaster”. Hazards may be natural, but the scale of the disaster is shaped by what we build, what we protect, what we invest in, and the trade-offs we are willing to make before the hazard arrives.

Because sometimes the best disaster response is not the fastest one, but rather the one that means the bad day never becomes quite as bad as it could have been.

A quick production note: Jess’s microphone decided to have a few technical opinions of its own during this recording. You may notice a little unevenness in places, but the conversation was far too good not to share, so we hope you’ll stick with us.

Technology can make us faster, more connected, and better informed, but can it actually improve resilience?

In this episode of But We Had A Plan, Jess sits down with Dimitri Syrris, founder of Baotree, to talk about why organisations still rely on paper forms and spreadsheets, what happens when communities can generate and own their own risk data, and the gap between having information and using it well.

Jess and Dimitri unpack real-world examples from conservation, to tourism, to community risk reduction projects. They explore why resistance to change is often more human than technical, what good data can reveal, and where AI can genuinely strengthen our approaches without removing the people, judgement, and stories that matter most.

Because yes, there probably is an app for it, but the better question is: What happens when humans actually use data well?