"[It's about] looking at issues as they come up start thinking about resolutions and strategies."
As the Fire Service were the "experts in fighting fires", Mr Cameron said they were left to do their job, as council and Civil Defence provided support - including logistics, operations, and bringing a police liaison in to co-ordinate traffic, help evacuations, and deter rubber-neckers.
National Rural Fire Authority incident controller John Sutton said the response had been a "big co-operative operation, there's a huge amount of co-ordination required".
Behind the numerous fire crews on the ground was another large group of people - the operations team focused on combating the incident, while those in planning worked to "anticipate the fire environment", and what crews could face.
"That allows the operations component just to get on with fighting what's in front of them but when they come to tomorrow they've got the resources there to go on," Mr Sutton said.
Backing up the operations is the logistics unit whose focus is on having enough resources - from fuel for pumps, hose for fire crews, to getting food and water to crews on the ground.
Despite all the planning resource, when the Waimarama fire broke out on Monday Mr Sutton said "we were pretty stressed out".
As their resources were at Colin White Rd fire, when they were shifted to the Waimarama fire "we didn't have any situational awareness".
"We didn't have people on site, we didn't know the shape of it, we didn't know where it was to start with. It was incredibly dynamic at that time," he said. "We were just chasing that fire trying to get resources on to it to slow it down.
"There wasn't much planning going on there. We were just reacting and trying to do the best we could."
Monday saw the fire claim one house, threaten other properties, with more fires breaking out overnight.
"But on Tuesday that's when our whole planning team managed to get us ahead of the game," Mr Sutton said. "Once we were able to get into it and design some tactics and work out where the pressure points were going to be and optimise our placement of resources ... it paid off."
Keeping the public aware was the job of a communications team involving staff from Hastings District and the Hawke's Bay Regional councils.
Hastings District Council marketing and communications manager Jane Mackay said they worked to keep the public informed, while also providing information to those in the vicinity of the fire.
Included in the multi-agency response - alongside local fire services, emergency services, and Civil Defence - were a number of volunteers.
"Events like these are amazing, [with] the goodwill from the public, continually offering help and support for what we were doing is great so it was a community effort," Mr Sutton said.