Bad Days Happen (and a bit of shameless self promotion)

Cross posted from my blog: https://www.unionfoxtrot.com/?p=137

I’m a subject matter expert in emergency management and EMS with an emphasis on human centric solutions and interfacing with local government.

How’s that for sounding like a consultant?

Don’t let it scare you off. At the end of the day I’m a pretty simple guy…I try to keep solutions as uncomplicated as possible, put people first, and know my way around city hall.

So, what’s all that matter to you?

Well, bad days happen. More often than you might think. And it’s not the catastrophe that’ll sink you, it’s the little things (don’t get me wrong…they can…they’re just a lost less common). The “everyday” emergencies that we think we can just handle in the moment.   

A bad day is anything from a power outage to a tsunami…anything that might interrupt regular programming you might say. Fire, earthquake, violence, rumors, product defects, and something bad in the same neighborhood are just a few of the things that can ruin a day.

Knowing what you’re going to do ahead of time makes the difference between a bad day and your last day.

Unfortunately, most places emergency planning goes as far as evacuating the building and calling 911. Or the focus is entirely IT disaster recovery. Things tend to be procedure based. Which is great, but if you’re not planning and practicing how to manage the event you’re missing the key part.

What happens after you evacuate? What if there’s a problem but you really don’t need to evacuate? How do you share information and make decisions? Did you think about options ahead of time? You need a strategy…a contingency plan to manage any event beyond the obvious. The last thing you want to ask on a bad day is “and now what?” without having a plan to get from where you are to where you need to be in short order.

There’s a reason quarterbacks just don’t call plays from the field. Tactically critical, they’re in the middle of the action and don’t necessarily have the perspective of the coaching team or the manager.  There’s plan, a strategy on how to best engage the opponent. The folks on the sidelines focus on the plan and the game…not just the current play. It’s about knowing the larger strategy and what the plan is to meet the objectives. If needed the quarterback can make on the field adjustments, but it just that, an adjustment to a larger strategy everybody agreed too before the game. They don’t just show up and wing it if they expect to win.

You can’t either. You gotta have a plan. You can tweak it when Mr. Murphy arrives…and he will…but trust me when I say it’s a hell of a lot easier to adjust a known plan for the Murphy factor than trying to compensate when you’re trying to two-step your way out of a charlie foxtrot “live.”

We can help identify what your bad days look like and develop contingency plans to guide you through the worst of days. We’ll get way beyond stacks of freeze dried food and phone trees. We’ll develop scripts to help you hit the ground with both feet and start setting things straight. We’ll develop tools & processes that help you navigate the oh so wrong tweet or the roof collapse. Tools based on how you operate, what you have, and what you need…not what some formula says you need. One size does not fit all.

We’ll help you figure out contingency plans that fit you. That’s what we do.

We’re also happy to look at what you already have, develop exercises to practice your plans and do post event analysis to help you understand what worked and what didn’t. Resilience is constant, you can’t just write a plan and put it on a bookshelf. If you do, just about when you need it you’ll forget all about it or you’ll open it up and it’ll be obsolete.

Like exercise…belonging to a gym doesn’t do much good if you only go use the equipment once a year. You get out of it what you put into it.

What you invest in preparing for a bad day may very well save the rest of your days. Think of it like floss, a little effort and money now will save you a bunch of pain and money later. I’m pretty sure those dentist chairs are the most expensive recliners on the planet.

If you need to do some planning, would like a second look at your plans, need to practice your plans or want to do some analysis of a recent or past event give us a call. We’d be happy to help.