The Law of Preparedness

The more prepared you are for an unlikely but disastrous or significant event, the less likely it is that it will happen. Even if that event happens, it will be a non-event.

The corollary is the central theme of many movie plots.

The less prepared you are for an unlikely but disastrous event, the more likely it is that it will happen. If it happens it will also be more disastrous than originally envisaged.

-?????????? Mohan MVK

As I am authoring this article, people are figuring out how to bring back Sunita Willaims from space and trying to figure out how such an unlikely event occurred in the first place. I am sure someone was involved is assuming that this unlikely event will not occur and did a premature launch. In the latest movie under Paris, the Mayor decides a shark attack is an unlikely event with spectacular consequences. They thought this was less likely to happen, with more disastrous consequences than imagined.

I will explain where I observed these laws and why they work that way, but more importantly, how they affect business and even life’s decisions. After going through the explanations, it would appear this is common sense, and does not actually require a law, but I think this law summarizes the phenomenon well. It may also have some links to the Murphys law.

I first observed this when I used to sit down to watch TV. I was still for long, and there appeared what looked like a dozen mosquitoes around me. I was unprepared for this and became a big nuisance. Many would know that there is an electric bat, by which you can zap the mosquitoes very easily. Whenever I sat with the bat, there were no mosquitoes. Or even if one or two came, they were zapped in milliseconds. When I did not bring the bat, again there were dozens, or what looked like dozens. When I was prepared either the event did not occur, or it was a non-event.

Then I started observing this everywhere, starting from my early days in Presales of software. A few decades back, when I started, the most demanding thing in the software was to configure a workflow and demonstrate it. On the first presentation of my life, the customer said, “I don’t really have much time, just show me something simple, say for example workflow.” After a few falls, I took the bull by the horns and learnt the stuff and was confident enough to configure one on a live demo. Till the date no one asked for it. I even asked a customer, “Do you want me to show you how to configure a workflow?” “Nah,” he said. “I am sure you have it.” In one demonstration, workflow was part of a bigger plot, and that went like a breeze. So, the more prepared I was, the less likely it was asked, and even if asked, was a non-event.

Have you observed that during a cyclone warning, the government acts promptly and evacuates people, and either the cyclone does not land, or is mild but a few days later, when people don’t expect a cyclone there is one which causes severe damage? Or the school declares a holiday anticipating rain and there is no rain, or little rain. On the other hand, when the children are at school, heavy rain troubles them. I read somewhere that droughts used to be very severe some 50 years back. Now with all the advances in irrigation, building of dams, storage of food grains and water, droughts don’t really affect us that much.

How many of us have had the experience of never being caught by a traffic police officer, but when your insurance or your driver’s license expired, they appeared in every corner? When I had them, I volunteered to show the papers, he just waved me on.

I am sure you can think of many more examples in your own experience.

Are these purely probabilistic events, or is there something else happening here?

Maybe the mosquitoes are aware of the sound of the bat and keep away? Did customers see the confidence in my face when workflow was mentioned and assumed, it was there? Do the police officers figure out whether I indeed have the papers or not by just a glance?

How does all this affect governance and public safety?

All the events quoted above have a human element to it. The more prepared we are means we have spent sufficient thought and deployed resources. We have thought through all the possible scenarios, however unlikely, educated and sensitized all the people involved, have standard procedures in case an event occurred. Since there was so much thought in either preventing it, designing early warning signals, or taking corrective action, the event itself becomes less likely to occur, or even if it occurs, the corrective action and standard operating procedures make it a non-event.

This can be seen very easily in fire hazard planning. All buildings where adequate thought has been given for this aspect, fire rarely occurs. There are fire drills every 6 months, Fire alarms and sprinkler systems, fire extinguishers at every floor, water runners, Fire, and ambulance pathways. If you take the total number of buildings, the occurrence is indeed rare. In my entire career, there was once a fire in an uninterrupted power supply room but was quickly contained. One person got acid burns because he attempted to bypass the system.

If you take the security system, in airports or in buildings, compared to the sheer volume, there occurrence of a person carrying any dangerous equipment is low. That is because there is equipment, X Ray machines, metal detectors, dog sniffers. However occasionally we hear someone does get caught, but what gets rechecked are some suspicious looking harmless items. The fact that you have an exceptionally good system is a deterrent for anyone to attempt to get past it. The more prepared you are, the less likely for the event to occur.

How does all this affect business decisions?

The entire TQM and six sigma are based on this. We analyze the process and environment so much that we have prevented all unlikely events, and if they occur, we do have procedures to deal with it. So, either they don’t occur, or are easily dealt with.

Take Insurance as another example. Property and automobile insurance prevents you from doing certain things or requires you to follow some safeguards. The very fact that we think twice before doing anything that will invalidate the insurance itself prevents a disaster. In health Insurance, nowadays, the Insurer is taking keen interest in paying for periodic checkups. The more prepared and aware you are of health problems, the better would be your lifestyle in the first place. Even if anything is detected early, it is most likely that it would be easily cured or contained.

Let us take an example of a turbine in a power station. Or a cement rotary kiln. These should never be stopped, else the thermal stresses induced by stopping and restarting reduces its life. Hence all systems around it are designed for continuous running, making it further unlikely that it will stop.

Inventory planning and quality check is another area. Planning well to prevent a stock out itself prevents a stock out. The vendors who know that they cannot get past quality inspector take care of it themselves not to send defective products. The more alert we are in detecting a potential stock out, the less the chances of it occurring. If it indeed occurs, it would be something where alternate arrangements have been made.

This law has far reaching consequences in every aspect. In software design and production. The less likely you thought an error condition would occur, that is exactly what turns up. Maybe because the other likely ones have been taken care of. In project management, in the risk plan you leave out something as an unlikely key risk, that is what would occur. We saw examples in disaster management. In wealth management, if we did not plan for a black swan, something or the other will make you realize you should have.

So, what does all this mean? How should we conduct our personal and corporate life? Prepare for the worst. Then forget about it. It will not occur, even if it does, it will not matter.

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