the parallel universe

 “A sudden crash…of the totally unexpected sea upon the ship produces a moment of crisis, a flash-point, one of those brief instants in time when the primal isolation and helplessness of the human condition are revealed.” —Edgar Allan Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” 1833

earthquake scenario part 1 | middle of the night | your bedroom

An angry jolt rocks you out of a sound sleep. You open your eyes; it’s pitch black and absolutely quiet and still in your bedroom. Suddenly your mattress rises and begins to roll in waves. The maniac who jolted you awake is back, and now he’s under your bed, kicking and shoving up as hard and angrily as he can. Noise fills your ears, like thunder, popcorn popping, and fireworks all at the same time. There is a heavy grinding noise too, like brick buildings rubbing together. After a while, the rolling stops and you fall out of bed. The bedroom is shaking now, violently, back and forth, back and forth; you hear lamps and pictures falling off shelves and breaking.

disasters are different

You fell asleep in one world and are waking up in another.

People who have experienced the first minutes of a major disaster report a strange feeling, like a plunge into chaos. Others feel a sense of unreality, like being in a movie or looking down at themselves from above.

That’s because everything is different. In this earthquake scenario, you are cast out of your orderly and familiar reality into a new one that is anything but. This new reality is not just a variation on the theme of everyday life. It is not just some fast-moving time—one end of the spectrum, with daily life being the other. The disaster is fundamentally different, alien, and abhorrent….

It is a parallel universe.

One day you will find yourself in that parallel universe. The good news is that you don’t have to be a miracle worker to survive.

earthquake scenario part 2 | middle of the night | your bedroom 

You manage to stumble into the living room and scramble under your grandmother’s sturdy old coffee table. You press your hand up against its bottom, as if to protect your head. You hope it will hold up to the pressure of two stories falling on it. If you were buried under tons of debris, would you ever get rescued?

You lie there in the noise and the shaking for what seems like an eternity. Ten seconds go by, then twenty, then thirty. The longest thirty seconds of your life. You begin to think that this is the end for you. And then, finally, it stops.

doing something is always better than doing nothing

You will be surprised at how quickly your elation at having survived the earthquake begins to fade. Because it will be at that point that the hard realities of a post-earthquake world will begin to filter in.

It’s the middle of the night. When you went to bed, your plan was to sleep for a few hours and then get up and go to work. Of course, all of that is gone now—evaporated, out the window.

You were comfortable in that old reality. You had things pretty much figured out. You are not comfortable in this parallel universe, and you’d really like to get back to the other one. But before you can, you’re going to have to figure this new reality out.

In this, your moment of truth, you look around and all you see is bad things. The old reality was our modern society, made possible through the benefit of the highly developed human brain. Humans are exceptional because we use that highly developed brain—in combination with our senses—to think and reason, to get organized and solve problems, to build things. Thinking is the key to nearly everything in the old reality. It is also the key to working your way out of this new reality and getting back to that other one.

Your thinking machine has started to shut down, just when you need it the most. The crisis has activated the most ancient and primitive part of your brain. The amygdala, commonly referred to as the lizard brain, is where your primal instinct to fight, take flight, or freeze resides.

In the old days, when your ancestors were lizards, their survival instinct would suppress all other thinking in times like this to focus on fighting or fleeing. This is good when your best option is to run away but bad for nearly everything else.

It’s not easy to figure out your next steps when the amygdala is in control, because it destroys your higher-level thinking in favor of panic. It releases a cocktail of hormones, such as dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol. As the hormone cocktail surges through your body, your muscles tense and you freeze.

Your brain has a very limited capacity for processing new information on a good day. Thinking requires you to hold on to new information while you try to decide about it. But in this disaster scenario, your working memory is busy trying to process all the information that this new reality is throwing at your senses.

Meanwhile, the hormone cocktail is working to shut down your prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for higher-level thinking. So just when you need your wits the most, they abandon you. That is why you will begin to behave strangely.

With your brain shutting down, you will start to rely more on your feelings than on the reality that is before your eyes. You will ignore stressful thoughts and information and reassure yourself by explaining away the danger. You will fall back into your old routines, trying to solve problems in familiar ways, sometimes again and again, regardless of the results. You might just act as though nothing is happening.

But this would not be a good move and is likely to result in suboptimal outcomes. Because in the parallel universe, doing something is always better than doing nothing.

What should you do?

In this scenario, thousands, even millions, of other people are impacted in the same way that you are. Like you, their feelings of comfort and sense of order have been destroyed. Like you, they have so many questions to which nobody has any answers. Fear seeps in to replace the destroyed rhythm of daily life. They get a strange sensation that feels like the fabric of society unraveling. Many will do what they always do when faced with big decisions: they will freeze. They will hunker down and try to distract themselves until help comes along and someone tells them what to do, trapped in a parallel universe of suboptimal outcomes.

take a tour of the parallel universe

Unlike our ordered and (sometimes) rational world, in the parallel universe, chaos and confusion reign. The normal rules of logic, even basic ones like cause and effect, don’t apply. It is a strange place, so strange that it is difficult to describe. Better to go there and see for yourself.

Because real-world disasters can be messy, we generally do this through simulation. We use our minds to imagine, in as much fine-grained, colorful detail as possible, a disaster scene (or scenario). Let’s do that now. We will start with a thought experiment. Think about yourself for a second. What does your calendar look like for the next month, the four weeks starting from today?

Forget about work. Think instead about all the nonwork activities that you would typically do during your free time. Aside from staring at your smart phone, these activities could include things like birthday parties, trips to the beach, reading David Baldacci thrillers, binge-watching Peaky Blinders, or taking your partner to lunch at that nice restaurant with the outdoor tables on the sidewalk.

Write all those things down.

Now imagine that it’s a beautiful fall day and you’re thinking about meeting a friend for a drink after work. Just as you hop into your car to go there, your cellphone rings. And, of course, you see that it’s work calling.

Okay, next pick up that list of yours, all of the fun, meaningful, nonwork stuff you had planned for the next month. Tear it into bits, crumple it, whatever, and throw it in the trash.

You won’t be needing it.

Because you are going on a trip. And you are leaving now; leaving your ordered and rational world and passing through a wormhole into the parallel universe that is the disaster—to face the crisis….

active-shooter scenario part 1 | 4 p.m. | friday, october 14 | downtown

You are driving away from that client meeting that you dreaded so much. It went pretty well; you managed to stay on everybody’s good side for a change and your mood is starting to improve. With a long workweek behind and a three-day weekend ahead, good thoughts start to creep into your head. You feel your shoulders relax a bit. It’s a beautiful day, clear and crisp, the sun creeping down toward the horizon, with dusk an hour or so away.

A friend mentioned meeting for a drink at that new tavern next door to the Starbucks on Woodmere, so you start to head over…

...and then your cellphone rings. 

You see that it’s your assistant calling. You pick up but there is so much background noise you can hardly hear her. You hear enough to know something is wrong. Very wrong.

She is distraught. “Oh my god, Megan, where are you?”

“What happened, Cara?”

“That guy Bob, Bob Norix I think, the guy you fired last year…he came in with a gun and shot everybody…he got in through the back door and just started shooting….When I heard it, I ran out the front door and down the street…and then the police came, and they killed him….He shot Emily and Alex…they’re dead, I think they’re dead….Clay and Ryan are shot, too, and I don’t know how they are…”

You quit a high-paying job in Silicon Valley seven years ago to strike out on your own. With thirty-plus staffers and three offices around the city, your boutique tech firm is thriving. You had no idea when you started that you were on the hook for something like this.

You feel the panic start to build; right now, you know you can’t let it overtake you. This company is your baby. You own it, and you have no choice but to jump into the fray with both feet.

Somebody held open a locked rear door to let a gunman into your workplace. Four employees are killed; four are severely injured. The shooter, a disgruntled former employee, is dead.

You try to make phone calls in your car on the way back to the office but come to your senses after nearly running a red light. You focus instead on gathering your thoughts. “What,” you start to think, “are the issues I need to deal with right now? Four of my staff are dead, at least four more are critically injured, the office is damaged, staff are still there, and there may even be clients there. On top of that, the police will want to talk to me. I have to talk to my lawyer, my investors, my insurance agent, and my landlord.”

So that’s a dozen issues, some big, some medium size, some huge. Your firm is a tech project management firm, so you try to project manage the situation. The first step is to figure out which of these issues can wait. Nothing is leaping to mind.

An image of a smiling Emily and Alex interrupts your thoughts. They are squinting into your cellphone camera at the beach. You were with them there, just this past summer. They were more than employees; they were good friends. And now they are gone. Sadness washes over you, from the top of your head all the way down to the tips of your toes.

Police cars and fire trucks are blocking the street when you finally arrive. You can’t even get near the building, so you park two blocks away and run into the crowd. The dead and injured are gone, and you try to focus on your staff. The intensity escalates, and you spend the next few hours in a blur, answering questions, hugging crying employees, talking, talking, and talking some more.

You are hijacked by the police and keep getting pulled away to talk to the detectives, often for long stretches of time. The people you most need to talk to are your key employees. They experienced the trauma of the event and of losing their friends and coworkers.

Your assistant seems to have the best handle on the situation and is connected to most of the people who are there, all of whom want to talk to you. Right now. She is looking at you while half a dozen people in a line are looking at her.

the “spectrous fiend”[i] that is the crisis

It could be anything—widespread and all-encompassing, like a natural disaster, or focused and devastating, like an active shooter. Whatever kind or variety of crisis you find in the parallel universe, it’s useful to understand what the crisis is not.

The crisis is not an incident. It is not a concept, not inanimate. It is not random, and it is not benign. It is a being, inhuman and flawed, with thoughts and intentions. None of those thoughts are good, and all of those intentions are bad.

The crisis is a dragon that must be slayed—because it wants to destroy you. It puts you into its crosshairs the instant you enter the parallel universe. It knows that when you get there, you will need to think,[ii] so it starts with sabotage.

It sends an electric charge through your body, triggering your lizard brain and the hormone cocktail that shuts down your prefrontal cortex. As your higher-level thinking slows, the crisis floods your brain with agonizing thoughts and painful emotions. It takes over the voice in your head: “You can’t handle this,” the crisis says. “No way can you figure this one out.” Or, “Life as you know it is over and it’s never coming back.”[iii]

Leonard Marcus and Barry Dorn at Harvard call this amygdala-controlled state the “emotional basement.”[iv]

As you stumble around in your dark and musty emotional basement, you are overcome with a jumble of negative emotions: grief, fear, anger, regret, hate.…You grieve for so many things, starting with lost loved ones or friends and extending all the way to lost birthday parties and trips to the beach.

You fear the ordeal. You know you will be hit with one painful problem after another. Some you will be able to solve, but not all—at least not immediately. These will burn white hot in your lap until they are resolved.

You fear the work, because you know that you won’t be working like you worked yesterday or had planned to work tomorrow. You will be working twice as hard, possibly harder than you have ever worked in your life (including in law school).

You feel anger and regret for things you did or didn’t do that supposedly put you into this situation (for instance, “I should have called the police about Bob Norix” or, “I should have done more to secure that back door”).

You hate your life. You hate the world and everything in it.

This is your moment of truth.

This is the fateful moment when you must decide to engage or to disengage. Do you step down and fade into the background? Or do you step up?

Even though the crisis has transformed your brain into mush—has turned your orderly and intelligent thoughts into white noise—you know there is no turning back, no running away from this. You steel yourself, set your jaw, and take that first step; in the desperate hope that step one will eventually lead to step two and maybe even to steps three, four, and five.

In the absence of complete information, in the presence of dozens of unanswered questions, in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, in the presence of danger and risk, you turn and face the dragon.

murphy’s addendum

In the run up to that phone call in the car, in the weeks and months before that fateful Friday afternoon, you were confident. You really didn’t give it much thought, but had you been asked, you would have agreed that someday a crisis would come and that you would have to face it. You were pretty sure that you were up to the challenge. These things happen in this life, you figured, and you had been in tough spots before. You were confident that with a little luck and a lot of hard work, you would get through it.

Once you were inside the parallel universe, that confidence was shattered—when those things that always worked for you stopped working and the people who were always there for you were gone.

But the crisis did not stop there. It took aim at your most important asset. It messed with your time. It slowed things down and then, in those first moments, brought things almost to a standstill. Then, with a haughty laugh, it cranked the dial and suddenly time began to race: days became hours; hours became seconds.

And all the while it conspired against you, contradicting your every attempt to figure it out. Just when you are thinking A, the crisis throws out Z.[v].

you can’t get big enough fast enough

The crisis is deliberate and methodical. It bides its time, gathering strength and power, and building its unique chaotic mix. And, at just the right moment, it unleashes its most fearsome weapon, an avalanche of impacts we call surge. Everything happens at once—everything, that is, except what we want to happen.

?active-shooter scenario part 2 | 6:24 p.m. | friday, october 14 | main office

And then the families arrive…

They are the spouses and mothers and siblings of the vibrant human beings who have been suddenly ripped from their lives. They are overcome with grief.

And they have needs. Mothers collapse on the floor, caring about nothing. They know it is true, but their minds play cruel tricks: “It’s a mistake,” says the voice in their heads. “She is okay. You will get her back.” This is the worst sort of agony one can experience in this life. Many will not eat or sleep. They will need everything—hotel rooms, transportation, clean clothes. They must get constant attention and emotional support. Most of all, they want information.

Grief, a great beast, is pressing down on them and you and everyone around you. You have to figure out how to contain it. You need a quiet space to engage the families and address their unquenchable thirst for answers: “Where is my loved one now? What happened and how did they die? What were their final moments like? Who can I blame?” Only a continuous stream of information will help them, and no detail is too small. You are finding out the hard way how tough it is to support a grieving family. And this is just one of a dozen issues sitting in your lap.

You spend the next several hours at the center of a maelstrom that shows no sign of abating. You got that call in the car at four o’clock; you just looked at your watch and its 11:49. Eight hours passed by in a New York minute.

You still don’t know what you are going to do with your office. Are you going to clean up and just open as normal? How are you going to talk to your staff? When are you going to do this? What are you going to tell them? You need a plan.

“I’m not leaving,” you think to yourself. “I can get through this.” You decide that you will work through the night. When the sun comes up, you’re going to feel like a vampire. You’ll be exhausted. The maelstrom will be there still.

How did you ever expect that you could get through something like this? You have a dozen big problems and one assistant to help you. Even if you had a dozen people to help you, it wouldn’t be enough—because you don’t need a dozen people; you need a dozen teams, some big, some medium size, some huge….

extreme multitasking

Although there can be no denying its tragic impacts, this devastating scenario falls on the low side of the disaster magnitude scale. You were the boss in that scenario. Think about how overwhelmed you would be dealing with the issues brought by that crisis.

Now think about what it might be like to be a boss for a more widespread and all-encompassing disaster—like the mayor of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, for instance? Through the long, hot days of late August, the crisis had been biding its time, waiting patiently to hit New Orleans with a torrent of chaos. What do you think that surge in human needs looked like on the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005?[vi] How many issues did the crisis bring on that day—twenty? Two hundred? Twelve hundred? How overwhelmed do you think you would be dealing with all of them?

Unfortunately for the affected community, in those early hours, the response community[vii] was essentially flat-footed.

Its ability to to meet the need across the entire affected area—to put response teams into the field, pump out the water, get the power back, and clear the streets—was days, in some cases weeks, away.

This unhappy condition is little changed today. We call it the “speed to scale” challenge, and it remains government’s biggest problem. For people in the disaster business, such as myself, it means failure and humiliation. For the affected community—the seniors, individuals with disabilities, children, and families—it means suffering on a grand scale.

The crisis understands this. Its surge is a chaotic mix specifically designed to disrupt critical infrastructure—power, water, food, medicine, sanitation, housing, you name it—in unique and unprecedented ways.

To counter this, it’s not enough for us to do a lot of things at the same time. Human needs cannot wait, so we have to be able to do everything all at once.[viii]

Because the crisis surges, we must surge too. We need to get big enough fast enough to manage a tsunami of issues in its early hours.

Let’s be clear about something: Surging doesn’t mean doubling down on Starbucks so that everybody can work harder and faster. It doesn’t mean calling in your crisis team and rolling up your sleeves, so that with a little luck you will get through it. Surging means getting fifteen times more people on your team than you have now. It means getting fifteen times more resources than you currently have on hand. It means turning your crisis team into fifteen crisis teams, each with a different mission, focused on a different human need.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Excerpted from Moment of Truth: The Nature of Catastrophes and How to Prepare for Them

[i] Irene Langridge, William Blake: A Study of His Life and Art Work. Hardpress Publishing, 2012: “O glory! O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours.”

[ii] In the parallel universe, the most important tool in your toolbox is your mind.

[iii] When the truth is just the opposite, “you can handle it. You can figure it out. Life as you know it is not over. Everything is going to be all right.”

[iv] Leonard J. Marcus, Ph.D.; Isaac Ashkenazi, M.D.; Barry Dorn, M.D.; Joseph Henderson, M.A.; and Eric J. McNulty, Meta-Leadership: A Primer, 2010

[v] It turns out that one of your employees who was killed was a dog lover who lived alone. A colleague went to Alex’s house to check on him and his dogs and found the front door wide open and the three Labradors gone. News of this triggers a fresh wave of panic among your staff.

[vi] The day Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

[vii] This excludes first responder services such as firefighting, law enforcement, search and rescue, and emergency medical services who are in the field 24/7.

[viii] We call this extreme multitasking.

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