Under Siege: Your Country needs you - Hostage Negotiators Wanted

As I listened to the Andrew Marr show I heard him ask the question that every Hostage Negotiator at any siege always gets asked:

“Everyone is desperate to know how long is this going to take?”

In siege terms, without proper planning and intelligence, action taken in haste is highly likely to lead to sub-optimal outcomes. Plus, there is always the dynamic of little being known about the ‘hostage taker.’

The answer lays in the strategy that Hostage Negotiators follow to builds better outcomes:

‘Buy time, Gain intelligence’

This is the strategy that will provide vital time and information to enable better decisions and generate better outcomes.

The next few weeks are the most important moments of this siege where we all need to become Hostage Negotiators, playing our part to:

Buy time:

• Slow down the spread of Covid-19 and support the NHS - 'never have so many, owed so much, to so few’
• Enable more ventilators and medical equipment to be made and get to where they are needed
• Give scientists the space to work on Covid-19
• To collect more ‘intelligence’ on the virus

Gain intelligence:

• Better understand Covid-19
• Enable scientists to find a cure
• Discover what else can we do to defeat Covid-19
• To learn how to protect and preventive this in the future

So how long?

That depends on us! Your role is to become an honorary ‘Hostage Negotiator’ and ‘Buy Time, Gain Intelligence’ – follow the government advice and keeping yourself resilient.

“Welcome to the Party” as one of the most formidable commanders I served under use to say.