Living in Florida, I am used to the spring and summertime ritual of hurricane preparedness. Long before I became an expert in the field of disaster planning, preparation, education, response and recovery, I was expert in my own family’s hurricane preparation.
All Floridians know the drill: Plywood for your windows, three days of food per person, and fill your bathtub with water. Being an overachiever all of my life, I of course have a pantry full of food (okay, so I shop at Costco), I share a commercial generator with my mother who lives next door, and I even have a 40,000-gallon bathtub. In Florida, we call it a swimming pool.
My 40,000-gallon bathtub is a beautiful thing. It is a gathering place for the family, our own little oasis in the southern heat. The water is chlorinated so it stores well, and when we have to use it as our emergency water reserve we have a small filtration and de-chlorination device that keeps the water safe to drink.
But all of this physical preparation is just one small aspect of resilience, and resilience is how we all get through life’s little and not-so-little disasters.
Before we can really discuss resilience, we have to understand a few simple definitions. First what is a disaster? A disaster is when your needs exceed your resources. During the holiday shopping season we all run into our own little mini-disasters. It is not uncommon, like Whimpy, for our wants to exceed our wallets.
Resilience is the opposite of a disaster. Resilience is when your resources exceed your needs. When we are out shopping for the holidays and the cash is low, we all have the same call of resilience, “Charge it!”
But even this leaves the majority of resilience unaccounted for. Resilience is far more than physical or even financial resource management. Resilience begs the question, “How big is the bathtub, and how do you build a 40,000-gallon bathtub in your soul?”
There are seven areas of human functioning:
- Physical
- Emotional
- Intellectual
- Interpersonal
- Societal
- Tactical
- Spiritual
Each of these areas of human functioning have a corresponding form of resilience—a canteen that we fill in the time between disasters and that we draw from during the response to a disaster.
It is through the maintenance and enhancement of resilience, both for ourselves as individuals as well as for the processes by which we provide for the most critical needs of our businesses and families, that we ensure that with whom we share our lives and careers thrive with us despite the adversity that faces us.
In the Disaster Field Office we long ago learned that mastering adversity depends on following three simple rules and applying five critical lessons.
- Disaster Field Office Rule #1: Know the language!
In the Disaster Field Office we speak a language that you will learn in the coming chapters, but three concepts that are common to all disasters are encapsulated in the very definitions of “Disaster,” Catastrophe,” and “Resilience.”- Disaster is when needs are greater than resources, or mathematically:
Disaster = Needs > Resources - Catastrophe is when needs exceed the ability to respond, or mathematically:
Catastrophe = Needs > Ability to Respond - Resilience is when resources are greater than need, or mathematically:
Resilience = Resources > Needs (it is the opposite of a disaster)
- Disaster is when needs are greater than resources, or mathematically:
- Disaster Field Office Rule #2: Know your needs and your resources!
In the Disaster Field Office, knowing needs and resources allows you to triage your needs and critical processes such that your available resources are used to support the most important needs, thus ensuring your resilience and staving off disaster.
- Disaster Field Office Rule #3: Learn the lessons and then apply them!
In the Disaster Field Office we discovered long ago that at any event there are:- Lessons that occur but are unobserved
- Lessons that occur and are observed, but are not learned
- Lessons that occur, are observed and learned, but not applied
- Lessons that occur, are observed, learned and applied
Only those lessons that are observed, learned and applied enable you to survive anything, anywhere, every time. The five critical lessons from the disaster field office are:
- Lesson #1: Completely Customized Customer Service
In the Disaster Field Office, we long ago learned that “all disasters are local,” in other words the response to a disaster must be customized for a disaster and the disaster survivors. In short, “One Size Fits None.”
- Lesson #2: Orchestrating Overwhelming Opportunity
In the Disaster Field Office, big numbers mean big opportunity and big responsibility. The ability to orchestrate these needs is the hallmark of the great leader.
- Lesson #3: Split Second Solutions
In the Disaster Field Office, split second decisions are made using methods born of experience and forged in the life and death of disaster response. Brought together here, these methods form Split Second Solutions—the three skills that make split second decisions possible:- Pattern Recognition
- Breaking Your Framing Bias
- Heuristic Thinking
- Lesson #4: Process Analysis and Triage
In the Disaster Field Office, we use vulnerability analysis and triage to identify and prioritize critical processes and outcomes, and then we allocate resources to the most critical processes to support critical outcomes. Process Analysis and Triage will teach you to identify and prioritize your key processes in your business, career, family and life while properly allocating resources to support and maximize your survival and success based on the three categories of business/life processes:- Critical (Red)
- Urgent (Yellow)
- Supportive (Green)
You then apply the four-step method for maintaining business/family continuity in almost any situation while maximizing results in every circumstance:
- Identify and prioritize outcomes
- Identify processes essential to each outcome
- Prioritize processes based on outcome priorities
- Allocate resources based on relative process priorities
- Lesson #5: Epidemic Enthusiasm
In the Disaster Field Office we know that morale and esprit de corps is essential to the survival of our people and ourselves. In the Disaster Field Office we know how to keep morale high and outcome higher because we have done it in the worst of conditions: disasters.
If resilience is when your resources exceed your needs, then the key to resilience is to always have more resources than you need. In life, these resources fall into seven broad categories—the Seven Canteens of Resilience.
