Last week, I watched BBC Newsnight when Lord Toby Harris said we should all be stocking up on tinned food and bottled water. Lord Harris chairs the National Preparedness Commission, which advises the Government and the Civil Service on how the country should prepare for emergencies. On Newsnight, Lord Harris said most of us are unaware of the significant risk to daily life in the UK from Russian drones, for example. He said we were closer to a major war in Europe than at any other time in the past 60 years.
That all sounds rather scary, so most people do the proverbial “fingers in their ears” and sing “La, la, la” while hoping it all goes away or that somebody else will sort things out. Yet conflict isn’t the only problem. We’re facing major changes, with disasters like avalanches in Europe and floods in Nepal attributed to global warming. And that is before you even consider the growing number of attacks created by artificial intelligence, which are starting to appear uncontrolled. Some worry that AI is “going off the rails”, which could lead to chaos.
Then, yesterday, the UK Government announced that we should stock up on food because significant weather events are likely in the coming months that could prevent us from leaving our homes for several days. And the Dutch Central Bank has moved billions of Euros of Gold in preparation for an impending crisis. Perhaps it is time to invest in a new book, Disaster Prepping For Dummies.
Has the world gone bonkers, or should we be worried? Research from the University of Houston found that people likely to worry and be “preppers”, ready for a doomsday scenario, appear to have a specific personality type with low levels of “agreeableness”. This is one of the five personality components that tends to make people blunt and self-interested. They get triggered by anything that could threaten them as individuals. The rest of us, with higher levels of agreeableness, want to rub along well with others. As such, we are unlikely to want to “prep” because it would demonstrate self-interest over the common good.
In business, this means leaders are also unlikely to want their companies to prepare for impending doom because it would show they care more about themselves than their colleagues. At the same time, you’d probably aim to prevent panic among your staff.
However, you also wouldn’t want your business itself to be in a state of panic should these emergencies materialise. After all, a senior power engineer revealed yesterday that power cuts in the UK are only a matter of time. Is your business ready for several days without power?
Ultimately, it is all about language. “Preppers” are preparing for “disaster”. But a business leader who does the same thing would call it “being agile”. Similarly, a “prepper” is doing a one-off act of preparation for a specific emergency. However, a business could frame it as a routine item, as regular as a financial audit or a software update.
Another way to deal with potential disaster in a business is to focus on the impacts, not the emergency itself. Data on “downtime” or “service levels” will help employees consider ways of ensuring these are not negatively affected. They are “prepping” without thinking of it that way.
You can also help staff be ready for problems by building different ways of doing things into a routine. For example, you can set aside half an hour each week to do a particular process on paper, rather than on a computer. This provides some relief from the tedium of being online all the time. It also builds resilience into the organisation. When the power goes out, people are ready and able to do things on paper.
Preparing for disaster does not have to focus on a negative idea. Governments and local authorities worldwide say we will face real emergencies soon. But we need to be ready without panicking. We might need to stock up on food and water, but there’s much more we can do in business to prepare for problems. Think of it as building an agile company that is highly resilient. That’s much more positive than preparing for impending doom, even though it’s the same thing.
