ZOMBIES, VAMPIRES, ALIENS!

Plan for Those, Plan for All

Halloween is right around the corner, and the season reminds me of a brilliant public awareness campaign run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Above is a snippet from the 2011 poster, "Don't Be a Zombie. Be Prepared."

"The whole idea was, if you're prepared for a zombie apocalypse, you're prepared for pretty much anything." - David Daigle, Assoc. Dir. Communications, Public Health Preparedness and Response, CDC

I've been thinking a lot about the recent, disastrous Hurricane Helene and the various responses to the storm, before and after. Why weren't many people prepared? Why didn't everyone evacuate? Who was supposed to help and how well did they?

Why did people make the decisions they made?

Let's make some general frameworks to better understand these decisions. This will help you make better choices for yourselves and your organizations.

ZOMBIE, ALIEN, AND VAMPIRE FICTION IS POPULAR FOR GOOD REASON

Our Halloween traditions have their origins in celebrations to honor the dead and to pray that the recently departed make their way on to Heaven. In our modern holiday, Halloween celebrates horror; the imagery of skulls, graves, and demons reminds us of our eventual death and of the impermanence of our life. Mythical monsters, witches, and ghosts evoke scary thoughts of the unknown and of the presence of evil.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

Horror as a genre serves a valuable role in waking us up and getting us to challenge ideas and to visualize things that we'd rather ignore. Like riding a roller coaster, experiencing fictional horrors, like zombies, vampires, and aliens, makes us feel alive and taps into buried, primal, "flight or fight" impulses. Those impulses kept us alive.

While modern civilization insulates us from many dangers, we still face a variety of threats for which we need to prepare. In the CDC campaign, a 42-page graphic novel tells the story of people confronted with a zombie-creating virus and finishes with a helpful recommendation to create an "All-Hazards Emergency Kit", complete with check list.

These types of lists are helpful, and its likely that the CDC campaign, created in anticipation of the 2011 hurricane season, reached people who otherwise might not have bothered to gather some basic emergency supplies. There are many of these lists circulating on the internet; one of the best was created recently in response to Hurricane Helene [Excellent, giant graphic here.]

Some are very terse, others very detailed. They all tend to be of the form:

1. Food and Water

2. Health and Hygiene

3. Shelter, Warmth, and Tools

4. Communication and Power

5. Financial Preparedness and Important Documents

A recent survey by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says that roughly 80% of Americans have gathered some supplies and that about 50% have an "emergency plan". The latter number is particularly troubling; more on that later.

YOUR PREPARATION FOR ZOMBIES, VAMPIRES, ALIENS, AND A BAZILLION OTHER EMERGENCIES, IS PRETTY MUCH THE SAME

When you acknowledge this, it sets you free. You can stop worrying about the wide variety of possibilities for which you need to prepare, when you realize the preparedness is much the same for each individual emergency. I can vouch for this having lived through a few major ones myself. I was at the US Capitol the morning of 9/11/2001 and in my apartment in lower Manhattan that night. I made it through the eight-day NYC 2006 blackout. Finally, I capitulated and evacuated NYC after a few days of misery when superstorm Sandy destroyed my apartment building in 2012!

In a previous post, titled "Rock! Paper! Scissors!", I discuss the potential disruptions from pulses of electromagnetic energy (EMP) and mention:

"The threat posed by EMP is featured in a number of books and movies: One charming example is "Survival Family" (2017) {Sabaibaru famirī}, featuring a spoiled Japanese family forced to rediscover old ways of living without technology."

There too, the family faces many of the same challenges I faced in my personal disaster triplet: terrorist act, blackout, and flood! If I can give you some advice from my own experiences, it would be two things. First, it's best if your supplies are things you already use - - so, if you like peanut butter, buy a few extra jars for your emergency food. Second, it helps if you are accustomed to living in austere conditions: Go camping, hiking, or trekking when you can. If you have a short, power outage, make it a fun event - - make cowboy coffee in your fireplace, make dinner on your grill. All of those skills you learned in scouting are helpful, as is living in a sheep wagon.

AMERICA IS A "NATION OF SHOPPERS" NOT A NATION OF PLANNERS - - REMEDY THAT

According to FEMA's research, Americans prefer to buy stuff rather than to do stuff. Most advice you get, most things you read, will tell you to buy things on a list. This is good. This is important. It's a start. There is a giant industry dedicated to this, with $2.5 billion in sales annually, according to a recent Newsweek article.

Equally important though, is to have a plan. After 9/11, my girlfriend and I made a plan where we would meet in an emergency where we lost contact. She lived and worked in Brooklyn, I lived and worked in lower Manhattan. We agreed to meet in Prospect Park in Brooklyn at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch. I'd have preferred to have a plan to go West, out of New York City, but these crossings are very difficult. Better to go East, and end up in suboptimal Long Island, than try to go West. You can see this clearly in satellite images. The route West has a single, giant bridge at the Northernmost point of Manhattan, the George Washington Bridge, over the massive Hudson River. The Eastern route has three accessible bridges, the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg, crossing the far-less perilous East River. Remember, you are on foot, as were the multitude who crossed those bridges on foot on September 11th to escape lower Manhattan.

In the military, these rendezvous points are called "rally points". This advice will cost you nothing: Next time you go somewhere, anywhere, with a loved one, say, "Hey, if we get separated, where shall we meet? Where's the rally point, the "RP"?" If you have kids, do this always; Start out by making it a game. Like the one I chose, the SSM Arch, you want the RP to be easy to find, easy to describe, and difficult to "erase". As a bonus challenge, come up with an ARP, or "Alternative Rally Point", this is where you go if you can't go to the RP - - imagine the SSM Arch is behind a barricade, or unsafe, for instance. How about the entrance to the Green-Wood Cemetery, straight down Prospect Park West at 20th Street? Excellent choice. [Later, in this post, we'll go to Mars with Elon Musk, I promise.]

An excellent piece of advice, circulating after Hurricane Helene, was to use one's mobile phone voicemail GREETING to locate oneself for others. "Hi, I'm OK, I have evacuated and am staying at Uncle Bob's. Beep." Any person outside the event can get this message, even when you have no outbound call capability, inside the event area. This should be the first act you do with your mobile phone, while you still have battery and service!

A valuable public awareness campaign would be to encourage planning. There was the famous, "It's 10pm. "Do you know where your children are?" public service announcement (PSA) for parents on American television from the late 1960s through the late 1980s. Advice to organizations, FEMA, or your own company: Do a campaign about making plans, like "The storm is coming, where are grandma Louise and her dog Pickle going to go?" [Roll shot of charming old woman and lovable dog with storm clouds on the horizon.]

This begs the question, why don't people plan? Why don't they evacuate when they are encourage to do so?

PEOPLE WITHOUT PLANS AND RESOURCES DON'T EVACUATE; PEOPLE WITH OBLIGATIONS CAN'T; SOME JUST WON'T

There are a number of reasons why people do not evacuate facing an impending storm. People with limited mobility are unable to relocate easily. People on farms, husbanding groups of animals, are also limited in their ability to evacuate: Leaving their animals dooms both the animals and their own livelihood, so they hunker down. Some people are just stubborn and have both a higher estimate of their own capabilities and a lower estimate of the event's severity and duration. Finally, a major obstacle to evacuation is money: Traveling to and staying in temporary lodging is expensive.

So what should organizations do?

More advice for FEMA, and for your organization: Let people self-identify as being vulnerable or unable to relocate. Make public announcements that your policy is to prioritize aide to those who are most vulnerable and least able to mitigate the impact of the event. This removes incentives from those "on the fence" and will motivate them to self-rescue by evacuating. There is little you can do for those that are obstinate; it is not a good use of resources to convince or force them!

EMERGENCIES HAVE SCOPES, SCALES, AND HORIZONS

As a way of introducing this, think about stepping out of your shower or walking out your front door in the dead of winter. A simple misstep, a slip and fall, can, immediately, create your own personal, existential emergency. The scope of this is you, an individual. And, this could be fatal or it could be lesser, a broken bone, or as little as a bruised ego. That is, the severity, the scale of it, can very a lot.

Finally, is this of a short duration? Is the time horizon limited? A bad fall might have long-lasting consequences, a long, time horizon of limited mobility, costly care, and, tragically, even pain.

In the spirit of Halloween, I just revisited my notes and the history of the "Hundred Year War", you know, that conflict between England and France in the Late Middle Ages, that lasted 116 years, occasionally interrupted by truces and once, by the BLACK DEATH. Some emergencies, like this war, have long horizons, like Hell. Think about Hell for a minute. It is personal. It has a "scope" of one, you. It has an enormous "scale", or severity, for you - - all kinds of torments. And, finally, it has a "horizon", or duration, of forever - - outside the horizon of your physical being!

A silly illustration of this point: If everyone on Earth, a the same moment in time, stubbed their toe, this would have an extraordinarily-large scope but a small scale of severity, "Ouch!", and short horizon, "Shucks!". See (0,0,1) above. Think about it like this: How many people? How bad? How long?

DECISION MAKERS HAVE THREE LEVERS THEY CAN PULL: LOWERING THE ODDS, MITIGATING THE IMPACT, AND RESPONDING TO IMPACT

I was thinking about this post a few days ago, thinking about something really bad. War. If we were really taking it seriously, we'd reorganize ourselves in this regard. We would have a Cabinet-level post, "The Secretary of Peace", head of the "Department of Peace". The Peace Department would have three subsidiary departments: Department of Diplomacy, Department of Defense, and Department of War.

The Department of Peace would have a mission of "creating and ensuring a lasting peace". It would task the Department of Diplomacy to lower the odds of war, through negotiation, trade, and alliances. It would task the Department of Defense with lowering the impacts of war, by making us more resilient, through hardening our infrastructure, people, and processes against war. And finally, it would task the Department of War with preparing to destroy an enemy, should it come to that, as a deterrent to actual, "war".

This is the model, these are the three levers you can pull:

1. What can you do to make a bad event less likely;

2. What can you do to lessen the impact, the "badness" of an event, were it to occur?

3. What can you do to "stop the bleed", that is lessen the impact of an event, after it does occur?

Here is a simple example. You go for a bike ride. You could go at a time when there is no traffic, reducing the change of being struck by a car [That is #1.] You could wear a helmet. [#2] You could have an EMT shadow you, down the road, in an ambulance. [#3]

These are your individual choices. And these are our societal choices as well. How much effort do we put into making it less likely that we stub our collective toe? Do we we wear house shoes? Do we keep an icepack on hand? Writ large.

In your own, personal life, and in your organization these are your three levers: You can invest your time and resources into lowering bad odds, donning armor for bad things, and preparing to repair your damages. It is that simple.

To represent this in mathematical terms:

• Consequences of a bad event equals the likelihood it happens times its severity;

• Or, Probability (Event at Time 1) times Damage (Event at Time 1);

• C(E,1) = P(E,1) x D(E,1)

We are all balancing that equation in our head, even if only subconsciously, every time we step out of the shower or don a bike helmet.

WHEN PEOPLE WEAR HELMETS AND HAVE EMTs IN TOW, THEY DO MORE RISKY BEHAVIOR

I recall, some years ago, being in a classroom at Harvard with Robert Merton [Nobel laureate, Economics] listening to him talking about risk. He pointed out that, with the advent of every new safety improvement in automobiles, drivers took more risk. He proclaimed something to the effect that the contemporary soccer mom in Connecticut, given ABS brakes, safety belts, and airbags, goes out on the road at times and in conditions that she would have never risked a decade earlier.

That is, Merton was saying that lowering "Damage (Event at Time 1)" with a new technology, to D(E,2), will make most people make more risky choices, so "Probability (Event at Time 2)" is greater than P(E,1).

So, people will trade off safety improvements to take more risks, making the expected consequences stay pretty stable.

Again, silly numbers for illustration: Let's double the safety of automobiles in collision AND double the risky behavior by driving faster and more carelessly.

• C(E,1) = P(E,1) x D(E,1) ; 1.0 = 1.0 x 1.0

• C(E,2) = P(E,2) x D(E,2) ; 1.0 = 2.0 x 0.5

The result is the same: Driving does not get safer!

As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data shows, American driving did get safer and then the trend reversed. Commenting on the trend, David Leonhardt speculated that driver distractions, drug use, and inattentiveness might be to blame. ["The rise in U.S. traffic deaths.", The New York Times, 2023, December 11, 2023]

Thus, a big takeaway for you. Think about this. Where are you investing in safety in your own life and organization, only to gain no benefit as the underlying behavior has become more risk-loving? This is across all of your life, across all aspects of your organization.

Returning to our bicycle example. It is wise to buy and use a bike helmet. [#2] It is absurd to hire a trailing ambulance. [#3] It is suicidal to ride in heavy traffic, at night, in the fog, wearing dark clothing! [#1]. Behavior matters.

THANKFULLY, PEOPLE DO THINK ABOUT LOW-PROBABILITY, HIGH-IMPACT (SCOPE, SCALE), LONG-HORIZON EVENTS

I promised you Elon and Mars, and here it is.

I've heard Elon Musk go on and on about wanting to go to Mars. I'm sure you have as well. I've always thought this was absurd, pure ego, arrogant bluster. Who would want to go to Mars when the Earth is perfect?! This was always my retort.

Then again, math does not care about feelings, yours or mine. And, here Musk has an argument.

Taking my 3D coordinate graph above. Imagine an event that is at location (1,1,1). That event has planetary scope, it effects ALL creatures, things, and materials. It has an extraordinary scale - - you know, like everything melts. And, finally, it lasts …forever. Check out this list from Wikipedia:

See that last row, "Astronomical"? These are events that most of us aren't thinking about. They're bad, especially "Impact event".

"An impact event is a collision between astronomical objects causing measurable effects. … Major impact events have significantly shaped Earth's history, having been implicated in the formation of the Earth–Moon system, the evolutionary history of life, the origin of water on Earth, and several mass extinctions." - Wikipedia

These events, though extraordinarily unlikely, have, potentially, planet-killing power.

In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported "It's 100 per cent certain we’ll be hit [by a devastating asteroid], but we're not 100 per cent certain when." Also in 2018, physicist Stephen Hawking, in his final book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions", considered an asteroid collision to be the biggest threat to the planet. - Wikipedia

So, Elon is right. A colony on Mars is a rational objective. I've been convinced. My son shared a video with me, "How Humanity Will Actually Colonize Mars (Year by Year)". It is extraordinarily well done. Watch it and take notes when you have time.

A Martian colony might be the lifeboat that saves humanity. The video will pique your imagination: There are so many challenges in building that lifeboat: in technology, in government, in economics, in science, and more. What an exciting time it is, to be a young person with one's life ahead of them!

FACING OUR CURRENT AND FUTURE EMERGENCIES ARE COLLECTIVE-ACTION PROBLEMS, MANY MADE BY US!

In the spirit of Halloween and in the interest of completeness, I will leave you with a couple more images to consider.

First is the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", an 1887 painting by Viktor Vasnetsov, depicting from left to right, Death, Famine, War, and Conquest, apocalypse figures from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament of the Bible.

The second half of the Wiki list is here:

Scan the list and find the horsemen. You see, the Four Horsemen are of man, by man. We create these emergencies, these calamities, these horrors.

We must all work together not only to tackle the challenges Mother Nature sends our way but also to clean up and stop creating our own messes.

Happy Halloween!