blog post – fourth quarter 2022
the perfect fallacy
Somewhere in your career or personal life you likely have been told
“practice makes perfect.” That phrase may have its origins as far back
as the 14th century and might have begun life as “use makes perfect.”
Whatever its start, I often hear it used in crisis response training and it
hits me like someone pulling their fingernails across a chalkboard.
In many applications, practice is designed to help perfect one’s skills.
An athlete may practice hours each day on his or her way to the
Olympics. A musician may practice a particular piece in advance of
an important recital. A sharpshooter may practice whenever possible
to hit the centre of a target from further and further away.
But in crisis response, practice is different.
Yes, exercises help people become more familiar with their roles.
However, unlike the examples above, a crisis is different each time
one arrives.
The United States National Transportation Safety Board has a simple
but impactful lesson they teach at all their trainings concerning
transportation tragedies. “If you have been to one accident, you have
been to one accident.”
Of course, your experience from a previous incident is useful. The
new event, however, will be different in many ways.
For the teams I have trained, I have always tried to ensure they know
that we are conducting exercises for two reasons.
The first is to get more familiar with an individual’s role and how each
fits into the larger picture.
The second – and I would argue the much more pressing and
valuable reason – is to expose where our planned response falls
short, creates an unfavourable outcome, or simply is not fit for
purpose.
In other words, when I design an exercise, I design it to bring
problems to light within a safe environment where our shortcomings
can be corrected without harming anyone.
I get so very frustrated when I see exercises scripted so that they go
well. “We don’t want to embarrass anyone in front of senior
management” is what I often hear.
Truth be told, senior management should be embarrassed that your
goal is to please them and not fix the problems that would truly
damage your organisation in a real crisis.
As you put your organisation’s exercise plan together, try to include
these among your goals:
1) Exercises are about getting things right for the people who will
be impacted in a real crisis, not for senior management now.
Design your exercise accordingly.
2) Test processes that will be difficult to get correct; test processes
that you expect will go very well. Both can cause significant
problems if they go awry.
3) In at least one exercise, involve an organisation other than your
own that will be part of a real-world response. We tend to
practice in a vacuum. Truth is, everyone involved will be
launching their own response plans. Better to know in advance if
you will be in sync or at odds.
There are numerous other exercise goals and you should prioritise
those just like you prioritise the crises that you will practice.
No one likes to have something go wrong. But exercises are the
preferrable place for things to malfunction. Organisations should
embrace the ability to practice and expose errors when nothing – well,
maybe excepting our pride – is on the line.
During crisis exercises, we are not practicing to be perfect. It is not an
attainable goal in any case. We are practicing to gain experience in
our roles and to find and fix correctable problems before we must use
our processes for real.
Be different. Be ready.