The Red Binder Myth: Why Most Crisis Plans Don’t Work

Let me paint a picture for you. The alarm goes off. Systems are crashing. The power goes out. And suddenly, the entire organization is standing around like someone just unplugged the brain to the building. Everyone is waiting for someone else to take charge. But the problem is everyone else is waiting as well. Most companies don't think that— most companies think that they're prepared for a crisis because They've done the work and they've gone ahead and they've defined a disaster plan. But here's the biggest challenge. Having a plan doesn't mean anyone knows how to execute it. And when people freeze in a crisis, the cost can be catastrophic. And that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode of Marc Haine Live. Of course, this is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up some core skill sets to help them create the show-stopping, jaw-dropping experience that our customers and our employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And today, my guest is Disaster Patrick, the Chief Response Officer. And today, we are talking about how to transform ordinary employees into an elite crisis team that can take command when everything else starts to fall apart. The price of admission today is please make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast. And please make sure that you share this episode with your circle. I'd love to see the business community really rallying around and supporting what I've been doing for, oh my goodness, we're coming up to our 6-year anniversary. And it's all free. So, please make sure you share it with your circle. You know, if you've ever worked in a large organization, you've probably seen it somewhere in the office. There's a disaster plan. It's usually in a binder. It's often red and it's usually covered in dust. Everyone feels reassured knowing that that's where it is. But here's the awkward question nobody asks. What happens if the emergency actually happens? And that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, if a real emergency hit in your workplace right this second, who would take command in the first 30 seconds? Do you know? I'd love for you to go ahead and share your experience. Why don't you go ahead, share this episode on your favorite social media platform, hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership. Put your comments down and be part of this conversation. As I mentioned, my guest today is someone who doesn't just talk about the crisis. response, he stress tests it in the most extreme conditions imaginable. Known to many as Disaster Patrick, he's built a reputation for pushing disaster planning out the boardroom and into the real world. Through what he calls the Disaster Lab, Patrick runs experiments that challenges the limits of both equipment and human performance. From 28 hours of continuous CPR testing to engineering experiments that push structures to 200 mile-per-hour wind tunnels. I can't even imagine what that looks like. Along the way, he has developed the C3 Method, a practical framework designed to help organizations move beyond theoretical plans and build teams that can actually respond when the unexpected happens. Patrick, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you.

Thank you for having me, Marc. I'm excited to have this conversation with you today.

Yeah, so maybe you could start a little bit. Why don't you Why don't you let us know who your clients are and how do you serve your clients?

Well, I have a number of different client lines. But one of the ones I work with, I work with small businesses of all kinds. I have worked with restaurants. I've worked with bars. I've worked with nursing homes. I've worked with alligator farms. I've worked with undersea cable operators. I've worked with apiaries, which are bee yards where they have lots of honeybees around. So, all different kinds of small companies. I also have been a Fortune 500 consultant for 15 to 20 years. So, I've worked with some. I've worked in Silicon Valley. I've worked with Big Pharma. I've worked with a lot of different kinds of firms. But small business is where I've done so much work. And it's a real passion of mine because, hey, I'm a small business owner myself.

Yeah, and I love it. And what I appreciate about that is this. When somebody opens up their business, they don't have this expertise. Right? They don't have the background or the training or anything to be able to do that. To have somebody in their back pocket like you, I think, is probably quite the coup.

Well, that's one of the things that ends up happening is I tell them, I say, listen, I want you to call me the Chief Response Officer because that's where I want you to slide me into your team. So, I'm the guy who's going to help you have the tools that you need to be successful when everything around you is disrupted. So, when that disruption occurs, I'm the guy who's going to help you get out of it.

I love it. You know, my background has been hospitality for the last 30 years plus. I was also an economic development officer where I got to peek into other people's businesses. And I find that many companies believe that they're prepared because they've done the work. I remember doing that at a casino. I remember sitting down with all the directorship was sitting down and we were going through each area of the business. And we took months and months and months to create this disaster plan. But at the end of the day, if you were to ask any employee or anybody where this plan is, people would be shocked to find that we didn't know where it was. So, why is it that people do invest in making these plans but they often fail in real-life scenarios?

Because what happens is that management says, we have a disaster plan. There it is on the shelf. And everybody says, yeah, sounds good because in reality everyone's mindset, the mindset that would make that plan successful is totally absent. Because what will happen is in that plan you wrote in the casino, I can guarantee you, Mark, I can guarantee you, and I'm sure you guys did the best you possibly could, but I can guarantee you if I pick that plan up and if I were to read through it, it would say things like You know, the floor manager will do this. The general manager will do this. The head of maintenance will do this. And ordinary employees are basically told, do what you're told. That's your role. So why in the world would anyone want to pick up that plan if all the plan meant in its final distilled form is do what you're told? Why would you even bother picking it up? Because first of all, You have no investment in that plan. You didn't help write it. You didn't make contributions to it. It doesn't matter. Senior management has it. They're running it. It's their plan. When things happen, I will just do whatever I'm told. And that's because the ultimate mindset is if I do nothing, someone else will handle it for me.

Right.

If I do nothing—

Don't we have that Good Samaritan issue of, I do something and I mess up, I'm going to be in big trouble. Yeah.

No, no, no, no. You're absolutely right. No, no, that reentrenches that philosophy. That reentrenches it because people say, well, there are all these negative consequences.

Right.

Right? I can get fired. I get sued. I could get— I could injure somebody, whatever.

Right?

So, I don't want to get involved with that. So, that's okay. If I do nothing, that's okay because someone else will handle it for me. And that reinforces that incentive to do that. And when disaster plans, when they are written, I can't tell you the number of times where I pick these plans up and that's what they say. Then, in the end, you have a plan that only managers know how to use, only managers are invested to use, and everyone else, why even bother? Yeah. And so, now you have a large number of people working in your organization at various levels Even lower management who have no idea what are the expectations or what they have to do because the plan basically says, don't worry about it.

Yeah. So, people tuning in who have invested, like I know that there are people out there who've invested a ton of money. They've hired consultants in to work with their management team and so on. So, are there any warning signs that a company's disaster plan is mostly just theoretical?

Yeah, I'll open the plan up. And the first thing I'll do, I've actually done this before. I did this with a big company who hired me one time. They had— they were a small business, technically speaking. In the United States, we define small businesses as 499 employees or fewer. And although some of these companies, they have 400, 500, close to 500 employees, they're basically a large company. That is, they operate like one, they act like one, they walk like a duck and they quack like a duck. And so, you start to wonder, is this really a duck or what? So, but I— and I'll pick it up. And so, I had this company, they had maybe 400 and some employees, and I literally said, I can audit your disaster plan right now. I can find a bunch of things wrong with it right now in 1 minute. Just give me a pencil. I don't need anything else. I don't need an AI. I don't need my cell phone. I don't need a computer. I don't need a tablet, just a pencil. And I literally will take the plan out and I could start glancing in there going, You don't need this. You don't need this. You don't need this. Because you know what I will find in there? Things like a page that'll say, all of management has officially agreed this is our disaster plan. And I'll see a bunch of really nice ink signatures. And then the next page, I'll see a bunch of stuff with, here are the laws that we followed. We had to follow this law and that law and this reg and that reg. And then the next page will say, you know, here's all the approvals from the board of directors. You don't need any of that stuff in a disaster plan. You don't need any of those things. So, I'll literally take a pencil, I'll scratch it, and I'll tear it out. Don't need that. Don't need that. Don't need that. So, that's the first thing I see. And the second thing is when I look in there and I start seeing names. John Doe will do this. Jane Doe will do that. Susie Q will do these things. Instantly, I can tell you right then, I can say, This plan is not going to work. I could come up with a drill right now without picking up a piece of paper or anything. I could come up with a very simple drill that will defeat this $150,000 disaster plan that you just bought very, very simply. And I do that because I want people to realize that just because you have a plan, that doesn't guarantee the thing is going to work. In fact, it could actually make you less prepared for disasters because it gives you a sense that you have what you need when in fact you don't, because there are so many elements, understated things, things that are abstract that have to go into the culture of your company. So, for those of you who are first starting businesses, you need to develop a culture. And I'm sure Marc and I'll be talking about that in this conversation.

Mm-hmm.

Because if you don't have that, that plan is going to sit on the shelf. It's going to accumulate dust and it's going to make you actually less prepared for disasters. Now more prepared.

It's really interesting because as you were saying that, I was thinking, okay, I think when we did ours, we didn't use names. We used positions. But again, part of it is that what you sit down and you do the work. Let's say we did the work in 2005 and we haven't had a time to pull out the crisis at the moment. Is this more kind of a practice of appeasement rather than actually a strategic process?

Well, what I say is, is that if you're going to have a disaster plan, you actually need 2 disaster plans. You need 2 different kinds of plans. You need a— and the analogy I give, the analogy I give are towels.

Okay.

So I tell every business, big or small, you need 2, you need 2, 2, 2 different disaster plans that represent 2 different kinds of towels. You need a beach towel and you need a decorative towel. Okay. And if you've ever had a decorative towel— and I grew up, I grew up in Orange County, California, and I was a surfer kid, and my mother had decorative towels. And so one day my mother ran out of beach towels. I came back from the beach and I literally showered and I tried to, to, to dry myself off with a decorative towel. And I don't know how many of you are listening to this, or Marc, if you've ever done this before, that is the most frustrating experience imaginable, trying to dry yourself off with a decorative towel. Is basically impossible because it's been designed so that all it does is basically pushes the water. It doesn't actually absorb anything, which is why they don't mold, right?

Yeah.

So you have to have a decorative towel, a decorative towel that you use for that stuff with the board of directors and the signatures and the legal stuff and all that. Do you need a plan for that?

Sure.

Just put that on the shelf and forget about it. So every time you have to renew it, everyone inks the signatures again. We approve it again this year. Fine. The other plan is your beach towel. That towel doesn't look great. It doesn't have to be. It's very colorful. It's— it covers exactly what it needs to do. It has high utility. And that plan, that's the plan that I should see on the shelves. And you talked about how you worked in hospitality.

Mm-hmm.

I do this all the time when I work in either outdoor or indoor hospitality. I'll say, listen, folks, someone at the front desk should literally be able to reach behind them and grab it. That is how close it should be at all times because they need to be able to pick the plan up. And the only thing I would say is that I appreciate what you say about the manager. You know, we had manager X must do these things. There are certain technical elements that of course they have to do them. But for most things, it should be able to be like anyone can activate it. Anyone can start doing things because the immediate moments after a disaster are so Crucial. And you should have all these people around you who you've hired and you're working for. They should be able to at least start the process. Otherwise, what will happen is if they open the plan, immediately say, don't do anything until you talk to Manager X. That's a big problem because then it goes right back to, if I do nothing, that's okay. Someone else will handle it for me.

I see how you mean now about it being a cultural thing because in a lot of businesses, Any decisions have to come from the manager. And so, encouraging the front desk clerk or a food and beverage server to grab that binder and do step 1 means that the management has to be okay with absolving themselves of the decision-making and passing it on to somebody who's there on the ground, on the front lines to be able to start dealing with this. And so, there has to be some level of trust building. Oh, it is.

And not only that, when I see managers who tell me, hey, listen, I have to be here at all times, that tells me there's a lack of leadership controls. There's a lack of leadership maturity because actually, you have done this at schools before where I'll work with the school and the principal will say, well, I have to be here. I have to do these things with small businesses. Actually, this happens a lot in restaurants where I'll say— I'll hear this all the time. I have to be here as the owner. I'll say, okay, fine. So what happens if you get hit on the head with a rock during an earthquake? Now what? What happens if you're not available? What if you're on your honeymoon in Barbados? We have a disaster. What happens if you're on jury duty? That, by the way, that actually has happened multiple times. What happens if you're unavailable for some reason? You got a kid who's really ill, you know what I mean? Or you forget your phone, or, you know, something happens, or—

Yeah.

The cell phone towers are out. Not an uncommon occurrence in disasters. So I might as well be in Bangkok because I have no way of knowing what you want to do. Therefore, what's the point of the plan in the first place? Because if you're doing it all, why don't you just have the plan and just leave and not even have the rest of us? But again, So some of you would say, well, you know, I have to make a lot of these decisions. You do, but you don't have to make all the decisions because if there's a disaster going on outside, being able to lock down the lobby of a hotel, that should be something that a front desk person should be able to do if there's obvious signs something is going on. There is a criminal action going on. There is somebody who's carrying a weapon. There's somebody who is clearly causing a disturbance. You have a chemical spill. You have the police who are saying, close the doors. If front desk staff can't make that decision and can't do that on their own, you are now wasting time.

Yeah.

You are wasting time. And that's what is the issue. So, when I see leaders who say, I know the decisions that I have to make, but the first decisions in a disaster, I can hand that off to people who I've hired, you're right. That is a trust issue and that is a culture issue. And there's a way of developing the culture. It's not random. There is a way of doing it. I've done it many times. And but, but once you develop the culture, then it's magical because then people start saying, if I do nothing, no one else is going to do anything. So, I have to do everything. I have to do it. You see how that changes the mentality? I think that's a good point. It changes how we think and says, now, that's my plan. Now, I'm in charge of it instead of handing it off to someone else. who I don't even know if they're going to be there.

Yeah. So, is that what you mean by the bystander crisis?

I do.

So, let's define that. What exactly does that mean inside the workplace?

Inside the workplace is exactly what I described earlier, which is, okay, we have a disaster. The first instinct people are going to say is, I'm going to call the manager. I'm going to call the owner. I'm going to call fill in the blank. With small businesses, a lot of times it's called the owner. If you work for a big company, you're clearly not going to call the owner. But If you work in a small business or you're an entrepreneur, you're going to— they're going to call the founders or they're going to call— I've worked with a lot of startups, a lot of startups in Silicon Valley. I live in Sacramento, California. So Silicon Valley is about an hour by train from here. And I take it many times to avoid San Francisco traffic. And when I go, I am amazed because I'll see founders, even mature founders, people who are in their mid-30s. who essentially have never run a company like this before, where they have direct touch and management with all their business units and everyone around them. And I turn to them and I say, listen, you have to empower these people because in San Francisco, if there is an earthquake here, I'm just telling you right now from where we are standing right now, you're not going to get here. Oh, yes, I will. I'm going to take you out to lunch. We're going to go to lunch right around the corner here. And then you see for real that, oh, yeah, we really can't get back. Because if you have an earthquake, all these streets and roads are going to be blocked off because these are hills and everything else. It's a mess. So I tell them, and this is on a peninsula. So in the end, if you're outside of downtown San Francisco, like if you live in the East Bay and there's a disaster, like we have massive earthquake, the bridges are going to be closed or jammed with traffic. Now you have employees who are expected to make decisions and you can't call them.

Right.

So, what do we do? So, I say we develop the culture where we say, that's okay. There are certain things I empower them to do. That's what the plan is for.

Hmm.

It says, I, as the founder, I, as the CEO, I, as the manager, empower you to do these activities. These are things I authorize you to do. There are certain things after that that you have to get my permission to do. But at least they get things, especially health and safety stuff. Health and safety stuff, that shouldn't require anyone's permission, period. There's no reason for a plan to say you can't lock down the building without management. Absolutely not. There's no reason for that because you could have any kinds of emergencies that are very, very rapidly occurring and people have to make decisions and they don't have time to make a call. They got to just act. And that's what plans are for.

So, is there a sign, like if somebody's tuning in and they say, you know what? I'm going to prove you. I'm going to take my binder and I'm going to go through this right now. And I'll prove you wrong. What are things that they should be looking out for, components within that plan that make it ineffective? We talked about naming people.

Right.

We talked about having to go to the boss or whatever to get permission to do stuff. Are there any other indicators that just on first glance of flipping through this thing that they spent time and money on that it's really ineffective?

Yep, it'll say things like, Uh, the equipment is stored in ABC room. You can't go in there without, without so-and-so. Why? So-and-so is the only one with the keys, right? So-and-so is the only one who's authorized. We have all this emergency equipment. Great. Don't touch the equipment because so-and-so is the only one certified to touch it. Things like that.

Yeah.

Don't do first aid. I've seen this before, and actually I really got after the business when it said do not do first aid without so-and-so, and I was like, uh-uh. Not gonna happen. That needs to be cut today. And they're like, well, we could get sued if someone tries to do first aid on someone else. I was like, then you need to cert— then you have to first aid certify everybody. That's it.

Yeah.

Because you can't put equipment in here and say the only one who can use the first aid equipment is so-and-so. Because you know what's going to happen if there's a real disaster? First of all, it's going to seem awful strange to people when they see first aid kits that they're not allowed to use on other people. On themselves is one thing, but doing it for someone else They're like, don't do any of that stuff. Those are the kinds of things where it's like, why would you— why would you even do that? Because that immediately disempowers people. Because you know what that communicates to management, from management to employees? I don't trust you.

Right.

I don't believe in you because, you know, and they— and the other way, too, is this. When I see trainings and drills, I see trainings where they basically run nonsense trainings that nobody cares about, nobody attends, and nobody— and the training is just basically do what you're told. Or they don't do drills, or they do what we call Shakespearean drills. What I call them Shakespearean drills, meaning we all know the alarm goes off, we went outside, we do a few things, and we came back. It was perfect. Okay, as soon as I see on there, my disaster drill ran perfectly, that is the very, very first flaw in the drill.

Right.

That tells me that you didn't do it. So those are the kind of written things that I see all the time where I say, If you're not prepared to do these things, then what in the world are you even creating a plan for? Because it's not going to work.

Yeah, I love that. Hey, when we come back, I'd love to uncover your C3 framework to uncover exactly some steps that leaders can take to really shake out their to-do list and their strategy and make them much more effective. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back. I am speaking with Disaster Patrick. Patrick, I think your name needs to have an R in it so it becomes disaster with an -er at the end. Patrick? Anyway, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your book.

My book is called Design Any Disaster. It is a book where it could be used by anybody. It could be used by families. It could be used by small businesses. It could be used by anybody. But essentially, what it is, is it is a book that says, You can be in complete control of any disaster, period. And the way you do it is you follow these steps. I lay it out and it's in fact, it's chronologically laid out for the 5 different stages that a disaster goes through. So the ready phase, the react phase, the respond phase, the recover phase, and the phase I invented calling the reverse phase. So how you actually reverse the the disaster. You actually convert it into a success. I go through that and I talk to people, and it's really geared towards small business owners because I wanted to make it simplified where it was like, you don't have to have a bulky 700-page disaster plan. I know because I've done disaster plans for over 100,000 small businesses. There is no rhyme or reason on earth to have to have a long extended plan. So, there is a simple way of doing it. And that's really what I walk people through. And I use a method called the C3 method. And that method is what I utilize as I go through each one of the stages. I say, here's how you apply the C3 method in the Ready phase. Here's how you do it in the React phase. Here's how you do it in the Respond phase. And so on and so on all the way through.

Oh, so it's not just 3 phases. It's you have the phases and then within that, The C3 fits right in there.

It does. It fits with the 5 different chronological time points of a disaster, right? So, so the lifecycle of a disaster. And I use the C3 method at each one of those 5 points because I want people to— because what'll happen is that people will apply it in one, and then when they go to the next one, they'll forget it or they'll say, okay, I'm going to default to letting someone else handle it. And then all of a sudden, creeping in, we start to see inefficiencies, and then there becomes a lot of problems.

Okay. So, could we dig into what the 3 C's are?

Yes, it is. Yes. So, the C3 Method is a method I designed many years ago working with small businesses where I ran drills. And this is how really the genesis of it was. I like to do this all the time. I'll go to a small business and I'll Put all the employees in the room, including the managers, and I'll say to all the managers, "Okay, we're gonna run a drill today." And they say, "Oh, sounds great. We're all excited." And I say, "The drill today is gonna run two hours long." And they all say, "Fine." They already knew that. And I'll turn to the managers and say, "You may not participate for the first hour at all. You may not do anything. Your role is to watch. That's it. Don't talk. Don't interact with anyone. Don't take out your keys. Don't help anybody. Your job is simply to watch." And I love watching managers who have to watch their employees doing a disaster response without them.

I bet.

And so, one of the things I designed when people were asking me, how is it you're applying it? I said, there's really 3 things you must have that underlie a successful disaster program. Command, communicate, and carry out. Those 3 things. Command, communicate, and carry out. Each one of those stages, when properly applied at each one of the 5 time points of a disaster, give you a chance to break that philosophy of, if I do nothing, someone else will handle it for me. Instead, I put you in the mentality, if I do nothing, no one else will help me. It's up to me. So, how do I do it? It's the C3 method. So, so I'm going to talk you through each one now. So, a command. Command essentially means that you can do it. Basically, I'm in charge. And so, any employee should feel as though they can take charge. It doesn't mean they're going to run the entire response. But what it means is, is that you're going to have a series of tasks and each person should be empowered to do those things. So, If I need to get into the equipment room, I should be able to have a person in charge who can delegate to someone else to say, you can go into that room and grab the equipment, or you're empowered to do everything that's in that disaster plan. You see why I go against this whole thing about John Doe will handle this, manager so-and-so will handle this, the maintenance director will handle that? Because if you— as soon as you do that, you're no longer empowering people. You're breaking their command out. So why I use the word command is because with first responders, command makes a lot of sense. So if the person in charge is connecting to a first responder, they know who to look for. Because as much as you may think, they don't understand what a COO is, they don't know who a CFO is, they don't care. All they want to know is who's in command here, who's in charge. And every single person on your staff should be able to take command of that disaster plan. Now, what they do with it is a little bit different, which is how we get to communicate. Communication essentially means what it means colloquially when we say the word, but really it means more like this: can you construct a team of people to carry out tasks? Are you able to do that? Does the plan allow you to do that. Because when one person's in charge, okay, that's fine, but can they empower the next people to do the next set of things? Do they have that ability? Does the plan allow them to do that? Because if it's just me in charge and that's all it says, that's not going to be a lot of help, especially if it says you got to do it all on your own. Okay, that's problematic. And thankfully that's very rare. But usually when I see that, it's usually when founders, they'll write plans out and they'll say, I have to do this, I have to do that, and you guys have to do what I say. Then that's when it's like, okay, so that's basically ruled by one person. That really doesn't work when you're not there because if you're not there, employees have to take over. So, can I construct an elite disaster team? And that's the way I talk to people about it. Can I construct a team of people from different departments, from different people who have never worked together? And then the last one is carry out. Can we do the tasks? Can we do the tasks? Because carry out essentially means carrying out tasks. And the question I ask is, does your plan let people do things? Can they access the rooms? Can they grab equipment? Do they have the certifications or whatever to grab what they have to do? These are— do they have the phones? Do they have the masks? Do they have the— all the things that become important because in the end, it's a logistics issue. And communication is important. Are they authorized to communicate with people who are on the board of directors just as a liaison until you get there? Or whatever. Do they have that ability? So, every disaster plan I've ever read, I put them through those 3 things. Can you take command? Can you communicate? And can you carry out? Because that will tell me if that plan has broken the philosophy. If I do nothing, no one else will either.

So, it's really interesting. As you were going through that, I was kind of going through kind of all the different environments I've had that are multi-departmental and so on. Through the training, how does any one person know that they have the right to take command? Or does everybody take some semblance of command? Are we training them to step up and defer to somebody? Like, if you're in this area, you're taking command. But then, we're going to come together afterwards. Or how do you create that logistics behind it that you don't end up with a power struggle of, no, no, no, we have to do this.

No, no.

Our role is to do this. No, no, no, no. Right? And you end up with kind of this roundabout kind of people pulling on the power dynamic.

I tell people all the time, whoever is carrying the red binder is in charge, period. That person's in charge. They have the red binder. They are in charge. And that helps people to understand. And I think what you're asking is that at some point, there's going to have to be a transition, right? So, and that's very possible. When that happens, the person with the red binder talks to the person coming up and they say, okay, great, thank you, you've done a great job, I'll take it from here. They need to, A, make the decision, is that the right person to be doing that? And then, B, how do I transition that person so that they understand what's going on so that they don't hinder what we're already doing? Because you're gonna have tasks already being done. People are grabbing equipment, people are evacuating, people are sheltering, people are Dealing with first responders, whatever. And so, that transition, and I write about those things in all my plans because I always tell managers this all the time. Don't just walk up and grab the binder, okay? That's annoying and rude, okay? You have to— and it's not professional. What you need to do is you need to walk up to people and say, thank you. What's going on? What have you guys done so far? And when they tell you, say, good job. Don't be like, that's awful, or you're failing, or anything. Always say, you're doing a great, great job.

Thanks.

I'll take it from here. Here's what I'm going to have you do though, since you clearly know a lot of what's going on. I'm going to have you do this.

You see what I mean? It's almost like the way doctors and nurses do rounds at a hospital.

Very much so. Very much so. And when I was an EMT, this actually happened. I was a young EMT and I'd actually had hazmat training. So I was actually a hazmat specialist. I was actually on a scene and there were medics who were more senior to me. Who were dealing with a hazmat scene, and people who had way more years than me, who had been doing it since I was in elementary school, but I had more hazmat training than them. And literally, they put me in charge. I was the incident commander because I knew more about hazmat than they did. Therefore, I knew what was the safer route to take. And it doesn't mean it was seamless, like it's no problem. I walked up to them and said, with all due respect, sir, that's not how we're going to handle this thing because You didn't read the labels, and you didn't because like on on tanker trucks in in the United States, there's like there's little placards on the side, and there's ways of determining whether or not those are accurate. And and the person who was in charge was doing the wrong thing. So it did take a little bit of discussion, but eventually they they they they they they said, you know, you know, you're gonna basically make the decisions because I mean you're gonna collaborate with us because we're a team, right? We're a team, and I have more experience dealing with. You know, people who are casualties in mass casualty incidents. But in the end, a hazardous material is a very serious event that could cost lives. And so when I say to them, we need to look at this document, read these books, and do these things— because there's like guidebooks that they call emergency response guidebooks and stuff— and I would pull them out and I'd say, I, I carry one with me all the time. We, we said we have to be, you know, upwind by 50 yards or 100 yards. It's not enough. It actually needs to be 200 yards. Okay, that changed the whole thing because I knew to refer to things. You see how that expertise happens? And a lot of facilities have actually seen this before. Really mature nursing homes, this happens where managers who understand how the night shift goes, even when more senior managers show up, the night shift managers will stay in charge because they know how the night shift works. There is a way that people behave because of their circadian rhythms. There's a way that people behave, especially in nursing homes where people have Alzheimer's and they have dementia and things. They understand that. I've actually seen it before where the night managers remained in charge, and this is a healthcare facility.

Yeah.

And so one of the things that I do is I work with teams all the time and I force them in training, Marc. I force them. I will go into trainings and say— and I have a lot of fun with it— I'll literally be in a room with like 50 people and I'll say, uh, hi everybody, um, who's new here? Who has the least amount of experience in this place? And I'll get some hand in the back. I'll be like, Come on up. Come on up to the front. And they'll come on up to the front. I'll be like, you're in charge. And I'll hand them the plan. I'll say, you're going to run this for the next hour and that's how I'm going to train you. And that gets everybody thinking, whoa, does this plan really work?

A.

B, is this person going to be able to lead everybody? And so, I do that in the training because the training then, they are now empowered because they realize that and they're invested in that training because they go, wow, This plan is for me too. I'm gonna have to do it. So, I do it all the time where I'll put groups of people, random people in charge. So, I'll put one random person in charge and then, I'll literally take the binder away after half hour. I'll give it to another new person and do the same thing over and over again. Everybody then gets the training. Everyone understands what has to be done.

Would it be fair to say that a business would need the disaster plan for disasters but they need a crisis plan for other crises? Because as you were talking, I was going through kind of some of the issues I've had in my past, right? Where things like the internet goes down and we can't process sales or something. But that's not necessarily a disaster. But it is a crisis to the business. It's a crisis to kind of what's going on. Would that be a fair assessment or does the disaster plan kind of COVID all those contingencies?

Covers all those contingencies too, because one of the things, the metric that I use with all businesses is I say, look, I don't want you to think of this as a disaster because it's not. It's not a disaster. The internet going out is not a disaster. A Category 5 hurricane is not a disaster. An earthquake is not a disaster. None of those things are disasters. They are disruptions to your operations. That's what they are. They are a disruption to the operation. So, the question I have is, is do you have the ability to respond the same way that I have companies and there are procedures in place for how to respond to a cyber incident?

Mm-hmm.

I'll literally put in place who do we put in charge and how do we do that and how do we respond. Usually, for small businesses, like, you know, you call these vendors, you call these folks. And I do that all the time because what I want people to understand is is that when you have a disruption to the business, do you have to respond to it? Yes. Do you have to recover from it? Yes. Do you have to be able to reverse it so it actually puts you in a stronger position than you were before? Yes. Then all of a sudden, something magical happens.

It's amazing.

You no longer had a disaster in the first place.

Yeah.

That's the metric, Marc, that I use when I define the word disaster. You and I were talking before we started here about how I did my master's thesis in Britain. I wrote a 347-page master's thesis about the definitions of the word crisis, emergency, and disaster in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and the European Union, and the comparison of those and how those applied to businesses. And one of the things that I discovered was that it makes a massive difference. So now, when I talk to people about disasters, I say, that's not a disaster at all. It's only a disaster until you make it one. So, I want you to think of them as disruptions to your business. I like that. So, when you talk about crisis plans, I, you know, what I say, people say you have a response phase and then a continuity phase. What is critical in your business? What do you have to have running for your business to operate? That's when I determine if something is disrupted in those processes that we identified. That's when I know we have to respond. And that's— I love that.

You know, it's when I go into and get commissioned to help out hotels and restaurants and all that, the number one thing I tell them because the one thing that happens consistently is things like the internet going out and they can no longer process credit card transactions. And it's like, let's go out and get a kit that gets the old credit card processor with the little number contracts, right? But now, they don't have raised credit cards anymore. But it used to be, you know, let's just go manual. Just get the little slips. Fill in the slips.

Yeah. Well, because here's the thing.

All those are the contracts, right?

No, I agree with you entirely. And in fact, I've done this at a restaurant before. I've done this in many restaurants. But there was one restaurant I did this for. I was doing a disaster drill and I was— we were just going through things. And I said, okay, tonight, tonight, you're going to do everything manually. But all the computers are up. Yeah, I know. So you want us to do everything manually? Yeah. How? Write it down. Everyone's gonna have to write down the orders. I mean, you're gonna have— and this restaurant had about 200, 240 covers that night, so it's a busy place. And so I said, you're gonna do everything manually even though you have 240 covers tonight? And they're like, wow, that's a lot. I go, well, here's the thing though, because in the end, if this— if, if the— during the drill we're really getting messed up, we can't get out of it, then you can switch back to the the computers. But you know what we've now discovered? We now need to train people on how to write things down manually. How do we write down the orders? How do we ensure the service sequencing is correct? Because, you know, everything runs on— I mean, and you've been in the hospitality business, you understand service sequencing is one of the most important things, especially in a restaurant where it's like these courses go in this order and they all have to come out at the same time.

Yeah.

And, you know, you have to have the desserts order has to run a certain period of time and the drinks have to be coordinated. And these are all things They have to happen simultaneously. And what do you do when there is no computer? And that's how it's so fun in hospitality because it runs— the paces are frenetic, right?

Yeah.

Friday nights, Saturday nights are frenetic days. And so, they have to put themselves in a position where they can very quickly go back and they have another system that again empowers employees. to be able to quickly switch over. But you've got to force yourself to say, I'm going to do this without the crutch that I would normally have. Otherwise, when the real thing happens, now you're in real trouble because you really have no backup.

Yeah, it was really interesting. About 3 years ago, we had a telecommunications breakdown for 4 days where one of our cell service providers broke down for 4 days. And it was interesting to see that all the restaurants Everybody said, cash only, cash only, cash only. But the hook was that all the ATMs used that same service. And so, people couldn't pull money out until they could physically get into bank accounts. So, all these companies were screaming bloody murder that, oh my God, we can't run a business. We can't collect money. And it's like, but you can. But their limit, their thought process was if somebody comes up with a credit card, we can't process it. And it's like, yes, you can. You could do it all manually and just upload it later. In their mind, they were like, oh, complete shutdown because we weren't trained. We don't know what the solutions are. We don't know what our options are. And they just shut right down.

In the early 1970s, Canada actually experienced a really famous ice storm. I think it was in Quebec and it knocked out everything. Pagers. And this is in the '70s when pagers were actually available as one of the few things they had. It knocked out everything. It knocked out phones. It knocked down everything. And for days, it took them to get it back up. And even then, I mean, this is before the advent of the internet. It's before anything. Even then, it was paralyzing entire elements of the economy because gas stations couldn't calculate through the pumps because it just knocked everything out. So, so that's a reason why when I think what you're saying is absolutely right, which is you have to be able to empower people so that you have multiple ways of handling things. I was in a place called Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I actually collect alternate currencies just for fun. I really enjoy that. Yeah. And I was in Great Barrington because I was actually doing a video there. I created a disaster currency and I wanted to test it in a local economy and it worked very well. And but they have a currency there called the Berkshare. And I literally was telling people, hey, look, if in the end you don't have a credit card, use the Berkshare dollars because in, in, in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, which is in a region, they use this currency all across the county. There's a lot of businesses that will actually accept subs up to it. And just like you said, if the credit cards aren't available, if that single point of failure is gone, you now have a backup, something that allows you to minimize that disruption and then turn it into something else that's even better. But again, if you don't do anything, you are relying and hoping that everything will handle itself when that's just not the way small businesses work. And in fact, small businesses have very little cushion. Bigger companies, the ones ironically enough do more planning than small companies do, They actually have almost unlimited resources where small businesses have almost none. And so, that's why the planning becomes so important there.

Yeah, I love it. Hey, I'd like to get into some common challenges that leaders face when they're trying to implement kind of a change to the way they think about their crisis plans or their disaster plans. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I hope you're getting tons of value from today's episode. As you can tell, Patrick and I are passionate about today's topic. If you belong to an organization that could use our help, or perhaps you or somebody you know might be planning a leadership retreat, a conference, a franchise, like bringing people together that you need to share this information, we'd love to explore how we could be of service to you and your people. So, feel free to reach out to us. Our contact information is in the show notes. This is what we do. Patrick, I really love something that you had in your notes, which was the 3-step equipment rule. Buy it, try it, and don't rely on it. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Well, what ends up happening is that you see on the internet all the time these indestructible knives or the flashlights that the Navy SEALs use or whatever. Or there's some app or some AI. Here's now all the time. I get all this stuff all the time. I have an AI that will break the disaster industry, and I always say, "Let me see it," and I just always go, and and I always see it and never works out. So what I tell people is is no matter what it is, a piece of equipment, a supply, or a technology, no matter what, it's what I call EST. Equipment supplies technology. No matter what, when you are dealing with an EST, you need to use the philosophy: you buy it, you try it, but don't rely on it. So by you buying it, I mean you purchase it yourself. So so in other words, you know those red backpacks you see in the big box stores? Like here in the States, we have like Home Depot and Walmart stuff. I tell people, "Well, I bought the backpack." No, you didn't. You bought A bunch of stuff, you have no idea what's in there, you have no idea what the food is, you have no idea what the equipment is, you've never opened the darn thing, it's still got the zip tie attached. That's not buying it. You need to get an empty backpack. And actually, on my YouTube channel, I have a set of 30 videos. It's a 30-day challenge anyone can take. It starts with an empty backpack on day 1, and by day 30, you have an entirely filled backpack. I tell you exactly what to put in there. I give little trainings on the weekend. I give a little drill for people to do on Sundays. I give them everything because I say you've got to try the equipment yourself. So you got to buy it, you have to try it out. So you have— do you have to put the batteries in there? Yeah. Do you actually have to do— do you actually have to practice in the dark? Yeah, you have to do all those things. And then when I say don't rely on it, I mean you can rely on it, but what I want you to do is I want you to have a sense of You need to have backups, just like we were talking about before. Is my Visa card gonna work? Sure. But what if it doesn't? So don't rely on it. Rely on something else. And that's the same with technology. There's always apps and things that come out that are disaster-related. This is what I tell people specifically about technology, and I know this is going to seem strange for a lot of you entrepreneurs, and some of you may bristle a little bit, but I understand, is I say The newer the technology, the less you should rely on it.

Hmm.

The newer the technology, the less you should rely on it because that means it isn't tested. That means it's never been tried in a real instance. So one of the things that you have to do is when you're in a disaster is use things that work, things that we know will work. I, you know, like, uh, I'll give an example. People always say, well, I have like a digital ID on my Apple or whatever. I go, You should have a physical copy of your driver's license with you at all times. Period. At all times. Because no matter what, if the technology isn't working, you have a physical backup. You have a way to access it. So, that's why I say you buy it. You try it. Don't rely on it.

I love it. I laughed when I saw that because the whole component of, you know, to your point, when you met with that person who says, oh no, I have to be here. And then, you took him to a coffee shop. That is a really good example of being able to paint a picture of what happens when you don't have any of this stuff. What happens when communications— like I believe, the next major terrorist attack is going to happen to telecommunications. I don't know why I feel that way. But I think that if telecommunications goes down, we are going to become powerless. And so, To me, that scares the bejesus out of me. But then, what happens when telecommunications goes down or power grids go down and so on? I lived through that ice storm back in the '90s where we lived for 3 days living in my mother-in-law's basement in front of a fireplace. I was lucky that my restaurant was in an evacuation area. It was at the train station in Montreal. And so, we had power during the day. And so, I was able to actually bring hot— bring food home and cook it and warm it up over the fireplace. So, I was lucky. But a lot of people, 4 or 5 days without any— we couldn't get a power generator anywhere. People's freezers went down. We became kind of an evacuee. We became kind of the drop-off point for all our suppliers because all their freezers shut down, right?

Absolutely.

And so, but we were lucky in that regard. I mean, we had the Queen Elizabeth. A perfect example. We had the Queen Elizabeth Hotel right next to us. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel was built a century and a half ago. It has no sprinkler systems, right? And so, people were burning candles in their rooms. It's like if the Queen Elizabeth Hotel went up fire, I mean, it would burn the building to the ground, right? And so, we had all these different things. And so, we stopped thinking, I think, in the context of what happens when we have no power, when we have no telecommunications. What do we do?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So, and I think you're right. And I, and I think the reason why people are so worried about it and why the probability of a, of a cyberattack of some kind where, which impacts the digital infrastructure is because it maximizes the disruption, right? Because essentially, you can find weak points in the infrastructure somewhere. And then basically, you can impact Millions of businesses, millions of individuals, just like you were describing. And what ends up happening is everything's out, right? So now we have to rely on other ways of being able to communicate. And that's very hard, especially today. I was thinking about this the other day. I was kidding around with another keynoter. I was keynoting up in New York and I was sitting and having lunch with him. And I just, I don't know why this popped up in my feed, but it was saying, you know, this is like the oldest video on YouTube.

Okay.

And it was in like 2002, 2006. And I thought, that's interesting. There are people living today who are like in the military. They're like adults who are younger than the oldest video on YouTube. So they— these people don't know a world without the internet. There are people who are being born today who, when my children are born, They will only know a world where there is AI. They will never know a world where they are not augmented in some way by AI. And really, they will not live in a world without VR. And because VR is on its way up because of the way that gaming is the way gaming is changing the world. And I just noticed I do a lot of video game. I do a lot of disaster plans for video game companies. And the amount of changes that are going on in the industry is astonishing what we'll see in 10 years. And that's what you're getting. So, so in other words, if that were absent, imagine the psychological crutch that that creates for businesses and otherwise. That's why with companies, I'll actually tell them this all the time. You know, we're going to operate for an hour. They say, okay, fine. Outside on the lawn, you're going to operate, do everything you would normally do on the lawn, and we're going to try to replicate it as if we were doing remote work. And literally, I've had people struggle before. And I said, you can't have your laptop, you can't have this, you can't have that. And it's really hard for them to work because, you know, they're not used to not having the infrastructure around them. I'll also do it where I'll say, hey, listen, no cell phones today. Zero. And that will distress companies a lot because I'll say, that's, uh, you buy it, you try it, don't rely on it kind of thing. In other words, you have to realize that if cell phones are down or there's no way of communicating, you have to find an alternate way of doing it. Yeah.

I love that. And it's such a good check mark on how bad can things get. Like when you look at the bombing, when Russia invaded the Ukraine, all of a sudden, my thought process went to how are these people contending with it? All of a sudden, grocery stores no longer exist. Currencies no longer exist. And really, at the end of the day, we go into survival mode. And really, the fact that I can't post on Facebook becomes irrelevant because we're in survival mode. mode, right? And what happens? What happens?

Yeah.

And I love watching the episode of The Pit with Noah Wiles. And right now, they're in the middle of a crisis where they have a cyber attack. So, they went everything manual. It was really interesting to see because they actually had to call an older person in who's long retired to come in and help them run because she was around when it was all manual before the computers came in. And all of a sudden, she's like the sage, right? Everybody's bowing to her because she knows what she's doing. And so, but we lose all this knowledge as time goes on.

Happens all the time. And that's a great— I'll have to watch that episode. I've never watched that show before. I just, I travel so much, I haven't had a chance to pull it up because that is a great instance of something that's very true. One of the things that I lament is Tesla, about a year and a half ago, they made an announcement that there will no longer be AM radio, AM or FM radio in their Teslas. Okay, so essentially everything is digital. And I say, well, what happens if there's no internet, which happens in disasters a lot? Or what happens if it's so bad that you can't access it? Radios still remain an incredible emergency communication source, so much so that in the United States we rely on ham radio operators, and of which I've been certified for almost 20 years now.

Yeah.

That we rely on them for emergency communications to ensure continuity of the government, of the armed forces, of critical government infrastructure. They rely on radio. And so when you don't have AM and FM all of a sudden, now you have folks who literally is like, who knows how to deal with analog? Not a lot of people.

How do you communicate with the population?

Absolutely. And in fact, I was actually at the cyber conference. I was chatting with a friend of mine and he was actually saying, Weirdly enough, some of the old technologies we have in computers, you know, like the, you know, like the 486s and stuff. Weirdly enough, those are almost immune now to cyberattacks, almost totally immune. You know why? Because the protocols that we use to make the 486 work, we don't use any of them anymore. All the protocols are gone. We used to use them. They stopped using the last protocol of a 486 was used in 2009. Wow. He goes, so literally, weirdly enough, you have a massive cyberattack. If you use something like a 486 computer, some of the old processors, it, it would actually make us immune because they're only trying to remain on the cutting edge. Right. So, so what you are saying is absolutely right. People would have to go back to an old system theoretically, especially like if you had something like an EMP attack, which is an electromagnetic pulse attack where you knock out all kinds of things. How do you rely on things that don't rely on the internet, don't rely on modern electronics and boards? That would be very, very tough. Even in cars, for those of you who are hearing this, how many of us have cars that basically rely on a computer chip?

Yeah.

And if that computer chip were not working, would our cars work? And I can just tell you right now, I already know the answer. The answer is no, they would not. They wouldn't even turn on.

Yeah.

So as we wrap up, Are there any cautionaries or pitfalls we should be aware of as we try to take a look at what we do have even? Or if we're absent of it, what is our first step? What do we need to do in order to avoid some of these pitfalls that we're talking about today?

What I want you to do is I want you to take your disaster plan. For those of you who have a plan, or for those of you who have a disaster backpack or whatever, I want you to take it to your youngest, most experienced employee. And I want you to hand it to them. And I want you to walk— I want you to, with them, walk through the plan and see if they can do it. Can they utilize that plan? Can they read it? Can they use it? If the answer is no, there you go. You saved a lot of time. You immediately have figured out that I am not letting people take command. I'm not giving people the chance to communicate and make teams. And I'm not empowering people to get the tasks done. In other words, they can't carry it out. Those are the things. If the backpack has never been opened, if it's zip-tied closed, or it's— there are things in there that people are not allowed to use, there you go. You have found out that you have not developed the right kind of culture for those things to be used. So, for those of you who are building small businesses, build your cultures now. If you only have 5 people, that's fine. Amazon at one time had 5 employees. Google at one time had 5 employees. You right now have 5 employees. Now is the time, not when you have 100 or 200 or 300 or 400, because once you're at that point, now it is very, very hard to break the culture. So, you want to make sure that you're putting yourself in that position so everything you are creating is reinforcing that culture. That is what I do, and that is my mission in life, is to break that. That's the whole purpose. If you do those things, you are now creating a disaster culture that's built to last.

I love that, Patrick. Amazing. How can people get hold of you if they need your help?

You can go to my website at disasterpatrick.com. Just simple spelling, disasterpatrick.com. I'm going on YouTube and this year, I'm taking on some incredibly difficult challenges this year. So, it's going to be really fun. The main challenge, the one that we're really going to be talking about soon, is in September, which in the United States is National Preparedness Month. I built a Lego structure based on that with the little Lego bricks, and I'm going to make it a FEMA-rated hurricane shelter. We are testing it at the University of Maryland's wind tunnel at 200 miles per hour. It's going to set a world record. It's going to be absolutely incredible. I've got lots of different Lego masters from around the country and all kinds of folks. I just want to demonstrate to people that you can do this. And so the message that I give to all of you— so, so my YouTube channel is Disaster Patrick. It's going to launch in, in just a couple weeks here. And my website is disasterpatrick.com. I'm happy to speak with you. I'm happy to consult with you, anything I can do. But in the end, this is the message I want to leave you with. Everything I've talked to you about today and everything that Mark and I have discussed with you about the C3 method and about backpacks and plans All of it really comes down to, are you giving people the culture that they need to be successful when everything around you is failing? Because if you empower everyone, if you truly prepare for a disaster, you will never, ever, ever experience one. Thank you, Marc. I appreciated it.

Patrick, thank you so much. I appreciate your being here and sharing your knowledge, your passion, your expertise. This was a much more fun conversation than I could have imagined it would be. So, thank you so much for doing that for us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hey, if you have any questions about today's episode or maybe you're thinking, hey, we could really use a complimentary 30-minute brainstorming session with Marc. Well, good news. You can snag a spot on my calendar. And please, if you need help with your disaster plan, please connect with Patrick. If you want to get hold of me, you can just hit the link below. It's the one that's marked meetwith.marchaine.com. And you're all set. And as always, I am at your service. And if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you subscribe to the podcast. Follow me on social media. I'm posting things all the time including little snippets of this episode. So, keep an eye out for them. Thanks so much for being here. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. See you next week!