Do we really need disaster communications plans?

摘要

Most of us realize that the day will come when a large clump of goat dung will be hurled through space with nary a moment's notice to hit the oscillating fans of our existence and redecorate the walls of our lives with unwanted color, fragrance and texture. Bad times are inevitable. Dung happens. Merriam Webster says that a disaster is "a sudden calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction; a sudden or great misfortune or failure." The key word in this definition is not calamitous,' 'damage,' 'loss,' 'destruction,' 'misfortune' or even 'failure.' The operative word is 'sudden.' If you're not prepared for the sudden universe of possibilities that might hit your fan, then—like it or not—your only choice is a seat-of-the-pants disaster communications plan. Good luck with that. But if you've mapped out a response structure for the various possibilities of chaos that may suddenly redecorate your walls, then you have a rapid response plan. Rapid response doesn't de-dung your world, but it can eliminate the sudden part. After an early winter snowfall a few years ago, I took my oldest teenager up to the high school parking lot and showed him how to safely steer through a sudden spin-out on snow. My father had taught me the same lesson on a frozen Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin back in the mid-1970s. "When you're prepared and know what to do when a sudden spin-out happens," I told my son, "then you'll have a cool, calm and measured rapid response that avoids disaster."