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Public sector governance contains a relative scant level of review, not in the form of annual budgetary allocations, but in colloquial terms, a “fit for purpose” analysis. I’ve written before on the outsized level of bureaucracy, which at the origin, was likely created in times of need, to benefit the public. We’re often quite good at ameliorating sudden onset issues with programatic interventions, what we’re far less successful at is sunsetting those initiatives. Track records demonstrate that they take on a life of their own, having personally spent well over a decade at the strategic level of national governance, I can attest to the internal force of expansionist interest. Often these initially helpful and necessary programs or agencies are morphed and adapted by what the public servants refer to as scope creep. By expanding the inclusivity of a program, the responsibilities assigned to it, it grows. It is far easier for governance to add a new category or scheme to an existing program, than to begin the regulatory and administrative changes to establish a new, specifically orientated agency. 

Over time, agencies grow past the initial mandate to become an octopus of entanglement, where the tentacles of the organization are now present in a diverse range of public sector arenas, that it becomes necessary and to some degree sufficient for overall public sector governance.

The answer may be a scalpel or chainsaw, or a combination of both. The answer might be to substantially rewrite the primary legislation for EM at the national level, redistribute responsibilities or remove requirements altogether. Everything should be on the table, to ensure the best possible service levels for the resources allocated.

We don’t know until we try - and we’re not trying

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Ongoing discourse in the international media is largely focussed on the incoming US administration. Not simply for their choices for key positions, but to ascertain the intent behind the bluster, what is the goal of reorienting the economics and relationships of the world’s superpower. Again, for the folks in the back, this is about knowledge, not opinion. The goal is to be part of the group who draw the correct conclusions and understands the specific roadmap of the new hegemonic leadership, thus embracing it to succeed.

My argument is that this is an exercise in national preparedness. 

The role of a federal government in any nation is to look outwards and hold onto internal unity. The role of public policy is to be the instrument that leads to that outcome, to design legislative statues with guiding regulations, supported by focussed administrative procedures that deliver on one of the two. To use a sports analogy, every nation has a home and away game. At home, where their records are normally more positive, the regime must settle internal quibbles and public demonstrations of angst with the administration, in democracies through ensuring the sub-national governments are capable of meeting the needs of residents and national programs are functioning at least above par. On the road, there are no fans, only opponents, where the record is usually less favourable, but there are key matchups in regional divisions that need to be dominated, or at least, neutral.

Whether you’re a fan of Peter Zeihan, Ray Dalio, Ian Bremmer, Yuval Harari or other notable thinkers, there is a consistent thread throughout their writings. A nation must be capable of delivering for their citizens, providing for their needs and protection. There are many theories on how to accomplish this, but in simple modern terms, it is the provision of food, energy, resources and a functioning economy in which residents can participate, thrive, survive and see a future. 

The provision of those elements is national preparedness.

A government must ensure that its citizen’s eat, so they either grow the totality of nutrients required to sustain the population, or they negotiate trade deals to allow the import of food. Further, a nation living in the 21st century requires a reliable source of power, generated organically within its borders or traded with nations. Finally, core resources, like steel and its byproducts, technological inputs like semiconductors and the litany of supporting parts are essential to a nation’s prosperity. Governments across the ideological spectrum negotiate trade deals to facilitate the ongoing provision of these three key elements: food, energy and resources. Together, they facilitate the functioning economy. These inputs allow a nation to create commerce, lives for their citizens and prosperity - as well as keeping a politician in power.

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In this modern, technologically enabled age, we often see explicit examples of bloated public sector bureaucracy’s inability to provide a service, deliver on a promise or otherwise operate at expectations. We’ve become accustomed to packaged excuses, a series of well honed announcements about limitations, regulatory requirements, procedural hurdles, governance considerations and a bibliography worth of doublespeak.

We’re left to wonder whether anything is reasonably possible to achieve through our established framework of systems, the origins of which likely had altruistic purposes. When we first decided that there was a need for government intervention or oversight, we restricted the creation of new offices to fairly focussed responsibilities. Then the good idea fairy visits, the expansion of things to be considered, the possibility of extending current programming to a slightly broader audience, to adapt to changing situations leads us down a preverbal superhighway to expansion. Long before taking a breath to reflect, we’ve created a monstrous behemoth, a leviathan of consumption to address what was at one point, a reasonable consideration.

The question is whether, at this point in history, with the taxpayer broke and the borrowing heydays behind us, should we look at a version of “gutting” the public service? Is there a rational argument for a significant reduction in “nice to haves” and concentrate on what is mandated?

Within EM, bureaucracy is preventing rapid, agile and resource intelligent preparedness, response and recovery operations. The calls for additional resources are because the beast is hungry, it wants to feed, to grow, to oversee more and more. If we were to expand resources in EM, there would likely be a bureaucratic addition, governance and additional regulatory frameworks to oversee the expansion. 

More resources ≠ more capabilities, just more governance.

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There are a range of preparedness specific goals and missions. From those who ascribe to cataclysmic societal outcomes requiring a considerable investment of resources, or those who simply seek a slightly more favourable insurance coverage, we are executing in the preparedness space. Your purchase of coverage against hazards in the form of disability, life, automobile, tenant, fire, and contents insurance are all preparedness measures. The budget allocation of an emergency fund of several months expenses and continuing your education while employed are both notable preparedness actions. The former protects against immediate pain and the later prepares you to pivot to an alternate line of employment.

Preparedness is not a mystical activity for doomsday, but an active ongoing consideration for everyone.

An approach I champion is to frame your preparedness strategy as the insurance plan for your goals and dreams. If you clearly articulate what it is you’d like to achieve, in specifics, that facilitates the strategic roadmap. This is the plan you create to get from here to your goal. while simplistic in nature, many fester at this point, they can express what they desire, but the pathway to reach it is unclear. By creating a plan to achieve your strategy, to reach your goal, you’ve delineated what must be protected.

Then all that remains is a series of questions on what might derail this idea and what must I do to mitigate against that event’s ability to alter my plan to reach my goal. Those actions derived from these questions in your preparedness strategy. Go forth and get your piece of the pie, wrapped in a blanket of preparedness insulation.

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The war in Ukraine fosters many an opinion, individuals who rally for the world consensus against invasion of sovereign states, those who seek to disrupt global order and those who seek to economically gain from continued conflict. The Ukrainian question is one where everyone wants to be right, to be on the winning side, the righteous, the benevolent.

The challenge with Ukraine is that everyone is right, if you look through the perspective of the waring parties, you understand why all sides fight: the Russians, Ukrainians, NATO, North Korea and the numerous unnamed belligerents who comprise the estimated dozens of nations with soldiers in the field. With an economic lens, you most certainly understand the value of a destroyed Ukraine to the reconstruction companies that made an almost unmeasurable fortune in the war on terror, or to the munitions companies whose latest technologies are employed on a modern real life proving ground. The Ukraine war is fuelling the goals and dreams of a vast swath of political and economic interests, which makes it incredibly hard to stop. Too many powerful interests have stakes in the continuation of this conflict to see it coming to a close, without a dramatic event.

In general, we understand preparedness to be the totality of physical and cognitive efforts to ready oneself, household, community, nation - etc., to navigate exogenous shock with the least disruption possible. These shocks are categorized into five main arenas, though in some cases the catalyst will be a combination of these origins: natural, economic, political, cultural and familial. To understand the implications of the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine on our lives, especially far removed from the conflict zone, we consider the five origins and frame a series of questions related to the effects on how we live our lives.

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The argument is this: I believe that within a decade or so, the losses from disasters will be so expense that irrespective of the damage, there will no longer be any government assistance for those who are uninsured. Residents will simply have to go bankrupt and walk away. Were need a solution to stop that outcome.

We cannot order insurance companies to make policies cheaper, they’d go bankrupt. We cannot order residents to pay premiums they cannot afford, they’d go bankrupt. We cannot order the government to pay for disaster losses, they’re going bankrupt.

Insurance is best viewed as an investment, not an expense. We protect that which we deem valuable, from ourselves through medical, our loved ones through life, our cars through automobile, our stupidity through personal umbrellas and our domiciles and contents through house insurance. Hence, it is an investment to hedge against exogenous shocks that are largely outside our control, to cover the recovery costs post event. A simple idea that suffers from two main problems - personal responsibility and coverage from the taxpayer.

These are tough conversations we're not having, how do we as a society navigate this reality?

Why are we assuming the government will always be able to fund this expense?

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Research from across the discipline over the past twenty years has argued that the most influential and correlated variable to better post event outcomes is the sense of community and belonging. Whether found in hundred year old disasters in Japan, recent hurricanes in the USA, floods in Europe, earthquakes in Asia - all point to one singular variable that is an indicator of a household’s likelihood of recovering from a disaster and made whole. In a previous article, I wrote about the strategies to build a resilient community, one where it is not individual household fending for themselves - the translation of public sector preparedness communications, but an intertwined web of networks and social connections that move as a whole. A force greater than the hazard and far out sizing government, community is the centre of gravity for successful preparedness operations.

We’re in the slow burn phase of a paradigmatic shift in the preparedness sub-field of EM, the evidence is present, the experiments continue to confirm community as the most influential variable, but change has yet to come. As Khun writes, this often takes considerable periods of time, where stalwarts hold onto previous ideas and theories, often due to sunk cost fallacy, educational structures in the discipline and organizational norms that reinforce the existing framework. We need to continue to champion the idea that the unit of measure in preparedness is not the human or household, but the community. Embracing what the science informs is more difficult than simple acceptance, as it challenges that which has framed and governed our efforts for generations. The world has changed, innovation is present at our doorsteps, but many continue to hold onto a comfort, the known, the accepted, the simple path.

It begins with changing the unit of measure to community and embracing technologies, being innovative and understanding that the government, community organizations, the corporate sector and households are equal partners in success. One is not superior to the others, collectively the four sectors of society are greater than the sum of the parts. 

We’re almost there…

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We live in a technologically enabled society, where residents look to online sources for information, guidance and education. The emergency management space has been lacking investment into this field, with few notable participants challenging the paradigm of traditional communication methods.
Hazadapt represents a breakthrough, an intelligent design that presents a series of Hazards and strategies to navigate, with a separate "Prep Check" to evaluate your readiness for such an event. The data is evidence-based, drawn from specific, tested and trusted sources.
This has the potential to become a standard bearer in the industry, Ginny is a brilliant human, passionate about her mission to prepare the nation for future calamities and unfortunate life events. 
A distinct honour and pleasure to interview.

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We've seen many recent calamities that called for a shelter in place plan, with the plethora of YouTube channels and information on sheltering, we offer evidence-based strategies to enable a successful event. 
Researchers examine populations that experience disasters and seek the individual pockets of households that had better post event outcomes, suffered less and navigated the event with less disruption. We then seek to understand those variables that influenced those better results and translate those variables into preparedness education. Evidence, not opinion or belief.
We cover family considerations, communications in a crisis, your animalistic requirements of food, water, shelter, health, safety and security as well as incorporating your dependency on and exposure to sectors of critical infrastructure. 
Non-apocalyptic evidence-based preparedness education, free of charge.

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The global economic picture continues to be volatile, unpredictable and profoundly influenced by political, cultural and natural events. In the modern technologically enable society, we have three choices for a career.
We can choose a profession, those with standards, formal education and fully regulated - military, medical, legal, engineering, construction trades, et.
We can choose a salary position, where we exchange our services for renumeration, contributing to the weather building of others.
We can choose entrepreneurial endeavours, where we exchange current effort for future benefits, as the sole responsible contributor to success or failure.
The modern entrepreneur includes everyone that has a bold and innovative idea to solve a pain in society, to overcome a barrier or obstacle to provide a dream outcome to the population - via minimal investment by the client. 
Be that a side hustle, a 100% personal time commitment or a combination of both, within all our industries there are opportunities to build real wealth, only availing through being an entrepreneur and accepting full and absolute responsibility for your outcomes. Exactly the same commitment required to adopt a prepared life.

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