Safety Solutions

In recent years several books have been written on tipping points. These books have looked at the “what if” scenarios in world history and explored the tipping points in people’s personal lives. They have helped us understand the pros and cons of those tipping points and the things to look for when tipping points are near.

We need to have that same awareness of tipping points in emergency planning; not only in our professional work but also our personal lives. Here is a few things to keep in mind:

• As we discussed in my last blog living in “code red” is not sustainable. It is neither productive nor beneficial to yourself or your organization. What is beneficial is having a healthy awareness of emergency plans.
• While emergency planning is very important it is also generally very simple. We tend to over complicate it. Keep it simple and you will be amazed how well it works and less stressed you need to be about.

I like to use this example when discussing tipping points in emergency planning. A husband and wife are traveling. They check into an unfamiliar hotel and get off the elevator on the way to their room. It is perfectly O.K. when they look down the hallway for the exit signs and understand where the stairwells are in relationship to their room should they need to evacuate. That is a healthy situational awareness. The unhealthy extreme is the person who checks into their room, immediately walks over to the window and does some calculations, phones the front desk and a few minutes later housekeeping arrives with the appropriate number of bed sheets. For the next 20 minutes the couple frantically ties the sheets end to end in order to make an escape rope… should they have to climb out the window. That is just taking it too far.

If you ever want to talk about how to make emergency planning simpler and far less stressful; give me a call. Until next time, John