Survival Thinking: How Much Is Enough?

The fear, of course, was that a major power outage in such weather conditions would spark mass riots and outrage amongst the locals, who tend to be "city folk" and ill adapted to dealing with a loss of technology. It turns out, these fears are perhaps misplaced, at least on a short-term basis. That said, one must wonder if these storms and their related outages would become more regular, would people be so understanding and patient? It's hard to say.

Back to the topic at hand, I'm thus left with wondering: just how much prep should I do from a survivalist perspective to cope with potential storms, outages, and riots? How much self-protection do I need in terms of weapons? How much stockpiling of supplies is really important or necessary?

In many ways, I'm starting to think that the honest answer is "more than I've been doing, but much less than the worst-case prognosticators would have us believe." For starters, I do need to take home defense a bit more seriously. Gracie Jiu-jitsu is great, but there's probably a good case to be made for doing more. Along those same lines, I should also be much better organized with our camping gear, and I really should have some sort of contingency plans mapped out should a major incident affect the area.

In terms of supplies, though, I actually think we're not doing too badly. We tend to maintain a lot dry and canned foods, as well as protein bars and comparable supplements, just out of sheer laziness. Where we perhaps put too much confidence is in our freezers, which do not currently have backup power, and where I did end up experiencing a loss (the GFI breaker blew on the outlet my freezer plugs into while I was away - that's a couple hundred dollars of meat, veg, etc., lost). So, there's certainly work to do here, but perhaps not as much as one might think. Considering that the worst power outage lasted a week, planning for at least that long with food supplies seems more than feasible, and just part of our standard practice. Perhaps doubling that would be worthwhile... perhaps not.

All of this thinking, however, has a high degree of relevance to how we manage risk in our organizations. If we were to listen to the FUD-mongerers, then we'd all have armed guards around our facilities, we'd have backup generators ready to provide a month or two of uninterrupted power, and we'd be investing billions of dollars per company annually (if not trillions) just to protect whatever data and systems we have. And yet we would fail.

At the same time, maybe failing isn't all that big of a deal. Consider that somewhere in the ballpark of 1 million homes and businesses lost power across 2 major power companies in DC/MD/VA. That's not a small number of people negatively impacted. And, yet, the businesses survived. The people survived. Mass chaos did not ensue.

Similarly, we are seeing data breaches reported in a constant stream of updates and announcements. Microsoft has been doing monthly patch releases for about as long as I can remember now. Other companies continue to release patches for their software, too. Heck, my Android mobile phone receives app updates on a near-daily basis. And yet, business continues, and people survive.

So, what is the right amount of investment into survivability? Do you know for yourself? How about your business? Do you even know what it is that you're protecting? What's truly important? As individuals, we often have a hard time differentiating between "nice to have" and "need to have" when it comes to things. How well do we manage this in a business context?

Survival is the imperative, but perhaps we could be doing a better job around preparation. Be wary of experts prophesying worst-case scenarios. Look at the real-world examples that we already see. Balance that factual data against your needs and make an appropriate decision. Anything more than that is probably excessive, and maybe even wasteful. However, as in most things, it may be better to err on the side of caution than to be caught unprepared and fail to survive.

Suffice to say, I won't be building a hardened bunker any time soon, nor will I be investing hundreds of dollars into freeze-dried foods that will last us a year (or more). I will, however, be improving home defense, as well as working on better setup for things like a "bug out bag" (for each family member) and making sure that we do have perhaps a week worth of food that can be prepared with minimal hassle and no electricity. Beyond that? Meh... no idea.

Good luck! :)