Got into a discussion about emergency response at a professional retreat recently and everyone was going on and on about agility, and I was like, "Okay but what about contingency?"
And they were like "What?"
And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."
And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"
And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.
And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.
Anyway, that's how I figured out I'm Batman-coded and also learned how Batman must feel talking to supposedly professional superheroes who never bothered to run disaster scenarios until I pointed out that it's insane that they don't already have a plan for if Superman turns evil.
There’s a phrase that really stuck in my head around this. It was from one of the British divers who enacted the Thai caving rescue, though I couldn’t tell you which one or which interview.
As he described to the interviewer a moment of panic and how he he overcame, the interviewer said, in one of those, summarise-last-answer-given-with-appropriate-levels-of-respect-in-order-to-proceed-to-next-question phrasing’s, “Wow, so you rose to the occasion -“
And the diver said, “No, actually people always get that exactly wrong. In an unexpected and urgent situation you don’t rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training.”
