Mastering Risk

Send us Fan Mail There are many publications claiming to understand why people choose not to become prepared, in order to provide guidance on the necessary amendments to influence campaigns, to improve the adoption of preparedness behavoirs by the general population. These are notable and important efforts, many of which are grounded in advancing certain models. This presents a difficulty for rese...

Send us Fan Mail What we have all seen in the southeastern USA over the past week has been heart wrenching, whether here in Canada where I could do little more that financially support the NGO conducting operations, to the individuals charging into the chaos to provide relief and rescue those in peril. Evidence is clear that humans do not panic, they rally to the cause, step up to the occasion and...

Send us Fan Mail Season 11 was a breakthrough season for the podcast, rapidly expanding our audience, which sets season 12 up for great success.  There are a number of tag lines, monikers, colloquialisms and catch phrases that permeate every discipline. They roll off the tongue without effort, others in the field smile and it becomes a language of its own. Newcomers adopt the practice, often witho...

Send us Fan Mail On the eve of Canada's largest gathering of the emergency preparedness and climate adaptation voices, we are in a unique position to create some epic advances in society's readiness. From considerations on a national disaster response force, to leveraging the power of the private sector and bringing together the skills already embedded in society, we have a chance to do...

Send us Fan Mail While the world is not going to collapse, the 2020s will continue to be quite spicy, with exogenous shocks happing across political, cultural, economic and familial spheres.  The stoics are famous for encouraging you to consider what is within your influence, the ideas and actions that you can do to improve your life, while accepting that others are beyond your control. You cannot...

Send us Fan Mail We live in a modern, technologically enabled society. The leaps in life-improving scientific achievements in the last few decades alone is substantial. From the advent of general AI access for the public, to autonomous systems, we are indeed in the 4th industrial revolution. Robotics, human-machine interfaces and a host of emerging technologies are poised to revolutionize how we c...

Send us Fan Mail Resilience is the 21st century emergency management (EM) buzzword, every initiative is grounded in the theory, flavoured for the desired outcomes, but linked to the overall concept of a capability and capacity to navigate through and emerge from an exogenous shock leveraging only internal resources. A generalist definition, but one that retains all the elements of a series of theo...

Send us Fan Mail Many of us have reflected after a significant unforeseen event, when we've done what we could in the moment, with the resources at hand, and wondered what we might have done to be better prepared for such an event. Whether it be an economic, political, natural, cultural or familial disaster, emergency or manifestly uncomfortable moment, we're often left with reflective t...

Send us Fan Mail To quote Brock Long, a former head of FEMA, "a culture of preparedness in society" is one of the necessary legs of a chair that supports our modern and technologically enabled society. We've written and argued at length that our society is enabled and supported by the 10 sectors of critical infrastructure (CI), Director Long's commentary speaks to the human sup...

Send us Fan Mail Today, we've lost the art of intellectual debate, in the pursuit of convincing others they are wrong. In the words of Neil DeGrasse-Tyson, we used to accept that everyone could have a different opinion or view, we were never concerned with pointing out their shortcomings or proving ourselves right and them wrong, we simply existed knowing that others had opposing views and th...

Send us Fan Mail Your local emergency management office is under an unmanageable regulatory burden. In Canada, this is becoming more prevalent. Within EM, governments in Western and Central Canada have appointed political staffers to key positions within EM to drive an agenda for change.  The first iteration is when the key municipal leadership is of a different political stripe than the premier....

Send us Fan Mail The world is a complex place, any number of interwoven dependent events occur daily, many with little impact on the human experience, some with devastating effects. Hazards exist and are realized largely, but not completely, due to events beyond the control of humanity. We do not cause hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, storm surges and floods. We do contribute to the n...

Send us Fan Mail At its foundation, the collective modern human system includes four principle spheres: public (government), civil (population), not for profit (community) and private (corporations). Each are inter-dependent to some degree and all are necessary to sustain the human ecosystem. When considering any policy endeavour, good administration requires the inclusion of all spheres. The inte...

Send us Fan Mail Jasper was devastating for those who lost everything, either homes, business, income or all of the above. We hope they'll recover, knowing the next two years will be difficult and challenging at the best of times. For everyone else, do we choose to take this opportunity to learn, to reflect on the losses in Jasper and how our families would fair, would you be ready, have a pl...

Send us Fan Mail There is a limit, irrespective of the evens occurring, where the state capacity is breached and no assistance is possible. That occurs at a different point for various services, but all have their capacity limit. The state is hesitant to delineate this point, communicate it to the residents and advise them as to when they'll be without services.  Preparedness is the totality...

Send us Fan Mail Whether you work at the unskilled level near minimum wage, are within the gig economy on endless contracts, or you are skilled an demanding remote work, you are in a position to have negative impacts on your income in the coming year. Whether or note a formal recession is declared, there will be some significant imbalances in the workplace, choices that impact your income and that...

Send us Fan Mail The fiscal cliff or abyss is not that far off, measured in years to a decade depending on your source, or political lens. Most economists, save those who support modern money theory (MMT), understand that perpetual deficit financing does have a life cycle, an end point where the interest on the debt will exceed the ability of the government to raise additional funds to cover it. W...

Send us Fan Mail For decades, 1990-2020, we enjoyed a period of globalism, an opportunity for individuals and nations to pursue whatever strategy best suited the times and the vision of their citizens. In reality, this was the closing period of globalism, a phenomenon made possible by the Cold War and protected by the vast military industrial complex of the US. The dividend to the western allied g...

Send us Fan Mail Recovery is the poor cousin of emergency management, the ignored friend at the party. They own no lights and sirens, begin to speak when the cameras are gone and are provided with little to offer the stricken public. Those dependant on government assistance to navigate significant disruptions will be prescribed a long and painful experience, loaded with bureaucracy and less than e...

Send us Fan Mail Jasper is but the latest example of the destruction caused by the intersection of a range of human decisions. We build in nature's backyard when fires are an essential part of the ecosystem. We hack the biodiversity of forests to achieve higher yields of profitable species, defeating nature's defence systems agains disease, rot and regulating healthy ecosystems. We choos...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to election chaos, another day in the interesting and if not amusing world of politics, watching the characters cleverly bend themselves and their message to remain relevant. Whether we're speaking of the change in US Presidential candidates, or the crevices in the European experiment, this week has been very popcorn worthy. We don't vote for preparedness, so the...

Send us Fan Mail The failure of Microsoft Windows IT based systems as a result of a third part software update from Cloudstrike serves as a telling tale of preparedness. Who has been affected, to what degree and how is their recovery planning rolling out? Preparedness is the set of cognitive decisions and physical actions undertaken in times of peace that facilitate navigating chaos. We live in a...

Send us Fan Mail To define a prepper we need a set of measurable variables, ones that should be grounded in evidence, or at the least be attributable to a known theoretical framework. The later is our pathway to the definition. Our research has led us away from personal and subjective announcements to an evolving framework. We begin with the fact that we live in a technologically enabled, intercon...

Send us Fan Mail Traditional preparedness encompasses navigating incidents related to natural events, be that storms, earthquakes, floods or other natural hazards. This is the initial 20% of preparedness, once we consider economic, political, cultural and familial events, we discuss the next 80%. Economic pressures include high inflation, interest rates, rents, unemployment and a host of influence...

Send us Fan Mail Season ten was our focus on practical preparedness, translating ideas, theories and concepts to physical and cognitive actions that will enable you to rock an credible life, while insulated from exogenous shock. From community preparedness, to designing a simple life, to navigating political chaos, preparedness creates the conditions for you and your family to pursue your dreams,...