How To Prevent a Catastrophe? 3: Conduct Area Studies.

(excerpt from It Doesn’t Just Happen: The Gift of Failure)

THREE

Conduct Area Studies

In Special Forces, prior to deploying to an Area of Operations, we conducted an Area Study of that location. You must conduct an Area Study of your Catastrophe Area of Operations (AO). Your home, your work, and any other locales where you spend a significant amount of time. When taking a trip, you should conduct a travel area study, examining the route you will take, your destination, and your route back.

There are so many cases where a thoughtful Area Study followed up by the appropriate preparations would have saved lives and avoided catastrophe. Prevention is more efficient than avoidance. Preparation is so much better than reacting.

Custer certainly would have benefited from an area study. At the very least, a better reconnaissance would have shown him what he was really up against.

The Donner Party put their lives on the line because of the words of a man who had not done an area study, but wrote as if he had.

Think about it. You live in a tsunami zone. Have you actually driven your evacuation route? How long does it take? Have you figured out the quickest escape route on foot, when an accident caused by terrified people blocks the road or everyone in your neighborhood fleeing on the same route creates a traffic jam? You work on the 90th floor of a skyscraper. Do you ever look around and ask yourself: how do I get out of here if the normal means of egress are blocked?

How close are you to the nearest military base? Nearest police station? Firehouse? Hospital? Even in day-to-day living, do you know where the closest emergency room is? How long it will take to get there? How quickly can an ambulance respond to your location?

You want to examine your environment for a lot of things. What can harm you? What can help you? What can hide you? What are your enabling factors? What are your disabling factors? What effect does your environment have on you? What effect will you have on it? In essence, an Area Study requires you to invest the time and energy on research.

For an A-Team, we conducted the Area Study in Isolation where we were locked up 24/7 in a secure compound. We’d bring in area experts (CIA agents, State Department personnel, people who’d traveled there, locals, academics, etc.) to tell us about the environment we were heading into. This is a technique I recommend for businesses under my Who Dares Wins program.