Just Finished Reading: How to Survive a Crisis – Lessons in Resilience and Avoiding Disaster by David Omand (FP: 2023/2024) [315pp] 

Crisis seems to be THE word of the 21st century, be it economic, environmental or political. Crisis is everywhere and those without direct experience of its effects are becoming quite the rarity. But if crisis is becoming more common, which seems to be the case, what can be done about it? This is the question raised, and largely addressed, in this interesting book. Somewhat disappointingly, however, it doesn’t look at things from the street level as I’d hoped. Instead, the author, who REALLY knows his stuff, looks at crisis survival from the level of governments and business leaders which is understandable given his expertise. 

Despite the disappointment I felt on putting the book down I did find many parts of it quite fascinating. Not only did the author range over a huge landscape of crisis after crisis – from nuclear accidents (and near misses), to various wars (Indo-China, Vietnam, the Falklands, Ukraine, Iraq/Afghanistan), Covid-19, Cyber-attacks, depressions and supply chain failures, Brexit, and much else besides – he was actually ‘in the room’ for some of it actually advising the UK government and other agencies about how they should cope with an emergency (to avoid it becoming a crisis), how to clean up afterwards or how to prepare for things ahead of a crisis.  

As you might imagine a lot of this was high-level and theoretical, calling on real-world events where applicable. The author worked through the ‘arc’ of a crisis pointing out break points, areas of opportunity when an emergency could be prevented from becoming a full-blown crisis and most definitely not a disaster! He looked at ways that organisations and states could increase their resilience to weather the initial shock so enabling them to respond to events in a co-ordinated planned manner. He looked at the difference between a slow-burn crisis and one that arrives completely out of the ‘blue’ and how to monitor the slower burning one so it doesn’t end up sneaking up on you. To drive the points home, at the end of each chapter are ‘takeaways’ to enable the building of plans and strategies to cope with, recover from and (hopefully) avoid any crisis coming our way. 

Although this was more interesting than useful this was still worth the effort of reading. The main themes of watching for the often overlooked slow-burn crisis and the building up of resilience (in practical terms as well as psychologically) are important ones that can be applied even down at ‘our’ level at the individual shallow end. If you’re a member of a larger organisation, and most especially if you’re involved in any kind of support role, there are many lessons that can be taken on board here and applied to your profession. One of the things I did find particularly interesting – with several crisis events ongoing – was regarding media use. Seeing/hearing various organisations using the playbook the author mentioned when using various types of media was instructive especially when hearing the same type of language used by very different organisations dealing with apparently very different circumstances. Recommended for a number of reasons.