This is both the first blog of 2025 and the first since I took my holiday break to write my second book. I am writing about "good enough" in a small part of the book, but current events make it easy to talk about now. I reject any kind of harm that happens needlessly.
We all saw news about the terror attack in New Orleans. I heard about it as breaking news online, which means I had a 30 seconds "breaking news" with no real information. My immediate thought (based on my years of experience and knowledge), "why weren't the barriers up?" Did I know for a fact they had barriers? No. I know Bourbon Street is a pedestrian street at nights and at other times of the day cars can get through. I've been to NOLA 4x. I assumed with the spate of vehicle-plowing-into-crowd attacks around the holidays since 2016, they would have had barriers.
They did. They had some temporary yellow archer style ones (that they never used) and bollards, which they got in 2017 but haven't been working properly and also weren't used for reasons of "ease" since 2019. The bollards were removed in order to install new ones for the upcoming Super Bowl...not New Year's Eve. Interesting choice. There was also a FBI warning in early December about lone actors driving into crowds this holiday season. Days earlier one such attack happened in Cologne, Germany, at a christmas market.
So what was "good enough" instead? One patrol car. The police chief said they had a plan but the terrorist defeated it.
Nope. Let's digest this (and tie it to business continuity, because that is what I do).
It was a hobby of mine to run races wherever I got stationed to explore the area the military sent me. Did you know Olympia, WA, had buconlic parts? Before I ran a half marathon there, I didn't! I ran 2 races in Massachusetts with the same race director: one was a 7 mile sea coast race (summer 2017), one was the Boston Marathon (April 2018). I didn't know the director was the same - I figured it out while running and verified it later with Google. How? Same safety measures were used: dump trucks park tip to end with each other at points where roads entered the course. There was no way any vehicle was getting through. This was a man who made it his priority to make sure no one was killed in a race he was in charge of, especially after people did die in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing .
A single patrol car wasn't good enough. The terrorist didn't mastermind a complex solution to get around the car (a.k.a. "the plan"), he just swerved around it easily at a high rate of speed. The NOLA police chief said she didn't even know they had the archer style barricades which would have blocked the sidewalk. The bollards were both more aesthetically pleasing and easier to use, anyway. But here's another kicker: the new ones they are installing are made of stainless steel and only rated to stop a vehicle moving at 10mph. Easier is prioritized over what actually works (please read this fascinating article about why they chose the 10pmh bollards). This is not a specific-to-NOPD issue. Similarly in emergency management, towns don't do the very necessary control burns because residents don't like the smell of the smoke. It's easier to not deal with the complaints, so they don't do them...which makes wildfires worse when they happen because of the natural fuel supply. But I digress.
Should it take the horrifying experience of people getting killed by terrorists to do more than "good enough"? Should it take losing your business in an event like Helene to invest in business continuity? Please see "good enough" for what it is: in a lot of cases, it is not.
Good business continuity is about doing more than good enough. Good business continuity is about knowing what resources you have. It's about investing in control measures that both work and achieve your goal (bollards that only stop 10mph vehicles are akin to a generator that only lasts 1 hour but an outage that will ruin your business is a minimum of 4 hours). It's listening to timely warnings. It's realizing the easy way/good enough can be exactly the opposite.
