The best way of avoiding trouble is to be somewhere else. Simple, isn´t it? Yet it is considered one of the highest skills, and has been ever since the oldest classic of strategy, Sunzi´s The Art of War, 2300 years ago.
There are three levels when it comes to threats or incidents: Before, During, and After. We are going to look at the basics of these over a series of several installments applied to NGO security here on Small Change Blog. Each one carries its own things to listen for, to learn to feel, and different ways of seeing your situation.
Before is everything you can do before the incident that will affect if it happens or how it happens. During is during the incident itself, and After is how you deal with the situation afterwards. After builds the foundation for dealing with next Before.
Before covers all the resources you have or can learn that you use before an incident. They can be strategic, such as knowing the ground, the location, the country, local actors and faces, languages, culture, habits, having good Acceptance skills, mapping the city, reading staff, training drivers, doing good crisis management plans and training, etc. They can be tactical: practical skills in scanning your environment, reading it, moving, using counter-surveillance, how to talk to people and how to talk yourself out of situations, use self-defense techniques, run, etc. An interesting part of Before is State Management, where you learn how to manage your physical, mental and emotional reactions. These will greatly affect your way of dealing with a situation and how you maintain good health afterwards.
See, listen, and plan. If you can, don´t be there. Learn to listen to your instincts – if a place feels wrong, or a person feels wrong, they are. Does something feel out of place? Has something odd happened, recently, something that feels out of the pattern of things? If it feels wrong, it IS wrong.
Doing the right things Before can mean that During never happens. At the very least it will mitigate what happens and how it happens. Being smart ahead of the event can make it simply go away, saving your life and other people´s lives. Another word for parts of the skillset in Before is protective intelligence.
And KISS – keep it simple, stupid. Often looking at things in small ways Before saves time, energy and money that being careless will cost you or someone else. Keep things simple. In the beginning, they usually are.
Information security has become another very important aspect of Before. Both the old and tested version of word-by-mouth, of course, but today Web 2.0 plays a huge part. Be careful what you say to whom – but what do you (or your staff) write on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter? The good message your organisation has is important, and most things we can talk about, but if you are involved in a program or in a hostile area you never know who is checking. Quoting ICRC Deputy Security Delegate Melker Mabeck from the NGO Security Conference in 2010: ”We get a lot of feedback from local stakeholders that say ”we are checking out what you are doing on other places of the globe that are within our sphere of interest, and we are checking to see if you really stand for what you say you do”.” Even more so now with the recent changes in Facebook settings that hand out more of your personal information to third parties unless you change it yourself in your Profile. What you or other people in your organization say or write will have an impact on how your NGO is perceived both locally and globally. It might mean a lot for how well your work goes, and it might mean a lot for how any aid work in that region will go in the future.
Think about your surroundings. Where are you going to be? It´s useful for you to carry two or three small items for first aid. Have you planned for how to avoid a kidnappning? Memorize one contact number so you know it by heart in case you lose your cell phone. The number might be to your boss, or a co-worker you know has your back, or to the security focal point, or someone who is all three, but it has to be to someone who will move and move now.
Acceptance is an important part of Before. Your skills in Acceptance covers how you plan Acceptance ahead of time. What techniques will make clear what your Acceptance is with the people where you work? How do you use this planning to spread it on the Web and in your information about the NGO? How can you use the Acceptance to be clear about the help you are giving on the ground? Do you know the techniques for how you use Web 2.0 to increase your Acceptance? How do you create Acceptance with local stakeholders? Is there anyone you don´t want Acceptance with? All this and much more is the facet of Acceptance in Before. Doing this well can have a huge positive effect on both your work, your NGO, and how well you can help other people in the future.
Good skills in Before will increase your security and safety a lot. It will have a positive effect on your work and it might save other the lives of other people too. Good skills in Before will grow to affect the security of staff and volonteers from other NGO´s in the area, both now and further down the line.
The best way of avoiding trouble is to be somewhere else. If you learn the skills of Before, the incident might never happen. Your life will be full of incidents and problems that you never have to experience, because your resources and skills in Before dissolve them.
What will you do Before?
Daniel Skyle © 2010
Suggested reading:
About the Protective Intelligence part of Before: one easy introductory guide is STRATFOR´s new How to Look for Trouble. It´s a short book with very good information.
Another useful read on Before is The Gift of Fear – survival signals that protect us from violence, by Gavin De Becker.
Some advice is covered in GPR 8 Revised, but the two books above are actually better in this particular facet of NGO Security.
At Small Change we teach the techniques and principles mentioned in this article, and adapt it for the client and the tasks that they have.
