I once thought that a disturbed ants nest was a great example of high entropy. It’s not.  Don’t believe me? Go kick a fire ant nest and stand there.  A wave of ants emerges to search and destroy the disruption; another gathers up young and critical supplies; some protect the hierarchy. Almost immediately, workers set to rebuild. Ants recover quickly from disaster — natural or man-made. If you don’t know, entropy is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work. It’s also a measure of disorder — the higher the entropy, the greater the disorder.  In the world of humans, certain problems consistently come to the surface in after action reports: communications; command and control; resource management and coordination. All of these problems raise entropy in major events. In 2005, adoption of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) was mandated by Presidential directive as a solution for these reoccurring problems.  Yet, as 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and 2012’s Hurricane Sandy demonstrated, we still have the same issues and entropy remains high. We’ve added complexity to how we address major events, and personnel continue to be vexed by how to best manage resources and reporting requirements. The NIMS approach raises entropy and takes the focus away from solving actual problems. I think it’s time we admit these recurring problems will be present in events and concentrate pre-planning efforts on keeping entropy as low as possible.  How? We need to simplify planning factors and accept that we cannot address every contingency. Pre-plan, train, and drill at the community level to undertake these immediate efforts:

  • To stabilize the threat, even if these methods are not perfect.
  • To rescue those unable to do so themselves. This includes children, the elderly, and those who are mobility challenged. It does not include able-bodied persons. They can take care of themselves or assist in one of the areas of stabilization, rescue, critical resource management, or restoration.
  • To protect key resources or obtain resources necessary to maintain basic living needs.
  • To re-open impacted community services. Partial opening is better than waiting for full service recovery.

In all pre-planning efforts, crowd-sourcing should be utilized to look for innovative ideas in meeting the above objectives. Ants understand entropy and the need to keep disorder to a minimum.  Rebuilding a nest is pre-planned and works very well because everyone knows their simple assignment.  I have never seen ants with incident command boards, expensive inter-operable communication suites, or a reliance on FEMA to provide grants and guidelines. Planning like an ant colony may sound nutty, but they control entropy and get the job done. Why must humans make everything so hard and complicated?  It’s time to revisit our whole planning process and focus on activities that help keep entropy as low as possible.