The best books to expand your thinking on disaster risk management

This book isn’t standard in any disaster risk management curriculum, but it should be.

Risk communication is perhaps the most challenging part of what we do as disaster risk managers, and this book offers several unique gems. This book was written for advertisers, but we have to remember that risk communication is, at its core, a ‘marketing’ effort focused on influencing human behavior.

This book explains how people process the information they receive in unexpected ways and provides several methods (and tricks) that risk communication professionals can use to make their risk communication more effective.

The ‘zombie apocalypse’ scenario has been used for years by risk management professionals to make the examination of possible societal breakdowns more fun and/or interesting.

By focusing on a hazard people know, like hurricanes or wildfires, audiences come to the discussion with pre-existing biases and, in many cases, first-hand experience. This forces the communicator to counter such bias before getting to key messages.

There’s never been an actual zombie apocalypse (nor is there likely to ever be one…), which means the zombie scenario adequately ‘levels the field’. It forces audiences to think beyond their go-to assumptions and introduces levels of uncertainty and unknown that are typical of major disasters.

This book, written without obvious heroes and heroines, in a documentary style, makes a perfect proxy for a disaster exercise scenario. I also believe it does a great job illustrating how different forms of governance result in different response strategies, which is something we saw play out in stark fashion during the COVID pandemic. 

When it comes to conversation starters about disaster risk management, there’s no better book than this one to do that.

We’ve all felt like a Cassandra at times, imploring people to see the obvious disaster to come - only to be ignored.

And even when that disaster as predicted materializes, we are rarely credited for having successfully seen what others could not so easily imagine. That said, for every accurate prediction, there are dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of predictions that prove false.

As risk managers, our job is to reduce uncertainty by predicting the future as accurately as possible. So how do we sift through the chatter and find the most accurate warnings?

This book, written by former national security experts, offers an interesting methodology that can help us do that.  

This is the obvious recommendation, but a ‘must read’ nonetheless. 

Whereas Cialdini’s text focuses on our response to messaging (on risk or otherwise), Ripley’s book focuses on our response to the incident itself (…and so where the former leaves off, the latter picks up).

The Unthinkable gives readers a deep look into our own psyche to prepare us for how we are likely to response when faced with physical or mortal danger. Nobody knows exactly how they will respond in a high-hazard incident because so many instinctual processes take over.

But as Ripley so effectively explains, it is possible to know what these phenomena look like so that when we are experiencing them we can adjust accordingly to be more effective responders.

Amanda Ripley’s approachable journalistic style effectively turns a collection of meaningful risk management messages into a hard-to-put-down page-turner. 

This is an older text, but a good one nonetheless.

Normal Accidents highlights the complexity behind major disasters. In the hours, days, and even years leading up to any major incident, there are often multiple opportunities to reduce the negative impacts or even avoid them altogether.

Focusing on technological hazards, Perrow highlights the fact that major incidents are rarely the result of a single point of failure. As risk managers, we need to understand the compounding nature of risk, and this book brings that lesson to life.