Welcome back to Sunday Story. We’re incredibly excited to be travelling to Seattle today to take part in the Northwest Association of College and University Housing Officers Annual Conference, where we’ll reconnect with friends and professionals who are dedicated to creating exceptional communities of student housing. And an exceptional community is one that is resilient, supportive, and disruption-resistant!
Let’s start this Sunday Story with my first day in university residence, over 20 years ago. My dad couldn’t take time off work, so my mom and I hitched a ride down the highway to the TransCanada. From there, we took a Greyhound to the nearest city and caught a flight to southern Ontario for my studies. We lived in far northern Ontario - a 27 hour drive away from my University - and I was one of the few students who was from so far away. That meant I showed up a lot differently than my new peers in College. They arrived with Mom, Dad, little sister or brother, and the back of the minivan chock-full of the things they needed to settle into their college experience - the clothes, a fridge, plants, decorations for the room, containers and bins, and more. The volume of stuff meant that the University enlisted over a thousand volunteers to help scoop all these essential bits and pieces from the minivan to the room, otherwise moving in would take weeks.
I showed up in a taxi, sitting next to my mom. She had a purse. I had a backpack. And that’s it.
It wasn’t the first or last time in my life where my experience was not the same as my peers, but it was an early recognition that folks have different ideas of what defines a “need”.
And that is the most important question a leader can ask when preparing for disruption: What do you need to lead?
What do you really need to lead?
Pause reading for a moment, grab a scratch pad or open a note on your device and make a list. What do you need? We’ll wait.
Still waiting, seriously - do it: What do you need to lead?
Done? Great. Some people jump right into it and in no time, they have a robust list, and maybe you do too. Lots of people have a list of things at this point, and they need their phone, their charger, their laptop, their car keys, their office keys, their coffee cup, their….
Slow down—do you need those to lead, or just to do your job? Even if your job involves leadership, the tools you use for work aren’t the same as what you need to lead. Leadership isn’t just a job—it’s a way of thinking, deciding, and acting despite incomplete information. It’s about inspiring others to follow a meaningful direction.
So let’s try that again - what do you need to lead? As a leader, you must assess information, evaluate the best course of action, and monitor your team’s well-being to address any issues. For that you need a few things: you need to be calm. You need to be able to focus. You need to be able to maintain personal relationships in a good way which means maintaining your ability to act on your emotional intelligence. If you spend time reflecting on this question of “What do you need to lead?” as we’ve framed it here, you may find you get a list that doesn’t have a single “thing” on it but instead is full of capabilities that you require as a human being.
Now that you’ve identified your list of capabilities, it’s time to answer the next question: What do you really need to maintain those capabilities? No doubt this list looks a lot different than your first list. You need to make sure you stay healthy - hydrated and blood sugar regulated. You need to make sure you’re not too cold or too hot or too dirty or too tired. Leadership is a cerebral process turned into action - it’s thinking (or sometimes, intuiting) and acting on those thoughts - and therefore you need to make sure that your biological machine is in good working order so it can act and support your brain’s ability to figure stuff out. What you need for this is decidedly not your briefcase or favourite pair of shoes. Your body isn’t going to stop working without them.
Humans don’t need a lot to maintain a solid, functioning ability to think and act, and that was a thing that was made abundantly clear when I arrived at the University of Guelph in the back of a cab with my backpack at barely 18 years old. When I was 19, I left University and travelled through Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and the USA with a backpack. Just last year, my wife, son and I travelled through Ireland for two weeks, and all we had was one bag (each, to be fair). In every case, my backpack had the same sorts of things - a bit of food, water, clothing, and small utility items like a cell phone.
This connects back to last week’s topic - Cognitive Bandwidth. If you don’t have the necessities with you, some amount of your cognitive bandwidth is going to have to be focused on solving that problem - where to go for food, water, and sleep can be really, difficult in a disruption, as the normal way of achieving those things is gone. But with a bit of preparation, you can ensure that you have a way of achieving these things despite the disruption, which frees up your cognitive bandwidth for your leadership.
To know what you need to lead, you need to start with what you need to be a healthy human, because that has to be the foundation of your leadership actions if you want to lead sustainably. You cannot keep others warm by setting yourself on fire. Fortunately, there is a survival maxim that can guide you on what you as a human truly needs, without a Gucci or Florsheim in sight, and it’s called “The Rule of Threes”.
The Rule of Threes
The rule of threes is incredibly simple yet powerful, and divides human needs into an easily memorable maxim:
- You can survive for 3 minutes without air.
- You can survive 3 hours without shelter.
- You can survive for 3 days without water.
- You can survive for 3 weeks without food.
- You can survive for 3 months without community.
This maxim not only tells you exactly what you need, but it also tells you the order to prioritize it. Next week, we’ll be talking about how the Rule of Threes can guide you on what items or belongings you’ll want to ensure you have handy in a disruption, because these items will allow your human machine to function well so you can focus on leadership. In the meantime though, you can think about this Rule of Threes for your specific context, because it is always contextual. If you are the leader of an underwater archeological team, your approach to the first bullet will be a lot different than if you are leading a team in an office of a major city - the first leader may need literal backup oxygen, the second, maybe a mask to deal with smoke, smog, a virus, or dust.
The Bag of Tricks
Of course, having every single tool or resource in the world is not helpful if you cannot access it, and that’s where the humble backpack comes back into focus. Your situation will determine what’s best, but every leader should ask: 1) How will I ensure I have what I need in a disruption? 2) How will I transport it if I need to move? I believe the best answer to both questions is a backpack, but that doesn’t have to be your answer.
For example, maybe cash is tight for you, and so you decide to use your everyday bag as your leadership prep bag - add a few essentials according to the Rule of Three alongside your gym gear or your lunch bag or whatever it is you normally do. Or maybe you’ve got the means to duplicate your resources in all the places you usually are - there’s nothing wrong with having a bag of essentials in your car, in your office, and at your house.
In either scenario - making it part of what you have every day or keeping duplicates in key places - you will be covered for 99% of the places you’ll be, and let’s face it, you don’t need to live your life expecting the bombs to drop at any moment - you don’t need to always have your leadership prep kit with you, because disruptions aren’t happening all the time. Disruptions, by their nature, are unpredictable. The point is not to turn you into a doomsday prepper with a bunker full of beans, bullets, and Band-Aids. The goal is to give you a few simple, basic resources handy just in case, and ensuring you’ve got some essentials in the places you usually frequent,. By doing this you increase the odds of having the stuff that you need when disruption hits.
As mentioned, I’m a dedicated one-bagger. I never check a bag when I travel, and always rely on carry on, and I’ve done it this way for as long as I’ve been travelling. That means I’ve got nearly 25 years experience now travelling out of a single bag, and because of that, I’m likely more comfortable with less than you might be if this is your first time thinking about this, but the rest of this series will help you wrap your head around it. The exact same bag that I use to travel Ireland for 2 weeks (and longer, because if you can go for 2 weeks you can go indefinitely) is the one I carry to work every single day. I replicate the bulky stuff - I’ve got a change of clothes in my office and my car, which has proven very handy when I’ve spilled my coffee or ripped my pants - but the essentials are always in my bag, and my bag is always with me, and that means I’m always equipped with what I need.
So, let’s talk about your bag of tricks.
What bag?
It doesn’t really matter - I’m a big fan of the backpack, because it’s universally easy to carry. But, some folks may have a professional image they need to maintain and the backpack may be contrary to that - that’s fine. Use a roller case or a nice gym bag instead. The actual bag doesn’t matter, but we will give you two things to consider:
Size:
You do not need a big bag. This is the reason we are telling you to pick your bag before you pick your stuff. Whatever size you pick, you will fill it, and then it will be heavy and hard to move, plus you’ll have to have awkward conversations with everyone when they ask you why you have an 80-litre hiking pack in the corner of your office despite no plans to take 3 months to hike the Appalachian Trail. Choose a back that is 30 litres in volume, and not much more than that.
A bag this size has lots of benefits - first, it won’t get too heavy. Second, it won’t take up a ton of space wherever you want to keep it - the emergency bag isn’t very useful if you take it out and leave it in the garage because you need to squeeze in the golf clubs. It will fit on an airplane, bus, or other type of transportation without having to be out of your direct control, and in normal everyday life, a bag of this size doesn’t draw any attention or look out of place.
Brand:
This doesn’t matter, but if you are looking to other sources to build an emergency kit, the first recommendation you will likely see is “check out military surplus”. We don’t care if you go with a Gucci, a Fjallraven, or a Samsonite - but don’t go with military stuff. Propaganda is an incredibly powerful tool, and every single one of us has been inundated with the idea that a soldier is prepared and equipped for whatever happens, and that because we spend billions on our military industrial complex, their equipment is high quality, robustly tested, and the best tool for the job at hand.
Except, the equipment is built by the lowest bidder, and the context of a soldier in the battlefield is not at all the same as the context of the average leader in society, even when disruption hits.
But because of that propaganda, anyone seeing your bag is going to assume it’s got good stuff in it. This increases your chances that your bag is going to get stolen, especially in a disruption where most people, candidly, will not be prepared. Remember, you cannot keep other people warm by setting yourself on fire, and if your core leadership prep kit gets stolen by someone else, that’s like them lighting a match to you without your consent. Your goal with this bag is to blend in and look just like an average commuter, businessperson, or whatever industry you are in, not stand out as a John Rambo wannabe.
Conclusion
Next week, we’re going to go into more detail about what you might want to put in your bag by expanding on the Rule of Threes. This week, if you are following along at home, feel free to go bag shopping. Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure - and your leadership prep kit is that ounce of prevention.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday!
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