Mission Branch Threat Response Planner Tool Launch TPS-0098

This is announcement of another web app tool that I built. It's an adaptation of a number of different decision tree type information architecture concepts.

But put simply, it's almost like a trip planner but if you wanna use the tacticool word and say mission, then it works for that.

I don't think mission is at all limited to state sanctioned, organized violence, which is what the military does.

It can apply to being a nonprofit organization and having a mission, but going on a mission and mission planning, how you feel about the word? I think it's useful.

But for this application, the idea is to exercise the antithesis of normalcy bias, it's the essence of expect the best, prepare for the worst.

Have a mindset of situation awareness, where you list out the "what ifs", some people are better at that naturally than others.

In a pathological sense, it's paranoia or neuroses, but maybe that can be applicable as a skill set.

If you're in dangerous territory, and certainly for a lot of my life, I've been in very dangerous territory and encountered all kinds of violence and potential violence, and certainly unsavory characters, very threatening.

When I was on Skid Row not that long ago, and it's kind of been my base of operations for a lot of my life since I was about twelve years old, being on the street and being a street person of sorts in some way, shape or form, houseless person.

If I was charming enough to shack up with a lover then that would keep me out of the alleys, as it were. But I spent a lot of time vehicle dwelling, and just living in the wild as well.

So my experience has been, I gotta find a place to sleep where you can minimize the threat level of the categories of threats that are cops, crazy homeless people, gangs and yuppies, those were my main concerns.

What I was doing in my head was what people call threat modeling, or a threat probability matrix, where you create a table to understand how probable and what the impact scale is of some threatening event.

You would learn that the more catastrophic a potential negative event can be, generally, the less likely it is, the less catastrophic, the more likely...like getting in a car accident, a fender bender is more likely than getting in an accident where you die. So you can map all that out.

My mind has always been racing and without using any formal tools or thought processes for decision making, it was just a fact of life, just a reality of survival.

What threatens me? How probable is it to attack me? Where can it get me, when?

Where am I strong? Where am I weak? What do I need to work on understanding?

Maybe that is gonna determine, I don't go to this place at this time, today, or ever, or maybe I would only do it with someone watching my back.

A lot of people, the with normalcy bias, the tendency is to say tomorrow will probably be a lot like today and not in my backyard, and it'll never happen to me. So we're all on some spectrum.

If you do any kind of work in a team where you are going into threatening scenarios as a team, that's when it really matters more than ever, to take responsibility to have each other's backs.

I've been a lot of those circumstances as well, at times, I've been team captain, at other times, I've been totally aloof and totally useless, even been a liability more than an asset.

But over time, growing up, maturing learning and then having more and more to lose, and priorities changing in life, wanting just to hold on to what I have and the stability that I have established.

Now I require the formal use of tools like decision making trees, and where I'm at now, at the early stages of learning how to build software, to take these concepts and put them into practice in an online worksheet or online tool...

I'm finding it's really difficult to take more abstract processes and concepts and really get them nailed down in code so that they're extensible and flexible and very open ended, but yet are also structured and somewhere in between.

So what I settled on, after doing quite a bit of thinking about what kind of paradigm I wanted to use and the list of different approaches that I wanted to synthesize, to make elegant and simplify, not having it be bound to one sort of classical framework...

What Bruce Lee taught about understanding the concept behind a move in a fight or in a martial art, understand the why and then you can you have more freedom to experiment with the how, once you know the deeper concept behind it.

So to describe the mechanics of this web app tool, I started out with a set number of possible combinations of elements.

First of all, you name your mission, whatever that may be, go to the grocery store and get back alive.

I've done that mission successfully however many times, but whatever the mission is, give it a name, and then conceptually, break up the mission into the simple concept of branches.

A word could be segment, but this is tactical permaculture, so what better analogy to use for breaking up a mission, or segmenting a mission than into the branching sort of framework?

I actually designed the web page, so that it does branch out like a tree, the form fields, so that it is visually conceptually on point. You don't have to imagine the tree branches. They actually appear exactly in that data structure.

So you have up to three branches that you can create, each extending from the previous.

The idea being, if you were to say, just getting from point A to point B to point C, then it makes sense. There's obviously other circumstances where you could have a data structure where there's a trunk that you start at and then branches go off in different directions and whatnot but for the purpose of this, the idea is you wanna get to the end goal which is when there's no more branches, you're at your end goal, even if that end goal is that you arrive back to where you started.

The idea is what could possibly go wrong from point A to point B is gonna be its own list of possibilities.

You learn the concept that maybe there only needs to be one branch that goes from A to B.

But however many possible, threats is the word that I use, the things that could possibly go wrong, that are probable and conceivable, foreseeable, things that can go wrong in a list of threats that exist in that first branch as distinct from the list of things that can go wrong on the second branch and the third branch.

But obviously, again, the goal is to think about what you're planning to do alone or with a group, or whatever, the risks once you get to your point of safety go down significantly.

Then when you leave from that point to go to another point, or continue with another objective, then you have a whole new list of issues that open up.

An analogy is apt for just driving up or down the 110 freeway in Los Angeles, the gang turf that you are going to be eaten alive in depending on your affiliations or not, if you break down and or run out of gas and you go to a place where you're not welcome, this is reality. These are situations that I have endured.

I can't count how many times I've had to use my situational awareness and be sure that I either don't end up where I know I don't belong or have a totally different protocol.

But if you're somebody who has no emergency supplies in your vehicle, no tools in your vehicle, no auto club membership, you let your battery on your phone be at one unit left all the time...you could be in a very vulnerable situation, and it would behoove you to think more in this manner, it's not enough just to be carrying mace or being a black belt or something.

There are so many other factors that are involved in just keeping yourself safe and accomplishing your mission.

In this planning process, you determine if it's possible to break the mission up, if it's necessary to break the mission up into, you have the option of creating three separate branches.

Then within each of those branches, there's room for a list of three potential threats that you might face.

The last thing, as far as the layout of this is that per each potential threat, per branch, you have another field that branches out, which is a field to write a description of what your response plan would be, and so that you're not struck by surprise.

Going back to a basic driving example, what happens if I get a flat, what happens if I run out of gas? What happens if I get in a collision? There are three probable threats that aren't even paranoid zombie apocalypse threats. They're very typical things. So to do this exercise, what would you write out?

Oh, check the inflation, check for the existence of a spare tire and also check that it's inflated.

Now that leaves the implication, if the planning for that response means going out and doing the diagnostic on that spare tire, then, obviously, with the plan to address the threat of being in a fender bender, drive safely, be well rested don't be distracted, don't be using devices, know where you're gonna go, visualize getting there safely. Know ahead of time what lane you need to be in, so you don't do stupid things like try to cut over five lanes at the last minute because you're singing along to the radio or something like that, and you forgot that you needed to be starting to work your way over.

It really helps to pre-visualize and think this stuff through. If you get totaled for whatever reason, do you have health insurance?

Now that I'm driving less often, it makes me hyper alert, makes me wanna not take anything for granted that I used to take for granted when I was driving every day...sadly, it was a lot. For a lot of people, if you drive every day, you're gonna start getting complacent.

So this tool is a way to, no matter what the context is, take the civilian experience and apply within reason as much as possible a military mindset.

I've studied and worked with and learned a lot from my ex military mentors in all kinds of different life situations. I've learned from the people that are squared away from that experience.

If they were exemplary and actually being dutiful in their profession, in uniform, then chances are they picked up some of these skill sets, and they've looked at documents like the military decision making process.

If you ever look at that, it's mind bending. So this is an extrapolation of a very, a very simplified civilian friendly app, you don't need to have gone to a war college to understand it and it may save your life. It may mitigate catastrophe. It's built in a way to where you can export it into a spreadsheet file.

It actually breaks out onto that spreadsheet file in a similar visual format of a tree structure branching out. Eventually it'll be even more high tech.

At least try to come up with a few of the most probable things that can make you have a bad day.