Your Disaster Drill Just Made You Less Safe

I've heard it hundreds of times. A school administrator, a business owner, a healthcare facility director looks me in the eye and says, "Patrick, we run disaster drills all the time. We're good." So I ask them to walk me through it. The alarm goes off. Everyone gets up. They go outside. They call roll. Everyone's there. They go back in. Done.

That's not a disaster drill. That's what I call a Shakespearean drill. Every line scripted. Every move choreographed. Enter stage left. Say your part. Exit stage right. Draw curtain. And when it's over, everyone congratulates themselves on a job perfectly done. That's exactly the problem.

If It Ran Perfectly, You Did It Wrong

I worked with a facility once that handed me a post-drill evaluation sheet. In the "what went well" column, someone had written: "Everything was done perfectly." I've never forgotten that. I've never heard anyone with that much confidence in a disaster drill — and I've never been more certain that a drill had completely failed. Because there is no drill on earth that should ever run perfectly. If it runs perfectly, you set the bar so low that you can't possibly learn anything from it.

I've run drills with experienced EMTs, hazmat teams, and healthcare workers — people who do this for a living. Something always goes wrong. That's not a failure of the drill. That's the drill working. The mess is the point. It's where the learning lives. The military understands this better than almost any other institution. When you're coordinating a real operation with real objectives and real human beings, things go sideways. The more people involved, the more guaranteed it is that something breaks. That's reality. And your drill needs to reflect reality.

The Eisenhower Problem

Here's a story that should make every school administrator and emergency manager uncomfortable. When FDR appointed Dwight Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War II, Eisenhower had never heard a shot fired in anger in his entire life. He was brilliant, organized, and completely untested in actual combat. FDR knew D-Day was coming — a massive amphibious invasion into Nazi-occupied Europe — and he knew they couldn't go in with troops who had only trained against phantom soldiers on American beaches.

So he made a controversial call. Instead of waiting for D-Day, he sent Allied forces into North Africa first — against Vichy French troops who were Nazi collaborators but not elite fighters. It was supposed to be a practice run. It was a disaster. The Higgins boats didn't open from the front — soldiers had to jump over the sides and wade through chest-deep water. Tanks rolled off the boats and fried in the heat. The Battle of Kasserine Pass was one of the worst American military performances of the war.

But then something important happened. They fixed it. They redesigned the Higgins boats so troops exited from the front. They solved the tank overheating problem. The soldiers who landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day weren't green. They had been punched in the face. They had made their mistakes somewhere else. That's why D-Day worked. That's why Eisenhower became one of the greatest military commanders in history — not despite the North Africa disaster, but because of it.

Mike Tyson said it best: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Your Shakespearean drill is shadow boxing. It's hitting the heavy bag. It's the home run derby where the pitcher throws 70 miles an hour right down the middle because the whole point is for you to hit it. Of course you score 500 points when there's no opposing team. That's not preparation. That's theater.

What a Real Drill Actually Looks Like

If you run a school, your drill needs a teacher who can't walk. It needs children who refuse to leave the classroom — because that happens, and if you're an administrator telling yourself it doesn't, I'm telling you right now that's not true. It needs parents showing up to grab their kids without telling anyone, because that happens so often it's practically a cliche in disaster management circles. It needs someone on the ground. It needs chaos, because chaos is what disasters actually deliver.

I worked with a nursing home in Pennsylvania where the first year we ran a full, realistic drill. We learned a ton. Fixed real problems. The second year, the administrator asked me to do it at half the intensity because the staff found it traumatizing. The third year, an eighth. I finally asked: why did you hire me? A drill that doesn't challenge anyone doesn't prepare anyone. That's not kindness. That's negligence dressed up as sensitivity.

Now, I want to be clear about something — because I know the pushback. "Patrick, we can't traumatize people." I hear that constantly, especially from schools and healthcare. And I take it seriously. Right now, I'm actually working with two scholars from two different universities to develop and test what we're calling a trauma-informed disaster drill — a framework for running realistic drills with communities that have experienced actual disasters, with the psychological triggers built into the design rather than ignored. It can be done. The trauma argument is not an excuse to run nothing. It's a design challenge.

And I want to be equally clear about mass shooter drills — that's a different calculus entirely, and I don't take it lightly. I've run them for charter schools and healthcare facilities. We never use fake gunshots, we never simulate active fire, and we build in significant psychological support before and after. But natural disaster drills, technological disaster drills, chemical lockdown drills — there is no good reason to run those at a Shakespearean level. None.

Stop Scoring 500 Points Against Nobody

I was recently at a school in Laguna Niguel — a beautiful area, well-resourced, well-intentioned administrators — and they ran a drill that taught everyone nothing. I told them directly: you are less prepared now than you were 30 minutes ago. Because now you have a false sense of security. A Shakespearean drill doesn't just waste time. It actively makes you less safe by convincing you that you're ready when you're not.

The drill you need is the one you don't know. The one that breaks something. The one where someone ends up on the ground and you have to figure out what to do. The one where the teacher isn't there and a student has to step up. That drill — the uncomfortable, imperfect, messy one — is the drill that saves lives when the real thing hits.

I go deep on this in a recent podcast episode — including what effective drills actually look like for schools, businesses, and faith-based organizations. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/K4k90rBY0nE

Stop running Shakespeare. Start sparring. Your community is counting on you to get this right.