This is my first time writing to The Professional Citizen Project audience, so I want to start the right way. I am here because contingency planning is one of the few skills that carries over into everything else. It reduces stress, reduces wasted effort, and it gives the people around you a better shot at doing the right thing when the day does not go as planned.

My name is Sam. I am a former Naval Flight Officer. I went to the Naval Academy for undergrad and I flew on the E-6B TACAMO platform. The job was airborne command, control, and communications in support of strategic deterrence. I served as a mission commander, airborne communications officer, and combat systems officer, executing dozens of nuclear deterrence missions.

The work was planning heavy from start to finish. We built mission plans, built PACE communications plans, briefed the crew, executed, and adjusted in flight while coordinating with teams that were not co-located. I finished my time in the squadron as the lead instructor and then moved to the program office where I advised engineers on the mission. I started MAD Gear because I kept seeing the same gap over and over again in the civilian world. People worry a lot, but they do not have a plan.

It is not that people lack intelligence, but rather that planning comes with friction. It feels like homework and it is easy to push it into next week. That works until a bad day shows up and you realize most of what you thought you had was just intent.
The moment that snapped this into focus for me was not fantastical. It was a seemingly mundane event that showed up at exactly the wrong time.

In 2024, AT&T had a major outage. I was gearing up to leave for deployment. I was standing in the base gym during lunch, getting my workout in. My Spotify music stopped, and I realized my phone had no signal. The first thing I did was connect to Wi-Fi to see if anything changed. Wi-Fi worked, cell service did not. Then I started asking other people in the gym if their service was down too. Where we worked, anything that smelled like a cyber-attack got attention fast.

The personal side of it hit immediately. My wife was at home and she was 37 weeks pregnant. She is also a former Naval Flight Officer, so for years our mental safety net was built around the idea that we could coordinate when it mattered. That day, I could not call or text, and if she went into labor, I was getting pulled from deployment. I could not even verify whether she needed me.

Once I was on Wi-Fi, I messaged her on Signal. I figured she was at home on Wi-Fi, and fortunately the message went through. The following week we wrote down the first thing that felt obvious to two comms officers, which was a backup communications plan that did not depend on the cell network behaving. We formalized a simple sequence. Connect to Wi-Fi, try Signal, and if nothing is heard within two hours, shift to a rally plan. We also added a practical option that fit our lives at the time. Call the workplace CDO and see if anything is going on that we need to know about. Realistically, if we ever had to rally, the workplace was the place we would converge. We kept building from there. My daughter was born in early March, and the framework was being finalized around the same time.
That story is meant to highlight a problem that a lot of capable people have. The first time you discover your plan is missing cannot be the same time you need it.

A lot of people treat it like scenario writing, meaning you sit down and try to anticipate every disaster you can think of. That approach usually fails because it feels endless, and it turns planning into a hobby instead of a tool. The way I mean it is more practical. Contingency planning is pre-deciding actions so you are not inventing your response while you are tired, stressed, and missing information.

Pressure does not make people stupid, but it does narrow their bandwidth. Coordination gets harder, communication gets messier, and the person with the most context becomes a choke point. In families, that often looks like one person trying to do all the thinking while everyone else waits for direction. This is where the framework matters. I plan around what I think of as common secondary effects. The initiating events vary, but the downstream problems repeat.

Power loss is the obvious one. The initiating event could be weather, a grid issue, a localized failure, or something broader, but the household impact tends to be similar. Evacuation is another. A fire, a storm, a local hazard, or a family medical emergency can all turn into the same requirement to move people quickly and safely. Communications is another. Networks get overloaded, coverage gets spotty, devices die, and coordination breaks down.

When you plan for the repeating downstream problems, you cover a wide range of events without writing fifty different plans. You also stay anchored in what actually affects people. I see preparedness minded people spend a lot of energy on EMPs while ignoring the things that routinely impact real families, like floods, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms. I understand why people gravitate toward the dramatic edge case, but that is not where most households get hurt.

As an instructor, one of my habits was making sure people were brilliant on the basics. I did not care how fancy someone could get if they still messed up the standard stuff. The same mindset applies here. Get the fundamentals right first, and your coverage improves across the board.

There is another point that matters for this audience, and it is a common failure mode. A plan in one person’s head is not a family plan. Most households have one person who cares a lot about preparedness, and the rest of the house either kind of cares or does not care at all. Even in high-functioning families, the plan often lives inside the head of the person who is most interested in the topic. That is the default outcome when one person becomes the planner and everyone else becomes the audience.

This is why I define execution the way I do. Execution is writing the plan down, iterating it until it is usable, distributing it to the people who need it, and drilling it enough that it becomes familiar. Writing is not the hardest part. Distribution is where most people fall down, and drilling is where the plan becomes real.

Here is the pattern I see all the time. Someone tells me they have a comms plan. They own radios, chargers, and backup power. They know the frequencies and they have the kit organized. The question that matters is whether anyone else can use it without them. If they are not home, can their spouse pull up the plan and know what to do in the first ten minutes. If they are the one injured, can the family still execute without them.
When the answer is no, it is almost always a distribution problem. Expertise was locked in one persons mind, and the household never got a usable product.

Iteration matters because the first version is rarely correct. If you wait for perfect, you will never start. The plan should be built to be reviewed, refined, and updated as new information comes in. Your first draft is supposed to reveal gaps. Drilling matters because familiarity carries you when stress spikes. Drilling does not mean you treat your family like a boot camp class. It means you do small rehearsals so the plan does not feel foreign on the day you actually need it. It also means you take your spouse’s feedback seriously, because they will see problems you do not see.

When the power goes out, the first thing we try to do is figure out why. If cell service is down, we check internet through Starlink running on a battery. We look for headlines and we check Downdetector. From there we narrow it down to local sources so we can decide whether we are dealing with the worst stuff first, or whether it is something innocuous that just needs time. This is our repeatable way to get oriented fast, and it keeps us from spiraling into guesses.

If you do this kind of planning and drilling, the payoff comes quickly. Anxiety goes down because you have already decided a few key things. Family stress goes down because expectations are clearer. Response time improves because you are not debating under pressure. You also stop wasting money on random purchases because you are buying to support a known plan.

If you sat down this weekend to start, I would keep it small. Pick two or three secondary effects that would disrupt your household. For most families, power loss, evacuation, and communications cover a lot. Write a plan for each one in plain language that another adult can follow without you standing over their shoulder. Make sure it is clear what triggers the plan, what the first actions are, who owns what action, and what the first hour is supposed to look like.

Put the plan where people will actually use it. Print it if that fits your household. Put it on phones. Put it where other people can access it without asking you for permission. Then do a small drill. A quick walk-through is more than 99% of people are doing. The only requirement is that the first time your family touches the plan is not during the emergency. If your spouse is skeptical, invite them into the planning process. Ask what would make them feel safer, and ask what they think will break first. People buy in when they feel respected and when the plan fits the reality of their life.

There is also a technology reality that matters. Most of us carry a powerful planning device in our pocket all day, and in most emergencies, you will have your phone even if you do not have cell service. That is one of the reasons I built ReadyPlan.
ReadyPlan is a place to build and iterate emergency plans, then distribute them to the people who need them. Once a plan is synchronized to the device, it does not require cell service to access. You can still pull it up and follow it when networks are down. In practice, coordination and remembering what you already decided is usually the hard part, more than owning the right gear.

Before I close, I want to give you one last thought, since I assume this audience tends to take the topic seriously. Do not let the edge case become the excuse. Start with the high-frequency problems. Get the plan written, shared, and drilled until it feels normal. If you do that, you will be ahead of almost everyone. Thanks for letting me borrow your attention!
Sam

If you want to look at ReadyPlan, the best place is https://madgear.shop/pages/readyplan. You may already be familiar with our framework since this community has had a relationship with our work before. Either way, the intention is the same. Reduce friction so planning gets done, and so it gets shared with the people who depend on you.

One last thing, and you are hearing it here first. The MAD Gear Contingency Planner is coming back, and we are targeting a May launch. When everything else fails, having your plan written down is an excellent backup. You cannot EMP a binder, and there is something else that is easy to forget. Writing things down helps you remember them.
Want to learn more and build a plan you and your family can use? Check out MAD Gear company’s offerings here.

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