Stop First

The culture of heroism demands that in a crisis you act instantly and do not panic. The advice does little for a person who is already panicking; a short procedure that starts with stopping is more useful.

After the Challenger disaster, the physicist Richard Feynman dropped a piece of an O-ring into a glass of iced water at a public hearing and squeezed it. In the cold, the rubber returned to shape slowly. A small demonstration made visible what had been getting lost in official language: at low temperature the material could fail to do its job.

Feynman later wrote about the gap between engineering estimates of risk and managerial rhetoric. In an emergency, stopping is needed for exactly that kind of return to physics: what is happening to the object, the person and the environment — before a confident voice explains why everything ought to work.

Better to have a short procedure.

First stop moving, if movement increases the danger. Then secure your own safety. Look around. Call for help. Do one thing at a time.

In an emergency, people tend to:

• dart between tasks;
• repeat an action that is not working;
• run to the casualty through the dangerous zone;
• try to direct everyone at once;
• fear looking lost.

The last one is particularly absurd. An accident rarely improves in response to a well-composed facial expression.

A useful order:

Stop.

What is the threat right now?

Who is calling for help?

What can I actually do?

What must not be made worse?

Calm does not mean the absence of fear. It means that actions are not chosen by fear alone.

The domestic version of this rule shows up in any leak. Water is dripping from the ceiling, and the first move is a basin, a rag, a call to the neighbours upstairs. The valve gets shut off about ten minutes later, when the rag has finally lost. Three seconds spent on the question “where is the source?” would have cost less than everything that followed, and it is exactly those three seconds that feel like an unaffordable luxury once the water is on the floor.

The unpleasant thing about stopping is that from outside it looks like doing nothing. The person with the rag looks active; the person standing in the middle of the room thinking looks lost. The assessment reverses about an hour later, when it becomes clear which of them shut off the water.