Who is Patrick?
Let me tell you a little bit about how I got here.
My formal journey into disaster management began as a volunteer with Team Rubicon in 2012. But the truth is that I committed to a career in helping people and organizations prepare for crises not long after September 11, 2001. And I have never looked back.
Today, I am a disaster preparedness consultant supporting clients as the Director of Preparedness with BAM Weather, where I support organizations that are readying themselves for severe weather incidents. I am also an entrepreneur and co-founder of The CP Journal, where I develop training courses for public safety professionals and organizational leaders. I co-authored the book Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps’ Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life. I have served as an emergency manager in Boulder, CO, and as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps.
I’m always interested in learning through conversations with others in the field, and I love it when people reach out to chat about disaster preparedness. If that is you, simply reply to one of my newsletter emails or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Outside of work, I am incredibly passionate about my family, cooking, and playing hockey.
Now, to what I write.
How do you prepare for an uncertain future?
This has taken me a few years to answer for myself, but it came from acknowledging that the nature of emergency management and homeland security has changed. It is a shift that began after September 11, reached a tipping point in the years that followed, and then changed irrevocably at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, the demands on every professional responsible for protecting people, their organizations, and their communities are evolving and expanding. Today, professionals have to prepare for an uncertain future without knowing exactly what that future holds. Today, we have to learn and develop the capabilities required for that evolving future.
There is no single path to preparing, though, which makes it really hard to chart your way forward. The skills needed to succeed tomorrow might not even be known today. But that doesn't mean that we can wait until we have complete clarity to position ourselves for success either, as that complete clarity might never come.
Paths to Preparedness is populated with some of the lessons I’ve seen throughout my career working with clients and partners in the public and private sectors to prepare for an uncertain future. They are things I’ve learned or read and things that I have put into practice in my own life. They all coalesce into a set of paths that are options for professionals to consider when deciding what their next preparedness steps should be.
Why Subscribe?
In the newsletter, you will find me writing about what it takes for people and organizations to get left of bang. There are two ways that I discuss this on the site:
1. The first is how to use behavior recognition to identify threats proactively and prevent violent events from ever happening. This was the topic of my book, it has its own set of free articles on the site, and there is a series of behavior-focused exercises and exclusive content for paid subscribers in the Academy.
2. The second is how people and organizations can use their time before a disaster occurs to ready and prepare themselves. This will be the topic of my next book, and it also has its own set of free articles as well as a growing list of content for paid subscribers in the Academy.
