S05 E06 Lucy Easthope

What happens when the crisis passes but the impact doesn't? And why does telling people to "move on" often cause more harm than the original event? This episode covers these themes and more in conversation with Professor Lucy Easthope, a leading authority on disaster recovery. 

Lucy breaks down the disaster recovery curve, explaining the honeymoon phase, the inevitable slump and why recognising that pattern can be a genuine relief for school leaders who think they're failing. She introduces survivance, a concept rooted in courage and defiance and makes a direct case for why "moving on" is the wrong goal.

The conversation covers burnout, vocational awe, the danger of bad help and how to build preparedness in peacetime. As Lucy puts it: "One of the things that too much hope does is it actually strips us of our own agency." Relevant to anyone leading a school, a trust or any team that’s carrying more than it signed up for.

Let us know what you think of this episode - drop us a message and connect via LinkedIn. 

Transcript

Welcome and a joyful story

Nick MacKenzie 0:07

Welcome to the latest episode of EdInfluence. I'm Nick McKenzie from Browne Jacobson, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Lucy Easthope. Lucy, I'd like to start, as I do, with all my guests by inviting you to share a story from your life that would give me a picture of who you are.

Lucy Easthope 0:25

Oh, thank you very much for having me, Nick. Yeah, it's a very happy day story. It's my wedding day, where I am eloping at New York City Hall, and I'm in the queue. And the tradition in the queue in New York City Hall is that your witnesses are provided from some other people ahead of you in the queue. And in that occasion, the two people ahead of us were Alan Ruck and Mire Enos, both famous actors, and Alan Ruck, particularly known more recently as Cameron in Succession, but I think most famously for our generation as Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And that's my husband's favourite actor. And much of our wedding day is now a blur because they did agree to be our witnesses, and that's all we can remember, really, is watching them very star-struck sign our marriage certificate. And it's a story that I think, you know, a lot of people would expect me to perhaps start with a disaster story or an emergency story, but it's also a story about sliding doors and moments of fate and dys and astros, the words of disaster coming from the Greek for the aligning of bad stars. One thing I want people to always take when they when they they immerse themselves in the field of emergency planning or or disaster management, as I'm in all my time, is that we see the aligning of good stars too. And just that that was a very happy day. And I think you know, some of the one of the almost one of the misconceptions about working in this field is that you're you're perhaps quite joyless. So I wanted to start with a joyous story for you, really.

Lessons from a family of teachers

Nick MacKenzie 2:01

That's a brilliant story. What are the chances of that?

Lucy Easthope 2:05

It's wonderful, isn't it? And it's it's fate, you know, it's those moments, and of course, a lot of the time in my life, people are trying to make sense of terrible, terrible coincidence or terrible kind of I shouldn't have been there at that moment. And it it's the opposite of that. And and I've written about that story, and that's where people I think quite often reach out to me. They they really they take comfort from it, I think.

Nick MacKenzie 2:26

Yeah, well, we might come back to some some themes linked to that, but I also wanted to ask you both like both your parents, I believe, were teachers, and you've written, I think, about your dad in some of your books. But I was I was just wondering what you've learned from your your parents as teachers, and I mean that in every sense of the word.

Why language shapes disaster aftermath

Lucy Easthope 2:49

And it is every sense, isn't it? And I think the fact that they are they are both teachers is hugely important to me in in who I am, and also, you know, one of the greatest joys is educational, particularly for things at the moment, like senior leadership events for head teachers and things. And one of the things that I always start my presentations with is that both of them were teachers, and that that meant that I really get the struggles and the stresses, you know, the fact that there's the idea that the six-week summer holiday is a complete myth. You know, nobody knows that better than the daughter of two teachers. All of that vocational awe and that pressure on them, and you know, the job adverts for teachers always start with, you know, make change somebody's life, make a difference. That incredible pressure on a teacher to not only deliver a curriculum but also be completely inspiring. And that teaching is incredibly hard to do when the life, when, when the world and and when life is in tumult, you know, you with food poverty and bed poverty, uncertainty out the window. And I think children are a little bit like animals in a tsunami. You know, the animals in a tsunami get out of the way, they they know the water's starting to boil and starting to move. And children seem to quite rightly sense when the world is is is sort of in distress. Adults are trying to pretend it's not happening. So for me, education, and that's really important, education is what I'm built on. So I'm not just the daughter of two teachers, I'm the granddaughter and the grandniece and the great niece of all of these matriarchal teachers. And my gran stayed on teaching after she was married in the 30s, which is very unusual. And she's from the first cohort of women to graduate in Latin and Greek. And I think one of the things from Liverpool Uni, and I think one of the things for me is it's not just the place of the school, which is where I feel at home. I love the corridors and the staff rooms and things. It's also the the great privilege that is education, the right to learn. And that is in all of our all of our family gatherings. There's usually an assembly banger round the piano, and then there's there's we're we we probably overdo it. Certainly, I think when you marry into us as a family, it's a lot is that sort of love of oh, that's a that's a certain type of column or cloud or that's a this. There's a lot of education goes on in my family spaces, the passing on of knowledge.

Nick MacKenzie 5:10

Superb. Well, thinking of passing on knowledge, I wanted to pick your brains about thinking about that disaster response. And the disaster recovery curve and your explanation of it, I find fascinating. You deliberately avoid the word recovery, and you use phrases such as survivance, reconstruction, and I I note in in some of your writing you prefer to call yourself a last responder. Why does the language matter so much? And what do you think we're getting wrong when we tell people or organisations to move on or draw a line?

Lucy Easthope 5:49

I've become very passionate about the use of language in in emergency management and emergency response. It's very, it's very thoughtlessly hurtful a lot of the time. And you also end up speaking with two faces, so you end up with a situation where in your workspaces you're talking about recovery, but you perhaps would choose quite rightly not to use that with a with a grieving and distressed community. So one of the things I challenge responders on is their language, and I'm very interested in in the language of response. My academic book, it was my based on my PhD, and it became a monograph called the recovery myth. And this was the idea that the coming back from terrible events is is very thorny and very, very difficult. And over a hundred years or so, disaster sociologists and disaster scientists had developed what was called the disaster recovery graph. And this was the idea that there would be the incubation phase sometimes, so the phase before the incident. Then there would be this big bang of the incident, or perhaps a chronic lead-in to it. And then you'd see, perhaps surprisingly, about an eight-week, twelve-week, or what they called honeymoon period or heroic period where people were pulling together, there was lots of community vigils, it all felt very, very supportive, world attention was on the place or the people. And then that wanes. And again, I think this has been the validation for both writing about, and particularly with the new book Come What May, putting out the disaster recovery graph to other audiences, has been so validating, particularly in the education space, because it depersonalises the struggle. You know, there was always going to be a time after the pandemic, but also I go into a lot of schools who've seen stabbings. I work in the North Kensington area after Grenfell. There's a lot of no-notice and indeed chronic disasters that school colleagues are dealing with, and they found the graph particularly useful to talk about what happens next. But survivance is a lovely word. We often see it in education settings where you come back from events very, very much sometimes there are good days and sometimes there are bad days. But survivance is something that's with courage, defiance, that sort of wonderful kind of slight bit of anarchy that's very important to me, which means you know, I keep a lot of the advice work that I do very independent because sometimes what governments will be looking for is a very neat kind of coalescence around the aftermath. And I'm kind of like, I love a little bit of rebellion, you know, holding a separate vigil or doing something different. And actually, what we find often in emergency situations is that tone, that that necessary helpful rebellion is set by both school children and school leaders, you know, with something like the terrible events in Southport, it was this it was the school children that sort of sent a very clear message about what they wanted to happen next, and often via their teachers and head teachers. And so it's a really important thing to understand the amount of agency that that you may have, not always, but hopefully. And survivance does that as a brilliant word.

Nick MacKenzie 8:54

Using the the graph, how and particularly the you talked about the honeymoon phase and then the slump. How do you work with organizations who think they're perhaps further on than they actually are in that?

The long slump after big events

Lucy Easthope 9:08

Yeah, I always remember doing a big GP's conference, and and one of the one of the sort of questions, hands went up, and somebody said, Oh, it's great that we're out of the slump now. And this was 2022, you know, and you're like, yeah, no, we're nowhere near that, you know. And I think one of the things about a chronic aftermath like the pandemic, and indeed the measures that we used to control the pandemic, like things like school lockdown, it really distresses people when you say probably the longitudinal chronic slump from something like that much of a world-changing event, is about 30 years. And you know, if I say that in a room full of educators, it is a real moment. And and you know, even now, whatever setting I'm in, and it can be a medical or or educational or or oil and gas, whatever event I'm at, people can give you the effects that they're still seeing. They will continue to do that for a long time. And it's also a little bit, I think it's a little bit like a sort of tide mark or a pattern. So I was with at a universities event earlier this week, and the staff were saying, well, this year the first years seem a little bit more settled and ready to come into university life, which has suggested that for four years the students were really struggling with the transition, and of course, transition points were a huge loss during the pandemic. So, how long do you see that harm? And it's the same as you can see trauma in a tree ring or on a children's bone. We have what are called Harris lines. So you can see on a children's bone the period of time where they were malnourished, or there was a perhaps a traumatic event in their life. And we're also seeing research in areas like epigenetics, which is how does negative experiences in in childhood affect children's genetics, and indeed then they pass that on to their own children, which is a is an additional idea to the ideas of things like intergenerational trauma. If you're, I mean, one of the things I've learned, particularly as often I'm used to give quite a chirpy upbeat talk, is that's a big message. You know, if you're an educator and certainly in leadership and education, it's it's what you do with that information. And you're not looking to make any excuses, and you're also not looking to completely depress the room. But this is the same as perhaps saying, you know, exposure to a contaminant or a learning need, it it helps you understand, I think, and the and the graph is definitely the tool that most people engage with from come what may.

Nick MacKenzie 11:37

So if there's no endpoint that's clear, or it's 30 years, maybe longer ahead. What are you actually aiming for when you're in it? What does good enough look like when perhaps complete recovery isn't really on the table?

What good enough really means

Lucy Easthope 11:52

You're looking for the terrible thing, I think, to be acknowledged alongside. So if you look at something like the aftermath of Grenfell, do I see little moments and days of survivance? Do I see joy? Do I see play? You know, I'm a very proud trustee of a children's art therapy charity. So you're living, you're living in the gaps, you're living in the spaces of uncertainty, and and you're also learning to kind of appreciate a bit like you know, the first story that I used, the moment that Alan Rock is ahead of you in the queue. And I think emergency planners, and it can sound trite and it can sound a bit like a sort of a niche stick, but I do think emergency planners and people like me that work in in kind of extremists and in extreme teams, we do learn to see good differently. You learn to savour joy, you learn to savour the wins. And I think perhaps education in the 90s and the and the early 2000s got used to big wins and it was the kind of offstead wins, and it was all of those kind of things. And just getting children through matriculation or just getting children through full stop is a huge achievement after disaster. So you learn to see to see change differently. And I think also when you see a lot of, I see a lot of obviously events that affect children and young people, you you learn to see how important it is for them that we you do create horizons, you do still have fun, you know, you still do have very good days. They have to have a purpose to all of this.

Nick MacKenzie 13:22

Want to move on to another area of your book. Your your chapter on needful things landed very, very personally for me, particularly after my own recent accident. You you discussed the hierarchy of needs, starting with basics and and working up, and it that sounds really sensible. But what I found most striking was how hard it actually is to know where you where what you need when you're inside that experience, especially so using your recovery curve, if if you can't even see what say reconstruction looks like, how do you help someone or an organization do that honest reflection of their needs when they don't yet have that clarity or the distance themselves?

Taking stock and naming your needs

Lucy Easthope 14:04

Yeah, and I think a lot of it's very intangible, isn't it? So perhaps working with the family after bereavement, I mean, one of the things that I think the society is much more honest about, and I I was able to benefit from this in my current writing, is that we're very clear that that grief is ongoing, you know, there's terrible toxic posity in terms like time will heal, it absolutely doesn't. But that doesn't mean that you become kind of nihilistic and despondent. You're still you're still doing things to be able to say, I would like to do this, or I would like to be able to still enjoy something. Or so your life has changed. It's that it's that very powerful Welsh word here. There's a life before and a life afterwards. And I think, you know, when you and I were talking at the planning stages of this, you probably were much earlier on after your accident, and there's a shock that comes, and shock can be very protective and kind of say absolutely nothing to see here. You know, that's how I see Mr. Shock operate most commonly. Even and you can apply this to so many areas, you know, a school that's gone from you know, absolutely wonderful to needing improvement, you can see a kind of tangible, it won't change anything. I'm seeing it in schools that I'm going into after stabbings. You know, it surely nobody will apply this to whether we're a good school next year or whether we're the right place to go to. So you start with this in that incubation phase, yeah, and then the in the incident and then in the aftermath, you see a lot of shock. And then I often think the body's very clever, the human body's very clever. Once it's into a sort of period of perhaps more adjustment and healing after, say, an illness or accident, you start to dream. The sort of the body's digestive system of psychology, you that's how you get some of these feelings out, you start to dream. And often in bereavement, that can take years, and you start to sense make. And the other great barometer for how much something has done to you, how much you perhaps need, how much you need to take stock, and you'll know from come what maybe before we even get to needful things, there's a chapter on taking stock. You have to stop and look at what's going on, is that with taking stock, you kind of get some 360-degree feedback, you know, and often you think you're powering through brilliantly, but maybe a family member says, Crikey, you're really hard to live with at the moment. And that's what we call the burnout monitor. So that's somebody that you do take constructive advice. It's very rarely right that that's in, say, a line management relationship. That needs to be a very close friend. So my husband and and his close friend will do it for each other, and that can be a physical thing, so you look drawn out or you've lost or gained weight. It's much hard. I think men's needs are easier than women. You know, whether you'd say to a friend, wow, you've gained weight, I don't know. But they're they're great burnout monitors for each other, and then you look at what you're you're missing, what you're not getting. And we with the powering through that comes with trying to cope, comes a lot of sacrifice. So all the fun things go. And one of the things that I'm seeing in in the vast majority of colleagues is, and we, you know, I'll I'll watch that with colleagues about this all the time, and and those closer colleagues that are more like friends, is that anedonia, so the loss of joy. And in the British culture, things like joy, lust, love, fun, frolics, laughter often get very much slow down on the hierarchy. So, you know, physical recovery is prioritized and getting back to work or meeting those targets again. And, you know, saying it I made somebody cry the other day because I was talking to them about when did you last feel joy? And it was the the end of 2019. You know, unfettered. They know they've had moments of sort of happiness or pride. And these are families, these are people with families, these are people that there's lots of things out there to seek joy from. So anedonia, I think, is often like the body running on very depleted nutrients at that point. And one of the things I think a lot of people are doing in the in the in the economy and in the state that we're in at the moment is is waiting for a better time to feel better again. And what my life has taught me is you cannot allow external world factors, those big world factors, to dictate how you're going to set out your needs store.

Nick MacKenzie 18:22

Thank you. There's so much in what you've just shared then. I th I think you talk about the first step being rest in some of your writing. And when you say rest, what what do you think that means for say a leader in a very busy environment who can't simply switch off on say a Tuesday afternoon because of because of the responsibility they feel, and sort of but perhaps this m might be linked? You mentioned vocational law in earlier in our discussion, and you you write about that. That that concept of teachers or public servants setting themselves impossibly high standards and going the extra extra mile. And yeah, that that just having the perhaps a different type of burnout to perhaps ordinary workplace stress.

Rest for leaders with vocational awe

Lucy Easthope 19:10

So, what would your your your reflections be on that that that rest and managing that vocational or it's such you know, and that's where when you're at the education events, and and you know, I do lots of different types, but as I say, education are particular favourite. When you're at the education events, I think being the daughter of the two teachers really kicks in because a lot of the management well-being material for how to cope with things like the early stages of burnout or or a lack of rest, or you're you know you can see yourself tipping over into a highly tense situation isn't designed for for certain types of environments. You don't, you know, I I I'll show it to my mum and she'll say, you know, you don't get to bring your B game to a year seven. Yeah, you can't quietly quit as a sort of restorative self-help strategy while on a residential or as a brain surgeon. So there's certain, you know, one of the things I think in in the world of executive support and well-being work is there's been a lot of things that I completely agree with, and I myself use, which is about how to sort of sneak in, rest, build, follow, take more time, take back control of your calendar. So in in the events that I do now, I'll often be very receptive to what the audience are finding are working. So the there's a few things that I'm finding are particularly important. One is to have control over your own diary and to have agreements over flexibility of that, perhaps being able to block out things. I ended up in a very enjoyable social media thread the other day about how people block out what is essentially an hour of rest between meetings. And they they put in a, you know, we joked and I said, Well, mine is always sort of a meeting with Alan, Alan doesn't exist, you know. But and I and I'm very lucky because I'm my own boss. I I am in control of my virtual diary, and quite a few people have said that's something they've they've taken back. Um, communication strategies. So, what's expected of you in terms of particularly in school and university environments, and and it always strikes me when I'm in the middle of an incident and perhaps a head teacher's had a very serious fatality, casualties on their school grounds, and the emails haven't stopped, you know. So things like communication strategies and an etiquette, one of the things that's a big change, I think, in the last few years is the ability to be able to book some flexi time or some time within term time. I always joke, and it's absolutely true, that when I went to my first job in university, and then sort of after university, I had sort of full-time work, I didn't realise that you booked holiday because I'd only ever grown up in a family where, you know, the local council set the term dates. I didn't realise there was a sort of holiday booking thing. Now, what I am starting to see with friends who are teachers and friends who are in health as well is a little bit more flexibility around their leave. Burnout is a really insidious. Thing, it really creeps up on you. And one of the things that we find with lots of professions where there is vocational law is that people are afraid about confiding in it because they are worried they will have the profession that they do ultimately love taken away from them and that people will suggest a solution that means you can't be that thing anymore. And that's a real pressure. And you know, one of the things that you know that's a very big theme in the book is that in the book, my husband is struggling with medical issues and he's an airline pilot. And it's incredibly hard. You just simply couldn't go to your doctor and discuss, say, burnout without you having to tell your aviation doctor who would then remove your class one medical while they decided whether this was any kind of risk. And that's quite right and understandable. But I still don't think we've quite worked out how to talk about the need for rest and how that's perceived. And of course, linked to that is things like being able to talk about mental health and other things. One of the things that I'm not seeing most colleagues doing, and particularly in the education sector, is putting themselves first. And we use, don't we, a lot in training things like the oxygen mask philosophy. And yet when you go to air crashes, you realise people haven't put their own oxygen mask on, they're still not, despite the announcements. And I am I'm I'm seeing some really just just when I walk in the room, completely exhausted people. And one of the big one of the biggest changes I've seen at education events in the last two years, so even since the pandemic, is the amount of head teachers and others and leaders who come to events and their phone is in front of them the whole time. And they are Pavlov's dogs, they're completely on it, they're completely responding to those messages. And I, you know, yeah, I don't take it as any kind of offensive people have to leave, but one thing's about doing both with health leaders at the moment and education leaders, is the number of times they have to leave the event because they've been called back. Now that's a state that we call chronic unease, and and it you can't stay in that. So you become very ill. And if you don't address it mentally, then of course what starts you start to see is things like your adrenal system, your cortisol, your high blood pressure, and then you start to see a load of stress-related physical illness. I am brutal about planning in my rest, I'm I'm brutal about my burnout monitors, brutal with my fallow, but it's it's a discipline.

Nick MacKenzie 24:37

Linked to this, I think, I love the phrase you you use when you speak about hope and hopium. If I've understood it right, there's I think what you're suggesting is sometimes we can get in the way of understanding where we're at because there's a kind of self-deception going on. Where I think you actually mentioned it earlier where we're you know telling ourselves we're fine, we're projecting hope when and we're saying things are returning to normal when you're there is no much still in the slump. So could you bring to life, explain how you see that distinction you draw between genuine hope and I think what you call hopium?

Lucy Easthope 25:17

Yeah, absolutely. And and why was it so important? Well, in a lot of disaster scenarios, we see a lot of people essentially almost lose their own agency because they put an awful lot of faith in the state. And that's even something that I'm seeing right now with say work around, I do a lot of radio shows and things around preparedness. So getting a household ready, thinking about if a power cut happens, thinking about having a torch in. And what people will say to me is that would be the government's job or it wouldn't happen. And that when you've grown up seeing the aftermath of, you know, lots of different disasters. One of the things that I say is, whereas, you know, pathologists or forensic scientists will go to a crime scene and see, you know, see the stories of the crime scene, when I'm in a disaster site, I'll see the stories there around kind of too much hope. So if you look at something like Hurricane Katrina, lots of people died at home waiting to be evacuated. And one of the things that too much hope does is it actually strips us of our own agency. And one of the things that emergency planners don't do, which makes us very weird in the rest of the words of words, you know, in the eyes of the rest of the population, is that we stay necessarily optimistic in our personalities, but pessimistic in our work. We use a reasonable worst-case scenario. And another three words that we use that are very, very activating is help isn't coming. And so this is the idea of really thinking about if I remove all of the protective factors from this scenario, what can I get ready? And so it's stripping away perhaps the denial. So one of the examples that I use in the book is those of us with caring responsibilities for an older relative. They're in their own home, they've started to fall a lot more. And as a family, there's a sort of sometimes you'll see a kind of collective denial that this situation's going to get any worse. It's only going to get worse. And so one of the things is, is this hope or is this hopium? And and how to look at things. Hope's so essential. You know, what I say in come what may is, it's hugely important to me. I couldn't do my work without it. It's that horizon, it's there in my surname. I said, Hope is everything. It's not a dissing of hope. But I think we would be safer and much more prepared and less startled if we were realistic. So hopium, analyzing something for whether we we've got hopium is being, you know, is is sort of taking us on a path to realism. And, you know, I think that's it's interesting. I mean, I've had less of a backlash than I feared, because hopium's quite a difficult concept sometimes, quite hurtful one almost, you know, thinking about is that is that realistic? And also I think what I've learned because I have lots of you know research colleagues in areas like death studies is it's linked to other forces of you know, other areas where we're in denial, so things like illness, that we will get old and and death. And so hopium is is is really interesting. And what's lovely when you put books out there is to see people sidle up to you at book festivals and tell you how they used it. And you know, for example, one older gentleman told me it'd been really helpful in his in his discussions with his wife because she had always assumed he was just very sort of negative and he was sort of putting a downer and he was like, This is what I'm doing. And a lot of emergency planners do struggle sometimes in family life because we we are more kind of okay, we're working to the reasonable worst-case scenario.

Nick MacKenzie 28:52

What you said about hope versus hopium makes me think about paradox, and it's something I've experienced quite personally recently. So when I was I kept hitting things that felt like genuine contradictions, two things that couldn't be both true at true at once. But what I found was that the paradox wasn't really paradox at all. It was when when I sat with it a bit longer, with the discomfort, instead of trying to move around it, try to move through it, the apparent contradiction resolved itself into something that made more sense. Is that something you you recognize?

Hope versus 'hopium' and agency

Lucy Easthope 29:31

Oh, definitely, definitely. And I and I think what you've also highlighted there is is the value of space and the value of thinking and giving yourself time with difficult thoughts and with with things, you know, there's a there's a chapter in the book called Two Truths, which is about kind of working through difficult, difficult ideas, without a doubt. And I think I think one of the things that I see a lot because of the nature of these extreme events is people working through those sorts of things. And one of the one of the whole actually the whole the whole premise sometimes with with some of the work that I do is people will initially feel quite confronted by it and then have that then have to sort of work out what their feelings are on it. So, yes, that definitely resonates.

Nick MacKenzie 30:15

Changing things slightly, thinking about how to to draw some of the lessons you've learned about perhaps proactive risk management. There's a few themes I'd like to get to, Lucy. So I just wanted to pick your brains briefly on this one. You've already touched on it, I think, a little bit, but risk management can feel to some people like they're trying to eliminate uncertainty. And you talk, you mentioned, I don't think you said the startle factor, but you talked about startling, and I was quite fascinated where you talk about perhaps good risk management is about reducing the startle factor. Could you talk about what you mean by that and what that looks like?

Lucy Easthope 30:54

And and of course, good risk management starts with going a step back and deciding what your what your risks are. And and it's very I was talking to somebody yesterday actually who wanted to come up with lots of different scenarios. And one of the things that we do a lot of emergency planning is we're less scenario focused, we're much more consequence focused. So there's many different things, for example, that can happen to a household, but by focusing in on would you be ready for a power cut, it helps us to get you ready for lots and lots of different things. And it, you know, the startle factor is a really interesting one for me. I did some Radio 4 programs around readiness, and that gave me a chance once and for all to interview some psychologists who were like, yes, preparedness work, risk management work does help with startle factor. It does help to manage things down. And actually, we're quite behind quite a lot of other countries around that. And that includes actually involving our children and young people in these discussions around risk. One of the things that really shocked me, I don't think I fully expected it, was when the Dust Settles came out, how much people would assume that I lived in this, you know, that I lived constantly chicken little, constantly worried about the sky falling in, that I my approach to risk management must be that I was constantly trying to manage my own safety, all of those kind of things. And actually, I mean, I'm not, I don't think I'm reckless, but it's sort of the opposite. I don't see risk management as about kind of managing everything down to the to the minimal. I do see it as a lens by which you can talk about things. And one of the things that I'm finding maybe we're starting to get back, but we certainly lost for a while, was being allowed to wildcard or bring the difficult into executive meeting. So anybody, you know, being perhaps gently challenging of an idea, you know, anything. If you said, okay, you're you're due to finish that project in May, if it does finish in June, what do we do? What's our comm strategy? What have we got ready? And people would turn on me, you know, like, why are you so negative? It will finish in May. You know, like, hey, we're not a regime. You know, we can we can talk about reasonable worst-case scenario, risks, things going wrong. And certainly I think, I mean, I I see quite a strong watershed around about 2011, 2012. There was a fundamental shift in being able to chat risk and be able to sort of bring crazy things that could happen to the table, but that not be taken personally by the room. And one of the things when I'm when I'm working with teams and with with leaders is how safe is it to bring risk to your table? And that that's really interesting to me. And and we sort of put it in the same basket, haven't we? It's almost like personal criticism. And also the big lie that is a risk register or you know, any kind of corporate document, they're just not accurate. They, and indeed, any kind of planning or simulation is often very, very much more gentle than the reality and allows the leaders to win all the time. You know, it's a sort of a skewed game. So risk is is really important to me. And one of the things I would say is if you're supporting young people, people looking for choices, there's so many great study programs, apprenticeships, degree programs around risk and understanding it. And my personal theory is it's great with things like a sort of low-level generalized anxiety, how to think and discuss and talk about risk is something that I think we should really consider increasing our literacy around.

Two truths and sitting with paradox

Nick MacKenzie 34:26

There's some fascinating insights there. You mentioned a few times just as the theme that seems to be coming out of the discussion. Your opening story was about seeing good things out there. You've talked about finding the joy. Well hearing you in in the past, the the phrase you use, I think, is planthums, which seem to be sort of getting yourself in the moment and in the and the mood. And some of the some of those felt joyous and energizing to me. Where where does planthems fit into you? Can you share a bit more?

Risk planning that reduces startle

Lucy Easthope 35:00

Yeah, so exactly as you say, really. Planthems and the playlist is the music that I use, and and I I love using social media. So planthems has become the hashtag for sort of today's planthem everybody is, and it might be something to sort of get us through or to or to make us think. And you know, one of the ones I'm sort of particularly known for is the the description that I've given to lose yourself by MM, which is the music that along with a few others that I'll put into the into the playlist to sort of transition from normal day, you know, if I'm on the call with you now, and then and then later on there's a call that says, Can we give you some, can you can can you give us some advice on this? Could you come to this scene? Can you come to this mortuary? I'll play some music in my head in the in the journey over. Um, and then there's other types of songs. So there's things like, you know, Thunderstruck is my desert island discs finale for kind of coming through the door at the end of a day and demobbing and and you know, and again, that's where the Daughter of Two Teachers thing kicks in. You know, I think many years before it was a known thing and an area you see much discussed on social media threads about well-being, I both of my parents sometimes would just sit in the car for 20 minutes, little bit of you know, the Rolling Stones or some some dire straits or something, and just be able to come just sort of take the day, difficult day, maybe a safeguarding issue or something like that, and then come into the house where you're in a different role. And of course, one of the difficulties with some industries that we've seen around working from home is you've lost that that that transition is very difficult, and music is incredibly important to me. And in fact, I I really do feel it in my body, and I feel that deep beat. And I was very, you know, very enthusiastic member of things like the Will School's concert band as a child, and I'm I'm desperate to see us understand that again, how music is used in our own well-being.

Nick MacKenzie 36:57

Thank you. We're getting close to the end of our time. I know I've probably got one one more topic I just want to ask you about, and then there was a few wrap-up questions I think probably wanted. Whilst I've got you, I want to make the most of it. But you make this argument that may stop many listeners in their tracks that sometimes it isn't the original crisis that causes the most harm. It's the response to it, it's the the the bad help that maybe in the moment doesn't feel like bad help, but it is. How do you recognise it when you're the one doing it, do you think?

Planthems and music as transition

Lucy Easthope 37:32

And isn't that the shock? I mean, there's something there's something really interesting, I think, particularly in in the chapter about bad help. And, you know, as I've said, you know, that can be something we say, a lot of toxic posity, but also something we may all be guilty of participating at some time. Things like the donation of secondhand items is an absolute secondary disaster in disaster. And what I'm finding is the best time to tackle what we're getting wrong is actually in peacetime. It's before you have an incident. It's very difficult to say to people in the heat of the moment when they're when they're very much charged and they're trying to get stuff done, actually that is the wrong thing to do. And it's very, very difficult. So, one of the things, for example, I like to do a lot of is preparedness work about how to think about the things that you would offer, the words you would use. You know, we've talked about language. I had a question recently with an incident about whether to reopen schools during a holiday. That probably has occurred to in in the last two years, probably 10 times as a question with incidents. And the obvious reaction, and it tends to be that that's quite right, that that's what happens, is the school is opened in the holidays in some way for children and their parents, and that's where educational psychologists will meet and things like that after an incident. But I'm acutely aware of the toll that may take on teachers, for example, who get very short breaks, and the breaks sort of start to become very critical, and they may have been using that whole holiday to get their you know the dentists and doctors' appointments and things. So, one of the things I think you have to look at is both the initial event and then what what the unintended and intended consequences are. Also, you know, let's be honest here, it's it's very much in the public conscious that we do some really terrible harms as emergency responders. And that's been a big feature in a lot of inquiries that we see. If you, you know, if you follow me on social media, you'll see me flag that the ways that we might dismiss people, the way that we might handle things like financial remuneration. And you end up in some ways, you know, the initial event can seem as a very terrible set of circumstances, but often the treatment in response and longer-term response can feel very cruel, very malicious. And that's something to consider as well. But it has to be trained before, and that's why I love writing. I love getting the books out because people can read them in their own times, they can listen to them, but and and you know, doing events like this, people can muse on on you know what they feel about it, they can quite quite rightly disagree with me, and then they go away, particularly the toxic positivity. So the things that we say, you know, they didn't suffer. Oh, you're lucky because you're still alive, all those kind of things. One of the biggest feedbacks I get from people is how much they relate to the toxic positivity when they have their own circumstances, and I'm again I'm very grateful to the fact that I'm in a very loud chorus now of people writing in in areas like grief and bereavement about just thinking about your actions a little bit more.

Nick MacKenzie 40:45

Lucy, we're coming to the close of our conversation. Across everything you've described today, the weight of your work, the uncertainty, the accumulation of other people's worst moments. What what grounds you? Not the professional framework, not not the recovery graph perhaps, but what do you actually go back to when things are hard?

Lucy Easthope 41:08

Oh, I mean, it it's so it's so clear to me, really. I'm you know, just how how much I think the work has meant that I do savour the everyday, and you know, I do in enjoy it. And I I knew, for example, that I would enjoy this talk with you, and I didn't want to put in anything else afterwards that wasn't equally enjoyable. So I'm off for a swim and I've found a very good hot chocolate next to my my swim. And one of the things, you know, that I say and come what may is I savour, I delight. I am I am really, I'm really very grateful to the to family, and I don't think that's always acknowledged, and I'm also conscious that that's not true for everybody, but I am very grateful to the to the family support that I have. And what's what's really changed, I think the last few years is the the colleague network has changed a lot as well. And there's this, I use it a lot in Come What May, the true meaning of kind of allyship, connectivity, finding a tribe that you can share wins and low moments with. We, you know, different different groups that I share information and support with has really made a huge difference. I I lost dad in April 23. It's it's it it's it's unbelievable to me because it feels like yesterday. And I think the big test then was did I what was the things I said I was saying on a podcast, was that true? Was I really living in the moment, or was I was I regretful, or was I, you know, I hadn't I hadn't espoused what I'm always banging on about? And when dad died, he he had taught me the principles that I use in my work, you know, we only have today. We I live for today and I enjoy today. And he and I always said goodbye, very fulsome, with lots of, you know, I love you, see you tomorrow. And I try not to end a day on a row. Can't guarantee I always get that right. I try, you know, and I I genuinely do, I do live for today, and I think I just I just live with great delight. That's not to say there aren't there aren't really difficult days, but what this work has prepared me very well for is you know, have have a nice bit of telly, cup of tea, a sleep, and tomorrow's another day.

Nick MacKenzie 43:26

A question I've asked previous guests and would love to put to you is what quality do you see in young people today that you wish you had more of yourself?

Lucy Easthope 43:36

Oh, aren't they amazing? I I do go there and come what may, the boundaries and the you know, the kind of clarity as to what is acceptable. I think I'm gonna put us at the same generation, Nick, but I think you and I, we were still, and particularly, you know, me as a woman, we were still confused about what our lines were, what boundaries were, what we were going to say no to. I think, I think other generations that have come before them are confusing that as them perhaps not not engaging with things in the same way. But when I do find myself, I was in a I was in a room recently and people were doing two things. They were much younger than me. They were articulating their working style and how they how they would support each other and how they would would work. So one person said, for example, I tend to work away from home, I tend to work from home, I don't tend to come into the office, but if you need me, do this. And they were so clear and able to articulate what they wanted up front. You know, that was an introductory meeting. And I just think that would have been that would have been so clear. And do you know what I'm seeing as well? You know, as my own girls get older, that that humour, that maybe born out of adversity, maybe we got a bit lazy and we thought we knew what humour was. Gosh, they're scathing and I'm here for it. You know, it's fast. It's it's they they they've got us, they've worked us out, you know, how how privileged we all had it and we didn't realize. What are they on, like their seventh global crisis? I just I I just am constantly schooled by by by my younger colleagues and indeed younger than that. And I'm so here for their for their articulation of what they want, and long may that continue.

What grounds us on hard days

Nick MacKenzie 45:20

And finally, then something personal and something that connects right back to the very beginning of this podcast. My first ever guest, Fiona Forbes, told me that a mother stroke taught her to look for the gaps because the gaps tell you more sometimes than the words do. And that idea has travelled with me through every series since. And when I was listening to your audiobook, you used a phrase living in the gaps, and it stopped me because it felt like it went one step further than Fiona's idea. Not just noticing the gap, not just reading it, but choosing to inhabit it, to be present inside the uncertainty rather than rushing through to the other side. And it also brought to mind something that the Buddhist teacher Hameen Sunin writes: that we're neither our feelings nor the story our mind tells us to make sense of them. We are, he says, the vast silence that knows of their emergence and disappearance. And feels to me there's something in all three of those ideas. Fiona's looking for the gaps, you're living in the gaps, and Hamine's silence that perhaps feels like it's reaching for the same thing. Could you perhaps say a bit more about what you meant? And I I wonder is that choosing to live in the gap rather than just survive it, really at the heart of a lot of what you teach.

Living in the gaps and closing

Lucy Easthope 46:45

And I think it's so perfect, and and thank you actually, because on your recommendation, I'm I'm working through that that beautiful book. And I I think I think a lot of the the spiritual and religious advisors that went before us kind of got it a lot better, and we need to revisit that. We've we've we've we've we've fallen into a trap of thinking that this period in history is different from any other and any less turbulent, or that we were owed some kind of less turbulent time. And I think it's it's very useful to draw on that. And it also goes back to that point I think I made earlier about I see a lot of people living for the future shuttle launch. They live for when it will be perfect, they live for when they will be ready. And when you work in a field like mine, you only ever see sudden and interrupted ends, you only see too soon, you only see the the day before it was all meant to be, all of those kind of things. And often in family sense making, when something terrible does occur, it's always about they were going to do this. And so I think for me, it's about recognizing what you what you have, and and rather than seeing things as when that terrible thing does happen, recognizing that the gaps and the time you you are given every day is precious. But also, I'm I'm a great facilitator to an extent of friends' dreams in the sense of as long as it's possible and legal and they've got the skills to do it, is the sense of right now is all you have, you know, it fits with my earlier answer. But also the idea, I think, that people have been very, very complacent about how uncertain the world is, and the the quiet moments, however short they are, are really all we have. But that shouldn't be anxiety-inducing, that should be a kind of call to enjoy those moments and the strive, asking your question, you know, asking yourself questions about what is it that you're you're aiming for. And I think some of that, I mean, like you you've been through with your recovery. I think although the disaster world has shaped me, I was quite badly put together medically as a small child, as the way my mother describes it as having been knitted by a committee. And I think a lot of people place great faith in their body, their physical body. And so what when you live, and my father was very, very crippled with a with a very painful disease called ankylosin spondylitis, is that when you live with chronic pain and degeneration, you realise that that little gap, that good day, is a truly precious moment. And I'd love to see us regain that and regain some of that teaching that others put our way.

Nick MacKenzie 49:25

I think that's a perfect place to draw a close to our discussion. Lucy, thank you so much for joining me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and I I do hope you, our listeners, have as well. And thank you for listening. If you found this valuable, please do share, follow the show, sorry, so you don't miss future episodes.