Build Process Into Your Preparedness

So, yes­ter­day, on The Sur­vival Mom’s blog, she had a post on “What Sur­vival­Mom Can Learn from Star­bucks” about sur­vival or prep­ping.  I read it with inter­est, because I try to think out­side the box when it comes to my prep­ping and oth­er areas in my life.  It helps me to jus­ti­fy what I am doing as well as stream­line my own process­es.  Which brings me to my point.  This is what I wrote as a com­ment:

Star­bucks sub­scribes to much of the same method­ol­o­gy that made McDon­ald’s suc­cess­ful. That method­ol­o­gy is “process.” The same process is used to ful­fill your order every time, just like a Big Mac at McDon­ald’s. A “Grande Cafe Mocha with skim milk, and no whip” is made the same every time by each employ­ee. Rather, no employ­ee makes it dif­fer­ent­ly than any oth­er employ­ee. It is exact­ly the same. The les­son, is that process works. It stream­lines the tasks so you get the desired con­sis­tent result every time.

To my point, If every­one in your fam­i­ly is of the same mind set, and you have laid out plans for home evac­u­a­tion, can­ning, stor­ing food and sup­plies, this all goes to process. If every­one knows the right way to do it, every time, it is stream­lined, and there will be no ques­tions as to how to get things done, or where items in your prepped inven­to­ry are locat­ed.

In addi­tion to this, to me, Star­bucks, McDon­ald’s, and frankly 90% of any fran­chis­es you might think of pur­chas­ing or walk­ing into as a cus­tomer, are built on process.  The process is pret­ty cook­ie cut­ter for most, giv­ing every­one a process so that works the first time, and giv­ing them a clear indi­ca­tion of what needs to be done to accom­plish their goals.

If you are going to prep, and do it con­sis­tent­ly, you need to have a plan (we all preach plan­ning), and the plan can evolve into a process.  So, as a sim­pli­fied exam­ple, if you rotate your food stor­age, this is a process.  If you stan­dard­ize on the process, then every week you go to the gro­cery store and replace what you have con­sumed, help­ing to keep you prepped.  The same rules can be applied to bug­ging in or bug­ging out.  For instance, if the pow­er goes out in the house one night, one per­son is des­ig­nat­ed to get the flash­lights, and anoth­er gets the hur­ri­cane lanterns, and the oth­er may start up the gen­er­a­tor.  The same peo­ple have the same job over and over, mak­ing it a process.

The mil­i­tary runs on process.  Chain of com­mand is process dri­ven, as are tasks.

Process will allow you to del­e­gate respon­si­bil­i­ty with­out hav­ing to del­e­gate in the time of cri­sis, and every­thing may run a lit­tle smoother.

Michael Ger­ber has writ­ten a book called “The E‑Myth,” which dis­cuss­es process in your own busi­ness.  I read this book years ago, and have re-read it sev­er­al times.  I hon­est­ly think could also be applied to prep­ping and sur­vival­ism if you think out­side the box and apply the con­cepts to your prepa­ra­tions for a man made or nat­ur­al cri­sis.

Thanks to The Sur­vival Mom for kick­ing me in the side of the head with her post and jog­ging my mem­o­ry about process.