Jason Buffington .com

A friend recently asked me “How are you?” and as I started to answer, he stopped me and rephrased the question.

video transcript

One of the key lessons I continually try to drive home to resilience leaders and implementers around disaster recovery and cyber resilience is understanding the difference between “looking” for green check marks and “searching” for red X’s. 

First, let’s recognize the difference between just “looking” (at face value) and “searching” which has much greater intentionality. You can apply that contrast to both it and personal resilience.

Check out this week’s post on DPM to hear more about green checks and red X’s in the IT space. On the personal side, this lesson hit home when I was recently at an event for extended family. Someone came up to me and asked “How are you”? I replied “fine thanks, how are you” and immediately went into asking about a situation that I know is prevalent in their world. But he stopped me – and said, “I wasn’t asking as a courtesy, I want to know how you are doing?”

He also knew about some of the dynamic changes in my world and so he’d made a point to seek me out when I first got there, take me aside for a minute, and earnestly check on my well-being. Not only did we have a short but substantive conversation on each of our current circumstances, but I felt uniquely valued and cared for because he really did want to know.

For more on green checks and red X’s, I’ll leave a link to DPMs post for the difference between looking and searching below – but for proactive resilience (business, IT, professional, and personal), the lesson is to avoid just looking for the face value of green checks and earnestly taking care of each other by searching for red X’s.

See you next Monday