Protecting Others Sometimes Means Protecting Ourselves

Something I notice regularly in Geneva is the number of cargo bikes being used to take children to school, crèche or simply around the city.

And, reassuringly, the children are almost always wearing helmets.

What strikes me is how often the parent riding the bike is not.

I should add that I am one of those parents. I cycle with my own children and, these days, if I try to leave without putting my helmet on, they will not let me.

There is something slightly curious about the way we assess risk here.

We put a helmet on the child because we recognise that an accident can happen. We strap them in, make sure they are protected, and then sometimes leave the person actually controlling a large and fairly heavy bicycle unprotected, while sharing the road with two-tonne vehicles travelling considerably faster than they are.

There is another dimension to this too.

Imagine being a small child, securely strapped into the bike and physically unharmed after an accident, but watching the parent you depend on lying bleeding and unconscious on the ground beside you.

The consequences of an incident are not always limited to the person who is physically injured.

And protecting someone does not necessarily mean protecting only them.

Sometimes it means protecting the person they depend upon.

A very different example

This reminds me of a situation from many years ago in Libya.

I was working with armed close-protection officers who initially resisted wearing seat belts in our EU vehicles.

Their reasoning was understandable. In the event of an armed attack, they might need to leave the vehicle immediately, and they were concerned that a seat belt could slow them down.

There was a logic to it. But there was also a problem.

We were considerably more likely to be involved in a road traffic accident than in the kind of armed attack they were preparing for.

And a road traffic accident could itself create exactly the type of security situation we feared.

A crashed international vehicle could quickly attract attention. A crowd could gather. Tensions could rise. Confusion could turn into hostility.

That would be precisely the moment when we needed the close-protection officers functioning effectively.

If they had been injured or incapacitated in the initial collision because they were not wearing their seat belts, our ability to manage whatever happened next would have been severely reduced.

In other words, a decision intended to improve our readiness for one threat could actually make us more vulnerable to another, more probable one.

I made the argument, but initially it did not change behaviour.

Eventually, rather than simply repeating myself, I asked a senior close-protection officer whom I knew and had trained with previously to speak directly to their team leader.

Sometimes good risk management is also about knowing when another voice will carry more weight. A short peer-to-peer conversation helped remove the remaining resistance.

The seat belts went on.

That experience has stayed with me for two reasons.

The first is that good risk management is not simply about identifying the most frightening scenario. It requires us to think about probability as well as consequence, and about the way one incident can create the conditions for another.

The second is that identifying the right risk-control measure is only part of the job.

People also have to accept it.

People rarely reject a safety measure simply because they are irrational or careless. Usually there is a reason behind the behaviour. Effective risk management means understanding that reasoning, engaging with it, and recognising that how we communicate a control, and sometimes who communicates it, can be just as important as the control itself.

The risks we see — and those we don't

Human beings are naturally drawn to visible and dramatic threats.

An armed attack is easy to imagine.

A roadblock, a violent crowd, a kidnapping or an explosion is immediately recognisable as a security threat.

But some of the most serious risks faced by people working in difficult environments are almost completely invisible.

The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a stark example. Thousands of people have died, including health workers trying to care for others. Three Red Cross volunteers were also among the outbreak's earliest known victims, apparently contracting the virus while managing the bodies of people who had died before the outbreak had even been recognised.

They were doing precisely what humanitarian workers and volunteers so often do: helping other people.

But helping others does not make us immune from the threat we are trying to manage.

A virus does not have the visibility of an armed group, a roadblock or an angry crowd. Yet it can incapacitate or kill the very people upon whom others depend.

And when that happens, the consequences extend beyond the individual — to colleagues, communities and potentially the operation itself.

Protecting ourselves is therefore not separate from our responsibility to others.

It can be an essential part of it.

Some risks accumulate quietly

There is another category of risk that can be even more difficult to recognise because there may be no single incident at all.

Stress. Fatigue. Repeated exposure to distress. Long periods of heightened alertness.

The pressure of making decisions that affect other people's safety.

The expectation that the person responsible for managing the crisis must remain calm, available and functional regardless of what is happening around them.

Unlike an armed attack, a road traffic accident or an infection, there may be no identifiable moment at which we can point and say: that was the incident.

The effects of this kind of pressure often build gradually, which makes them easy to overlook. People working in difficult environments can become very good at functioning under sustained stress, and in many circumstances that ability is essential. Operations still have to continue, decisions still have to be made, and colleagues need people who can remain calm under pressure.

But continuing to function does not mean that the pressure is having no effect. Someone can complete a difficult deployment, return home, and only then realise just how exhausted they have become.

The mission may be over, but its effects may continue long afterwards.

Stress, exhaustion and psychological strain can follow people home. Burnout may emerge not from one catastrophic event, but from months or years of repeatedly prioritising everybody else's needs while assuming that our own capacity to absorb pressure is unlimited.

It isn't.

The problem with resilience

We use the word resilience a great deal.

It is an important concept, but I sometimes worry about how easily it can become shorthand for expecting people simply to endure more.

That feels particularly relevant in the current humanitarian funding environment. Teams are shrinking, responsibilities are being combined and people are increasingly being asked to do more with less. Security responsibilities may be added to already demanding operational roles, sometimes without the training, time or specialist support that should accompany them.

Localisation can add another dimension. Shifting greater responsibility to national and local colleagues is both necessary and overdue, but responsibility should not be transferred faster than the resources, training, authority and support needed to carry it safely.

Nor should look after yourself become a convenient way of transferring organisational responsibility onto the individual.

Yes, individual responsibility matters.

We should wear the helmet.

We should wear the seat belt.

We should use the protective equipment.

We should recognise when fatigue is affecting our judgement.

And we should ask for help when we need it.

But organisational responsibility matters too.

If people are expected to carry responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of others, organisations also have a duty to protect their capacity to do so, through realistic workloads, appropriate training, access to experienced support, adequate rest and, when needed, psychological support.

A culture that celebrates people for functioning until they break is neither a healthy nor a resilient culture.

Duty of care works in more than one direction

Which brings me back to those cargo bikes in Geneva.

A parent puts a helmet on their child because they have recognised their responsibility to protect that child.

But the child also depends upon the parent remaining capable of protecting them.

Perhaps my own children understand this rather better than we sometimes do as adults. If I expect them to protect themselves, they now expect me to do the same.

The principle is no different in more complex environments.

A close-protection officer needs to survive the vehicle accident if they are going to protect others from what happens afterwards.

A health worker responding to Ebola needs to protect themselves from infection if they are going to continue treating patients.

A humanitarian worker needs to recognise the cumulative effects of prolonged stress if they are going to continue exercising good judgement.

A manager carrying responsibility through months of crisis needs to preserve their own capacity to think clearly, make decisions and support the people around them.

Self-protection is therefore not selfish.

Sometimes it is an integral part of our duty of care to other people.

The oxygen-mask principle

Airlines have been explaining this remarkably well for decades.

In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, we are told to put on our own oxygen mask before helping others.

For a parent sitting beside a child, that instruction can initially feel counterintuitive.

Surely our instinct should be to protect the child first?

But the logic is simple.

If we become incapacitated while trying to help them, we may no longer be capable of helping anyone.

The purpose of putting on our own mask first is not to prioritise ourselves over the person beside us.

It is to preserve our ability to help them.

That principle extends far beyond aviation.

It applies to parents.

It applies to security professionals.

It applies to health workers and humanitarian responders.

It applies to managers and leaders.

And it applies to organisations deciding how much pressure the people working for them can reasonably be expected to absorb.

Protecting others is not simply about putting protective measures around them.

It also means protecting the people upon whom their safety depends.

Because sometimes, protecting others means protecting ourselves first.

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