Never trust straight A's or zeros in your audit sheets. Find the combustion points before they ignite 

Crises and critical incidents rarely start with major failures. They usually begin with routine things that get overlooked, an unaddressed vulnerability, an untested policy, a deferred decision, or a gap in communication. Individually, they may not raise alarms. Under pressure, they can accumulate and multiply until the system fails.

The recently released Utah Valley University After-Action Report is another reminder of how much those seemingly small gaps can matter.I’ve spent nearly 40 years dealing with these issues, 30 years in law enforcement, including serving as Baltimore Police Commissioner, followed by the past decade as Chief Global Security Officer for Under Armour.

Much of that career was spent dealing with what happens after something goes wrong, managing the incident, making decisions under pressure, protecting people, communicating through uncertainty, and then dealing with the operational and reputational aftermath.

At this point in my career, I have the opportunity to be selective about what I take on and where I spend my time. And I keep coming back to the same thought. What if more of that experience could be put to work before the incident happens? 

That’s why I’m launching Universal Asset Protection.

Over the years, we’ve become very good at putting out proverbial fires. The experience gained on the response side of a crisis gives you a clear view of what tends to go wrong before the crisis begins, where systems break down, where assumptions fail, and where small vulnerabilities become much larger problems.

I’ve brought together people who haven’t just led organizations through major crises and reputational incidents. They’ve worked these problems themselves, phase by phase, and understand what happens on the ground when plans, people, policies, and pressure collide. I want to use that collective experience to help organizations operate left of boom, identifying the small vulnerabilities, friction points, and potential combustion points before they accumulate into something much bigger.

What we have learned is that there is no substitute for advanced planning, coupled with in-depth, ground-truth analysis of risk factors that range from the routine to the extreme. And experience has also taught us to be skeptical of anything that looks too perfect on paper. Straight A’s and rows of zeros on an audit sheet can be reassuring, but they can also mean nobody has looked hard enough.

After a career spent dealing with the aftermath, this next chapter is about prevention and finding the combustion points before they ignite.

-Fred Bealefeld