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Community Team Building

Just finished a course designed to help you understand your team members. I love this phyco babble stuff. It is spookily accurate. First of all you fill in a series of questions. Simple stuff, nothing controversial. Then they feed it into a computer and it calculates your personality type and comes up with a model where it shows your personal style, how you make decisions, strengths and weaknesses, how well you fit into a team, how best to manage and communicate with you and the types you find difficult to manage, your opposite type usually. Your entire personality is split into four colours with some more dominant than others. I’m always impressed how accurate they are.

Of course it goes without saying I had few weaknesses, (avert eyes and whistle tunelessly). Oh, OK I had a couple but none I am not painfully aware of.

We then spent a few days exploring the differences between the colours and finding out ways to improve our interaction with others, especially those with the opposite colour.

Now I’ve built dozens of teams for projects and I like to think I’m a fairly good judge of character and so far there have been few issues. My style seems to work fine in my working environment.

So, what has this to do with us you ask. Well, now I’m looking at building groups for a Survival bent I suddenly see issues that don’t exist at work. First of all I don’t have much knowledge about people’s likes and dislikes so I can understand them and put them in colours. Secondly, as we all tend to be secretive to keep OPSEC so we are not open and we keep our cards close to our chest. At work I can simply replace people that are distruptive or don’t do what I want but it rarely gets to that as they are there to work and must follow defined boundaries. Our fellow prepers don’t have to do anything they don’t want and can in fact actively work against you.

Even while keeping our cards close to our chests we divulge enough information in our communications that you can work out if someone is someone you could be friendly with. This is the start in building a community. These casual friendships can build up until you are friends.

The issue we all have is that it is OK having friends but considering a new member of your community is a big deal. One we don’t really have the time to evaluate properly. I’m met a few preppers now and have made some friends. Some I trust and some I don’t. Even so when an event occurs we can expect people to change. We must ensure that we understand these people well before then.

In particular looking back at the course it was proven time and time again that teams with a mixture of colours work well but there is friction. In our prepping we don’t care about friction as it brings forward ideas and we want that so we can prepare properly. However, if an event occurs we want people to perform certain roles and so we don’t actually want a rounded team as there will be dissent. The team we need to prepare is not actually the team we need to build up our community. Why does that not surprise me? Nothing is ever easy.

Most of us here are Alpha males with a large streak of Red through us. We have built up our preps, planned how we will handle any eventuality we can think of and how we will stride out in this Brave New World. What then we some people start to want more control, to be involved in decision making. I for one don’t want newcomers involved in decision making that may impact on my or my families security and I certainly don’t want anyone trying to control me under threat of death, there being no other way to enforce their will. It is bad enough they irritate me now, what will it be like then when the stakes are much higher?

I still think we need communities to survive long term, just communities that are in local family sized groups and not in the same house. We live with neighbours that annoy us now mainly without major issues. Even the ones we don’t like much we just tend to be polite with and the ones we don’t like at all we tend to ignore.

I’m wondering if there is are certain personality attributes that would be best for smaller communities. A mixture of colours, personality types, that would be suitable for communes, local communities and what dynamics are best for small groups. Each must have differing requirements. What traits would be best for roles? Not something explored on the course but there must be studies somewhere on this. There are defined ranges for certain roles in businesses. Some job searches include a profile requirement either for the role or to fit in with the team. our requirements are no different although I suspect nobody has bothered to fund the definition of the personality requirements for a butcher, farmer or gardener never mind a prepper. I’ll be interested in finding out if any work has been performed on this and if not if there is something we can use to help us build up profiles. Watch this space.

In the meantime it is up to our gut feel if someone is going to fit in, with you of course.

3 comments to Community Team Building

  • LawAbidingCitizen

    Hi SD

    Without wishing to stereotype or categorise, although we all need to do this somewhat from time to time as part of our survival processes – from what I have gleaned to be the ‘average’ prepper psychology, is that they are very much like cats. Many are fiercely individualistic and often ‘libertarian’ in their mindset, and I would describe myself as pretty much in that category. Cats often love to please but sometimes just do their own dam thing, and sometimes when you want their attention they don’t want yours. Conversely, when they want your attention they are often all over you! So, the question might be, how does one herd cats?

    As you said many preppers seem to be alpha male types, and even though there are of course female preppers, many of them seen to have alpha male type characteristics. These can of course be positive traits and the alpha male type is often fiercely individualistic, creative, and often very ‘protective’ of their loved ones and those close to them. The question then is, how does one build a team or group filled with people of these similar types of trait? I believe the key here is that most prepper types are not only prepping for prepping reasons, but also do it for the love of it, particularly people with the various specific skills needed by the whole of the prepper community. Perhaps then the focus on a prepper group should be ‘expertise’ led, and rather than trying to have a team filled with different types (probably very difficult when most preppers have a similar mindset), one should seek a team of similar types filled with people of various expertise who are largely left to get on with their own thing, but also train people in their area of expertise if others so wish, and then perhaps leading to a degree of crossover from experts becoming expert or near expert at a secondary ‘expertise’. This is of course not to say that anyone is restricted to a particular field, but I have often found that if someone is an expert in a particular field, and has become that way because they love and enjoy it, then they often love imparting that knowledge to others wishing to learn that field.

    Just my 2 pence worth as they say.

    LAC

  • midnitemo

    I agree with the alpha male comments LAC makes…my own feelings are you need to select your group from non alpha’s where possible as a leadership challenge could be devastating…i think the onus for us as preppers is to maybe make contact with people likely to be leading nearby groups after an event purely as peacekeeping possibly trading type relationship but not for the purpose of integration(Building a relationship with these other leaders before the event)

  • bigpaul

    whenever I’ve heard the phrase: “we are looking for someone to join our jolly little TEAM !” I usually run a mile!!