The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters

by Juliette Kayyem

An urgent, transformative guide to dealing with disasters from one of today’s foremost thinkers in crisis management.

The future may still be unpredictable, but nowadays, disasters are not. We live in a time of constant, consistent catastrophe, where things more often go wrong than they go right. So why do we still fumble when disaster hits? Why are we always one step behind?

In The Devil Never Sleeps , Juliette Kayyem lays the groundwork for a new approach to dealing with disasters. Presenting the basic themes of crisis management, Kayyem amends the principles we rely on far too easily. Instead, she offers us a new framework to anticipate the “devil’s” inevitable return, highlighting the leadership deficiencies we need to overcome and the forward thinking we need to harness. It’s no longer about preventing a disaster from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when it does.

Filled with personal anecdotes and real-life examples from natural disasters like the California wildfires to man-made ones like the Boeing 737 MAX crisis, The Devil Never Sleeps is a guide for governments, businesses, and individuals alike on how to alter our thinking so that we can develop effective strategies in the face of perpetual catastrophe.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Business, Audiobook, Science, Environment

240 pages, Hardcover

Published March 29, 2022

About the author

Juliette Kayyem is currently the Robert and Renee Belfer Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she is Faculty Director of the Homeland Security Project and the Security and Global Health Project.

She is the CEO and Co – Founder of Grip Mobility, a technology company looking to provide transparency in the rideshare industry. She has spent over 20 years managing complex policy initiatives and organizing government responses to major crises in both state and federal government.

Kayyem appears frequently on CNN as their on-air national security analyst. Additionally, she is a weekly featured analyst on Boston Public Radio, 89.7 WGBH Boston’s Local NPR. She also has columns in The Atlantic.

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 2 out of 5]

Anybody who's lived through the past few years of The Circumstances, Covid-19, supply chain disruptions, and the shockwaves of natural disaster, war, and terrorism at various distances, probably has a sense that disasters are going to be permanent and ongoing. Kayyem has an interesting CV. While she's a professor at Harvard and a news talking head now, she was a counter-terrorism hipster, working in counter-terrorism before it became a major priority on 9/11, and she was Obama’s Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, where she worked on the response to the Deepwater Horizon book. Unfortunately, this book is scattered and under-theorized, and has a bad tendency to drop fascinating fragments without properly following up on them.

In Kayyem's model of disasters, there's the boom, the moment of crisis, left of the boom where you are going about your life and hopefully preparing for disaster, and right of the boom, with recovery. The boom is inevitable, over a long enough time scale something bad is going to happen. The only question is how prepared you are, and how you can recover.

There's actually quite a lot of literature on preparation, from The Ostrich Paradox to your local government preparedness guide, to the paranoid fantasies of preppers. From an organizational context, a few key points we've been missing are that a plan that is not tested and rehearsed is not a plan you can use at all, that stockpiles have to be refreshed regularly, and that modern efficiency drives in just-in-time logistics, cell networks, and integrated cloud computing solutions have introduced distant and complex single points of failure that we have to be aware of. This is my own analysis, the book unfortunately buries its discussion of preparedness under a jargon laden diversion into black swans and gray rhinos.

Moving on, there is the moment of the boom itself. Daily leadership and crisis leadership are different skillsets, and Kayyem is a fan of the Incident Command System as a flexible and expanding model of the crisis. My favorite factoid of the book is that many organizations have created a position for Chief Security Officer, responsible for preparedness and disaster response, and staffed that position with an ex-FBI agent, and then wall the CSO off from the rest of the organization so that they have no actual power. Oops.

I buy that crisis leadership is a unique skillset, but this book doesn't make much of a case about what exactly it is. The first goal of an ICS is to "stop the bleeding", to make sure that as a few people as possible die, and that damage from the disaster is contained as much as possible. What makes this hard in 2022 is primarily a problem of information, of a brittle reporting chain from "on the ground" to the command center, and conversely from the command center to the public. Cell phones and the internet are a double-edge blade. While in theory, they allow tremendous transparency at all levels, the book has little to say about the obvious problems of picking a useful signal of information out of a mass of 911 calls and tweets, especially when seconds matter, and of getting official response information out to the public in an age of distraction and disinformation.

The final side is right-of-the-boom, the response. One of the tragedies is that many deaths in disasters are what Haitians have started calling "stupid deaths" (and I'm curious about the Haitian source of this, given that they're a poor people who have suffered deeply from colonialism, earthquakes, and hurricanes), avoidable losses well after the worst of the disaster has passed. In blizzards, these are the people who die of carbon monoxide poisoning from poorly placed generators, in hurricanes, the deaths due to breaks in water and electrical service, rather than wind and flooding, and in Covid, it's the millions who died after vaccines and masks became widely available. These deaths may be stupid, but they are also some of the hardest to prevent, ultimately caused by poverty, under-investment in infrastructure, and outright misinformation. In theory, a disaster is an opportunity to rebuild properly. In practice, it seems to be a chance to Shock Doctrine the last exploitable wealth from the victims. Kayyem notes that leaders believe that can survive disasters and in practice, they rarely remain in power afterwards. Of course, they also rarely actually die or even suffer from the disasters they supposedly are responsible for.

This book isn't awful, but it's a missed opportunity. Every major disaster of the past decade is touched on, which means that none of the case studies are in sufficient depth, or any depth beyond a retrospective news magazine article. Where there needs to be a proper theory and argument for preparedness, information, decision, and resilience, there are generalities and an appeal to common sense.

[Jessi Collier Wakefield · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt that this was informative book that looks directly at disasters and how to deal with them. What I found interesting was that the author delved into tragedies, crisis, and disasters - where things went wrong and the inevitability of more disasters to come. But she was not nihilistic, this is not doom porn. It was actually empowering and clinical. I appreciated that.

Thanks to Libro.fm for my ALC of this title.

[Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a lot of pluses. It’s informative and interesting. The author is knowledgeable and has a very strong point about preparation. But it’s very, very slow moving and extremely repetitive. This, I assume, comes from the author’s frustration at the world not listening or paying attention the way she is forced to. But it makes for a difficult read, or rather listen. I read this one on audiobook and I would NOT recommend it. Instead of hiring a professional narrator, the author read her own book. This resulted in very choppy audio, where whole passages were suddenly read at different levels of urgency. You’d be listening along and then all of a sudden a spliced audio of the author reading much faster and louder (despite the content not being more urgent!) would come barreling through the headphones, and it was completely jarring. I nearly gave up on the audiobook.

All this being said, it’s a decent book with important information and warnings. I think it could’ve just as easily been a long form journalism piece instead of a book, however.

[Susan Tunis · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

[Edward Champion · Rating 1 out of 5]

Given the pandemic and climate change, I picked up this book hoping to get some insight into how to better prepare for disasters. Instead, I soldiered through platitudes and insufferable narcissism and didn't really learn anything new. Juliette Kayyem spends more time in this book bragging about how CNN invites her to speak, how she got to interview James Clapper, how she is a mother, and how she owns a home. With all due respect, Miss Kayyem, I do not fucking care about you and your grifting and your privilege. I came here to learn, not to suffer through your hubris. You should have written a fucking memoir instead. Thankfully the book was only 200 pages. But this is a completely useless volume for anyone who wants to learn anything significant about disaster management and preparedness. Oh, and you may laugh as loudly as I did at the so-called "endnotes," which liberally refer to tweets. Jesus Christ. This author is a professor? Seriously?

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is right up my alley. I'm disaster and emergency minded. Maybe I should go after her job. She ends the book with an anecdote of her being on a train heading toward NY as the twin towers had been hit. She decided to exit the train and turn back and strongly urged others to do so as well without much success. She talks about Cassandra of Greek mythology who could predict the fate of others but then couldn't convince them.

I enjoyed learning the details of some recent disasters (natural, man-made, superbowl) from an expert in the field. I probably would have preferred a long article over a book. I'm curious what a day at work is like for Juliette Kayyem, she could have personalized it more.

[Anne Jordan-Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, approachable book with lots of memorable aphorisms and phrases: “less bad is good,” “assume the boom,” “left of boom,” “right of boom.” Minimizing damage after the boom is win. Hopeful. Encouraging planning for both before and after boom.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book to anyone who might experience a disaster (i.e. everyone.)

[Betsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I teach a college course on Emergency Preparedness. I will definitely use lots of information learned in this book.

[Abby Mars · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love her interviews and was glad to read her book with its calm and steady approach to crisis & crisis management

[B_rodger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently in the middle of a massive boom (read the book for the definition) and this is one of the most comforting books I’ve ever read. I’m not sure it was meant to be. But it was written from a perspective that I recognized and understood - deeply practical and pragmatic and realistic rather than unnecessarily optimistic - and it was exactly what I needed to read at this moment in time, near to the right of boom.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this after taking a class with Kayyem. The class was great and the book had some good nuggets/reminders but overall it would have been better as a shorter article.

[VK · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is very timely. It delves into the intricacies of navigating a world filled with crises, offering rich examples and case studies from past emergencies. That’s a very important book for the time of endless disasters and crises, which we’re living through right now, it seems.

However, my biggest issue with the book is how repetitive it is. The central message advocating for a focus on consequence minimization over prevention repeats persistently in each chapter, making the book feel overly redundant. While this is an important idea, the constant reiteration makes the book boring very quickly. Given the “essence” that you take away fr the book, it could have just been an article instead of a whole book.

[Adam Colby · Rating 1 out of 5]

The basic message is to mitigate for disasters because they will occur. Like most emergency managers, the articulation of how to do it is mostly missing. Basically, the book could have been 50 pages and the rest is fluff.

[Tim Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disasters happen. That’s a fact. Many are of them are of our own creation, a failure to learn from history or to see the broader landscape and incorporate all the variables. Some are just plain bad luck. As I used to tell my kids, the whole world is full of people who thought it wouldn’t happen to them.

If you doubt Juliette Kayyem’s assertion that disasters are continuous, think back over the last 10, 20, 30, or 40 years. How many disasters can you come up with? The 2008 global financial meltdown, BP oil spill, the Challenger explosion, Columbine, Covid, Exxon Valdez, Fukishima, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, the Joplin tornado, September 11th, and on, and on. As this is being written California is still digging out after multiple blizzards and the government is supervising the clean up of hazardous chemicals from a train derailment in Ohio.

So, what do we do about it? This first thing is to commit to a constant state of preparedness that it never complete. We cannot fall victim to what Kayyem calls the “Preparedness Paradox” which describes humanity’s tendency to question why we have dedicated resources for a disaster which may or may not transpire. We must recognize that the disasters will come. We can’t stop them. We don’t always get to decide their form or the timing. The thing we can do is have the resources and training in place to mitigate the losses.

Also, every disaster has some things in common. They require large scale responses and the ability to pivot as new information becomes available. Kayyem would also say that overreaction is always the preferable course of action.

We will never be able to stop all losses. The goal should be to minimize. Have layers of defense and redundancies (back ups for your backups). Overreact and do it with speed.

Kayyem examines several of the disasters mentioned and what went wrong, what was ignored, and what could have been done better. She brings in strategies from diverse environments (the 10 Standard Firefighting Orders, the practice of having regular situational reports, giving the bottom-line up front, and “Stop the Bleed”). She also argues that the structure of the and budgets of our organizations must reflect our dedication to preserving life. There is no last line of defense, just another potential failure to anticipate and plan for.

There is so much more that we can learn from this book. It is a fascinating study and there’s no way I can adequately boil it down to it’s essence. What I will leave you with is that we can all be disaster planners and for our family’s sake, we should. This should be both in emergency terms and financial terms. Also, when a disaster comes about the people responsible almost always lose their jobs. But when questioned if they want to be the person who lost their job and cost a bunch of people their lives, nobody says yes.

Nobody says yes.

[Matt Nyman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book for people interested in disaster management policy. Given all the failures on mass shootings and COVID and innumerable other disasters, Kayyem takes a very organized look at how we need to deal with all this from a policy perspective. I thought this was excellent. Organized. Detailed. Thorougly reasoned. A ton of extremely practical policy advice. And what I really appreciate about this book is how much it attempts to go to the next level of disaster prep and disaster response. She's ahead of most policymakers in this area.

I think maybe the weakness, if there is one, is that she comes from the disaster management industry and accordingly she doesn't have the personal perspective of a leader trying to balance cost, priorities and policy. I'm sure all of her recommendations would be great, but of course you need the time, the money and the commitment. But Kayyem addresses this repeatedly, with the VERY obvious point that a little bit of prep saves a LOT of cost later on. So much of her advice can be implemented immediately and at little cost.

The big idea that I took from the book is that disaster management is a VERY unrewarded field, because it is super hard to pay attention to all the disasters avoided by existing policy. People are always saying you should dismantle protective agencies because they don't do anything. Take for example the FDA on food protection. No one says you should do away with it entirely. But people believe too much regulation is just a cost. But regulation also has benefits that may be hard to perceive.

Also, you HAVE to go over what went wrong, and go over your current plans to see if you can find flaws. These things seem obvious, but I'm confident many organizations and governments get the plans done and then pack them away for years. Planning has to evolve.

Superb well written practical book. Useful.

[Ed Bernard · Rating 2 out of 5]

More like 2.5 stars.
I am a massive fan of Juliet Kayyam, who appears on one of our two public radio stations (and how lucky am I to live in Boston, a city that HAS two public radio stations!) weekly with smart commentary and incisive remarks. And yet, it’s rather remarkable that a book about her specialty, disasters and how to prepare for them, could be as dull as this one. That’s probably a bit unfair, because she does many things right — peppers her thoughts with real-world examples, writes in a conversational style, she even narrates the audiobook in her familiar voice — but somehow the parts add up to more than the whole. I learned almost nothing that I didn’t already know, and literary devices — ending each chapter with “you are here”, repeatedly referring back to her own “before the boom/after the boom” quip about pre- and post-disaster — ultimately work against her, in my opinion. There is useful information in this book, but it’s worthy of a reasonably long magazine article, not an entire book. I expected to find this book wholly absorbing, but it rarely was. A real disappointment, sadly.

Grade: C+

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crisis, disaster and even catastrophe all describe a world after the devil has arrived.

Six leadership biases: myopia, amnesia, optimism, inertia, simplification and herding.

The black swans and gray rhinos both demonstrate our failure to recognize and act upon the obvious.

Stop trying to control probability when it comes to disasters and start trying to control the consequences.

In a world of disasters, the ultimate judgment isn't black or white but always in the gray zone.

It may seem easier to accept a level of harm, worry, complain, freak out, but still get on with our lives with no action. We could. But it hasn't been a great strategy so far.

Every disaster has a history. They expose all that is already wrong in a society.

[Jonah Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took Juliette Kayyem's class on Disaster Management and Response at Harvard and it is one of the few classes that has stuck with me a decade later. This excellent book, about how each of us can contribute to making the effects of frequents disasters "less bad", is as accessible as it is thought-provoking. While not in the field of disaster management, I found many of the lessons applicable to my own work. While most of the book focuses on the lessons from those in the middle of previous disasters, I found many of their insights applicable to my own life and family. Definitely recommend. I'll be talking about this book as much as I continue to think about her class.

[Laila Khalil · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well informed and descriptive book on disaster management for governments, agencies and emergency managers. Without getting too prescriptive or authoritarian, the author does a good job of listing numerous examples of natural and human caused tragedies, and the simple lapses that led to the failures of systems and resulted in stupid deaths, a term she uses to describe the loss of lives which could have easily been prevented or avoided by implementing some “common sense” measures prior to the occurrence of the “boom”. In the authors own words, “Good leadership is knowing crisis is coming, so get your head around it”

[Scott Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work discusses the idea of disaster preparedness, but it is not a checklist. It is more a collection of thoughts/experiences from one who has been at the forefront of government responses to various disasters (natural and otherwise). There are some good nuggets of thoughts for how to think, prepare and deal with disasters, but the audience for such inputs is not the common reader, but more the policy-maker. It is decent food for thought for the common reader, but it is not so revolutionary that it will alter how society writ-large views life and disaster preparedness. An okay read, but not much more beyond that.

[Kevin Sandell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just a must-read for disaster planners, but also for families, small business owners, city managers, corporate leaders, and anyone charged with safeguarding themselves, others, and property (everyone!).

How do you mitigate disasters - by making them less bad. Before they happen, during, and then after. How do you make things less bad? Disasters will always occur. There's no stopping a devil hellbent on destruction, but there's a way to make the death and destruction less bad.

I learned a ton from this book, and it's one I will purchase and keep for future preparation. I recommend you do so too.

[Dennis Henn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was the wrong audience for this book and only made it halfway through. Though short as a book, it should have been published as a fifty page booklet dedicated to disaster remediation. Kayyem's point, made abundantly clear through repetition and example, is that we cannot prevent disasters and we spend too much of our resources on doing so. We can only minimize the impact of disasters and must acknowledge that they will happen, whether that be an oil spill, a natural weather disaster, a cyberattack, or a pandemic. The devil never sleeps

[J Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty interesting idea from an expert disaster person that disaster always will happen. We are on two sides of disaster, before it happens and then after it happens. My big complaint is just to much reference back to the title! Constant and annoying. Seems a silly analogy for disaster to me- if disaster is built in reality of our world it is an objective fact where as the devil idea is most certainly not! That said, good book!

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting look at disasters we have already seen (shocking to remember how many there have been and their wide variety) and how we have reacted to them. And the reactions (read lack of planning or creative foresight) are stunning. Kayyem explains how "to alter our thinking so that we can develop effective strategies in the face of perpetual catastrophe." Fortunately, she still has faith in her fellow humans!!!!!

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Key point: focus less on the nature of the disaster (earthquake, pandemic, ship stuck in canal) and more on being prepared to respond to the effect of the disruption (entire electric grid down, supply chain disrupted, evacuation route blocked). And also disasters are going to happen no matter what, and they are going to happen more often.

[Steven Groner · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and necessary book! A must read for the leaders, planners and organizers of each family and organization. Juliette Kayyem really pulls her thoughts together in this enjoyable and educational effort. I read her earlier "Mom" approach to resilience and liked it too but The Devil Never Sleeps is her best effort to date.

[Marc Schultz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read worth the time. A bit repetitive in some areas but Juliette dies a great job in showing the challenges in being prepared separate from the challenges to minimize the impact of events.

I hope managers, particularly those in finance read this and find ways to value the investments needed to protect and recover from these types of events. They will happen, they are happening.

[KatieMc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admire Juliette Kayyem and her work. Shit is going to happen, it's not always preventable. Life will bring problems, it's how you deal with them that shows what you are made of. This idea translates to dealing with crises and disasters. The boom is the crisis, and you are before (left of boom) or after (right of boom).

[Scott Draper · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s ok. Not exactly sure what I’d apply from it though. I’m in the emergency management field in healthcare and have been for the past 17 years. She makes some good points and some of the past historical disasters are interesting but application is all over the board in this book. I came away wondering what I just read.