August 6, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 4 min read · Emergency Services & Tech
My kit for a callout looks, to anyone watching me pack it, slightly excessive — spare batteries for things that already have batteries, a backup torch for the torch that's already a backup, more than one way to charge anything that needs charging. It looks like overkill right up until the one specific time it isn't, and I've had exactly enough of those times to keep packing this way without a second thought.
The Job That Taught Me This Properly
Early in my volunteering, I had a single piece of communications equipment fail partway through a job — nothing dramatic, just a connector that finally gave out after one knock too many — and realised, in that moment, I had no backup for it at all. I'd backed up almost everything else and somehow decided that one specific item was reliable enough not to need it. It wasn't a disaster. It was a genuinely uncomfortable twenty minutes that taught me more about redundancy than any safety briefing ever had.
Why "It's Reliable" Is the Wrong Test
Almost everything in a kit is reliable, most of the time, which is exactly why a single point of failure feels statistically safe right up until the one occasion it isn't. The actual question isn't "how likely is this specific item to fail." It's "what happens if it does, at the worst possible moment, with no backup available." For some gear, a failure is a minor inconvenience. For comms equipment specifically, a failure with no backup can mean a genuinely isolated, unreachable person in a situation where that matters enormously.
How I Actually Think About It Now
For anything where failure carries a real consequence — not just inconvenience, an actual consequence to someone's safety or to the team's ability to function — I ask whether I've got a genuinely independent backup, not just a second one that fails for the exact same reason as the first. Two batteries from the same depleted charging cycle isn't real redundancy. A second device that depends on the exact same single point of failure as the first isn't real redundancy either.
Where This Directly Maps to Client Work
I apply the identical logic to business continuity conversations with clients, and it's the same question every time: if this one thing failed right now, today, what's the actual backup, and is it a genuinely independent backup or just a second copy of the same vulnerability? A backup stored in the same building as the system it's protecting isn't real redundancy against fire or theft. A single staff member who's the only one who knows a critical process isn't real redundancy against that person being unavailable on the one day it matters.
The Balance Worth Striking
You can't realistically build infinite redundancy into everything — at some point the cost and the hassle of doubling up genuinely outweighs the risk being protected against, and that's a legitimate, reasonable judgement call to make consciously. The actual skill is identifying which specific few things genuinely warrant a real backup because the consequence of failure is serious, and which things are fine to leave as a single point of failure because the consequence, honestly, just isn't that big a deal if they fail.
What I'd Want Anyone Reading This to Actually Do
Pick the one thing in your business, your home, or your own kit where failure would genuinely hurt, and honestly check whether you've got real, independent redundancy for it or just an assumption that it won't fail. That's a five-minute audit that's saved me real grief more than once, and it costs nothing except the slightly uncomfortable admission that something you'd been quietly assuming was fine might not actually be.
