Dear {{ first_name | reader }},
This week I want to take you somewhere most crisis plans never look: the network the message travels through, not the message itself.
A few days ago I read Christian Johnson's account of cascading failure on a power grid, and one detail in it explained why some crises stay contained and others run away, almost regardless of how good the messaging was.
I've turned that logic into something you can actually use, and a (fictional) water utility's “brown-tap scare during a heatwave” scenario shows exactly how it could work.
Here's what's in this edition.
Enjoy!
WAG THE DOG NEWSLETTER | ISSUE WEEK 26, 2026
KEY TAKEAWAYS
A cascade runs away at a specific point, not gradually. When each affected node passes a failure to more than one other node on average, the event crosses from contained to systemic — the same threshold that governs grid failures, financial contagion and epidemics.
Information and electricity are cousins, not twins. Power is conserved as it flows from one line to the next; information replicates, so the grid's flow equations don't transfer to a rumour, even though the shape of failure does.
Trust functions as carrying capacity, not as a tool you reach for mid-crisis. A message moves across a relationship in proportion to what was deposited there beforehand, and no holding statement manufactures that reserve on the day.
There is no "general public" to brief. The water utility's real audience was 180,000 people in specific districts who, after a prior billing dispute, didn't believe a word the company said — and who were reached through the local voices they did trust.
Containment is engineered in the calm, not improvised in the crisis. The decisions that held this cascade below the line — a pre-written explainer, a current list of trusted messengers, and a rehearsal built to break — were all made months before the pump failed.