A one-day workshop about turning risks into opportunities
with the theme “understanding future sources of human-induced disasters”
led by Nathaniel Forbes, Robert Kay and David Parsons

The Forbes Kay Parsons Charrette 2022 (FKPC) is a one-day exploration of ways to turn the risks of the next ten years into opportunities. (Get it? 2012 + 10 = 2022) FKPC  is an accelerated planning workshop focused specifically on how to get a return on your investment in organizational and community resilience planning.

The Forbes Kay Parsons Charrette 2022 is an innovative approach to resilience organized by Nathaniel Forbes (Singapore), Robert Kay (Australia) and David Parsons (Australia). As far as we know, no one’s ever organized a charrette on resilience risks and opportunities before.

What’s a charrette? It is “an intense period of design activity… organizing thoughts from experts and users in a structured medium that is unrestricted and conducive to creativity and the development of myriad scenarios.” From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette

FKPC 2022 will be held on Sunday, 24 June 2012, at the Ontario Bar Association in downtown Toronto, Canada. Admission to FKPC 2022 is CAD $395.00, including lunch.  Participation is limited to seventy-five (75) people selected from the public, private and non-governmental sectors.

Sunday, 24 June is the Sunday before the World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM).  Read more... (646 words, 1 image, estimated 2:35 mins reading time)

Everybody’s favourite pastime: comparing themselves with others! Complete the KPMG-Continuity Insights BCM Program Benchmarking survey and maybe win this Amazon Kindle Fire.

They say it takes twenty (20) minutes to complete; the deadline is 15 January 2012. To hear how your BCM program compares to everyone else’s, register for the Continuity Insights conference in Scottsdale, Arizona (USA) in April 2012. Or just read the May 2012 issue of Continuity Insights magazine. Here are the 2007 KPMG-CI Benchmarking Survey results, for comparison.

So this is what passes for thought leadership in business continuity management (BCM) these days.

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI), a U.K. professional association with global ambitions and under-exploited footholds in the growth markets of Asia, Middle East and South America, goes looking for a partner in North America. After thoughtful deliberation about the future of BCM in the 21^st century, and with all the time in the world to make a choice, they select…the Disaster Recovery Journal (DRJ), a 24-year old, American, family-owned magazine publisher and conference producer that must be the only BCM business in the world still calling it “disaster recovery,” the most-resented term in BCM profession.

BCI’s announcement says the alliance “aims to align thought leadership between [the] two organizations,” while DRJ’s press release says the alliance will “broaden and deepen discussions in…business continuity and related professions.”

That “thought leadership” bit caught my eye. When I first skimmed the headline, I mistakenly thought the BCI and the American professional association formerly-known-as the Disaster Recovery Institute International – DRII – had finally decided to stop pissing on each other’s shoes. Now, that would be news.  Read more... (2676 words, 2 images, estimated 10:42 mins reading time)

Rise up and rebel against the presenters who oppress you! Join the Anti-PowerPoint Party, a grass-roots global movement dreamed up by Swiss software engineer and author Matthias Poehm. Be sure to check out his “Horror slide of the month”! You can “Like” the APPP Party on Facebook, too.

Columnist Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times wrote about the APPP in her column, “Anti-PowerPoint revolutionaries unite”. (The FT makes you register to read their stuff, but it is free.) She was brave to admit publicly she’d been “gang raped by PowerPoint slides more times than I can count.” I can’t wait for her podcast of that one.

Joining the APPP is free. And very much tongue-in-cheek. I joined. I’d send money, too, but it’s not quite clear how it would be used. Matthias is flogging his book, The PowerPoint Fallacy, for SGD 29.00 if you join the APPP, SGD 46.00 if you don’t. His marketing strategy is positively a work of genius, in my view, because so many bad presentations waste so many people’s time, all over the world.

U.S. President Abraham Lincoln dedicated a Civil War cemetery in three minutes and just 268 words – and no slides – in his famous Gettysburg Address. 150 years later, American school children can still recite it from memory (I learned it in the 4th grade). Here’s Google’s Director of Research Peter Norvig‘s satirical version of that Gettysburg Address  as a Powerpoint presentation. Point: bad slides detract from good content.  Read more... (375 words, 1 image, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)

I suppose that putting up posters in your office might raise awareness of risk, security, audit, fraud, theft and other naughty behaviors. New Zealand IT consulting company IsecT Limited publishes risk management posters for that purpose every month on their NoticeBored web site. The company has been distributing free, high-resolution posters since May 2006; there are five or six new ones each month. (The April 2008 selections featuring auditors are amusing.)  I’d like to be at a brain-storming session where these are dreamed up; I’ll bet that beer is involved…

American training firm Native Intelligence also distributes security awareness posters online and in print. Some posters are free, but print versions without a watermark cost USD 7.50. Native Intelligence also produces 60-second animated presentations for video kiosk and desktop screensaver displays. The company is owned by Native American women, hence the company’s name. (“Native American” is how Americans refer to American Indians, to distinguish them from people from India.)  Read more... (701 words, 0 images, estimated 2:48 mins reading time)

It’s hard not to notice the earthquake risk around the Pacific Rim these days. Maybe the risk is actually higher, or maybe I just notice it more, but in the last four months, Asia has had three earthquakes of 6.0 or higher on the Richter scale, the magnitude at which earthquakes are generally considered destructive.

The Wenchuan earthquake in China’s Sichuan province in May drew worldwide attention to the enormous impact of a big earthquake, even in areas with low population density: 70,000 people killed, 18,000 missing, 375,000 injured, and 5 million people homeless. And that was only the second-deadliest earthquake in Chinese history: the Tangshan earthquake was worse (250,000 people killed, 150,000 injured) and that took place just 30 years ago in 1976.

China is in the largest orogenic zone on the planet (that’s how the Himalayas got there), but Wenchuan had “never been considered high-risk compared to cities near other fault lines”, according to Hong Kong-based seismologist Dr. Michael Spranger. And now, after the Wenchuan earthquake, the earthquake risk in China is even higher because of tectonic shifting.

The Indian Ocean earthquake near Sumatra that caused the 2004 tsunami was also in an “unexpected location”, Dr. Spranger said. In fact, Munich Reinsurance reports that Sumatra accounted for nearly a quarter of all earthquakes measuring 6.9 or greater in the world since the 2004 tsunami; Sumatra had accounted for only 2 percent of them in the previous 30 years.  Read more... (1584 words, 0 images, estimated 6:20 mins reading time)

This month, U.S. credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) started evaluating the enterprise risk management (ERM) capabilities of non-financial companies that it covers. This is S&P’s announcement, and here are their answers to common questions about it.

Extrapolating a risk evaluation to a logical, eventual conclusion, if a company doesn’t have a business continuity management (BCM) program, its credit rating could be lowered. The consequence? Borrowing money would cost more, and for the large companies that S&P reviews, that could be a material consequence.

S&P already evaluates risk management at the banks, insurance, energy and agribusiness companies that it rates, and now wants to do so at companies in other sectors. These are the Asian corporates that S&P rates and these are the U.S. corporates. You’ve probably heard of their S&P 500 index of American companies. S&P also rates companies, governments and debt instruments all over the world.

Suppose one of those companies wanted to issue a bond for $200 million to build a new plant in, say, India. Suppose also that, in part to its assessment of the company’s risk management, S&P lowered its credit rating from, say, A- (upper medium grade) to BBB+ (lower medium grade). As a result, the company was forced to pay a 4.1% coupon instead of 3.9% to make the bond attractive to investors or underwriters. On $200 million, two-tenths of one percent (the difference between 4.1% and 3.9%) is $400,000.  Read more... (885 words, 0 images, estimated 3:32 mins reading time)

Singapore’s financial sector industry-wide exercise (IWE) will run from Thursday, Aug 28 to Friday, Sep 11, 2008. There will be three sessions, presumably corresponding to escalating stages of epidemic development, in a highly-pathogenic influenza (HPI) scenario over the two-week period, plus a “practical drill” on Friday 29 August that will require participants to execute HPI response plans at their own facilities.

These are the briefing slides used at ABS’ Apr. 3 announcement in Singapore, and these slides are for the first “communique” briefing on May 7. This slide lists the dates of future briefings and communique’s. The ABS has opened an IWE portal (exercise web site) specifically for the exercise.

• These are the MAS guidelines on pandemic measures for banks, issued in January 2006.

• These are MOH’s recommended infection control measures for workplaces, last updated in May 2007.

• These are the Singapore MOH influenza alert levels (there are five; WHO has six).

The IWE is sponsored by the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) with support from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), which includes the Singapore Police and Civil Defence Force (our fire department). Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MoH) will surely contribute, too.  Read more... (1131 words, 0 images, estimated 4:31 mins reading time)

Here’s an amusing 30-second television advertisement from Fidelity Investments that illuminates the benefits of contingency planning.  The spot originally ran in the United States; it’s posted on YouTube.

The premise: your investment is safe because Fidelity has a recovery plan for electric power failures.

This may be the first TV spot in the world for the benefits of business continuity planning. It’s certainly the first one I’ve ever seen, and I’ll bet it’s the first that reached a mass audience in America.

Contingency planning must be ‘ready for prime time’ if the largest mutual fund company in the United States thinks its advertising can compete with ads for beer, babes and burgers by showing investors it can keep the lights on when other companies can’t.

This is no small-change decision: advertising on “Desperate Housewives,” for example, costs USD $394,000 per minute.

Think of the future possibilities: in only 24 hours, intrepid CTU agent Jack Bauer develops a BCP to save the civilization as we know it…

Too far-fetched? Not in Hollywood…

Ladies and gentlemen, start your Tivo‘s.