A human resources manager in Singapore told me during an exercise she planned to notify next-of-kin of  injured or deceased employees by text message (SMS). I was stunned. If there were a worse way to receive sensitive, painful information, I can’t imagine what it could be.

The rules for ‘breaking bad news’ are:
1. in person: never by phone, email or text
2. in time: anxious relatives want news – good or bad – as quickly as possible
3. in pairs whenever possible: a man and a woman are the best combination
4. in plain language: the facts, frankly and clearly
5. with compassion: as you would want your doctor would tell you.

Here is a page of tips for breaking bad news from Counsellor Suzanne Anderson MSW at SACAC in Singapore. You can learn more about death notification and practice doing it in Suzanne’s Crisis Communications & Crisis Intervention course in March 2013 in Singapore.

Resilient Business NZ is one of many Sisyphean efforts to engage small businesses in contingency planning. A project by Welfare & Recovery Manager Jane Lodge of the Auckland (NZ) Council, Resilient Business NZ has simple menus, engaging photographs and international-standard BCM advice. But its initial self-evaluation questions include, ‘Does your business understand the Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption?’ Gee, I hardly understand MTPD myself…

Memories of two destructive earthquakes in New Zealand in the last two years may be enough to motivate owners of grocery stores, dry cleaners and coffee shops to prepare for disasters, but I doubt it. I hope Resilient Business NZ results in a measurable increase in preparation, because it’s a good idea, but it is basically another entreaty – like Canada’s B-Ready Now and the Singapore Business Federation’s National BCM Programme for SMEs – to small business owners to spend time and money they don’t have. A business owner isn’t looking for ways to spend money; she is looking for ways to make money (and aren’t we all?).

Small business BCM challenges the paradox of preparation: there is no return-on-investment in preparedness unless asteroids hit the planet or some other Extraordinarily Unlikely Event occurs. Resilient Business NZ tells business what they should do, but people don’t always do what they should do, or what their well-intentioned governments exhort them to do. They shouldn’t smoke, drink or eat supersized French fries, but they do anyway.  Read more... (1159 words, 1 image, estimated 4:38 mins reading time)

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

The FKPC 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... (589 words, 2 images, estimated 2:21 mins reading time)

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)