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)

3-day BCI Professional Certification Training
Last session in 2012
Tuesday – Thursday, 2 -4 October 2012
20% discount for first ten (10) registrations

This is Nathaniel Forbes’ highly-rated version of the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) prep course, intended to help BCM professionals pass the 125-question BCI certification exam. The course covers all six (6) practices of the BCM Lifecycle outlined in the BCI’s Good Practice Guidelines (GPG) 2010.

What are the six (6) BCM practices you must know to pass the exam?  Download Nathaniel’s free course brochure here, or email to Chris Tan at chris.tan@calamity.com.sg for your copy.

Click here for a copy of the BCI GPG 2010.

Because of his long experience teaching this course, Nathaniel covers all the material – plus his proprietary, real-world case studies – in just three (3) days instead of the usual five (5) days.

Why take BCI’s certification preparation course from Nathaniel Forbes in Singapore?
• Save time:  take just three (3) days instead of the usual five (5) days
• The highest-rated BCM instructor in Asia, year after year for 16 years
• More than BCM theory, Nathaniel shows you real-world examples
• 80%+ of the students who’ve taken this course from Nathaniel passed the exam
• Save money: Nathaniel’s course fee includes the USD 500 exam fee
• Watch Nathaniel Forbes’ introduction to our 3-day BCI training course
• Our No Fail Guarantee: if you don’t pass, you don’t pay again to retake
• Read the testimonials from our participants have to say about the course.  Read more... (416 words, 1 image, estimated 1:40 mins reading time)

‘Because every year, I meet twenty people I should know.’ – David Parsons

In evaluating any conference, I think there are just three questions to ask:

• Did you learn something new?
• Did you meet someone new?
• Afterward, will you do something new?

For the World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM), my answer to all three questions has been ‘yes’ – or ‘Yes!’ – every year since 2005. I always get new insights, often from the same smart people who attend year after year. I always bring back a fistful of name cards from new people I’ve met – public sector emergency managers (EMs), private sector business continuity managers (BCMs), crisis managers (CMs), risk managers (RMs), disaster relief (DR) professionals. And I always lug home my well-travelled leather bag stuffed with new scribbles, new strategies and new quotes to try out immediately.

Those are the KPI’s of a worthwhile conference, in my opinion. And for a guy who lives on the sweltering equator, Toronto weather in June is wonderful.

Some unofficial WCDM history

At its peak five years ago, WCDM drew 1,800 people to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (MTCC) for three (3) days. It seemed to be the only truly “international” resilience conference in the world; flags from 20+ countries accurately represented the origins of the attendees. Its organizer, the Canadian Center for Emergency Preparedness (CCEP), was able to operate for a full year on its revenue from WCDM.  Read more... (3176 words, 0 images, estimated 12:42 mins reading time)

Everybody’s other favourite pastime: comparing salaries! The deadline is 31 December 2011 for recruiter BC Management’s Asia BCM compensation study. Click here to complete the survey. Results for 2010: 27% of BCM people in Asia get SGD 50K or less per year, 23% get up to SGD 100K and another 23% get up  to SGD150K. 75% of the SGD 50K or less were in India. View the chart for Asia Pacific. Hey, you do this for love, not money, right? When you complete the Asia BCM compensation study, you get a free copy. Pass it on to your HR department.

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.

Is sexual abuse an organizational resilience issue?

It is for Pennsylvania State University, a large, multi-campus public university (“college”) of 44,000 thousand students in the eastern United States. It could be at any organization – not just a school – if one of that organization’s employees were accused of abusing vulnerable individuals, especially children. Sexual abuse of children is a “significant public health problem” in many parts of the world, including the United States.

College (university) sports are a billion-dollar business in the U.S., a source of weekend pride and prejudice for millions of Americans. The top thirty (30) college sports programs alone raked in $5 billion in revenue last year (the 2010-2011 season). Penn State’s football team generated $73 million for the school, and they don’t even pay their players.  So the business impact of losing the trust of a campus, a community or a country because of criminal sexual conduct is enormous.

If you were a trustee of an educational institution at which lurid charges of sexual abuse by an employee had publicly exploded onto every screen in the land, you’d have a right to expect the school’s administrators to have a crisis management plan, and to brief you about it.    The trustees of Penn State have hired a public relations agency, Omnicom Group’s Ketchum agency, to advise them about crisis management.  Read more... (2929 words, 1 image, estimated 11:43 mins reading time)

Is drought a business continuity issue? It is in Texas. If your business is raising beef cattle, running out of something to feed them is an emergency. No rain means no hay. Drought is a ‘boiling frog disaster’: it comes on gradually. You don’t know you’re in a drought until your assets – crops, animals – start dying. Recovery time is…unknowable. Prayer is a plausible recovery strategy. Texas is as affected as Timbuktu and Somalia. But in Texas, you have to watch out for fire ants.

The International Disaster Conference and Exposition (IDCE2012), to be held January 17-19, 2012, at the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, will bring together emergency management, homeland security and disaster industry professionals from the public and private sectors around the world to share lessons learned and forward thinking regarding the policies, procedures and best practices shaping disaster preparation, response and recovery, loss mitigation, business continuity and more. Conference speakers, exhibitors and attendees will share the latest knowledge, technologies and techniques toward the common goal of minimizing the loss of life and property in future catastrophic events.

Industry professionals can review the entire IDCE2012 program and register to attend at the IDCE website: www.internationaldisasterconference.com. To receive news on the latest developments with IDCE2012 via email, click on the “Keep up . . . join the IDCE mailing list” button on the website’s home page.

Published in the Singapore Business Review, 5 December 2011 http://bit.ly/vIPCg0

I believe Singapore will eventually experience a severe earthquake. I’m not a pessimist; I’m a realist. You can’t live 400 hundred kilometers from a major earthquake fault and say there is no risk of earthquake.

The kitchen drawers in my 23rd floor Singapore home rolled open by themselves in the “tremor” from Sumatra in February 2008. That was a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. What happens after one that’s 8.0? Or 9.0, like Fukushima?

You understand that 9.0 is one hundred times stronger than 7.0, right?

As an organizational resilience professional, I imagine these consequences in Singapore:
• Civil Defense focused on high-priority locations. Ambulances simply unavailable
• Damaged office towers too risky to re-enter, and BCA inspectors overwhelmed
• Hundreds of employees and customers injured by falling glass
• Broken telecom lines and jammed mobile circuits
• Collapsed or buried segments of MRT track, and impassable road surfaces
• Damaged water, sewer and electric power lines
• Thousands of people trying to acquire drinking water
• Toilets that flush once but don’t refill
• Panic cash withdrawals from ATMs, only some of which will be functioning  Read more... (673 words, 1 image, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)

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)