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.

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)

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)

The World Conference on Disaster Management (WCDM) is the leading global gathering for emergency professionals from the public and private sectors. The speakers are from all over the world. The networking opportunities are tremendous; 1,800 attendees are expected next year. And Toronto is a spectacular place to visit in the summer.

The theme of the 18^th WCDM from June 15-18, 2008 is “Resiliency – Individual, Community and Business.” If you live in Asia, and you work in emergency response or management, business continuity, risk management, security, disaster recovery or crisis management, WCDM is an opportunity to share what you’ve learned by making a presentation.

Submit your presentation idea by December 2, 2007. You can submit your proposal online: write up to 250 words to describe your presentation, then click on “Call For Papers.”

I receive email warnings from the U.S. National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center about earthquakes that might cause tsunami events in the Pacific Rim. The service is fast, free and helpful to emergency response authorities.

Just since late July I’ve received alerts for several earthquakes: two in the South Pacific, two in the Aleutian Islands (Alaska), the big one off the coast of Peru. The PTWC warnings are text-based so they can be received on the lowest common technology denominator, I suppose. The alerts contain no HTML links to the PTWC web site where you could see maps showing the locations of earthquakes.

So I can find it hard to place an event’s latitude and longitude in my mind – “2.7 NORTH 127.5 EAST”, for example. Most people can picture “the coast of Peru,” but I must admit I’m a bit hazy about “North Moluccan Sea.”

Where is that, anyway?

You can find out quickly and simply, and in stunning detail, in Google Earth. Download and install Google Earth (15 megabytes) onto your computer. It’s free. And sign up to receive the PTWC alerts by email. They’re free. too. Then wait for an alert message to show up in your mailbox.

Inside each alert you’ll find data for these parameters:  Read more... (479 words, 0 images, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)

Playing a Russian submarine lieutenant in the 1966 film “The Russians Are Coming“,  actor Alan Arkin repeatedly mispronounces the word “emergency” as “Egermency! Egermency!” to hilarious and memorable effect.

The real challenges of communicating in an emergency – when those involved don’t share the same first language – are illustrated effectively (and humorously) in this video commercial on YouTube for Berlitz language schools, featuring an imaginary German Coast Guard operator misunderstanding a distress call.

The commercial drew laughs in a presentation at July’s World Conference on Disaster Management in Toronto, Canada.

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.

UNESCO‘s International Tsunami Information Centre offers tsunami warnings by email from 31 seismic stations and 79 tidal stations around the Pacific. Sign up at this link. It’s a bit jarring to get an email with the subject “tsunami warning”, but nice to know it works. Hosted by the U.S. National Weather Center‘s Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, the system is administered by the ITSU/Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. These are the member states. Note: there’s also a warning system for the Indian Ocean and for the Atlantic/Mediterranean.