This is the second part of an article that is the basis of my presentation for WCDM 2013. [The first part was ‘What’s wrong with contingency planning?] They expand on thoughts I expressed in “Linking emergency- & business continuity management in resilience” in 2008, “Is the BCM profession a dead-end?” in 2010, “BCI-DRJ alliance: this is ‘thought leadership?’” in 2011 and in “Why traditional approaches aren’t working”, my presentation to the Australian National Security College in 2012.

I haven’t tried to develop a list of skills that resilience professionals ought to have, but I know the ones we have now aren’t enough. I’m happy to look for your comments on the WCDM blog; I’ll be ready to defend myself in June in Toronto.

Here’s Why I attend WCDM; I hope you will, too.

In 2012 the Australian Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department commissioned a report, CEO Perspectives on Organisational Resilience, as part of its Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy. To prepare that report, WCDM presenter Dr. Robert Kay and Dr. Chris Goldspink of InceptLabs conducted face-to-face interviews with fifty (50) CEOs of large Australian enterprises, the kinds of companies that could be expected to have some understanding organizational resilience.  Read more... (4723 words, 1 image, estimated 18:54 mins reading time)

Author’s note: This is the first part of a longer article that will become my presentation of the same title for WCDM 2013. It incorporates thoughts expressed in my articles “Is the BCM profession a dead-end?” in 2010, “BCI-DRJ alliance: this is ‘thought leadership?’” in 2011 and in “Why traditional approaches aren’t working”, my 2012 presentation to the Australian National Security College.

It is not yet fully developed, months before WCDM. In particular, I’m wondering if my analysis really does or not apply to both emergency management (EM) in the public sector and business continuity management (BCM) in the private sector. Your comments will help me refine my thinking. I’m happy to engage in a dialogue here or on the WCDM blog; I’ll be ready to defend myself in June in Toronto. Be sure to bring an ample supply of rotten tomatoes to my presentation…

Here’s Why I attend WCDM; I hope you will, too. This article is also available on the WCDM blog.

What’s wrong with contingency planning?

If your CEO asked you – a private-sector business continuity manager (BCM) – to list the major, long-term risks to your company, what risks would be on your list?

Or if an elected official asked you as a public-sector emergency manager (EM) to list the major long-term risks to your community, what risks would be on that list?  Read more... (2267 words, 0 images, estimated 9:04 mins reading time)

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 heart-warming story like this one about a hotel’s effort to return a child’s lost stuffed animal confirms my belief in the inestimable, long-term resilience value of customer service.

Business impact doesn’t necessarily have to be negative.  Ritz Carlton Hotels’ good customer service had very positive impact:  they made a loyal, vocal customer; they got priceless word-of-mouth publicity; they can charge (a lot) more for their rooms.  That makes them more competitive, and therefore more resilient in good times and bad.

In June, I stayed at The Varden Hotel, a boutique gem rated #1 (of 48) on TripAdvisor in Long Beach, California.  A package arrived for me after I’d returned to Singapore. The hotel staff contacted me by email, asked where I’d like it sent, shipped it at their own expense, and wouldn’t accept any reimbursement. There’s a reason they’re rated #1, I guess.

That contrasts with my experience at the Radisson Hotel LAX, which had no water in the shower, the sink or the toilet from midnight to 05:30 a.m. the night I stayed in June. I couldn’t flush, shower, shave or brush my teeth before flying the next day. At checkout I wasn’t asked, ‘How was your stay?’, but I expressed my unhappiness anyway. The desk clerk responded, “You can talk to my director, if you like.” He seemed to have been specifically instructed to pretend there wasn’t a water problem.  Read more... (516 words, 2 images, estimated 2:04 mins reading time)

Most industrial parks don’t include SCUBA divers in their recovery plans. But car companies and a shoe maker in Thailand – but nowhere near the ocean – had to hire divers to retrieve hard-to-replace moulds from submerged factories in November. “No one thought about such a worst-case scenario”, said one company president. “In future we will need to reconsider the flood risk.”

They sure will. Three (3) major rivers – the Chao Phraya, Lopburi and Pa Sak – converge around the industrial estates in Ayutthaya. But companies obviously decided that tax incentives and the proximity of suppliers outweighed the risks of catastrophic flooding. Or maybe they just skipped a risk assessment entirely.

Supply chain resilience strategy: don’t build a shoe-, car- or disk drive factory in a floodplain. Some companies may even avoid Thailand. Impact: if one Japanese multinational were to choose, say, Vietnam or Myanmar for its next factory, others would follow, beginning a chain of falling dominoes for Thailand – eventually. Prime Minister Shinawatra’s crisis management effort is just beginning.

• In addition to flooding and storms, risks in Asia include volcanoes, earthquakes and volcanoes with earthquakes – not generally worries in Europe or North America.

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)

International Humanitarian Assistance Symposium

Dave Parsons and Jason Kelly

Most industry conferences don’t have a “Survivor Reception”, but there will be one at International Humanitarian Assistance Symposium (IHAS), 7-8 June 2012 in Miami (USA). In fact, one day is just panels of disaster survivors, including 9/11 New York and Pan Am Flight 103, and TWA Flight 800. IHAS is organized by the Family Assistance Foundation (FAF); FAF board member Jeff Morgan was Manager of Emergency Response & Contingency Planning at Delta Airlines. Check out the sponsors (bottom of the home page). A whole conference on private sector humanitarian assistance in the cruise, energy, manufacturing, retail and transportation businesses is new in organizational resilience. IHAS is affordable, too: USD 350 for two days, and even less if you register now. Miami in June? Just like a Singapore monsoon . . .

I learned about IHAS from Jeff Morgan at the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) Emergency Management (EM) conference in Kuala Lumpur in September 2011.

I was on a panel at AAPA EM with Dave Parsons and Jason Kelly answering the question, Are Crisis Leaders Born or Made? Our answer: both: about1/3 born, 2/3′s made. See our slides on SlideShare. We were moderated by Cathay Pacific Airways‘ Crisis Response Manager, Carrie Shiu.

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.

I think of organizational resilience as a chain that links security, emergency management (EM), disaster recovery, business continuity management (BCM) and crisis management. A resilient organization deploys appropriate security, has an I.T. disaster recovery plan, exercises its business continuity plan and has a separate crisis management plan.

But most organizations do not make emergency management plans, in my experience. Emergency management in the private sector is the weakest link in the resilience chain. That may be because there are substantial differences between emergency management (EM) and business continuity management (BCM) in scope, scale and skills.

Scope
One difference between EM and BCM is methodological: in any disaster, emergency management (actually, emergency response) comes before business continuity management. Emergency response precedes disaster recovery, crisis management and business continuity. When the fire alarm starts ringing, when your building starts shaking, when water begins to cover your shoes, it’s an “emergency”. It’s more than an incident, but not yet a catastrophe. There is immediate danger to life and health (IDLH) in an emergency that differentiates it from a “crisis”.  Read more... (2070 words, 0 images, estimated 8:17 mins reading time)

There is no more important long-term challenge in protecting businesses, homes and lives than bridging the knowledge gaps between what I call the “resilience professions”: business continuity, disaster response, disaster recovery, emergency management, crisis management, risk management and security. Asia is about to host the first conference I’ve seen to take on that challenge explicitly.

The 2008 International Disaster Management Conference on Public Private Partnership will bring together for the first time in Asia both public- and private-sector professionals in disaster, emergency and business continuity management as both presenters and attendees. The conference is on April 16 & 17 in Delhi, India and is endorsed by India’s National Disaster Management Authority.

In one conference you’ll be able to hear and meet senior executives from, for example, the Red Cross/Red Crescent Society, the British Standards Institute, India’s Oil Industry Safety Directorate, the Micro-Insurance Academy, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry, the US Agency for International Development International Resources Group – and the Mumbai airport. There are about twenty (20) presentations, plus India’s normal introduction and thank-you rituals.

The conference is organized by volunteers at Responsenet, an initiative of the Aidmatrix Foundation, a non-governmental organization (NGO) supported by high-tech companies. Some financial support for the conference has been given by the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM), GeoHazards International, Tata Indicom and Sphere India. Last year’s conference organized by Responsenet on supply chain for disasters drew 120 people.  Read more... (676 words, 0 images, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)