As an operational risk consultant, I encounter clients who have no business continuity plans—“that takes too much time and money” and/or “we don’t have anyone on staff who knows how to do that kind of stuff”—and who have opted instead to create plans around disaster response and/or crisis management. Sometimes such plans are emergency management oriented, with a fat binder full of procedures, and in such situations, what can be done to better prepare any organization to handle a crisis, especially if the organization has critical business processes?
I led the Washington Mutual (WaMu) Crisis Management Team for six years. Each member of the eight person crisis management team owned an operational piece of decision making that ranged from California wildfires and Florida hurricanes to West Coast earthquakes, New York snowstorms, and the 2003 East Coast power outage. My colleague Al Wilson called being a member of the team “sitting in the big chair.” That’s still the best definition of the work that I have. I have taken many of the refinements that we made in the crisis management program at WaMu into the work that my firm does today.
At the heart of crisis management lies the ability to obtain good outcomes using split-second timing. Practice makes perfect, especially if the organization is willing to run drills and scenario tests around the most common risks faced. Creating what we call a “playbook” that outlines in a streamlined fashion the most common events and the range of decisions around each type of event does work, especially if the playbook gets thinner not fatter because actual events, as well as tests and drills, have refined the work. A particular challenge these days is the new world in which we live with iPhone photos, real time Tweets and Facebook updates.
Growth & Funding Strategist
UNDERSTANDING CRISIS MANAGEMENT
By Annie Searle