Understanding Emergency Services and Your Business.
I recently heard an interesting response from a CEO:
No, we're good. FENZ have it sorted...
He was referring to Fire & Emergency New Zealand in response to my question on whether any professional crisis management and business continuity support would be valuable as the event developed.
At a time when his premises began catching alight for the second time in a decade, I was surprised to see the incident's impact left in the hands of FENZ alone.
It isn't clear to me that his team understood tactical and operational response, but it certainly appeared as though neither was a priority while they waited nearly a week for FENZ to extinguish the fire.
No offence...
But, firefighters have bigger concerns than your business continuity.
They care about putting the fire out. They're in crisis / emergency response mode, not interested in operational resilience plans. Which means someone else needs to be implementing this.
Arriving at your premises and getting a good SITREP (situation report), first-hand facts, and information of hazardous materials is music to a firefighter's ears.
This is achieved with practice.
It's achieved by being tactical, narrow minded, and process driven. Then knowing when to move to operational, assessment driven activities (the business continuity piece) when the time is right.
When an emergency occurs, for the most part, you are at the mercy of emergency services. So it's important to understand how their decisions may impact your business continuity response.
When Fixinc designs a business continuity plan for our clients, we make them direct, adaptable, concise, and most of all relevant for this exact reason.
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So what happens when something like that isn’t in place?
Get comfortable with disciplines
Dreamworld told media they would be open within 3 days after four of their guests died on a malfunctioning ride.
Police were quick to shut that statement down informing the organisation that the venue was now a crime scene; a huge disruption to their business continuity strategy.
Poor operational planning and communication are just two of the possible reasons Dreamworld assumed operations would resume so soon. But it's probably a lack of a fundamental understanding and validation of process driven response that really caused an extremely poor outcome for this business.
So, what are the phases your organisation will go through in an event that moves you from a tactical to operational response? And how flexible will you be if / when emergency services influence the first half of that?
As a minimum, CEO's should get comfortable and intimate with these stages of response. It should be clear when certain disciplines stop, and new ones start.
We can do better at this...
...was the first comment made by a CEO of a 700-million dollar, multinational mining operation after a scenario exercise Brad Law MBCI ran last year.
This statement told the room that whilst he recognised the commitment, there was work to be done, and it had his backing.
While the fire on his premises was slowly being extinguished, the CEO I connected with was ignoring the operational impacts yet to be realised. That’s too late. You need to know what the potential impacts are before you have the incident. After all, the objective of business continuity is to ‘minimise the impacts of a disruption'.