Beyond the Black Stump

G'day, this is Ken Simpson and welcome to episode 37 of Beyond the Black Stump.

Do you live to work, or do you work to live? My guess is that most fit into the later group. So altruistic ideas around awareness raising and learning good, but show me the money! My guest today is well positioned to advise on the return on investment for our personal learning and development. She runs one of the better known recruitment firms in the BC/risk field and we discuss the skills and expertise that employers are looking for. The company she founded, BC Management, also produces a number of industry research reports - including their long running survey of remuneration in the industry. Stay with me as I explore what makes you employable for a senior role in the industry today, and how those in-demand skills might change into the future. Let's go Beyond the Black Stump with Cheyenne Marling. Links referenced in this episode

• Cheyenne's LinkedIN profile
• BC Management Inc
  • Complimentary reports
  • eNotifications page - don't miss new research
• World Economic forum Report - "The 10 skills you need to third win the Fourth Industrial Revolution".
• Black Stump LinkedIN Group

Are you in the job market, or thinking about making a move? What are your views on the skills demanded today and for the future? I would love to read about your perspectives on the Black Stump LinkedIn group. I am especially interested in exploring the ideas we discussed around greater focus on softer skills and how those are taught and developed. When we think about how we invest in our own development, remember the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. We need to understand what employers want, today and into the future - rather than what the industry and practitioners might want that profile to look like. Food for thought on your journey. Stay safe and I hope you will join me again next week.

G'day this is Ken Simpson and welcome to an overdue episode 36 of Beyond the Black Stump. Last week I was hit by the podcaster's nightmare scenario - sore throat and coughing. Not a good sound, so I spared you the experience. But I still wanted to share my thoughts about BC Awareness week and how we go about trying to promote the discipline. My thanks to the small number of practitioners who reached out and wanted to share views on this year's events. So Business Continuity Awareness Week has come and gone for another year, and my Awareness Challenge for the month of May has ended. The past week has been one of those times when I wonder where the year has gone, June already!

Links for this episode

• Old BCAW Blog Posts
• BCI Britghttalk Channel
• Martin Caddick post
  • Two other really good PwC posts, Paul Robertson and James Crask
• Burke & Jones "Top Down" Webinar
• Lucey and Burton Exercise webinar
• Flashblog
• Dennis Goulet/BCMIX LinkedIn conversation
• David Discenza/David Lindstedt conversation
• BCI BCAW Feedback Survey

In next weeks show we will explore some elements of the personal ROI for those who work in BC. Join me as I chat with Cheyenne Marling from recruitment and research firm BC Management about what she sees employers are looking for and how you can best get Return on Investment in your own learning and development. Until then, stay safe and aware on your journey.

G'day, this is Ken Simpson and welcome to episode 35 of Beyond the Black Stump.

Our May podcasts are all about awareness, not just making others aware of BC - but ensuring that we increase our awareness of other disciplines, the world around us - and how these things are changing.

This week my guest is a young, female practitioner. While those two attributes alone make her rare in BC circles, she can also claim another rare attribute of being a second generation practitioner. Listen in and perhaps become more aware of the thinking and expectations of the new generation.

You may become more aware of how we often patronise young practitioners, especially the female ones - and if you are subject to this sort of behaviour, there will be some awareness of strategies that you might like to consider.

All of this from a New Zealand contributor to the "20 in their 20's" publication, so let's go Beyond the Black Stump with Sarah Kara.

Links for this show

• 20 in their 20's
  • Some commentary on that publication
• Black Stump LinkedIn Group
• Resilience Awareness Challenge
• FlashBlog index page
• Other BCAW events
  • Hear more in last show with Andrew Scott

...

I hope you found something to think about in Sarah's stories. To be sustainable, our future practices are going to have to be aligned to the needs and thinking of the emerging generations. This is a critical area where we need to raise the awareness of the industry.

As always, would love to hear your thoughts - come over to Black Stump LinkedIn Group, link is is in the show notes, and share your views. I am sure you will be able to engage with Sarah there if you want to.

If you are really keen to explore these gendered rand generational issues - then reach out and be a guest on the show. All are welcome, drop me a note and we can schedule something.

Don't forget the Resilience Awareness Challenge, it's not too late to sign up and commit to learning about something new and different this month.

Next week is BCAW, still not too late to sign up for the FlashBlog index page.

Until next time, thanks for listening - and stay safe on your journey.

G'day, this is Ken Simpson and welcome to episode 34 of Beyond the Black Stump. The podcast for the risk. Continuity and resilience communities.

Links in this show

• BCI BCAW Page
• Participate in the Flashblog
• Webinar Guide
• Take up the Resilience Awareness Challenge

I had every intention of recording live conversations at the Australasian BC Summit this week, but it wasn't to be. I actually had to miss the second day of the Conference due to client commitments.

Despite only having one day at the conference I thought I got value from it. The great thing about value is that it has meaning only "in the eye of the beholder" so to speak.

What value do you put on a new idea? Learning about something you did not know about.

I think it is priceless, worth the effort of losing the income and the cost of travel. For me that value came from Gareth Bone's session about Design Thinking. Listen out for more on that idea in a few weeks.

I would love to hear about your thoughts on the value of a single new idea. What did you learn from the Australasian Summit last week, or at the last conference you attended? Post a comment in our LinkedIn community.

Value is also a theme for this week's show. We are only a week away from the start of Business Continuity AWareness Week. This year BCAW starts on Monday 16 May and the theme is "return on investment" for BC. For many that will translate to the value delivered via BC rather than a true ROI assessment.

What are you doing to promote awareness during BCAW?

To get some ideas of what is being co-ordinated by the BCI I spoke to Andrew Scott, Senior Communications Manager at the BCI.

Plenty of opportunity to learn something and raise awareness from the various event the BCI are co-ordinating. What about your awareness?

What are you doing to raise your own awareness of what other disciplines do and how they do it? Are you willing to take the Resilience Challenge, there is a link in the show notes, sign up and invest 10 minutes a day in raising your own awareness of how other disciplines contribute to raise the level of resilience.

Until next week, stay safe (and inquisitive) on your journey.

G'day this is Ken Simpson - and welcome to a new week, and a new month. Kicking off the month with episode 33 of the show and a month of learning and awareness raising. I am launching a month-long challenge to people today. You can get the details at blackstump.fm/challenge. Essentially the challenge is to commit to raise your awareness of another discipline, body of knowledge or a new skill. All you need is 10 minutes a day. Check it out and see if you are up to the challenge! There is a big opportunity for learning, and awareness raising, in Australia this week as the BCI Summit is on in Sydney. Back in January you heard about Glen Redstall's 3 words to guide BC for 2016. Last week I caught up with Glen again to find out how the summit was looking. FULL TRANSCRIPT Links for this show

• Summit sponsor - RSA
• Summit sponsor - Dynamiq
• Summit Program
• #BCISummit2016 follow the conversations on Twitter

Too late to get into the conference this year - if you missed out make sure you register early for next year. There is a trade show as part of the Summit and Glen confirmed that that is open for visitors if you are in Sydney this week and want to check out the products on display. I am speaking on the first day on the topic "Self-Leadership for Change". If you are attending the Summit, put that session on your schedule. Are you up to take the challenge? Awareness is not just about raising other people's awareness of BC - it cuts both ways. If are coming to understand that we need to be open to other disciplines in order to build resilience - so here is your chance. Sign up for the Resilience Awareness and Learning challenge - blackstump.fm/challenge - or come look in the Black Stump LinkedIN community. Later in the week you will hear from a range of people on the floor of the BCI Summit, and get a preview on BC Awareness Week with the BCI's Andrew Scott. Until then, stay safe on your journey.

G'day this is Ken Simpson, and welcome to Episode 32 of Beyond the Black Stump. Another month has come and gone, the last Friday of the month so we celebrate it as a Book Club episode. But a book club with a difference, in that our author today has published a number of articles and blog posts - and is seeking to write a book. So we are just getting in early. After all the intent of book club is to encourage reading. And on that note before we get into today's conversation I just want to remind you that there is a full transcript of the interview available on the shows web site -http://Blackstump.FM The link is active in the show notes on your podcast player. The reason I made a point of reminding you about that at the top of the show is that there are some patchy parts of the audio today, and you might need to refer to the transcript to better understand the meaning. My guest today brings learning and experience form the military into the corporate world of BC and resilience. Of particular interest to me is his focus on resilience as a cultural outcome. Our industry has been plagued with ex-military folks promoting their versions of command and control models for many years - but here are some different perspectives. Perspectives that are derived form research, as well as experience - and more importantly perspectives that are alive and shifting as the world moves. Ideas and practices that adapt - might be a good way to describe preparations for improving resilience. So join me as I discuss these ideas with Aaron Gracey. Links for this show

• Aaron's LinkedIn profile
• Black Swans Vs Organisational Resilience
• LinkedIn index page to all Aaron's posts
• Squared Apples on Twitter
• BCI World 2014 Presentation
• ResOrgs
• Torrens Institute
• Coutu "How Resilience works" HBR
• Starfish and the Spider

Thanks for staying with us, and I hope the audio (and the accents) were not too hard to follow. If there is anything here that you want to explore further, why not come over to the Black Stump LinkedIn community and join the discussion. I am sure we can get Aaron to engage in conversation with you. You can also go comment on any of his articles liked in the Show Notes. Join me next week as I preview the Australasian BC Summit and give you a challenge to complete during the month.

G'day this is Ken Simpson and thanks for tuning into episode 31 of Beyond the Black Stump. This week we are going to hear about the experience of a practitioner who has gone exploring beyond the black stump of legacy BC practice. Wider horizons provide different perspectives and resilience takes on different dimensions when you immerse yourself in another contributing discipline. This is the continuing journey from BC Newcomer of the Year, to his “difficult second album”. Lets catch up with Luke Bird. Thanks to Luke for being open and sharing his experiences of life beyond BC. Sometimes we really don’t see the practices and the discipline clearly until we get outside and look back in. Do you have an observation, comment or reaction to what we talked about today? You are welcome to discuss these or any of the issues raised in the show at the LinkedIN community. Here’s a radical idea, instead of the social media communities, why not go to a local forum or chapter meeting and discuss these issues with other practitioners in the flesh! You may also find it informative to simply have these conversations with other people in your own organisation. Start by opening a dialog between BC and InfoSec - cyber threat is all the rage, it is an overdue connection. Join me next week for book club with Aaron Gracey. Until then, I hope your journey takes you to new and fascinating ideas. Stay safe.

G’day this is Ken Simpson and welcome to Episode 30 of Beyond the Black Stump.

Over recent weeks I have been talking to a range of people about the need to build capability – not just produce documents. Even if those documents have “plan” in the title.

To be totally accurate, I have been having those conversations for the past 20 years, it has just been a feature of the podcasts for the past few weeks.

To some extent the current theme started with Rina Bhakta in Episode 25, then the first part of “Fit for Purpose” in #26, a significant feature of the thinking of Andy Osborne in show 27 and also with Karen Stephens in episodes 28 & especially episode 29.

This show is the second part of the “Fit for Purpose” story.

There has been a clear message from the various people I have spoken with on this subject over the years – capability comes from practice and rehearsal, not documents and procedures. Karen summed it up really well in the last show “firemen don't learn how to put out a fire by reading a plan.”

In part 1 of Fit for Purpose I drew on my experience as an elite basketball coach to make the same point. We had to build the skills of the individual players, they had to refine those skills in individual practice, then we had to learn on the practice court how to perform as a team. No different to the situation with BC, Crisis and Emergency teams in your organisation.

At the end of that show I talked about the role of BC Manager, before we worry about anybody else, perhaps we need to consider if the way we approach our practice is “fit for purpose”. Here is a recap;

The idea of coaching often reflects the position the BC practitioner finds themselves in. They don't generally have command and control authority over those who will need to execute plans. Coaches in professional sport often find themselves paid much less than their star players, and they also need to learn to manage the super-star egos.

In that context they learn to mound a team by collaboration and influence, rather than using the techniques of command and compliance.

Do you think acting like a coach might be better received by the senior players (aka your Executives)? Could a change in the way you perceive your role lead to better engagement going forward?

Links for this show

• "Fewer Bosses. More Coaches. Please." Paul Gonzales
• Getting their attention. Ken Simpson, Continuity Magazine
• The Innovators Dilemma, Clayton Christensen
• Stamford Prison Experiment
• Embedding culture into BCM, Ken Simpson
• CEO perspectives on organisational resilience [DOC ... - TISN

If you are motivated to discuss or comment on any of the issues in this show, come over the Black Stump group on LinkedIn. Would love to hear from you.

Until next time, stay safe on your journey.

G’day, this is Ken Simpson and we are back with a mid-week episode - the 29th Beyond the Black Stump Podcast. This show is the final part of my chat with Karen Stephens from the Kestrel Group in New Zealand. I have known and worked with Karen for 17 years, we have delivered a number of engagements together -and at one point in her career she was also my client! Here is a link to part 1 in case you missed it. Lets pick up the conversation talking about capability - what it is, and example of how Karen has delivered it - and how it helps engage Executives. .. Thanks for listening across these two shows with Karen. As always if you found the show useful, please feel free to tell your friends and colleagues about it. Send them to http://Blackstump.fm to listen. If you have 5 minutes free to leave a comment or rating on iTunes that would also be much appreciated. Join me again in a few days time for the second part of the Fit for Purpose story - where we wrap up some of this discussion around capability - and explore how some of our capabilities actually become disabilities in a response/recovery situation. Until then, stay safe on your journey.

G’day, this is Ken Simpson and welcome to episode 28 of Beyond the Black Stump. As it turns out this is really the introduction to episode 28 and episode 29 of the show. After I recorded this interview I decided it needed to be split into two shows. You see this is an interview with somebody I have known and worked with for about 17 years, so it was both a little odd at first, but we ended up chatting for over an hour! My guess today will probably not be widely known outside her current adopted country of New Zealand. So while she might fall into the “new voices” category for a global audience, she has 20+ years of practice behind her. We are going to explore her background in Business Continuity, Crisis Management and Emergency Management. She has worked extensively in the financial services sector, been a BC/CM consultant/manager for a "Big 4” firm, worked in Emergency Management for local government and consulted to a range of private sector, local government and national government entities. She is currently a Director with New Zealand-based Kestrel Group. So join me as we discuss Emergency Management in Middle Earth and how we may at times embed vulnerability in the culture, issues you can find beyond the Black Stump to with Karen Stephens. ... I think that is a good spot to break the conversation. But don’t worry, you don’t have to wait a week to hear the rest of the conversation. There will be a special episode of the show released mid-week. In the interim, take a few minutes to reflect on what we have been talking about. Are you embedding vulnerability into the culture of your organisation? We mean well, but if we don’t actually understand how culture works - or in fact, how being resilient actually works - then we might inadvertently be creating vulnerability. You might also take a moment to think about your use of “assumptions” in writing plans. Unless a proposed response/recovery solution is approved at the highest levels and fully funded - then it is a dream, make believe. Not a solution. Telling people they have implemented a response/recovery plan based on fiction - thats vulnerability, not capability. Join me of the next part of this chat, where we talk about Capability, and what that leads to resilience and executive engagement. Karen will talk us through a specific client case-study of how they approached making that client capable. Until then, as always a comment or rating on iTunes would be appreciated, and stay safe on your journey.