How do you make a plan for a crisis situation that you didn’t see coming – the unforeseen crisis?

That’s what we tackle in this week’s episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast. Topics discuss include crisis frameworks, the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI) program, crisis communications, situational awareness, and dealing with unknowns during a crisis.

Episode Transcript

Hi everyone. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. And welcome back to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast.

Today I want to talk about this idea that you can have a perfect plan for any crisis situation. I think in our list of potential podcast topics, my co-host Jen, who’s currently on military leave, wrote this down as the idea of, you can’t have a perfect plan for something that has never happened before. And Jen, of course, is correct in this. We often have talked on the podcast and in our writings on our blog, about building crisis management frameworks, and about writing plans for specific situations, about creating collaborative decision-making processes, about communicating the results of those decisions. And so, what I want to talk about is just this idea of building comprehensive crisis management frameworks and how the unknown risk, the unknown scenario, the thing that you didn’t foresee factors into that framework.

We’ve talked before about building frameworks that move from the bottom up within an organization where incidents or crisis situations of all types, financial, reputational, technology, continuity, natural disasters, security incident, information security incident, pick the problem, pick the disruption that’s impacting your company, and you’re bringing that into the same crisis process. You’re bringing it into the same way that you’re talking about something and making decisions in a collaborative manner. And you have a way to escalate that to senior executives and to the board of directors or to the elected official in a public sector agency. But you’re moving, this crisis is moving up through your organizational hierarchy in a way that you define as a framework. And that’s usually where you start. It’s where you start when you’re building a crisis process. And then we go back, and we say, we’re here are the top five, six, 10 things that we think are going to happen.

They’re disruptions that we know we’re going to have, that we’re most at risk from having. And now we build specific plan annexes to address those particular problems that might happen to your organization. Those risky situations that you think you’re going to find yourselves in. I think of those as routine incidents. There are things that we’ve built plans for, their things that we’ve foreseen. We probably have preparedness steps for these. We have expectations for the various business units in our organization to prepare for these incidents. And we’ve put probably pretty good detailed processes and protocols in place and that’s great for the situations that you can see, that you think are going to happen. That’s exactly the planning that you want to do because then you can just execute. You can just get it done. You pull out the plan, hey, we just saw the hurricane be forecast, and I know in five days out from rainfall and I got to do these 40 things today as an organization. That’s awesome.

The challenge becomes when you’re hit with the thing that you didn’t expect, the crisis that you didn’t foresee and now you don’t have a plan that you can execute. Instead, what you’re doing is you’re relying upon this framework that we hope you’ve built that allows for collaborative decision making and communication, and you’re able to use that framework to get you through the crisis situa...