In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses supply chain resiliency. What lessons do we need to mind in order to avert the next supply chain crisis? Related Episodes & Blog Posts Blog Post: Your Supply Chain May Not Be As Resilient as You Think Blog Posts: …

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses how coaching can help you as a business continuity and crisis management leader.

Topics discussed include how coaching can help clear your business continuity and crisis management program roadblocks, how a coaching program works, and some factors you should consider in choosing a coach.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: 5 Ways Coaching Can Help Your Business Continuity and Crisis Management Program

Blog Post: Business Continuity Standards: How each can help you

Episode #111: The Value of a Trusted Advisor

Episode #113: Roles and Responsibilities in a BC Program

Episode #132: 7 Business Continuity Exercise Scenarios

 

Episode Transcript

Hello, and Welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal & Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath. And in this week’s episode, I’d like to talk about how coaching can help you as a business continuity and crisis management leader. I’m often talking with folks who are suffering from this challenge that they’re working harder than ever, but not making forward progress on their continuity and crisis management objectives. They’ve read all the books and they’ve listened to all the podcasts, but they’re so at a loss on where to even begin, or maybe fear and doubt and uncertainty are keeping them from taking the right actions. Whether you’re looking to level up or just get back on track, I have found that one-on-one coaching can be the just-in-time tailored solution that our clients need to get unstuck, gain clarity and take their next best step.

So here are five ways that coaching can help clear your business continuity and crisis management program roadblocks and what you can expect. The first is I want to talk about the benefits of coaching. The first is having an outsider’s perspective. I always use the example that many of us are familiar with, ambiguous images. There’s the picture of one where there’s a duck, that when you turn it on the end, it looks like a rabbit, and you may first see it’s a duck, or you might first see it’s a rabbit. But after being told about the other answer, you can see both of those things clearly.

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses the top 4 Business Disruptions that you should be preparing for in 2022.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: 4 Top Business Disruptions to Plan for in 2022

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Episode #110: Is your BC Program ready for the next disruption?

Episode #124: Business Continuity Standards – Which is right for you?

Episode #: 125 – What is resilience?

Episode Transcript

Hello and Welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Brian Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath. And we’re well into 2022 at this point, and I want to talk about four top business disruptions that you should be planning for as 2022 evolves.

As we saw in the last half of 2021, there’s been a resurgence in economic activity around the world due to monetary and fiscal stimulus, increased consumer spending, increased confidence, but supply chain challenges, rising price pressure, and lingering concerns about COVID have increased inflation. Many pundits predict that 2022 might present several disruptions that could interfere with your ability to conduct business. So here are four disruptions to plan for in 2022.

The first is the unrelenting threat of COVID-19. Experts predict that the pandemic will persist for longer than we expect it. Even though there’s improved awareness and vaccines that are now available, the threat is still high due to low vaccination rates globally. With the emergence of new strains of the virus, the latest being Omicron, and higher caseloads even in industrialized countries, there’s no sign the situation will improve in 2022. Reports indicate that new strains may be more transmissible and more resistant to treatment. With highly dysfunctional health challenges as observed at the height of COVID-19, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how the situation will unfold this year.

There’s also uncertainty concerning the vaccine’s effectiveness in dealing with new, emerging variants. Even though we may not witness new lockdowns or stay-at-home orders, the disruptions caused by the pandemic will persist due to restricted movement and delayed return to work by employees. But this interference may not as be as severe as we previously witnessed. That’s because many foreign trade partners have also recorded a significant number of vaccinations and may not need to resort to lockdowns or travel restrictions. It’s advisable, as you plan, to imagine the worst-case scenarios. It’s better to be overprepared in the case of COVID than to be caught flat-footed when interferences with your business continuity plans and scenarios soar.

The second challenge facing us this year, supply chain disruptions. There’s a lot of

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses how to craft a crisis management framework for your organization.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

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Episode #133: How to Create and Conduct a Rewarding Crisis Management Exercise

Episode Transcript

Hello, and Welcome to The Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath. And in this week’s episode, I’d like to talk about how to craft your crisis management framework. Now, you’ve probably heard from us and everyone else that every organization should develop and continually revise a crisis management plan which should then be exercised regularly. Why? Well, because listing procedures and blindly walking through them are only going to get you so far. To benefit you really need to get into your organization’s DNA and your approach to managing a crisis. So I want to explain why I think you need to bother about this and to do so, we need to talk about your crisis management framework. The goal of this, as you build your crisis management tools is that you need an underlying philosophy, a framework that will make all of your crisis management parts work together. A consistent framework across your company describes how you will make communicate and execute decisions when it matters in a crisis.

Think about your governing approach now, because a crisis is no time for confusion or making things up on the spot. Crisis management aims to plan for an effective, coordinated response with the resources available and the resources that you have and internal and external communication requirements before and after the crisis. Everybody, teams, and the top leadership of your company need to know what to do, or they will make mistakes that make matters worse in the moment. An established crisis management framework ensures that your executives can expect a consistent process and consistent communication no matter the crisis, should that crisis morph and pull in others and additional teams, then everyone still approaches crisis management from the same starting point with the same goals and the same shared expectations. Let’s start with the basics. To start building your framework, you need to your organization’s mission and vision statements. Everybody in your company and your organization needs these values as the foundation for all of your crisis management activity.

The first is when is it a crisis? A primary consideration is what constitutes a crisis and who declares it. Crises often start as a minor problem in one functional area. Often functional groups can contain and solve those issues before they can expand. If not, a crisis team might step in and they may solve the problem. Usually, your executives are not involved in these localized events, but this depends a lot on just how your company’s structured. If units can’t contain an issue, then they escalate, but you need to decide beforehand what th

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses how to create and conduct a rewarding crisis management exercise, providing tips to help you build a rich and rewarding exercise remotely or in person.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: 5 Ways Coaching Can Help Your Business Continuity and Crisis Management Program

Blog Post: How to Create and Conduct a Rewarding Crisis Management Exercise

Episode #88: What is the goal of crisis management?

Episode #117: What Successful Crisis Management Looks Like Internally

Episode #132: 7 Business Continuity Exercise Scenarios

Episode Transcript

Hello, and Welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. I’m Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath. And in today’s episode, I’d like to talk about how to create and conduct a rewarding crisis management exercise. So you’ve settled on a crisis management framework to understand your goals in creating a crisis management plan. You’ve written your plan, and now I can’t stress enough how important it is for you to exercise that plan. Here, in this episode, I want to talk through tips to help you think about how to build a rich and rewarding exercise, even if your team is working remotely.

So let’s start with why you should exercise crisis management plans. Having a crisis management plan on a shelf or on your company share drive is only going to get you so far. You conduct fire drills so employees know how to muster themselves and exit. In a similar way, your crisis management team need to work through their checklist to understand how an emergency plays out and make their crisis management plan part of their muscle memory. It’s a normal human response to freeze, even briefly, when a problem occurs.

People will deny that a problem exists. They might fear the consequences and avoid addressing the situation altogether. They might also feel overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness, and that makes them withdraw. Everyone experiences these emotions differently and on a different scale of intensity, but regular drills and exercises with your emergency procedures, give people a structure on how to channel their thoughts and energies into proactively moving through the crisis. Your goal in running an exercise is to build people’s confidence in using a new plan, or for new team members, you want to familiarize them with your firm’s version of crisis management. For teams that are more experienced than you want to challenge them on how to react correctly while you stress them with noise and the inputs from the exercise.

So here are some ways to make your exercises engaging and educational. The first is to align your exercises to your company’s goals. Think about your company’s mission and mission-critical processes, and then build exercises that practice how to bolster those essential functions and outputs. A scenario about key card locks not unlocking is not that interesting, but playing a survival scenario that involves a Cylon invasion is just too farfetched. I threw that in there for you Battlestar Galactica fans.

The second is to set well-considered goals. You should pi

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses 7 Business Continuity Exercise Scenarios that you can use to prepare your organization for disruption.

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Episode #131: Suiting Up for a Crisis – Part 2

Episode Transcript

Hello, and Welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath. And in this week’s episode, I’d like to talk about seven business continuity exercise scenarios that you can use, that you can prepare for in your organization. According to research, we know that about 25% of businesses fail to recover after a disaster. If they lack a business continuity plan, a recovery plan, it becomes hard to cope with the repercussions of a disruption. That’s why your business needs a business continuity plan. Now, to top up your security, your business security, and thinking about exercises, testing your business continuity plan is crucial. It’s good to understand that every business has a distinct business continuity plan and approach, depending upon your industry and your size and regulatory issues, and other factors.

That’s why you need to make sure you carry out a risk assessment and a business impact analysis, to be aware of these factors as a part of your planning process. But here we’re going to talk about some common business continuity exercise scenarios, the types of exercises, and the importance of making sure that you’re exercising or testing your continuity plan.

First, from our standpoint, there are three common types of exercises that you may use with your business continuity plan. The first is just a plan review, probably the most straightforward type of exercise. Your team goes through all the points on the business continuity plan. We use it to ensure the plan covers all the company’s objectives. And we do this without doing any real practical exercise work. It’s a walkthrough of review. The second is a tabletop. It’s probably the most common type of exercise. It’s definitely a strengthened version of the plan review. In this exercise, employees use the plan in a facilitated kind of conference setting, virtual or physical. And as inputs are received from the facilitator, your employees then respond to those exercise inputs as if they would, in an actual incident. The third is a simulation, by far the most realistic of these three exercises where employees actually do the thing.

They use the plan and execute the elements of the plan. It’s the most practical and detailed, and probably the closest to reality that you can get in an exercise. Now, exercising your business continuity plan is critical. It creates a picture of risk scenarios. It makes it easy for teams to understand how to use the plan. It builds confidence. Your team gets practical preparation. They build muscle memory, it helps you identify loopholes in your continuity plan. It ensures you cover al

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses Part 2 of ‘Suiting Up for the Crisis’, focusing on being a part of the Crisis Management Team.  This series is dedicated to helping crisis team leaders and crisis management team members prepare for their next crisis.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: Suiting Up for a Crisis Part I: The Crisis Leader

Blog Post: Suiting Up for a Crisis Part II: The Crisis Management Team

Episode #55: Crisis Leadership Roundtable

Episode #105: Taking care of yourself during a crisis

Episode #117: What Successful Crisis Management Looks Like Internally

Episode #130: Suiting up for the Crisis – The Crisis Leader

Episode Transcript

Hello, and Welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath, and in this week’s episode, I want to take us to part two of our series, Suiting Up For A Crisis. This series is dedicated to helping crisis team leaders and team members prepare for their next crisis. Part one was about being the crisis leader, and in part two, I want to talk about being a part of your organization’s crisis management team, or CMT.

As a newly minted member of your crisis management team, it’s normal to have a lot of questions and probably some anxiety about what does it mean to be a part of this team? What are the expectations of me as a crisis management team member? How does my role as a member of the crisis management team impact my normal job responsibilities? What, if anything, can I do to prepare?

Like me and many others who walked this path before you, you’re quickly going to learn that there’s no substitute for experience, but you can still take some simple steps to help you suit up, so to speak, to respond to your next crisis. So here’s what we think you need to know.

First, what can you expect as a crisis management team member? Well, as a member of the CMT, you probably understand that it’s your job to run into the metaphorical burning building and help put out the fire. But there are many hours of training and conditioning that come beforehand, and the painstaking hours of mop-up and investigation and debriefing that are necessary to make sure that a fire is really out and that it doesn’t happen again. Your role on the crisis management team extends far before the crisis and well after its resolution. Here’s what you can expect at each stage.

Prior to a disruption, I would expect a crisis management team member to participate in discussions and activities calculated at improving the organization’s overall preparedness because this is your only chance to be able to do that.

My friend Juliette Kayyem at Harvard University describes this as being left of boom. You’re on the left side of the incident of the crisis, and so you have this opportunity to invest in preparedness. This might include things like participating in building developing plans for potential disruptions, integrating an

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses ‘Suiting up for the Crisis’ as a Crisis Leader.

Topics discussed include what it takes to be a good crisis leader, the importance of thinking about crisis management as a team sport, and crisis management frameworks.  In addition, Bryan discusses where to find additional training and resources to strengthen your crisis leadership muscles.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: Suiting Up for a Crisis Part I: The Crisis Leader

Blog Post: Before the Crisis: The Value of a Trusted Business Continuity & Crisis Management Advisor

Episode #55:  Crisis Leadership Roundtable

Episode #75: Big Mistakes during a Crisis

Episode #88: What is the goal of crisis management?

Episode #96: Crisis Leadership in the time of Coronavirus

Episode #104: Supporting the team in a prolonged crisis

Episode Transcript

Hello, and Welcome to The Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal & Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath. And this week I’d like to talk about Suiting up for a Crisis. I specifically want to talk about crisis leadership and how to think about being a crisis leader. If you think about it, it takes about 60 hours of training to become a certified first responder. It’s about 600 hours of training to become a firefighter. I’m a volunteer emergency medical technician and have been for several years. And that was hundreds of hours of my time between coursework and practical experience and hands-on experience on an ambulance and in an emergency room and continual education year over year to maintain my EMT certification. But to become a crisis management leader in your company, the requirement is no training, a whopping zero. But yet as your organization’s crisis leader, although it might not be your everyday job to save lives, a lot is still at stake, halted operations, downed facilities, lost revenue, damaged reputation, and many times the safety and wellbeing of your employees, your customers, your visitors, and others.

Firefighters and EMTs have hundreds of hours of training, building endurance, learning how to suit up for their job, and then wielding the right tools so that they can confidently run into their next burning building or help an individual in need of critical medical care. As your company’s crisis leader, are you prepared to do the same? Here’s what you need to know. Let̵

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses corporate citizenship in the midst of economic, social, and political upheaval.  With the renewed focus on corporate citizenship over the past two years, as companies have engaged their customers, employees, and communities in the midst of economic, social, and political upheaval, how have our thoughts on corporate citizenship evolved and changed?

How can your company benefit from contributing to the broader good?

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

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Blog Post:  Your reputation command center:  Social Media Monitoring

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Episode #117: What Successful Crisis Management Looks Like Internally

Episode #127: Engaging your Board on your Crisis Communication Strategy

Episode Transcript

Hello and Welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath. And in this week’s episode, I want to talk about corporate citizenship in this age of unrest that we’re all living in today. The past two years have brought renewed focus to corporate citizenship, as companies have looked to engage their customers, their employees, and their communities in the midst of economic, social, and political upheaval.

Pursuing these efforts can drive large-scale meaningful change for society while differentiating a company’s brands and products to deliver a competitive advantage. But what is corporate citizenship and how can your company benefit from contributing to the broader good? Well, let’s start by looking at the evolution of this idea of corporate citizenship.

According to the Boston College Center for Corporate Leadership, they define corporate citizenship is how a company exercises its rights, obligations, privileges, and overall corporate responsibility within our local and global environments. Now, this practice goes by many names, corporate social responsibility or CSR, environmental, social, and governance, ESG, corporate responsibility, conscious capitalism, or compassionate capitalism.

But this is all about how a company creates a positive social and environmental impact while practicing good corporate governance while meeting its financial goals. A broad range of business areas could be involved in this practice of corporate citizenship, such as community giving, di

Managing Uncertainty

Managing Uncertainty Podcast – Episode #128: A conversation with Steve Raffe of StarLeaf

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