In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses what successful crisis management looks like inside of an organization – including some philosophy about how the team at Bryghtpath thinks about leading in a crisis.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: How 3 companies have managed the COVID-19 pandemic

Blog Post: The Importance of Having a Crisis Communications Strategy

Episode #59: All roads lead to one – Crisis Management Framework

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

Episode #93: Crisis Management Plans – What your executives really want

Episode #96: Crisis leadership in the time of Coronavirus

Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. And this week, I want to talk a little bit about crisis management philosophy.

I want to hit on really two big topics. One is, as we’re demonstrating to clients in a lot of conversations, what does successful crisis management look like? When you’re inside of a company and you’re watching the company react to a crisis situation and go on to manage that crisis well, whether it’s an IT disruption, it’s a natural disaster like a hurricane, a violent attack like an active assailant, or active shooter situation or it’s a reputational crisis, what does that successful crisis management effort look like inside of a company?

The second is I want to talk a little bit about our crisis management philosophy here at Bryghtpath, how we think about structuring crisis management programs and leading through crisis situations. I’m going to have kind of five key points to make as we talk about that.

So let’s start by talking about what successful crisis management looks like. So, again, you’re inside of a company and you’re watching the company react to a crisis and if you’re managing it well, there are some core key factors that you’re going to see. There’s going to be some key things that will really stand out to you.

The first one is rapid response. The company is going to quickly move to react to the situation. And if they can, if it is a situation where they can prepare for it, if they can be on the left side of the boom, as Harvard professor Juliette Kayyem likes to say, like a hurricane where you know it’s coming, you have three, four, five, maybe even seven days to prepare for that, you’re going to position that response in advance of that incoming storm so you can move as quickly as you can. But no matter what the crisis is, you’re going to see the company respond rapidly. They’re going to get geared up and they’re going to activate their crisis process and they’re going to start to prepare and react.

The second thing you’ll see is that inside of the organization, there are clear roles and responsibilities. Again, there are clear roles and responsibilities. Someone is in charge of the response, the incident leader or incident commander if you want to use an incident command s

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses some of the tools we use here at Bryghtpath each and every day to manage our business and work with our clients.

Tools we discuss include:

Monday.com

Notion

Slack

Salesforce Sales Cloud Professional

Superhuman

Google Workspace

Drip

ConvertKit

Pandadoc

WordPress

Zoom

Avoma

Quickbooks

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: The Importance of Having a Crisis Communications Strategy

Blog Post: What is a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)?

Episode #109: Business Continuity as a Service (BCaaS)

Episode #111 – The Value of a Trusted Advisor

Episode #114: Mental Health in our Profession

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 a question that we get asked all the time. And that is what are some of the tools that you use there at Bryghtpath to manage your business, to manage collaboration, to work with your clients? And so I want to walk through a couple tools in our suite of tools that we use that really help us do the work that we’re here to do. And then I also want to talk about a couple outside services that we would recommend for consultants or small businesses to have in your back pocket as well.

So let’s start with project management. As a consultant, as somebody who does client engagements on an ongoing basis, one of the tools that we use is our project management tool. And we have been on for most of the past year, a platform called monday.com. You may have seen ads for this on YouTube or Facebook. It’s a newer platform, but one that’s quite interesting that we’ve enjoyed using because of the flexibility that Monday provides. The way that we use Monday within the organization is that we have two types of workspaces, which you can think of as a collection of project boards and reports. Our main workspace is a base of sorts for Bryghtpath, where we have our internal efforts that are going on. These could be projects, it could be maintena

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses Brian Kreb’s recent article “Don’t wanna pay ransom gangs? Test your backups”.

Topics discussed include dealing with ransomware as a disaster recovery and business continuity problem. Do you have the proper backups in place? Do you really know what recovery will require in the event of a large-scale ransomware issue?

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: 6 times business continuity and disaster recovery plans mattered

Blog Post: 10 Ways An Effective Crisis Manager Survives a Crisis

Episode #50: Conducting an Effective After-Action Process

Episode #63: Prioritizing Top Risks

Episode #82: Speed in a Crisis

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 ransomware specifically about backup strategies and ransomware. And what raised this to my attention earlier this week is an article by information security journalist, Brian Krebs who writes at KrebsOnSecurity.com, and his article is entitled, Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups. And Brian hits upon some really important facts and underlying issues with the way we think about ransomware right now.

And we’re thinking about ransomware, I think we think about ransomware primarily as an information security problem, and it is, but it’s also a disaster recovery and business continuity problem. And it’s bigger. It’s more of an issue. It’s a bigger issue than we think of in the BCDR space. So, I want to kind of talk through some key points that Brian makes then I’ll add a little bit of other contexts to wrap up this episode. Krebs writes, look at the comments on almost any story about a ransomware attack and you’ll almost surely encounter the view that the victim organization could have avoided paying the extortionist, the ransom working if they’d only had proper data backups.

The ugly truth, as he writes, there’s many non-obvious reasons why victims wind up paying even though they’ve done nearly everything right from a data backup perspective. His story, he points out is not about what companies are doing in response to cyber criminals that are holding their data for hostage and that’s become a best practice now. And in an approach on how they’re going to, how you respond, how do you do this? But rather why will victims pay for a key? The key that’s needed to decrypt their systems, even when they already have the means to restore anything from backups on their own.

What experts are saying according to Kr

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses mental health as a Business Continuity, Crisis Management, and Corporate Security Professional.

Topics discussed in this episode include stress and anxiety, the impact of the pandemic on business continuity and crisis management professionals, how to find help in an emergency, and where to go to talk about the last several months.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: Four steps you can take today to improve your personal preparedness

Blog Post: Making Decisions in the Midst of a Crisis

Episode #94: Personal and family preparedness for Coronavirus

Episode #105: Taking care of yourself during a crisis

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 a little bit about mental health. Mental health for you as a business continuity and crisis management, corporate security, professional, and everything that we’ve been through over the last 18 to 20 months as we’ve guided our organizations, our clients, our families through this global pandemic that has driven almost everything that we’ve had to deal with over the last almost two years now.

And, I approach this from the standpoint that I don’t have all the answers. I’m not asking for help here or crying out for help. I’m not trying to be brave or anything like that as I talk about mental health and these challenges we’re faced with, with our own resiliency, with our own challenges. As we think about what we’ve all been through in the last 20 months or so with this pandemic and the role that we’ve had to play as business continuity and crisis management and security professionals.

But, I do think that we need to do a better job as an industry, as individuals, as people normalizing talking about struggles like this. Struggles that we have as we work through challenging situations. Struggles that we have, we may have, with depression or anxiety, both of which are issues I’ve been faced with in my teenage years and adult life. But, also just the stress that we face in these situations that we have to deal with. In my own career, I have dealt with all of the issues related to managing crisis situations where lives were at stake. I have lost fellow employees in shootings and violent crime. My team, when I worked in a Fortune 30 company, regularly dealt with homicides and suicides of their fellow workers. We managed and helped to manage situations where an employee had killed another employee. Sometimes people that we knew and had interactions with.

And, all of the stress that is created in that and all of the trauma that impacts us. And, I think that all of those are things we should acknowledge, but then we look at what we’ve all dealt with in the last two years dealing with the pandemic. Where whether we’ve had support within our organizations or not, whether we’ve had resources, maybe not even the resources that we need within our companies to have dealt with the myriad of issues that we’ve been faced with over the last year and a half, as we’ve dealt with the pandemic.

Our companies

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses roles and responsibilities within a business continuity program.  What roles should be established?  What are their responsibilities?

Topics discussed include the benefits of having clear roles and responsibilities in a business continuity program,  assessing the best talent for key roles in your program, and how the various proposed roles help advance and mature your business continuity program.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: Business Continuity Program Roles & Responsibilities

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

Episode #102: The Bryghtpath Business Continuity Framework

Episode #104: Supporting the team in a prolonged crisis

Episode #106: Rethinking Business Continuity in the age of COVID-19

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 of our podcast, I’d like to talk about roles and responsibilities within a business continuity program.

Folks come to us all the time with questions about their business continuity program. Wondering about roles and responsibilities, if you’re wondering about roles and responsibilities, you are not alone. When we talk to businesses about their continuity planning, we get asked every time, and every thing from what is one at the most basic level. A lot of companies don’t understand about business continuity plans, or BCPs and how that’s fundamentally different from disaster recovery planning or crisis planning. Whereas, business continuity plans are about keeping your business running through a disruption. In the latter, disaster recovery plans are about resuming IT operations and bringing back critical technologies and infrastructure.

But we also get questions that are on a more granular level. Like what are the most important roles in a business continuity planner program? What do those roles and responsibilities mean? How do roles interrelate? And how do we ensure we have the right people in these roles? As risk management and continuity experts here, at Bryghtpath, we help companies cut through all this confusion and get clear about the path you need to be on for business continuity planning and program success.

When we talk about business continuity planning, we’re talking about the process of creating a framework that effectively allows you to respond to organizational disruption, minimizing the impact of that disruption on your organization, and ensuring operational continuity and resiliency.

Let’s talk about the benefits of having good continuity planning, and then we’ll transition from that to talking a little bit about the roles and responsibilities. When we take a step back and examine the why of business continuity planning and programs, if the pandemic has taught us anything it’s that the unexpected can and absolutely will happen to our organizations. One client of ours shared a debrief of their experience and how having a solid continuity plan was critical to their response

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), how we approach the BIA process at Bryghtpath, and the value it can provide to your organization.

Topics discussed include the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), the ISO 22301 Standard for Organizational Resilience, our approach to the BIA here at Bryghtpath, and the value of the Business Impact Analysis.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: What is a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)?

Blog Post: Validating your Business Impact Analysis Results

Blog Post: Why failing to validate your business impact analysis results is a huge mistake

Episode #24 – The Traditional Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

Episode #25 – To BIA or not to BIA

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 the business impact analysis or BIA. We’ll talk a little bit about what it means, how you go about doing one, our approach in doing so and what the value is in doing the BIA in your organization. I started off with kind of this question, which is how many days of payroll can you lose? How many days can your payroll function in your company be down before it impacts your business? What about the servers that power your product or platform that you provide to customers? Or what about your virtual private network, your VPN, that employees use the connect to your secure resources and work remotely, that you probably use a lot during COVID. An hour, a day, a few weeks a month?

If you’re like many companies, we talked to you, you may not know how long your business can survive without critical systems and business processes. For that reason, a thorough business impact analysis or BIA is one of the most important steps that we take when we work with new clients. Here’s what a business impact analysis is, why it’s important and what you’re going to learn by doing one. So, what is the BIA? Well, the formal description of a business impact analysis from the ISO 22301 standard on organizational resilience is the process of analyzing the impact over time of a disruption to the organization. The process of analyzing the impact over time of a disruption to the organization. To say it more clearly, a BIA is

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses in detail the value of working with a Trusted Advisor before there is a disruption or crisis in your business.  How can having an expert guiding your every move related to business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, and crisis communication be of value to you and your program?

Topics discussed include the value of a trusted advisor, coaching & advisory services, how a trusted advisor can help mature your program, and ways in which you might utilize a trusted advisor in a critical moment.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

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

Blog Post: Evaluating Business Continuity Programs: Is your Business Continuity Program ready for the next Disruption?

Episode #50: Conducting an Effective After-Action Process

Episode #63: Prioritizing Top Risks

Episode #81: When to bring in a consultant and use them effectively

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. With today’s episode, I want to start off by kind of illustrating a situation and then getting into the real meat of this episode. And that is, I’ve been in this space about 30 years. And during that time, I’ve always been in some way, shape, or form on call. Sometimes a Bryghtpath client will call me late at night or early in the morning and they’re not checking in. It’s not a social call.

They’re not out having a drink and calling me to check in or have some discussion about family or anything like that. Something’s happened. Something’s happened at their company and they’re calling to ask for help. In my three decades in working in business continuity and crisis management, I’ve gotten calls because of workplace fatalities, active shooter incidents, data breaches, employees stranded in a foreign country because of civil unrest or geopolitical disruption, for natural disasters, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, executive malfeasance, and just many, many more.

If it’s happened, I’ve probably have dealt with it in some way, shape, or form. And that doesn’t count national and global disruptions like COVID. These are the ones that prompt phone calls and emails from every company we work with, and they’re all looking for help with their response. Every company deals with business disruptions and crisis situations, and no one wants to think about… For the most part, no one, other than us who work in the

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser asks how you can know if your business continuity program is ready for the next disruption?

In other words, how can you evaluate your current business continuity program and tell if you’re ready for what’s next?

Topics discussed in this episode include industry standards such as ISO 22301, business continuity program evaluations, business continuity maturity models, and more.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: Evaluating Business Continuity Programs: Is your Business Continuity Program ready for the next Disruption?

Blog Post: ISO 27031: Looking at ISO’s Disaster Recovery Standard

Episode #91: Roles and Responsibilities in a Business Continuity Program

Episode #93: Crisis Management Plans – What your executives really want

Episode #96: Crisis leadership in the time of Coronavirus

Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast this is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. And in today’s episode, I want to start off by setting the stage for the discussion that we’re going to have about understanding if your business continuity program, your crisis management program, is truly ready for the next disruption. So, I want to take you back to August and September of 2017, the beginning of the most recent run of crisis situations of business disruptions around the world. We had a series of hurricanes that tore through the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. We had Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, three of the strongest hurricanes in recent memories. They took hundreds of lives and inflicted $210 billion in combined damage between the three storms, between the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. We fast-forward just two years later as we’re still recovering, in some cases, economically from the impact of those three hurricanes and even, logistically, still challenges in Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean.

And now, we’re faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, March 2020. March 11th, 2020, the National Basketball Association postpones its season with no clear idea if or when that it could resume. And then within days, companies across the country and truly around the world, sent their employees home, many of them with no clear plan of how to do their job remotely, all of this due to COVID-19 and the pandemic that we’ve all been faced with the last 15 years. And that hurricane season in 2017 and the pandemic of the last year and a half are just two of many recent examples of crisis events that have drastically disrupted business operations. So the question is, in the event of a disaster, how will you respond? And nobody enjoys thinking about crisis management or disaster recovery, outside of those of us that work in this space and do it because we enjoy the work, but nobody really wants to sit and think about these things, certainly not at all your senior executives.

But the questions that business leader

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses Business Continuity as a Service (BCaaS) and how you can mature your business continuity program through outsourcing your program with a company like Bryghtpath.

Topics discussed include what is business continuity as a service, how you can use it to mature your business continuity program while reducing your organization’s financial commitment to the program, and why companies would choose to outsource this service versus doing it in-house.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: Business Continuity as a Service: How to Outsource Your Continuity Program

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

Episode #45: Small Business Continuity Planning

Episode #102: The Bryghtpath Business Continuity Framework

Episode #106: Rethinking Business Continuity in the age of COVID-19

Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. And this week I would like to talk about outsourcing your business continuity program. Or in other words, how can you contract with a company like us to provide business continuity as a service?

Now, lots of companies build and manage their business continuity programs in-house. They might hire an expert that has run a team before, run a program before at another organization. But they often will hire an expert in resiliency to help design and execute a program internally. But this comes with challenges. And if you lack the in-house expertise, or you need to implement a business continuity program quickly, you have another option. And that is business continuity as a service.

So what is that? What does that mean? Well, business continuity as a service is the practice of contracting with a third-party firm to design, build, execute, and maintain your resiliency program, your business continuity program. And at Bryghtpath, we work with a number of companies to do exactly this. And we often use the ISO 22301 standard as the industry standard, as to how we approach that service.

We offer business continuity as a service to companies of all sizes. Small consulting firms, up to multi-billion dollar utilities, healthcare organizations, and technology firms. So when we define business continuity as a service, we’re talking about the practice of contracting with a third-party firm to design-build, execute, and maintain your program. Now, why would you do this? Why would you outsource this?

Well, there’s a lot of reasons why companies choose business continuity

In this episode of our Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal and CEO Bryan Strawser discusses the trends that we’ll see in the Post-COVID ‘New Normal’ or ‘Next Normal’.

Topics discussed include remote work, business travel, work productivity, collaboration technology, telehealth, and more.

Related Episodes & Blog Posts

Blog Post: What the COVID-19 pandemic will mean for the office of the future

Blog Post: Engaging your Board of Directors on your Crisis Communications Strategy

Episode #97: Returning to the office in the age of COVID-19

Episode #105: Taking care of yourself during a crisis

Episode #106: Rethinking Business Continuity in the age of COVID-19

Episode Transcript

Welcome to Managing Uncertainty, podcast series from the experts at Bryghtpath, discussing global risk, business continuity, and crisis management. Will you be ready to lead your organization through its critical moment?

Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath. And in this episode, I want to talk a little bit about the trends that we’re going to see as we begin to adapt to the next normal, as we begin to adapt to what we hope will be a post-pandemic world. With the vaccine now beginning to roll out, we start to see some light at the end of the tunnel, and we hope that there’s not another disaster or calamity headed our way.

So we really view 2021 as a year of change and transition, as we talked about in the previous episode, about returning back to work, about the role that distributed workplaces and remote work will play for us in the coming months and year. Here, I want to talk about some trends that have really been forced on us by COVID, by the global pandemic related to COVID-19, but also some changes that were accelerated that were already in the works, that the pandemic forced us to address more quickly than we would have expected. These are some trends that we expect are going to take place, and in some cases, are already taking place.

The first one is that we’re already starting to see leisure travel begin to bounce back. We’re seeing more people taking vacation, we’re seeing more people travel to vacation spots, both in and outside of the United States. And that folks really want to get back to traveling for pleasure. And we saw a celebration of this in the third and fourth quarter of 2020, but I expect that that will accelerate even more quickly in 2021, in places where the pandemic has lessened significantly, particularly in countries like New Zealand, and Australia, and China, if you’re to believe their figures. Leisure travel is back in a huge way, at least within the country, where folks are going to leisure locations.

The challenge though for travel is that business travel is lagging significantly. And we’re seeing this with our own clients, where folks are saying they don’t want to travel for business until they and their families have been vaccinated, or until the pandemic has ended, which may be very connected, in terms of vaccination, helping us get to the end.