What factors would make a threat “high risk” versus “medium” or “low risk”?

What are some good examples of low, medium, and high-risk threats?

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser addresses these questions as he shared a model set of threat severity levels and examples that can be used by any organization.

 

Episode Transcript

Hey, folks. Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath, here, and welcome back to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This week, I wanna continue our discussion on workplace balance and threat management programs by talking about how to categorize a threat in terms of severity. We like to keep our threat severity discussions relatively simple and think about organizing threats as either low, medium or high. A low-risk threat would be a threat that is a general security incident with nonspecific threats. In these cases, this might require … it might involve general security support in a situation, it might involve a simple employment dispute, and involve, primarily, indirect threats.

So, if we think back to last week’s episode where we were talking about the threat incident risk factors and how to evaluate those risks against those risk factors, evaluate the threat rather, against the risk factors, that’s really what we’re doing here. We’re looking at this low-risk threat, we’re looking at those threat incident risk factors and we look at it and say, “Well, there’s not many of these risk factors present.”

So, a good example of a low-risk threat would be when your company’s call center receives an anonymous call that’s a nonspecific threat to blow up your headquarter’s location. It’s literally someone calls and says, “I’m unhappy about this refund that I didn’t get, and so I’m gonna blow up your headquarters in Minneapolis,” and then hangs up. That’s not a very specific threat. There’s nothing specific there, there’s not a lot of directness, there’s not a lot of detail, there’s nothing actionable, there’s no outlining of a plan. It’s just somebody who’s mad and they’re blowing off steam. Should you still communicate this, should you still evaluate it, should you still think about, “Are there preventative measures?” Sure. But again, this is a low-risk situation.

Next, we think about how we categorize a medium-risk threat. Factors here could be multiple, repeated threats about the same situation or from the same individual, repeated angry outbursts, a repeated pattern of harassment or violent behavior, it could be a subject with multiple risk factors present, the risk factors that we talked about in last week’s episode, or it could be a strong suicide threat where those threat factors, threat risk incident … threat risk factors we spoke about last week for suicide are present in this individual, and so you’ve chosen to classify this as a medium-risk threat.

An example would be a current employee at your company who’s made a public threat of suicide. They have had recent performance issues and problems and a recent uptick in grievances towards their supervisor. So, this is a medium-risk situation. This is one that probably requires a threat action plan. You may need to take some specific safety and security measures in response to this. Definitely worth active intervention and determining the right threat strategy, threat management strategy to put into place.

And then, finally, we have high-risk threats. This would be where you have a specific, direct, and actionable threat made or perhaps threats made against multiple victims. It could be a subject with multiple confirmed risk ...

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser talks about threat incident risk factors in threats of workplace violence, including potential suicide situations. Topics discussed include threats of suicide, threat management, workplace violence prevention, and domestic violence.

Episode Transcript

Hey Folks, Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast for this week where we’re going to be talking about risk factors with threats.

When we think about threat management, and threat management programs, one of the ways that we evaluate the risk of a threat, and I’m talking about a threat from an individual, a threat in terms of workplace violence, or against an individual in your company like an executive, or others. When we think about a set of threat incident risk factors, these are things that go along with threats such as written, verbal, or veiled threats made towards your company, at your company, in regards to your company, or an individual working there that might be a precursor to violence.

These are important things to consider when we’re thinking about how serious to take a threatening situation, with comments or commentary made by an employee or others. Let’s walk through some of these risk factors, and we divide these into four categories. The first is about risk factors that indicate potentially a desire to commit suicide.

The first is that the individual has had previous attempts to take their own life. No matter how serious or insignificant they may be. Previous attempts to commit suicide. The second is to look at their level of alcohol or substance abuse, drug abuse, particularly if any of those are prevalent. The third is a feeling of hopelessness that the individual exhibits what can be viewed as signs of depression, signs that there are no hope, that there’s no way out of a difficult situation or relationship, or debt, or another factor in their life.

The fourth is impulsiveness, that the individual is an impulsive decision maker, that they make impulsive decisions in the course of their life. They suddenly decide on a Friday to go to Cancun on Saturday. They jump into a relationship, and instantly plan to get married. These kind of impulsive decisions. They go out an rapidly buy a new car after just commenting about debt.

Another high risk factor for suicide is a recent significant loss. This could be employment, or a job. It could be a financial situation. It could be a relationship or a marriage, or a close friendship that has ended, but have they have a recent significant loss?

The next factor and perhaps one of the most important factors when it comes to gaging the risk of suicide with an individual is access to lethal means. Do they have the means available to them, easily available to them, that would allow them to take their own life? This could be ownership of a firearm. It could be talking about knives, or suicide via gas, or different ways that are out there that an individual might use, and that they have access to.

The next is another significant risk factor, and that is creation or verbalization of a plan, or perhaps a written plan or ideas that they have shared, and a post on Facebook, or other social media in writing, in their diary that they talk about, but individuals who have made a plan, and who have access to lethal means are at high risk of suicide, high risk of taking their own life.

The next risk factor is lack of social support, that they don’t have friends and family, and others to lean on that are nearby. They don’t have a close social network that serve as anchors to help them through a difficult situation. The next risk factor is withdraw, and here we think about withdraw from work, from relationships,

What are the basic elements of a Travel Safety & Security Program?

What are some of the things I need to ensure that we have in place?

Where should I start with Travel Safety & Security?

These are some of the questions that Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser tackles in today’s episode on Travel Safety & Security programs.

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath, and welcome back to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast.

Today, I want to talk about travel safety and security programs.

We just had a client ask us last week about what it would take to start up a travel safety and security program, which, of course, turned into a long conversation about, “What do you have in place today, and what kind of things should, do you feel like you need to have in place? And here’s what other companies your size do. Oh, and by the way, are you talking about geographically, your employees’ travel?”

All of these are good questions to ask, as you’re starting to think about this, but here’s what I want to focus on. Here are some elements of the travel safety and security program, from our perspective. This is an area I have a lot of personal knowledge in. I was responsible for most aspects of travel safety and security at my former employer, where I was the head of crisis management, intelligence and business continuity.

And as a consultant, we’ve helped a number of organization stand up travel safety and security programs for median and large enterprises, whose employees travel and operate globally, even if it’s just in North America, between Canada and Mexico, and the United States. So there’s a number of elements to a travel safety and security program. It starts with an acknowledgment that there is a duty to care, that you have as an employer, to make sure that your employees are safe.

That, as they travel, and this would include your contractors, and really, any guests that might be traveling with an employee, like a spouse, or children, if you allow such things. But it’s certainly an acknowledgement that there’s a duty to care. That you should have, as an employer, in terms of making sure that people are safe, as they travel.

You almost want to think about as, whether they’re on the clock, so to speak, or not, if they’re traveling for you, the reason why they’re there is that they’re with you. You’ve sent them there. And so, you have some responsibility, from a safety and security standpoint. Not just legally, but because that would be the right thing to do, because they’re employed.

So a good travel, and safety and security program, starts by having travel policies that allow you to put some structure around where employees can travel, and kind of activities that they can engage in, and your ability to decline them from visiting certain locations. Usually, I think about this at a country level, where, perhaps your business operates in many, many countries. And that requires your employees to travel to even more countries, from where you might source products or talent, or you might have a vendor as a BPO, as an outsourcer.

There’s a lot of reasons that you might have employees traveling to countries that are not necessarily places that you normally are doing business. You need the ability to understand the risk of traveling to those countries, the training or briefings and knowledge that your employees need to have, in order to successfully and safely operate in those countries, and in some cases, you need the ability to restrict them from traveling to those locations.

For example, for many years, most US companies did not allow employees of their businesses to travel to Myanmar. The reason is that the former Burma was under economic and other sanctions by the United States, and other entities,

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...

How do you take care of the crisis team when you’re in the middle of a crisis?

That’s the topic that Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser tackles in this week’s episode. Topics discussed include emotional intelligence, maintaining balance in the middle of the critical moment, Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, and crisis leadership.

Episode Transcript

Hi folks and welcome back to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. It’s been a while since we’ve done an episode. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath.

One thing that happened last year, in the middle of the year, as we were kind of clipping along with he podcast at a pretty good rate, is that Jen Otremba, one of our employees and my co-host on the podcast, received deployment orders. Jen is long-time member of the Minnesota National Guard. She is a Black Hawk instructor and command pilot in a medevac company, and she was called up for a year plus of active duty serving with the military and the National Guard in Southwest Asia.

Jen has now been there for several months with her unit, flying medevac missions and engaging in other activities and is doing well. We have regular contact with her, and we’ve sent her care packages, and, in fact, I just saw photos from her yesterday about things that they were up to. We wish her well.

We look forward to having her back, but I thought it was time to get back into doing the podcast on a regular basis. So hopefully this is the beginning of getting things back on track.

What I wanted to talk about in today’s episode is about taking care of your team during a crisis. We’ve talked a lot on previous episodes about how we work in a crisis situation to take care of others at your company. Survivors, those that are impacted, people who need medical care. We’ve talked about the long-term emotional impact that crisis situations and critical incidents have on your team. What we haven’t talked as much about is how to take care of your team, how to take care of the folks that are managing through the crisis situation, whether you’re in corporate security or human resources, facilities, the core business line, manufacturing or retail, or IT or whatever the makeup of your crisis team is. How do you take care of them in a crisis? And so I want to talk briefly about that during today’s episode.

I think that taking care of your team in a crisis starts with acknowledging that, as you bring people into roles that have crisis management responsibilities, whether that’s a full-time thing for that employee, or that’s an add-on to their current role, that they’re representing their organization in some kind of cross-functional crisis team. I think we have to acknowledge up front that not everyone is cut out for this. Working in a crisis, particularly in a critical incident where people are in harm’s way, whether it’s through an intentional act of violence, or they become victims of a natural disaster and have to survive through that incident, or some type of accident that happens in the workplace, not everyone is cut to be able to deal with those situations in a calm, rational and emotionally intelligent manner.

One of the things that we talk about a lot as we vet people for crisis management roles, is the need to have emotional intelligence, the need for individuals involved in these decisions and discussions and collaborations to be able to deal with these very difficult situations in a calm and rational manner during the situation. And then afterwards, like everyone else, they’ll experience the same range of emotions that I think all of us experience in our own way following a critical incident, a crisis, a disaster situation. But in my mind, a big part of this is just how do we vet these individuals? How do we train them for these kind of situatio...

Why do crisis or business continuity exercises?

Are exercises really that valuable to maturing a crisis management or business continuity strategy?

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser takes on that topic and more. Topics discussed include effective exercises, table top exercises, simulation exercises, integrated exercises, business continuity, crisis management, information security, data breaches, and the need to build muscle memory for crisis teams.

Episode Transcript

Hi, folks. Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath, and welcome back to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. Today we’re going to talk about why we do crisis management exercises. Why do we exercise our plans?

One question that we get a lot here at Bryghtpath from prospective clients is about coming in and running crisis exercises of some type. It could be a tabletop exercise. It could be a full simulation exercise, where you’re actually working through and doing some of the things that are in your plans, or all of the things that are in your plans, or some variation on the exercises. It could be a virtual tabletop instead of an in-person tabletop, so on and so forth.

Now there’s a number of reasons that you want to exercise your crisis management plans. The first one is, is to see if it works.

If you create the exercise scenario correctly, and you set the type of exercise that you’re doing, correctly, for what your goals are, you can test and see if your plan would actually work in the crisis situation that you intend it to work it in.

And what I mean by that is, not that necessarily, you’re going to be successful in managing the crisis and testing that in your plan, but you’re testing the processes that you put into place in your plans.

For example, we do a number of data breach exercises, or other crisis exercises, where there’s a significant internal and external communications component. And we’ve often found in the plans, and exercises that were involved, that one of the challenges is actually working through that communications process.

Think about the number of moving parts in a data breach. When it comes to what, and how, and when, and where you’re going to communicate what has happened. And particularly if you’re in a regulated business, you have to balance the need to communicate internally, communicating with your customers, your stakeholders, your vendors, your regulators, and of course, your employees and leaders, and your institutional investors.

So, there’s a number of audiences that really come into play as you’re thinking about crafting that communication, and you will likely have, most companies would have, relatively robust communications review and approval process.

If you think about your typical large scale communications campaign within a company, if you’re not time pressed, if you’re not being forced to communicate something due to external threats and influences, well, you have all the time in the world to create your communication strategy and publish the communications on your timetable.

But in a data breach, you don’t have that. You are balancing the challenges of regulation, which might require you to disclose within a certain period of time. You’re balancing the challenge of notifying your stakeholders that that communication is coming from you and not from a third party. You have the issue of the press finding out that something has happened, whether through their own investigation, or because of a leak of some type inside your company. And then, law enforcement, particularly federal law enforcement, may know about the data breach, and are pressuring you to communicate or not communicate what’s going on.

Continuing our three-part series on Communication – Episode #36 of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast focuses on the new product launch — what do you do when you’re ready to launch your new initiative, system, project, or product inside of a company?

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba discuss launching new initiatives and the importance of communications planning. Topics discussed include communications planning, creative collateral, building a communications plan, and related topics.

Episode Transcript

Jen Otremba:

Communication.

 

Bryan Strawser:

I like to communicate.

 

Jen Otremba:

I do too. I think it’s important. This is actually part three in a three-part series of communication discussions, if you will, that we’ve started. We started talking a little bit about kind of an overview of communication with regards to crisis and things like that. Then we went into some of the challenges, holding statements, and things like that. Now we want to talk about the launch. At some point in time, you’re going to want to launch some kind of new product or a new team.

 

Bryan Strawser:

A new application.

 

Jen Otremba:

A new application or something along those lines. You’re going to need to know how to kind of launch that, how to get that out there to people.

 

Bryan Strawser:

We talked in part one about the fact that we’ve heard from many leaders in security crisis management business continuity that they think their team are doing all of these really cool things, but nobody knows about them. The launch is really an opportunity to make sure that whatever the big splash is that you’re going to make, that people are going to see it. You need this one chance to kind of message this thing the way that you really want it to be. This is your opportunity to do that, and to really think about in advance of that launch what are the different ways that you can that message out?

 

Jen Otremba:

Very much like anything else. How do you want that to be perceived? How do you want to get it out? How do you want people to know about it? That type of thing. Without any [inaudible 00:01:48] doing that, like you said, people don’t know that you have these great things going on unless you’re properly communicating them. In this podcast episode I guess we want to talk a little bit about planning that launch and then socializing it, and then the launch itself.

 

Bryan Strawser:

I think first you have to start with realizing that you have a launch. I think that often leaders look at all the different things their team is doing and you see this new initiative coming in and you’re like, “It’s not going to be really be that big of a deal, so why pull up a big campaign about it?” But then you also have things that are so huge that it becomes obvious that you want to communicate that.

 

I think realizing that really any change that you’re driving can be a launch to a certain extent, and how do you really take advantage of that? But I think it really starts with understanding you’ve got something new that you’re bringing into the environment. The new strategy, the new team, the new command center or whatever. Or something boring, new access control software. Yeah.

 

Jen Otremba:

No matter what, in all of those cases it’s going to affect people, right?

What happens when you find yourself in the middle of a crisis, some of your facilities are impacted, and suddenly you need to relocate several critical teams to an alternate workplace for an indeterminate period of time.

If you have planned well, then you’re ready to execute your plan.

But if you haven’t….

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser along with Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba discuss alternate workplace strategies for business continuity situations. Topics discussed by the experts from Bryghtpath include the business impact analysis (BIA), effective business continuity planning, trends in alternate workplace strategies, and their own practical experience with managing large-scale business continuity situations that required the use of alternate workplace strategies.

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser:

A bad thing has happened. The boom has happened.

 

Jen Otremba:

What do we do now?

 

Bryan Strawser:

We’re on the right side of the boom.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah.

 

Bryan Strawser:

We’re responding. We’ve activated our crisis process. We’ve realized that we’ve got a facility or two that has impact.

 

Jen Otremba:

For whatever reason.

 

Bryan Strawser:

For whatever reason and now we’re activating business continuity plans for critical teams that are in those facilities and we run into the problem of alternate workspace.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah. We may have planned for this or we may not have planned for this.

 

Bryan Strawser:

We hope that we have a plan for this.

 

Jen Otremba:

I always like it when you discussed your story about what had happened with the flooding where individuals lost their workspace because of flooding. Because oftentimes, we think about this like the tornado blew the building the over, but it’s not always like that.

 

Bryan Strawser:

Yeah. We always seem to think of the catastrophic situation, but I think we relayed it previously on the podcast many years ago. An employer of mine at the time, 50 story skyscraper building in Minneapolis where we occupied 40-ish floors of the building, there was a flood inside the building. The flood was caused by a one inch water line that ran into an ice maker that had a filter change on a Friday or a Thursday and by Saturday night it was leaking and by Sunday afternoon had proceeded to flood. I believe it was three and a half floors of the building. Now, we had 600-ish, 800-ish employees that we need to work and couldn’t work because there was three to four inches of standing water in their offices and cubicles and common workspace.

 

Jen Otremba:

They couldn’t work in that space.

 

Bryan Strawser:

Couldn’t work in that space. That’s correct. Important distinction. This is where this whole idea of alternate workspace comes up is if they can’t work there then where can the work?

 

Jen Otremba:

Right.

 

Bryan Strawser:

How do we solve that problem?

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah.

 

Bryan Strawser:

We build a second building that just sits empty and when you have disruption, you just move people to your other $250 million skyscraper. That’s how this works.

 

Jen Otremba:

I think we’ve seen this come up in even less drastic situations like that and ...

Continuing our three part series on Communication – Episode #34 of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast is focused on what happens after the “BOOM!”… or in other words, we’re going to focus on crisis communications.

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba talk candidly about crisis communications. Topics discussed include crisis communications planning, holding statements, developing key messages, managing social media, and more!

Episode Transcript

Jen Otremba:

Hi, we’re back. Managing Uncertainty podcast. Today, this is actually part two of the communication series we talked about last week. Today we are going to talk a little bit about crisis communication. What happens in a crisis, and why do you need to communicate, and for how long, and for when and to who, and all of that. Crisis communication. Let’s talk about that.

 

Bryan Strawser:

When we’re talking about crisis communication, we’re really talking about kind of the left and right of the boom. As we’ve said before, the boom is the bad thing. To the left boom which is before the boom, you’re thinking about how do you prepare for the boom. Then the boom happens and everything after that is right of boom. You’re reacting. You’re responding. And then you’re into short and long-term recovery. Communication differs as you kind of move throughout this.

 

Jen Otremba:

I think let’s start with the before the boom. The planning process.

 

Bryan Strawser:

Wait, you want to plan?

 

Jen Otremba:

Yes.

 

Bryan Strawser:

Oh my gosh.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yes. You know, I do like to plan.

 

Bryan Strawser:

I think there are planners here. One of the biggest challenges we see when we talk about crisis communications with clients and with others is that I can’t count high enough to count the number of times that we’ve sat down with a corporate communications team or a PR and social media team, and said, “Tell us about your crisis communications planning.” And they say, “We don’t plan for crises because every situation is different, and you can’t build messaging for that.

 

Jen Otremba:

While I’ll agree that every situation is different, and you should understand that going in. There’s the need to be a little bit nimble. You still need to have a plan. Some kind of templates or something created beforehand, because let me tell you when the boom happens-

 

Bryan Strawser:

There is no time to figure this out.

 

Jen Otremba:

And as you’re editing through it, it is so easy to make a mistake during the boom. Having those holding statements can definitely set you up for success when that happens.

 

Bryan Strawser:

What we’re talking about here is that we believe you should take the handful situations that you think you [inaudible 00:02:22] highest risk for is a place to start. Just like we encourage folks to build specific plans to deal with those situations, and what we would also encourage you to build communications plans for those particular situations. You can leave large gaping blanks in those plans in the messaging on how you’re going to fill in details as you learn them in the event because it is true the events are going to be different.

 

How often does a leader in security, crisis management, or business continuity find that their team is doing great things, but absolutely no one in the company knows anything about it?

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba talk candidly about communications and awareness strategies in the first part of a three-part series about communication strategies. Topics discussed include communication and awareness strategies, creating an editorial calendar, content creation, and related topics.

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser:            Jen, what are we doing here today?

Jen Otremba:               Well, first of all, welcome back to Managing Uncertainty Podcast.

Bryan Strawser:            Had a little bit of a break.

Jen Otremba:               Yep, a little bit.

Bryan Strawser:            We’ve been a little busy with some real work.

Jen Otremba:               We have. But because of that, we have sort of come up with some ideas of what we want to talk about based on client needs. As we’ve been talking through this with several of our clients. So what we decided to kind of start talking about a little bit more and maybe have a whole series on, is communication.

Bryan Strawser:            So we’re gonna talk about a couple different communication topics. I think we’re gonna start today with more of, I think, an overview of communication. Then, we’re gonna get into talking about communication and awareness planning. One of the bigger challenges that we see that we’ve helped a number of clients with over the last several years. Part two, Jen?

Jen Otremba:               Yeah, part two, we’re gonna talk a little bit about crisis communication, so how to communication in the event of a crisis. During, before, after, that type of thing.

Bryan Strawser:            Then, in part three, we’re gonna talk about the big launch. At different points of your business cycle, you’ll have the opportunity to launch a new product, a new service, a new campaign, maybe a new … It can be a new vision mission statement, a new EOC-

Jen Otremba:               A new team, yeah.

Bryan Strawser:            A new team.

Jen Otremba:               Yeah.

Bryan Strawser:            So we’re going to talk about how to prepare for that launch. How to use some of the communication tools that we’re going to talk about in part one and two, to really go out and launch that series.

Jen Otremba:               Yeah.

Bryan Strawser:            Launch that [inaudible 00:01:45] through the [inaudible 00:01:48].

Jen Otremba:               Right. So I think some of the ideas around this really stemmed from just talking to some of our clients that we’ve been working with and understanding their needs. Kind of talking through … We have all of these great programs. We do all of these great things, but no one knows about it.

Bryan Strawser:            Yeah it happens a lot where, I think, we have seen numerous times and I saw even early in my career in Security that companies would … Or teams would be doing a lot of really great things and be doing a lot of great work and absolutely nobody knew that those things were going on.

Jen Otremba:               Yeah. In this world, it’s all the more important that people understand and know who you are and what you’re doing. We work in Crisis Management and workplace violence prevention. We need people to know who to call when things happen.

Bryan Strawser:            Even beyond that, there’s a lot of really great work being done by Security, and Business Continuity, and Intelligence,