In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jen Otremba talk about personal preparedness and how it directly connects into business resiliency.

Together, Bryan and Jen talk through the four steps that you can take to improve your personal preparedness:

* Have a plan

* Get a kit

* Practice your Plan

* Review your Kit

You can learn more at our blog post on the same topic from last week.

Additional links:

* Ready Campaign – ready.gov

* National Preparedness Month

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser:                   So, every great story starts with a story, a lead, right?

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah.

Bryan Strawser:                   So, I’m from a small town in Indiana called Covington, whole 2,400 people and in 1979 we went through a tornado, I was five. My brother was maybe 18 months old. It went about a half mile, maybe a quarter mile from my home. We had pretty significant damage. I vividly remember, we didn’t have a basement so we ran to an interior closet with my mom and the dog.

Jen Otremba:                        Okay.

Bryan Strawser:                   And we’re hiding there and the storm comes through. My mom saw the funnel cloud, that’s what started all of this.

Jen Otremba:                        Oh, really?

Bryan Strawser:                   So, we’re hiding in the closet and then, you know, it passes by and then you go outside and you look at the aftermath of the storm. My city was without power for more than a week, actually I think it was closer to two weeks. We had trees down in the yard, we had a tree at a 45 degree angle leaning towards our house so we couldn’t sleep in our bedrooms because that’s what the tree was aimed at. We had to sleep on the floor in the living room with sleeping bags, which fortunately we had.

Jen Otremba:                        That’s kind of fun for kids.

Bryan Strawser:                   It’s kind of fun for kids, for my mom, not so much and my dad was out-of-town working because he was usually gone every other day.  We weren’t prepared to deal with this other than having sleeping bags and enough food for a couple days.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah. So, on the flip side, I grew on a farm so we were used to kind of living without for periods of time because we weren’t very close to a grocery store, things like that. I also have few childhood memories of some major storms that came through.

Bryan Strawser:                   Mm-hmm (affirmative) Snow storms. Right?

Jen Otremba:                        And my mom waking us up in the middle of the night for tornado warnings, dragging us down into the basement.

Bryan Strawser:                   You had a well for water then?

Jen Otremba:                        We did.

Bryan Strawser:                   Okay.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah, we did and we had a basement sort of cellar type of place that mom would drag all four of us down there in the middle of the night, terrified. Again, you’d walk outside, like you said, trees are everywhere.

Bryan Strawser:                   Could you get to the cellar from inside your house?

Jen Otremba:                        You could.

Bryan Strawser:                   Or you have to go outside and go through the wooden door?

Welcome! You’re reading an older post that references workplace violence, threat management, and active shooter situations.

Would you be interested in taking our free Active Shooter 101 Planning Mini-Course?

Our mini-course contains twelve comprehensive lessons that help you prepare your organization for an unthinkable situation. It’s completely free with lessons delivered daily via e-mail.

In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Senior Consultant Jen Otremba and consultant Lindsay Bradford, discuss leading through an active shooter incident. Together, Bryan, Jen, and Lindsay led through a major active shooter incident at a Fortune 30 corporation that turned out to be a false alarm after nearly four hours of watching law enforcement clear a headquarters building in Minneapolis.

In this podcast, we share lessons learned for preparing for, responding to, and recovering from an active shooter situation in your workplace. Topics discussed include crisis leadership during an active shooter situation, the perspectives of an incident leader in the midst of the crisis situation, communicating and making decisions, and sound strategies that can be used to prevent situations from reaching the point that gunfire is involved.

Key learning points:

* Mitigation and preparedness strategies for active shooter situations

* Crisis leadership during an active shooter situation

* Helping your employees recover from workplace violence incidents

* How to communicate and make decisions during a crisis

View Slides from Secure 360 2017 Presentation by Bryan Strawser

Episode Transcript:

Bryan:

Welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast, and this is our first three person podcast, and we have one of our employees with us, Lindsay Bradford.

 

Lindsay:

Hi, everyone.

 

Bryan:

Lindsay, tell us a little bit about you.

 

Lindsay:

Sure. I am up here visiting Bryghtpath. I met Jen and Bryan when I worked for Target at the corporate command center, where I learned all of my crisis management background. Before that I was in investigations with Target, and before that I was with Tempe PD police department out in Arizona as a tactical crime analyst, so I focused on homicide and cold case sex crimes, so I have a little bit of a unique background. Husband is in the navy. He’s on one of the new ships, so that brought us down to Jacksonville, Florida where we currently reside. I’ve bounced back and forth across the country now two and a half times in the last three years, so it’s been exciting and I’m excited to be back here with the crew again.

 

Jen:

We’re excited to have you.

 

Bryan:

Our long term goal here at Bryghtpath of course is to get the band back together, literally, and we’re well on our way to doing that. We’re adding our fifth person here in a couple weeks. We’ll have her on the podcast as well.

 

Jen:

Which will be really fun.

 

Bryan:

Which is going to be really fun, but we’re here today to talk about something else entirely which is leading through active shooter situations, and Jen, Lindsay and I, when we worked together at our previous employer, had the unfortunate experience of leading through multiple active shooter situations. I think it was seven for me, one of which was an actual,

In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Senior Consultant Jen Otremba, discuss the makeup of a corporate crisis management team and how important selecting the right talent and skills can be to the overall success of your program.

Topics covered include forming a corporate crisis management team, emotional intelligence, procuring the right skill sets for the team, and the need for a unified approach involving all different types of disruptions that your organization could face.

 

Episode Transcript:

Bryan Strawser:

[inaudible 00:00:22] the first podcast, which you had not, I don’t think, you weren’t a part of the first one. But I talked about this idea of having a crisis framework. The background there was that everybody always would call. Clients would always call and say, “I need to have crisis plans. I need to have plans because of active shooter, for a power outage,” and for whatever. I would always steer them to, plans are fine but that’s not really what you need. If you’ve never thought through this, you need a framework. How do you make decisions? How do you communicate the results of those decisions? How do you get the stakeholders …

 

Jennifer Otremba:

Right.

 

Bryan Strawser:

… at the table?

 

Jennifer Otremba:

Who’s responsible for the final say in something?

 

Bryan Strawser:

Who’s gonna make the decision? How do you escalate a decision? So, we wanna talk a little more about that idea today because we were having some discussions with some clients recently and partners, around, who should be at the table? I mean, who needs to be there?

 

Jennifer Otremba:

And if they’re there, what is their role?

 

Bryan Strawser:

What’s their role?

 

Jennifer Otremba:

What’s expected of them.

 

Bryan Strawser:

I think, one of the really difficult things to think about as you’re building a crisis management process in a company, in a non-profit or a private sector organization is, you’re gonna have this crisis management team and in a crisis, however you decide to define it, somebody’s gonna be in charge, so to speak, of managing that process. But they’re not necessarily in charge of the crisis. Right? Or are they?

 

Jennifer Otremba:

Well they could be. I guess it would depend on how it was set up. In our previous experiences I’ve seen it done a few ways but you could have Incident Manager for instance, that would be responsible for bringing all the appropriate parties together. They would need to know enough about the incident. To know who to call and who to talk to and who to bring to the table. Then once they’re to the table, it’s that group to sort of make the decisions as to what happens next.

 

Bryan Strawser:

In our world, what we typically bring our clients to is, look at everything that could be a major disruption to your company at that enterprise level. It should filter into one crisis management process, right? We think about financial crises, reputational crises, executive misconduct or serious HR issue. Then we have all the things that we typically think of as a big crises. Data breach information, security event.

 

Jennifer Otremba:

A hurricane.

 

Bryan Strawser:

National disasters.

 

Jennifer Otremba:

Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Senior Consultant Jen Otremba, talk about planning for major events for private sector companies, such as internal events (board meetings, company meetings) and external events (Super Bowl, NCAA Final Four, political conventions), and similar events.

Topics covered include coordination with public sector agencies, obtaining access to intelligence information that may be available through local partners, situations that you should consider planning for, and how to best integrate your plans with existing crisis or event management frameworks.

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser:

So, Jen. Major events.

 

Jen Otremba:

Major events.

 

Bryan Strawser:

Shareholder meetings. Board meetings.

 

Jen Otremba:

The Superbowl.

 

Bryan Strawser:

Board series. NBA All Star game. Major league baseball All Star game in Minnesota last year.

 

Jen Otremba:

That’s right.

 

Bryan Strawser:

Hmm (thoughtful)

 

Jen Otremba:

Red Bull’s crushed ice.

 

Bryan Strawser:

The crushed ice. Which [inaudible 00:00:43] you’re not from Minnesota, you probably have no idea what that is, but it’s an outdoor … What are they riding on? Is it snow mobiles? They’re on snow mobiles.

 

Jen Otremba:

No, crushed ice is on ice skates.

 

Bryan Strawser:

They’re on ice skates?

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah.

 

Bryan Strawser:

See, I don’t even know …

 

Jen Otremba:

They’re crazy.

 

Bryan Strawser:

What I’m talking about.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah. It’s crazy exciting.

 

Bryan Strawser:

It’s by the Cathedral of St. Paul.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yes.

 

Bryan Strawser:

It’s definitely worth looking at. It’s insane.

 

Jen Otremba:

It’s a huge event. State Fair, of that matter.

 

Bryan Strawser:

The Minnesota State Fair. The largest state fair in the world, despite the fact that we’re not Texas.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yes, that’s right. The inauguration of the President.

 

Bryan Strawser:

These are huge events that happen. They don’t happen in a bubble. Companies have to deal with these events, because they cause all kinds of disruption.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yep, not just the police or the National Guard but individual companies and organizations have plans for these types of events.

 

Bryan Strawser:

The Superbowl is going to be in Minnesota next year. February 4th, 2018, at the new US Bank stadium in downtown Minneapolis. It’s going to cause absolutely no disruption whatsoever.

 

Jen Otremba:

No traffic. No traffic in Minneapolis.

 

Bryan Strawser:

There’ll be no traffic. There’ll be no security check points.

 

Jen Otremba:

That’s right.

 

Bryan Strawser:

It’s gonna be a huge disruptor.

 

Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Senior Consultant Jen Otremba, talk about the McDonald’s social media flap from this week, the need for companies to have a “radar screen” through a command center or social media monitoring center, and a bit about crisis management and crisis communications.

Show Notes / Links:

* McDonald’s twitter hack

* Bryghtpath – Crisis Management

* Bryghtpath – Crisis Communications

* Bryghtpath Case Study – Intelligence Center

* Bryghtpath Case Study – Crisis Frameworks

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser:

Hey there, it’s Bryan Strawser. I’m the Principal and CEO here at Bryghtpath, and with me is.

 

Jen Otremba:

I am Jen Otremba, and I am a senior consultant at Bryghtpath.

 

Bryan Strawser:

Jen just joined the company, I don’t know, it’s been about a month now.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah, about a month.

 

Bryan Strawser:

But Jen and I had previously worked together at our former employer where we have stolen her away to help our clients with a number of crisis management, business continuity areas. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah, I’m very excited to be here. Yeah, so prior to Bryghtpath I was with Target Corporation actually with Bryan. But I was there for about 10 years or so. I worked in crisis management and workplace violence prevention in my most current role, and my parallel career that I’ve had from that is I’ve been in the military for almost 20 years as well.

 

Bryan Strawser:

I was waiting for you to say that you had this hobby of flying Black Hawks, but it’s not really a hobby.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah, I do, I fly. I’m an instructor pilot for the Medevac company in Minnesota, flying Black Hawks as a part-time job.

 

Bryan Strawser:

So Jen and I are in, we’re in Boston today with a client. We’ve been here since Monday morning helping them with business continuity effort, and we’re recording this right before we head off to the airport to fly back home from one cold climate to another. But we were discussing right before we started the recording about what we were going to talk about today, and Jen suggested that we talk about something that happened this morning, which is the McDonald’s hacked Twitter account, allegedly.

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah, it’s crazy.

 

Bryan Strawser:

So what happened, Jen? There’s a tweet from McDonald’s on their corporate Twitter account and it was probably not, well, certainly wasn’t intended to be sent out by McDonald’s. But what did the tweet say?

 

Jen Otremba:

Yeah, shall we read it? It says, “@realDonaldTrump You are actually a disgusting excuse of a President and we would love to have @BarackObama back. Also, you have tiny hands.”

 

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal Consultant and CEO Bryan Strawser talks about the first question that any potential client asks:  Shouldn’t I have a plan for alien invasion??!

That’s not really the question, of course. What gets asked is this:  Shouldn’t I have a plan for X?! 

That situation could be an active shooter, a workplace violence threat, executive misconduct, a data breach, or a host of other common threats that businesses are faced with in today’s uncertain world.

Instead, Bryan steers the conversation towards the idea of a crisis management framework. In other words, a process to triage information, escalate an incident into a broader crisis, and then manage that crisis through a defined decision making and communication process.

Now your company is able to deal effectively with any situation that it is facing, rather than just those where plans have been already put into place to handle.

 

Podcast Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast hosted by Bryghtpath, LLC.

Managing Uncertainty is a podcast series where we discuss global risk, crisis management, business continuity, and crisis communications. We talk about strategies, tactics, and resources that help you prepare for, respond to, and recover from all sorts of disruptions and critical moments. Our goal is to make sure that you’re ready to lead through your company or organization’s critical moment.

I’m Bryan Strawser, the founder, principal consultant, and CEO at Bryghtpath.

 

On today’s episode we’re going to be talking about the one question that I always get when a new client calls, when someone is calling us asking for our help or our advice on learning how to prepare for some type of critical moment or disaster that they see in the future. The question that I always get is shouldn’t I have a plan for some type of situation that’s on their mind?

These days it’s often an active shooter scenario or a food safety product recall, workplace violence or executive misconduct. These seem to be very popular crisis situations that companies are preparing for today.

My answer to this always is that having plans is great. Companies should build plans for the risk that they anticipate could happen to their organizations, for the disruptions that they think could happen to their locations or their headquarters or their employees, and they should plan for those situations that can really cause harm to their assets particularly their people around the world.

 

In my mind, from my experience, crisis management doesn’t really start by building a set of plans. It starts with thinking about what I like to call a crisis management framework. We use this a lot in our consulting practice. That before you get to build plans, you should start by understanding how your organization at a strategic level is going to prepare for situations by building a decision-making and communication framework, basically a decision-making process that you’re going to use when these situations happen. Because if you don’t build something like this and instead you build a set of plans, you’re eventually going to find yourself in a situation where you’re confronted with a business disruption or a crisis or a risk that you never anticipated and for which you don’t have a plan. Now all of a sudden, because you have never built a decision-making process, you’ve never built a crisis framework, you’re not sure what to do.

 

I think a great example of this from recent history is the huge earthquake that the country of Japan faced back in 2011. They saw, I believe, one of the five worst earthquakes that’s ever happened in US or world ...

Later this week, we’ll be launching Managing Uncertainty, a podcast series discussing global risk, crisis management, business continuity, and crisis communications.  On our podcast, you’ll learn strategies, tactics, and resources about preparing for, responding to, and recovering from all sorts of disruptions and critical moments.

Will you be ready to lead through your company’s critical moment?

Have a listen to our teaser for our podcast launch – we look forward to your feedback!

Podcast Transcript

Hi, this is Bryan Strawser, Principal Consultant and CEO at Bryghtpath.

I’m here to give you a bit of a teaser about the upcoming launch of our new podcast, Managing Uncertainty.

Bryghtpath is a global strategic advisory firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that specializes in global risk, crisis management, business continuity, and crisis communications.

In other words, we help companies, non-profits, and public sector agencies prepare for, respond to, and recover from every sort of disaster that you can imagine. From hurricanes and wildfires to reputational challenges and product recalls to terrorist attacks and active shooter situations.

 

You’re probably wondering where we came up with this title of managing uncertainty. Well, companies today are really faced with a huge amount of uncertainty around the world. They work within a global supply chain that delivers products just in time, that were manufactured in a country whose politics and stability they likely don’t understand, and that product crosses many boundaries and in brings many risks with it as it moves around the world.

Companies are confronted by geopolitical instability that moves at such speeds that make it incredibly difficult to keep up. Their employees travel through countries and are faced with violent attacks that were once considered to be quite safe.

A lot of companies simply fail at managing and understanding this kind of risk. They don’t understand the risk. They have no idea how to prepare for mitigated, and because they’re unprepared when the bad situations really happen, they have no idea how to respond.

Their companies and their employees and their business suffer as a result of that.

 

Here on the podcast, we’ll be talking about the strategies and tactics and resources that really help companies and non-profits prepare for these kind of uncertainty in situations. We’ll talk with some of the experts that have actually gone out and done this, that have prepared companies and managed through these situations.

Our team here at Bryghtpath has been there too. We posses over a century of experience in managing crisis situations around the world. Many of the worlds leading brands work with us today as a trusted advisor. They do so well in advance of when the crap truly hits the fan.

 

We look forward to sharing our lessons with you and the lessons of of our guests on the Managing Uncertainty podcast. I hope you’ll subscribe today by joining our newsletter at bryghtpath.com/newsletter. We’ll be launching our first episode later this week.