In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser discusses what a successful incident or crisis management process looks like when you’re inside of an organization.

Topics discussed include: crisis management frameworks, leading in an incident or crisis situation, crisis management teams, executive crisis teams, global security operations centers, and communicating in a crisis

Episode Transcript

Hey folks, and welcome back to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. I’m Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. On today’s episode, I wanted to talk a little bit about what successful incident or crisis management looks like when you’re inside of an organization. When you’re a leader in a nonprofit, in a fortune 500 company, a public sector agency, that’s undergoing a major incident or a crisis situation. Whether you’re involved in the process or not, what does that look like? How do we know that that’s a successful incident management or crisis management process?

So there is a handful of things that, in our experience that we’ve identified that can really be seen inside of a company when we’re looking for signs or characteristics of a successful incident management process.

The first thing that we see is that there’s a radar screen. We’ve talked about this on previous episodes of the podcast, but there is a mechanism to detect incoming threats to the organization and this has to be really kind of a multidisciplinary look at threats, a holistic view of threats. It might be things like your cybersecurity detection tools being used by ISOC, or by an incident, an ISOC kind of team inside the organization. It could be proprietary global intelligence services that you use through third parties or an internal global intelligence team. It could be social media and regular media monitoring. It could be reputation management and monitoring. It could be your leading indicators of core business analytics like sales, shipping, your worst supply chain analytics and etc. But that you have these tools put into place where you’re able to see the incoming threat.

The second characteristic that we see in successful organizations is a rapid response process. And what I mean by that is that from the time that that threat is identified, there is a process that triages that threat to understand, it helps to understand the threat in the context of your organization and then activates or escalates this issue within your internal incident management, crisis management process. So there’s a way to, once that detection is made, to evaluate that, put it in front of the right folks for a decision and then escalate that process. The third is one of the most important and that is that there are clear roles and responsibilities in an incident. Who is in charge? How are decisions made? Who is informed? Who’s accountable for the process? Is there a crisis management team or some coordinating body that assembles? And even if there is a team that assembles, who’s in charge? We often build processes, crisis management frameworks where we have a cross-organizational team and middle management, some middle management layer. We typically assign a senior executive or a business leader to that team who is responsible for making decisions in that process or is the final arbiter of the decisions.

That next characteristic is exactly that. It’s that beyond clear roles and responsibilities that there is good cross-functional coordination. There’s a body, a crisis management team, a corporate crisis management team, an enterprise incident management team, you can call it whatever you want. But there is a body within the organization that gets together, that represents the business lines and all of the core s...