Preparing for the Unexpected

Earthquakes are powerful natural forces that have the ability to cause allot of devastation and early prediction is something still to be defined. Yet, it's happening. We speak with Dr. Dimitar Ouzounov, an expert in pre-earthquake phenomena, Earth's lithosphere-atmosphere coupling, and short term earthquake forecasting using space technologies. Dr. Ouzounov talks to us about a current AMADEUS initiative that is helping to determine earthquake probabilities and their potential impacts; something that will take years to accomplish but potentially save the lives of millions of people. Dr. Ouzounov will also discuss some of the challenges with these new technologies and what the future holds for Earthquake predictions.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) can be a major challenge for small organizations, sometimes even more so than for larger organizations. We speak with long-time BCM expert Alex Jankovic, who helps us identify what some of these key challenges are and why they are concerns for small organizations; from the program initation phase to implementation to the ongoing maintenance phase. Alex also talks to us about some of the solutions available to small organizations that can be leveraged to help address the BCM challenges.

This encore presentation is to support Business Continuity Awareness Week, May 13-17, 2019. The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) is one of the world's leading promoter Business Continuity and Resilience with chapters around the globe.

This show will focus in on the BCI Canada chapter and we'll talk to the BCI Canada Chapter President, Chris Horne.

Chris will speak to the objectives BCI Canada and how it offers a benefit to all BCM/DR practitioners and professionals.

We'll also learn a bit about the upcoming Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) in May and the events BCI is handling to help promote the week long event (https://www.thebci.org/event-detail/event-calendar/business-continuity-awareness-week--bcaw--2018.html).

Chris will also give us some insight into his own experiences throughout the years, which will benefit all listeners, regardless of the level of experience.

Sometimes we manufacture our own negative situations because we don't pay attention to risk. We speak with Professor, Global Risk Expert and author, Robert Muir-Wood about his book 'The Cure for Catastrophe - How We Can Stop Manufacturing Natural Disasters'. We'll discuss how we create some of our own consequences with regards to natural disasters and define a true natural disaster. We'll hear about examples from around the globe how we have responded positively to disaster occurrences, yet how we still need to learn so much more from our hazard landscape. Disaster Risk Reduction is a major topic in the world right now, and this episode is sure to provide some valuable insight into how we can plan and prepare responsibly to reduce disaster impacts.

To paraphrase a well-known saying, 'We must learn from our mistakes and from the mistakes of others'. In BCM, DR and Crisis Management we talk allot about Lessons Learned and making changes but a Lesson Learned without action, is simply a Lesson Identified or Observed. All too often, the lesson we could learn from remains an observation.

World renowned speaker and author of The Lessons Learned Handbook, Nick Milton, will join us to talk about how we identify lessons, learn from the lessons and put the learnings into action. We'll talk about how we can collect data to ensure the lessons we've faced in the past, help us to move forward, not come back to haunt us.

Stop talking about Lessons Learned and listen to expert Nick Milton, teach us how to take these lessons and build a learning culture that benefits the entire organization and strengthen our BCM and DR programs.

Organizational Resilience is a hot topic in the Business Continuity industry today. For this episode we talk with renowned global experts and authors of 'Organizational Resilience: Managing the Risks of Disruptive Events' Dr. Marc Siegel and Dr. James Leflar. We discuss what Organizational Resiliency is and how it benefits an organization, using a risk management based approach. We'll talk about Risk Committees/Councils and how they can help bring various organization disciplines such as BCM, DR, Audit, Quality Control etc. together to help build the resiliency within an organization. We'll also talk about the key component to any resilient organization - people. This is a very informative episode that will help you understand just exactly what Organizational Resiliency is and how to start your organization on a path of resiliency.

To ensure our messages on disaster are received and understood by the appropriate audiences, we need to think about New Approaches to Disaster Education. We speak with education expert, researcher and environmental and disaster hazard expert, Neil Dufty. Neil will talk to us about the best ways to develop and manage disaster communication awareness and how to identify our various audiences - or learners. He will also help us understand some of the challenges we face in education and awareness, providing some helpful take-home pointers to help us with our own education activities. Neil will share with us some of his own personal experiences with disasters in Australia.

Navigating through a crisis successfully is something all organizations must be able to do, unfortunately that isn't always the case. This is because they haven't developed a strong Crisis Management program. We speak with internationally recognized expert Regina Phelps, to discuss her latest book 'Crisis Management: How to Develop a Powerful Program'. We'll talk about how to build a great teams and how to identify team members to ensure executive support. We'll also talk about roles and responsibilities and something that all team members need to be provided if they are to be successful. We'll also talk about how to validate the team and team structure using exercises and how we can execute exercises successfully. This is guarnateed to be an informative talk about Crisis Management and Crisis Management Teams.

The Association of Continuity Professionals (ACP) is Not-For-Profit organization with the vision of being the world's premier association of resiliency professionals. Our guest is the National Board Chairperson for the ACP, Mr. Scott Ream. Scott will provide us an overview of the organization, its vision for the future and its curent mission, including the benefits of membership, its partnerships and its various chapters. Scott also provides some great insight on some of the key challenges facing Continuity and Resiliency professionals today. You can contact ACP International by email at [email protected] or by phone at +1.800.445.4227.

Continuing with our speaker series from the Continuity & Resilience Today conference (Toronto, May 2018), this week's episode will focus on BCM Program Trends and what successful programs are doing right.

We speak with well-known and well-respected industry recruiter, Cheyene Marling.

More than ever business continuity professionals want to know how the most mature programs are approaching business continuity planning. What are these organizations doing different from the rest? How are they achieving the visibility within the organization? How are they obtaining the necessary executive support? We'll chat with Cheyene to assess the differentiating factors between the “Very Immature” programs and the “Very Mature” programs and get some great tips along the way.