Article published in The Sentinel, a magazine for IIRSM members. Tim Bird, Managing Director of Eddistone Consulting Ltd, examines the responsible business approach to emergency planning and response. Let’s be honest, the current world’s a bit unpredictable. [...]
Resilience for organisations is the ability to anticipate disruption, respond effectively and recover with purpose, while protecting people, maintaining essential business activities and safeguarding long term reputation and viability. We understand that resilience connects risk, safety and preparedness with coordinated organisational response and structured [...]
Preparing for action The recipe for top-level team performance continues to be the focus of research and development programmes in business, sport and military contexts across the world. Combining a group of individual capabilities to create a team capability is a function of many factors [...]
Communication is fundamental to working efficiently and safety. It seems straightforward to expect a high level of skill and effectiveness for teams working in high hazard contexts such as chemical processing and storage facilities. But when we take a closer look we find that problems [...]
Some of the most challenging and rewarding work we do is around crisis management teams under pressure. Whether the pressure is real or simulated, we get to watch leaders perform in a ‘pressure cooker’, often with interesting results. The ‘pressure cooker’ tends to amplify some [...]
In the last five months two customers have postponed strategic Crisis Management training at group level because of COVID-19 and an operational issue. Postponing Crisis Management training because of an operational interruption is like running a bus company that have repeated crashes and postponing refreshing [...]
A year on: lessons learned Around a year ago we committed to supporting clients with emergency management support throughout this pandemic, wherever possible. Not all clients have taken up our offer, but we have continued training and exercising for several, throughout. In fact, we have [...]
In an ideal world, you’ve been exercising your crisis team for years; team members know each other well, they follow a process fluently and understand the full range of risk scenarios. You have practised activation, use of information sharing and communications systems; you have slick [...]
There is an adage that crisis simulations are the second-best way to prepare (the best being a real crisis). However, we’d like to challenge this: too often we’ve seen leaders disengage because they have recently been through some kind of incident and feel the crisis [...]