I had a leader regale me with his management style regarding when employees came in to complain.
Them: “I’m mad!”
Him: “I get that you’re mad, but are you outraged?”
They were normally just mad and realized it wasn’t that bad.
Similarly, any kind of disaster or disruption needs the same question back and forth:
“The systems are down!”
“How down?”
It is key to understanding the scale and scope of a problem. It helps you with knowing when to activate the plan or sit it out and wait. Exercises do very little with this query: the assumption is we’re activating the plan. There is a missed opportunity here to practice the authority to say “Go.”
There are other assumptions that exercises fail to consider. The main one being that when you test the plan, you’re the only one with the issue, the only one calling for help. You won’t be if it’s a regional disaster. You won’t be the only one the building manager has to respond to, or AWS has to deal with, or EMS has to show up for.
I recently had to advise a company if a very specific, massive, and expected natural disaster were to happen (more people are expected to die than from Katrina), they will have to accept that for at least a month, they would be without one of their key services that produces the majority of their money due to its location.
I don’t do pie-in-the-sky/perfect-world thinking. A business doesn’t want to hear that despite investing and preparing they will still have to lose money (but not permanently close!)...and the reality is mother nature won’t care and the vast majority of humans (plus their customers) will understand. I like to prepare businesses for the fact that people have lives and families – both of which might be negatively impacted by the disaster.
Sometimes there are bigger problems to solve. Some of my fellow BC professionals will joke about “well, if X happened, there will be bigger problems to solve than getting X back online” but I don’t think any of them are having the conversation with their companies about that.
I like the idea of planning out this doomsday scenario and what can we do for the month you won’t have this aspect to make sure you at least have some money coming in. That’s what I’m supposed to do, right?
Comments