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The current corona crisis is putting companies and organizations under unprecedented pressure, forcing them to take drastic measures and enact their crisis plans to stay afloat. Vicky Kyris and Ben Schramm from management consultancy Cube Group outline how adopting a crisis management approach can make a positive contribution to business resilience.
When disaster strikes, it’s easy to fall into a cycle of daily response and survival. This has never been truer than when considering the entrenched pandemic of industry and business leaders: protecting critical services, moving to remote work arrangements and adopting digital engagement solutions.
Yes, quick response is vital, but if we are to future proof our industries and organizations, it is not enough. We need to start thinking differently and learn from how the crisis management sector responds to emergencies. And it’s not that they dust off their business continuity plans and hope for the best.
Continuity plans are a false sense of security
The current global Covid-19 crisis is slowly revealing the inadequacy of most business continuity plansbetter suited to handling a one-off incident like an office fire than a global pandemic. Knowing how to access your IT system from home will only get you so far. What about managing employee well-being and engagement, productivity planning and maintaining a healthy organizational culture in the absence of office and face-to-face interactions?
Building enterprise resilience requires more comprehensive and longer-term thinking, a point not lost on over 50 CEOs from some of Australia’s most trusted public and private organisations, who ranked scenario, simulation and workforce planning as the most important activities in supporting their organisation’s capabilities. respond to disruptions. In particular, business continuity plans languished at the bottom of the list.
Business Resilience = Corporate Immune System
Successful businesses understand that response does not happen in a vacuum – recovery must be firmly on the agenda when the crisis is alive. Furthermore, they recognize the need to anticipate and prepare for future shocks and crises now, not later. They recognize that their business must be able to survive and adapt to thrive, no matter what disruption or shock comes their way.
The crisis management industry has long set the benchmark for such holistic and progressive thinking. Resilience is at the heart of their business and working models and the way they enable and support community recovery: they know what they’re doing and they do it exceptionally well.
It’s surprising that so few other industries and organizations draw on the wealth of expertise, lived experience and insights of an industry that lives it year after year. It’s a body of knowledge that we need to tap into, and quickly.
Crisis management organizations use a proven model known as the Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Recovery Life Cycle – PPRR for short. Their continued resilience stems from having systems and processes in place to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from a variety of crisis scenarios and to reduce the impact of major disruptions on their service delivery, stakeholders and the community they serve.
Examples of emergency situations
Take, for example, the way PPRR performed in our recent fire response. While our firefighters battled the bushfires on the frontline, rescue and recovery work was also underway, with Bushfire Recovery Victoria set up to work directly with local residents and deliver what was needed to get them back on their feet.
Former police commissioner and Victoria fire recovery chief Ken Lay said in January that the bushfire crisis would not be the last and that a permanent agency would be there to provide support now and in the future. Takeaway – the relationship between response and recovery is dynamic, never linear.
Another current example is the nationwide introduction of telehealth services. This didn’t happen overnight. The health sector was already prepared to respond to the pandemic in this way, with many rural and remote health services already using telehealth to overcome the tyranny of distance. As the telehealth response has proven to be an effective recovery measure in preventing further community transmission of deadly viruses, it is a model that is likely to be more durable once the current health crisis has passed.
“Resilience is at the heart of business models and workforces in the crisis management sector…. businesses that adopt this approach are best positioned to bounce back.”
On the contrary, adopting PPRR thinking may have built stronger resilience in our justice system. While audiovisual links for bail and custody hearings are used for people in custody or for giving evidence from another location, they have not been widely adopted. As part of their response to the covid-19 crisis, courts are fast-tracking this capability to maintain the delivery of their essential services.
Unfortunately, the lack of preparedness meant that many matters were delayed and new jury cases were put on hold, creating an even greater backlog of already strained judicial resources and further hampering any enforcement efforts—problems that could be better mitigated by PPPR modeling.
The road to resilience starts now
If natural disasters and health crises are our new norm, organizations must adopt an emergency management approach. Businesses that adopt the PPRR model will be best positioned to weather the next shock, and it will come.
Here are some immediate actions you can take:
- Start planning your recovery now: don’t wait for the ‘answer’ to be done and dusted and filed as usual. What are your recovery goals? And how do you achieve them?
- Shifting from a business continuity planning mindset to a resilience mindset. It’s time to start thinking, talking and acting throughout the PPRR life cycle. There are plenty of trusted emergency knowledge banks to draw on – the Australian Disaster Resilience Institute being one of them.
- Protect your organizational culture. It takes years to build, so make sure you maintain all the positive elements that make up your organizational paradigm. You will need a positive and healthy culture to support recovery efforts.
- Don’t be isolated. Engage your people, partners, clients, funders, communities and other stakeholders. Walk them through the language and mindset of PPRR: get them on the path of thinking, doing and talking about resilience in a more holistic way.
Don’t wait to debrief or review the lessons until it’s all over. Now is the time to learn and incorporate these insights because only the most resilient organizations will survive.
About the Authors: Ben Schramm is a strategic planning and business performance expert and the founder and managing partner of Cube Group. Vicky Kyris is a director and head of commercial and financial services at Cube Group.
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