I made the investment of time and money to come to London this week for the BCI World Conference. I have to admit that I surprised myself with this as my 2013 visit was not truely valuable.
However today has almost made the whole trip worthwhile – and there is still the Gala Dinner and tomorrow to go!
The day started with a great keynote by Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of Britain’s MI5 from 2002-2007. Her presentation offered useful insights into leading in difficult circumstances. Some great ideas about honesty when you don’t know something, praising and thanking people and not taking everything too seriously. What a great idea if we could make BC fun at times!
The conference theme is “How to rise to the resilience challenge”, and there were useful ideas and examples of this from the outset. Baroness Manningham-Buller offered the idea that you can make changes mush more easily during a period of upheaval and crisis – leading me to think that would be a useful addition to a Crisis Management Team/Plan, a group to look at changing the organisations, rather than just recovering things to the way they used to be.
The second keynote offered a practical example of Adaptive Capacity as he had to drop his prepared plan and fit into a shorter time slot. Professor Ulrich Winkler (from University of Liverpool, UK) spoke about “megatrends” and the rate of change.
I spent the rest of the day facilitating the Future Practice Stream, so didn’t get to so what was happening in the other rooms. No complaints as I found the stream very good, with plenty of interaction between audience and presenter.
- Charley Newnham kicked off with some PwC research findings about the business imperatives for resilience, and started some discussion around the difference between BC and resilience.
- I followed with findings from my 2020 research project (more on that later) and more thoughts about how BC needs to change and adapt
- Mike Osbourne talked about ideas and tips to make BC more of a BAU activity. Great quote form a CEO
- “If you want an hour to talk about BC, then I will send you to talk to my BC team. If you want to tell me how your BC service can help transform my business – then I will give you an hour.”
- Hint there about the challenge we need to rise to!
- Ian Charters challenged notions around Horizon Scanning and the risk/anticipation approach compared to impact/resilience approaches.
- Andrew MacLeod generated a lot of question and interaction on the “effective BC” and mindsets as limitation
- Mel Gosling finished off by outlining a very specific change – the end of paper plans and the era of BC apps.
- With help of a demo of the Marks & Spencer app, the session presented a classic case of how this change in BC practice gained them Executive engagement and move BC from just a cost and compliance function to an innovator and value-add.
The best aspect was the engagement with ideas throughout the day, and some common themes that arose around change and the challenge to modify practices to contribute value.
Also a good start on the Social Media front, but did seem to fade as the day progressed. I was not expecting a lot after my analysis of SM use at the 2013 conference. Will have to see how the Twitter stream looks tomorrow.
Top marks to Deborah Higgins and the team for today. With up to 6 concurrent streams, and good content and interaction, a much improved event.
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