BC Awareness Week is over for another year.
There were some interesting webcasts and events, and some less interesting ones. This is to be expected, not everybody is interested in the same things.
I was personally disappointed with the level of discussion generated by the “Managing for Resilience” discussion paper that was published during the week. I can only assume that the concept of resilience is not of primary interest to the BCAW community. Perhaps it could have been promoted a little more, it was not even a specific topic for discussion at the local chapter event I went to. I wonder if it had more promotion elsewhere?
Hopefully it is of interest to the community at this site, and I would love to hear people’s opinion on the cultural issues discussed in the paper. The discussion forum is on LinkedIn if you want to join in – here is the link
It will be interesting to see how the success of this week is measured. One way would be to see if the extent of C-Level engagement has improved in a survey next year!
I have a concern that the week is more of an internal focus for the BC industry rather than an effective vehicle to raise the awareness of BC and its value in the wider community. The only way we will know is if BC folks are measuring within their organisations.
How are you measuring the change in awareness in your world as a result of your BCAW activities?
Is it enough to just raise awareness annually?
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.”
I think motivation and awareness may have some attributes in common here – an annual refresher is probably not going to make a huge difference. Heritage BC may be able to get by with an annual awareness activity – but to become resilient requires a lot more committment.
Awareness of changes in the environment and associated threats and opportunities is an essential part of being reslient. So is being aware of your own strengths and vulnerabilities. Situational Awareness is something we need to work at and practice.
We also have to keep developing and improving our skills, which has been a theme on the blog all week. Awareness is great – but it applies to us as well as everybody else.
Did BCAW encourage you to critically review our BC programs?
Did it encourage you to improve your skills, or to develop new skills to expand your capabilities?
I found this week of BCAW not really monitored by many companies I know off. There were some colleagues who were trying to tie the week into some internal initiatives within their corp’s but overall, management wasn’t interested in any sort of awareness week (even with all the resources that were available during the week).
You’d think after the earthquakes in NZ & China and the resulting nuclear and tsunami disasters recently, corporate leaders would be more interested in BCM/DR/ERM etc. It felt like this year was all industry professionals and not much external focus or participation from external professionals (i.e. those not normally part of the industry).
But I could be wrong – it’s just my opinion/feeling.
Alex
Agreed Alex, looking very much like an industry event, rather than raising consciousness of the value of BCM.
Here is a link to a discussion on LinkedIn where I argue that we are not learning becasue organisations have specific learning disabilities when it comes to risk/BCM.
These are elements of organisational culture that we need to be able to understand in order to change.