Questions, Decision making and missing the capability gap

Finally, we have questions and robust discussion!

We went thru the two presentations in the earlier Thought Leadership session with only 1 single questions asked – and that was a question about what standards existed!

The real debate came around decision making models and their role in assisting Crisis Management and CM teams.
The panel sessions began with a very brief presentation – which unfortunately only presented a single model (which will generally come across as an endorsement) rather than a quick overview of 1-3 models to present a contrast.

It was still enough to generate debate. There is the tension between having a decision model for a Crisis team that is not commonly used in BAU – obviously the team is not going to be familiar and use the tool. The desire of some to have a common process and follow it for all events – at times mindlessly – compared to others who embrace agility and the need for crisis teams to be able to recognise and react to a situation.

Is this the real conflict between BCM (as a standardised practice) and the type of crisis events and response that have strategic implications? Procedure following vs Sense/Respond?

Perhaps the discussion flowed because we were back to discussing more “nuts and bolts” issues rather than the softer issues Paul Robertson raised in his earlier session. Those seem to be the issues that people are more confident to pose questions about.

The presentation about the a CM Capability Gap continued some good points – but the real gap was that those same soft issues were not really mentioned.

At the end I was concerned that we still had not addressed the question Lyndon Bird posed to the group – what is it that BCM is bringing to the Crisis Management party?
Hopefully we are not the late arriving guest who comes empty handed.