Wednesday of BC Awareness Week, how can you sustain interest (yours and others) for the balance of the week?
Have you learned something new yet this week?
Awareness – the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns. Awareness is a relative concept.
Self-Awareness – describes the condition of being aware of one’s awareness. e.g. “I think, therefore I am”
(both from Wikipedia)
It is not about putting up posters!
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I joined the Rick Cudworth webcast last night to hear what he had to say about engagement at Board level. Rick leads Deloitte’s Resilience practice in the UK, and was one of the authors of an article about the need for new skills in the BC field that was reviewed in an earlier post.
This webcast discussed the findings from a survey, full results available from the BCAW resources page (registration required).
I was surprised to see that 70% of respondents were from large organizations (>1,000 staff), which in some ways will skew the findings.
I suspect the results are skewed in a couple of other areas also. The survey showed very low engagement with Supply Chain and the Marketing Executives. My guess is this is cultural and a problem of silo-thinking. I have seen a number of clients where the Marketing/PR people own the Crisis Management territory and they often do not see this as part of the BC Plan.
When I put that question to the panel Rick agreed with the idea, of course it should not be that way – and both parties need to understand that Crisis Management and BCM need to work together.
Not a lot of surprises in the rest of the findings. Boards are often perceived to not be interested in BCM, mainly because they are not interested in the methods and techniques as much as the result. Resilience was something that Boards appear more likely to be interested in. Why? – because it covers high and low probability events and it is the result not the process.
Rick made some really important comments about exercises and the need to make them relevant to Executives. If people learn nothing else this week, I hope they learn about the value of engaging Executives via relevant exercises – I have seen the power of this activity so many times over the years, and unfortunately also seen a number of BC Managers doom their programs (and themselves) via irrelevant exercises.
Go and listen to the webcast, it was recorded for people to listen at their convenience.
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My BCAW moves to the real world today, I am attending the local chapter event in Canberra.
There is a presentation dealing with convergence of disciplines (Risk, BC and Resilience) plus a panel session. No mention of Crisis Management – perhaps I will ask the same question as last night!
Hope to see all the Canberra folks there!
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Final word on engaging with Executives – learn to sell yourself and your program.
You sell the sizzle not the steak!
Of course the Board is interested in resilient operations to deliver competative advantage. Stop trying to sell them a bunch of detail that sounds like a compliance activity.
Of course, if you only contribute to the governance/compliance, not the outcome of resilience, then …
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