As the 2017 Hurricane season has wrapped up, we’ve spoken with several clients and prospects who call asking about building crisis management plans for the next round of hurricanes in 2018.
We always steer the conversation back to “Plans are great, but a framework is the real starting point so that no matter the threat or situation, you have a defined method to make decisions and communicate the results of those decisions internally and externally.”
In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba talk about why crisis management isn’t a pickup game – that companies and organizations really need a crisis framework, a defined method to make decisions, clear roles, and responsibilities, and so on in order to effectively manage through a crisis situation.
Learn more about our crisis management services here on our website and in our Ultimate Guide to Crisis Management.
Episode Transcript
Bryan Strawser: What do you do when the crisis hits and you have no plan? None, you’ve got nothing?
Jen Otremba: Well, we always say that we should have a plan.
Bryan Strawser: We should have a plan.
Jen Otremba: Yeah, but we definitely have a lot of people coming to us, right, that don’t have plans.
Bryan Strawser: Usually following a major crisis, we get the question about, “Can you help us develop crisis plans?” Which, of course, we turn into a discussion of, “Plans are great, but you need a framework first and plans follow, because you need a way to make decisions and manage through the crisis.” Because if you don’t, you will be hit with a situation. I guarantee you. That for which you have no plan and for which you are not prepared to respond because you have no method of managing the situation, making decisions, and publishing communication-
Jen Otremba: Right. So what does your program look like holistically?
Bryan Strawser: Right. Or, what’s your framework, is at least as a starting point.
Jen Otremba: Right.
Bryan Strawser: But you think about a company that comes into a hurricane season and they have no crisis team, no framework, no plan for dealing with a hurricane, despite operating in hurricane-prone areas, what do you do? Or, there’s the alternative, which also comes up. We dealt with this at our last employer, which is you have a framework, and you have plans, and you have a process, and something happens, and there’s some leader not involved in the process who wants to throw the whole thing out and manage it a different way.
Jen Otremba: Right.
Bryan Strawser: And we always go back to a saying from the infamous Texas Director of Emergency Management for many years, Jack Colley, who said, “Emergency management is not an effing pickup game.” And we’ve bastardized into, “Crisis management is not an effing pickup game.”
Jen Otremba: Right.
Bryan Strawser: You have to have a plan.
Jen Otremba: Right.
Bryan Strawser: And a framework, and a method for dealing with the madness when the madness starts.
Jen Otremba: Right. What we just mean by that is that you can’t just decide what to do like in the middle of it, the day of. You have to have a good understanding of how you’re going to manage all crises as they’re coming at you.
Bryan Strawser: We talked with a current client of ours, where we’re not doing crisis, but we’re in there doing some other stuff. They were impacted by the recent hurricane season, and they had some specific challenges because they did not have a crisis framework, or a crisis management plan, or really a defined crisis management team. They had some loose elements of this, but really not anything comprehensive. And so the Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico and they had facilities in Puerto Rico, and what they found is in a short period of time, everybody was calling the Puerto Rico team.
The operations organization was calling to find out about the status of the business. The supply chain team was calling to find out about the status of product that was due to ship from there. Human resources was calling them to find out about did they account for their team? And were they safe, and did they need to do anything, and when could they return to work? Environmental health and safety were inquiring about the conditions, and mold, and flooding, and all the kind of things you wanted, and just continued to multiply that.
Everyone was calling the team down in Puerto Rico and then all of them were reporting this separately to the CEO. Not through any centralized mechanism, but like the CEO was literally getting like 10 emails a day from different groups with different pieces. And do you think all of them followed their roles and responsibilities?
Jen Otremba: [inaudible 00:03:45].
Bryan Strawser: So the security organization at this particular company was also accounting for employees on their own, but they weren’t syncing their info with HR, so the CEO got two different updates. And the two updates had different numbers of people that were accounted for. And he literally goes, “[inaudible 00:04:01], what is this?”
Jen Otremba: Well, and of course, we naturally asked, “Well, what’s your single source of truth?”
Bryan Strawser: There isn’t one.
Jen Otremba: There isn’t one.
Bryan Strawser: Hey, we said exactly the same thing.
Jen Otremba: Yeah.
Bryan Strawser: There isn’t one, right. So they’re playing a pickup game. And that’s a bad place to be.
Jen Otremba: Right.
Bryan Strawser: You need some basic elements of a crisis management program, even if you don’t have resources to devote to it. But at a minium, what do we look for, Jen? We look for framework, to make decisions and communicate the results of those decisions.
Jen Otremba: Yep.
Bryan Strawser: And to oversee the company’s response.
Jen Otremba: Yes, who has been delegated to make the decision, which shouldn’t necessarily be the CEO? They should be delegated down to somebody else.
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Jen Otremba: Who has all the information?
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Jen Otremba: Who is appointed to make certain levels of decisions? And maybe there’s a different level of decision that needs to be picked, so it maybe somebody at a higher level has to make those decisions. But that framework should outline who can decide what.
Bryan Strawser: And there’s a team. There should be some kind of a crisis management team. I don’t care if it’s the eight direct reports of the CEO, but you should have some cross-functional team that can get together and kind of manage to this framework, and be able to make those decisions, as you just said. And then communicate the results of those decisions.
Jen Otremba: Right, so it’s not done in a silo. So it’s not just one person that’s the commander of the company that’s making that one decision. It’s having a discussion, all of the appropriate cross-functional, multi-disciplinary folks in the room, discussing situations so that it’s seen from all different angles, so that they can make a smart decision based on all the information.
Bryan Strawser: You also need some method of communicating to keep the company on the same page, so it could be as simple as a very generic email template that can be used to publish to your team that says, “Here’s the … We’ve activated the crisis team for this situation. We held a call this morning. Here are the results of that call. And there’s the status, the situational update, along with the decisions that have been made as a part of that.”
Jen Otremba: Right. We like to do some sort of a daily briefing or so, so you can update different levels of employees at different times. It maybe the mass population can get a more generic version. Maybe there’s higher levels of leadership that gets a more detailed version of this daily briefing. But really, it’s giving updates to the company to say, “Here is what we’re doing. We actually are doing something.”
Bryan Strawser: “And we’re doing it together. We’re doing it collaboratively.”
Jen Otremba: “And we have a plan for this. And we are able to manage this situation. And trust us in that we are, because here’s some information.”
Bryan Strawser: And it’s important in that situation for as you build this very basic framework, even in a small or medium sized business, that there’s a clear path of escalation to the CEO or to other more senior executives on a certain decision. Like you’ve outlined the decision-making rights and how that’s going to flow upward for approval.
Jen Otremba: Right, so a certain threshold gets hit, and the next level of approval would answer to it, right. So that’s ultimately the framework, right.
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Jen Otremba: I mean, that’s what we’re talking about.
Bryan Strawser: Right, it doesn’t have to be a 200 page plan. It can be, “The crisis team is made up of the following five people. It will be led by this person, with this person as their backup. They will assemble if their initial conference call looks like this. Communication template looks like this.” And so on and so forth.
Jen Otremba: Right. “This team will make a decision unless it reaches this threshold. At this threshold, we’re going to bring in a more senior executive leader to make decisions. Or, at least to help in making those decisions and can continue up the chain.”
Bryan Strawser: I think a lot of cases, this framework, or this plan gets overcomplicated because we wind up all of this detail, and really, it can start is something simple. That this is the group that’s going to get together and is going to work on the crisis situation. You can get fancy later.
Jen Otremba: Yeah.
Bryan Strawser: Right, but start with, “How do we do this? How do we get this group together to make these decisions and how do we communicate the results of those decisions?”
Jen Otremba: Yeah, and in the absence of that, things can get circumvented or it’s not being utilized, but we see that with companies that manage similar things over and over again. Like say big storms. The East Coast gets Nor’easter storms every year, multiple times a year, so they know how to deal with these situations. Or, so they think. But as soon as a wrench gets thrown in, maybe their not managing it the way they should, or their hindsight, wishing they had done something different. And these types of situations, if they’re managed through this framework every time consistently, then things like that aren’t being missed.
Bryan Strawser: The other issue we run into that we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast was, in some cases, you have this. You’re in a more mature environment, and you have a plan, and you have a process. This usually happens in larger organizations. And then something happens, and you’re in the middle of the response, and some leader that’s not involved in the process for whatever reason, attempts to throw the whole thing out the window, and create a process on the fly in the middle of the situation, even if your process is working just fine.
Jen Otremba: Right. And oftentimes, that can happen, especially if they’re not being educated on the situation.
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Jen Otremba: So they’ve lost trust in the process.
Bryan Strawser: Right. I had a situation at our previous employer, where earthquakes were a hot topic of discussion for a while. It’s very difficult to make plans for a catastrophic earthquake, because it is such a rare event. Even though it’s a known event, like we statistically know that within a certain period of time, we’re going to deal with a major earthquake in the United States. We just haven’t since really the 1980’s. A big one. I’m talking like the California kind of earthquake that could be very damaging.
But it’s difficult to prepare for that. And it was incredibly difficult for some leaders at our previous employer to understand, “Hey, your actual crisis team is not that concerned about the major earthquake response because we have these things in place and we have the framework in place.” I’m not really sure what they were looking for, other than like the 200 page crisis plan for dealing with an earthquake, which of course, we didn’t leave in that kind of planning in this particular case.
So as we did exercises with them, they literally wanted to throw the whole thing out, and go down the pickup game route, which would have been a disaster, in my mind. But it’s tough for folks to understand the difference there, I think, to your point about maybe education is the opportunity, but you’ve got to stick to your plan and stick to your guns, unless it’s not working.
Jen Otremba: Right, and then if it’s not working-
Bryan Strawser: Well, then-
Jen Otremba: Then fix it.
Bryan Strawser: Then the ad hoc comes in, right.
Jen Otremba: Yeah.
Bryan Strawser: Because it’s not working. You’re going to go a different direction. And it’s okay to make those decisions. We just can’t, you just can’t ad hoc for the purpose of ad hocking.
Jen Otremba: If you’re ad hocking because you’re not familiar with what the current plan is, then that’s more of a problem than adapting to the situation. And then on that note, then that’s going to come out in AR, which we’ve talked about.
Bryan Strawser: Right.
Jen Otremba: And then the plan, itself, should be updated.
Bryan Strawser: Right. Right. So overall, have a framework. Have a plan, at least on how you’re going to manage through a crisis situation. Focus on the team, decision-making rights, communication, basic templates, conference call templates, et cetera. That’s where to start. But going into a situation without a plan because you’re not willing to take the time to invest in that, will put you in a world of hurt when the major incident comes knocking for your company. You will not perform as well as companies that do invest in this area.
I’d be remiss in not pointing out, we sell some of this material like this on our website crisisplaybook.com, where there’s a simplified crisis framework along the lines of what we just talked about.
