“Crisis? What crisis?” So said UK Prime Minister Jim Callaghan way back in 1979 returning from the Caribbean to a strike ridden UK in national crisis with rubbish piled high on street corners and even the dead unburied in some cases. Or so history says. Callaghan never actually said these words. Instead the ever popular Sun daily newspaper said he did and our perception did the rest, with the result that Prime Minister Callaghan’s entire Government was out of office a few months later.
It might have been 30 years ago but in a new age of immediate and global communications there is a message here for 2009: Any world leader is on a stage these days and the audience compared to 1979 is not just one country. It is the world population looking at their TV screens, mobile telephones or internet. How a crisis manager looks, speaks and manages can make all the difference between success and failure with repercussions that spread from one end of the globe to the other.
Now 30 years later the lessons for all of us are still exactly the same, but with the added twist that communications are global, instant and on many different levels. This is one reason why in December 2009 the first Crisis Management (CM) to be held in Kuwait will take place.
Across the globe supply routes for all critical services have become ever more stretched, fragile and vulnerable so that large scale emergencies hitting the critical national infrastructure of any country are likely to span regions, countries and even continents. Made even worse by a global recession. We must therefore look more closely at a common language of crisis definitions, shared risk management in the broadest context and focus on continuing critical services and activities during the acute phase of any crisis linked to post disaster recovery when the initial drama has past.
Some years ago we only talked about disaster recovery plans which by their title dealt specifically with trying to recover operations post event, rather than increasing resilience and planning to continue key activities irrespective of the crisis scenario. Quite often disaster recovery plans in the private sector only dealt with IT restoration in any case so that the rest of the organisation was more or less ignored.
Nowadays this has changed considerably as it becomes clear that all critical economic, social, cultural and business needs should be capable of sustainable existence, albeit on a reduced scale, if any community or organisation is going continue operating when a wide scale crisis occurs, especially in a world of severe economic depression, increasing threats and risks as well as rising insurance premiums. There are three basic reasons for scrutinising our radar screens and getting to grips with this now:
- Moral – All countries, regions and organisations have a de facto duty of care towards citizens, staff and other stakeholders and the efficient running of all societies and business operations. Also I suggest, to exercise best practice, compliance with regulations and effective leadership;
- Physical – The need to demonstrate robustness by using intelligent risk measures to deter incidents and better business continuity plans to apply if anything does happen. Especially in a world where (a) terrorism has become more dramatic, deadly and wide spread and (b) global pollution now threatens all countries - and is in fact a much greater threat to mankind than terrorism;
- Conceptual – To understand risks and threats as an end to end process and examine exposures caused by anything from inept Government decisions to critical supply chain failure triggered outside a region or country boundary. To then work out how best to respond and practice the skills needed to lead combined and productive teams operating in the adverse circumstances of a crisis.
A good crisis manager should inspire trust, command respect, act with authority and impartiality, communicate well and be able to minimise potential conflict across a multidisciplinary team.
The hallmarks of a stable personality include reliability, level-headedness, and the ability to remain calm under pressure. Decisiveness is an outgrowth of the other two and dictates that managers should be prepared to formulate and implement decisions when under pressure; use balanced, analytical, and sound judgment and know whether to use an authoritative or consultative decision-making style. Such people are I expect a rare bread but I do believe you can train the right people to become leaders, or as a colleague of mine put it “given the right material we can actually make born leaders”.
Reading the newspapers or simply watching television almost every week reveals some action or failure of action applied or committed by some individual or organisation that shows how vulnerable we all are to the application of leadership, especially in relation to crisis situations. All too often it seems that we do not have enough leaders, yet on other occasions we seem to have too many leaders and not enough followers?
CM in this sense, includes the need for executive leadership when a catastrophe is perceived to have hit, or might hit any organisation and its dependant units, in which case the real damage is most likely to cluster around one or more of these three key areas, over which the impact on people inextricably applies, whether employees or not:
- Reputation
- Finance
- Operations
Taking command in crisis might also include a multi agency approach to wide scale geographic events ranging from terrorist attacks to catastrophic fuel shortages. Plotting (a) the likelihood and (b) impact of these incidents, often at a local or regional level, has been something the UK Government has been working on for several years. They require all local authorities throughout the country to complete a qualitative risk assessment against four headings set against a combination of (a) and (b) above:
- Health
- Social
- Economy
- Environment
But just listing a series of considerations can ignore the vital point about perception, or how others will be observing our crisis and it’s here where the media step in and become your best friend or worst enemy – often depending on the attitude towards them by the organisation actually suffering the crisis.
In a very simple sense, any realistic response to a crisis has to come from the top, especially when it impacts or otherwise covers a wide area. But where is the top? They may not always see it this way, but the heads of any organisation in any country have a responsibility to avoid being crisis-prone and to demonstrate more than just routine boardroom respect. Add up the implications of whole raft of new pan global guidelines and legislation on issues ranging from corporate killing to risk assessment and the task can seem daunting. But it is not all about being pushed by fear of prosecution.
Several organisations in the private sector have actually increased investment potential by successfully demonstrating strong crisis leadership as a positive feature of wide scale crisis management in the ‘abrupt audit’ of a real drama. Take just three examples:
In 1992 the IRA exploded a massive bomb in the City of London that seriously damaged the CU head office. The company showed commendable Crisis Leadership from the top and immediately formed an executive crisis Management committee and gave priority to informing all stakeholders what they were doing.
The next day they placed an advertisement in several newspapers that adapted their own advertising slogan “We won’t make a drama out of our crisis” and quickly produced a very professional video of the damage and open conference meetings to outline their recovery plans. As a result stakeholders were reassured that the Management team were on top and in control so that no loss of business followed. Indeed, it is said CU actually attracted more business.
- British Midland Kegwoth air crash.
In 1989 a British Midland Boeing 737 crashed on the M1 in Leicestershire killing 47 people. Sir Michael Bishop, Chairman of BMI British Midland, lost no time going to the scene and telling the Press that as the head of the company, he was responsible and was organising his team once the initial rescue operation was complete. There was no hiding behind official enquiries or any sense of obfuscation. His crisis leadership technique was clear and very sympathetic, but equally positive and transparent. The person in charge (Bishop) was visible, coherent and reassuring.
He always kept the Press informed of the enquiry and what BMI was going to do next. Consequently his lead during a time of intense drama has gone down in recent history as a good example of Crisis Leadership from the very top and the company, despite an enormous tragedy caused by technical and human failings, BMI remains a very profitable enterprise.
In 2000 a small fire at the Philips semiconductor plant in Albuquerque in the US blazed for only 10 minutes, but far away in Scandinavia the fire touched off a corporate crisis that shifted the balance of power between two of Europe’s biggest mobile phone companies. Nokia and Ericsson. Both organisations were heavily dependant on micro chips from Albuquerque, but only Nokia immediately spotted a glitch in the supply chain and without actually knowing what was wrong (and not settling for reassuring words from the Philips factory) made rapid crisis Management decisions that resulted in them flying to Albuquerque ASAP where they found the fire had been more serious than they were told.
The Nokia team where the leader made it clear that positive thinking was vital, then gave the factory owners a series of ‘non negotiable’ instructions if they wanted Nokia to remain as customers. Nokia also secured chips from just about every other producing company in Europe and so maintained supplies at a time of the mobile phone boom. Ericsson on the other hand left it far too late to react and paid the price a few months later when it clearly lost a lot of business.
In all of these cases timely, inspirational and effective CM and good communications positively enhanced the organisation’s reputation. In others, such as the Exxon Valdez or the Coca Cola contamination in Belgium, failure to properly lead and communicate did untold damage.
It is not just the actions you take but the actions you are seen to take.
Often the real threat to corporate reputation has come not from what has happened but from what people think has happened is in the case of the British Prime Minister mentioned above.
In other words, perception really counts, especially in restoring trust, enterprise and postitve risk taking to recover international financial stability. This is no side issue. In any country a wide scale hit on the economy is going to be one of the worst imaginable catastrophes, yet how many civil or military commanders ever consider this?
I have seen many times in the past (and if I’m honest I’ve been guilty of it myself) crisis leaders, managers, indeed all of us when suddenly faced with any catastrophe demonstrate the tendency from the outset to try and follow routine or familiar references, sometimes just to keep sane.
A sort of displacement action in a world, to quote Dr Patrick Lagadec in his excellent book ‘How to prevent chaos in a crisis’, that is suddenly full of ‘un-ness’ (events that are unimaginable, unnecessary, unprepared for, unusual, unacceptable etc.) Indeed, the more disturbing the situation the stronger the urge to take refuge in familiar procedures. Yet such procedures are going to be the most inappropriate ones to take since familiar procedures do not work for unfamiliar situations. Something the London Metropolitan Police discovered in 1985.
1985 was not a good year. In fact it was one of the worst ever for disasters. In February nine Police Officers were killed by a terrorist bomb in Belfast, in May fifty six people perished in the Bradford stadium fire and later that month thirty nine people were killed in the crush at Heysel stadium Brussels.
The following month an Air India flight over Ireland was bombed, killing three hundred and fifty nine people on board. The remainder of that year saw one hundred and thirty seven people killed in a Delta Airlines crash in Texas, five hundred and twenty people losing their lives in a Japanese air crash, thirty one in another air crash in Wisconsin USA, sixty people shot in Malta when Egyptian commandos stormed a hijacked aircraft and a further two hundred and fifty six air passengers killed in Newfoundland.
But just one event that year, when only on person was killed, changed forever the way the UK responds to all major emergencies and also how thousands of commercial operations also deal with crises.
On Sunday 6 October 1985 a riot took place in North London that ended with the murder of PC Keith Blakelock. A management problem caused a failure to clearly appoint leaders for strategic, tactical and operational command, causing confusion at the rear and indecision at the front. The result was a riot out of control and a demand from all ranks to never to repeat it. Within days this lead to the creation of a new role (not rank) based command system that over 24 years later is still used by all emergeicny services and many private sector organisations in the UK to respond to any emergency - Gold/Silver/Bronze:
- Gold – the ‘I think’ layer responsible for strategic thinking and policy creation;
- Silver – the ‘I direct’ layer where policy is translated to tactics and where all Bronze operators are managed;
- Bronze – the ‘I do’ layer where relatively short term tasks are managed, choreographed by Silver.
So where does this leave us? With Swine Flu breaking out across the world, a Bird Flu pandemic apparently on our doorstep, the footprint of terrorism spreading globally without restraint, fragile national infrastructures, and no end of corporate banana skins ready to trip us up we should listen to the alarm bells that are already ringing.
But the sad the truth is, the alarms have been ringing for ages, but too many countries keep pressing the snooze button. It’s time to wake up and take collective action now. So who needs Crisis Management? I think we all do…
Peter Power runs Visor Consultants (UK) Limited (www.visorconsultants.com) and is one of the most requested public speakers on CM and often appears on TV and Radio. He will be speaking at the GMEMS Kuwait conference mentioned above.
His research on crisis decision making is quoted in the UK Government (Cabinet Office) Guide on Integrated Emergency Management and he is the author of many advice guidebooks. He is a founder member of the UK judging panel for BC Awards and sits on the British Standards Institute working party on Crisis Management. He is also a member of the Resilience subgroup within the UK Security Review Commission.
Peter is the primary author / promulgator of the present UK Police command methodology Gold, Silver & Bronze and is a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, Emergency Planning Society, Business Continuity Institute and Institute of Risk Management. He is also as a member of the Guild of Freemen of the City of London.