What do David Lindstedt, Mark Armour, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin have in common?What are the most effective ways to do Business Continuity (or Cyber or Crisis) planning and training? David Lindstedt and Mark Armour are spearheading Adaptive Business Continuity, a framework that brings flexible, pragmatic and iterative approaches, much like traditional 'waterfall' software development has been supplanted by Agile scrums and sprints. | Watch how a team of semi-literate Army misfits quickly memorizes a complex battle plan! (the best part starts at 1:02) |
One of the tenets is Train by Acronym. The old way of writing voluminous plans in a binder and training critical staff with extensive modules is not effective. Adaptive proposes crisp, terse checklists and terse, rote training with mnemonics and memory aids. Critical managers may not remember the classwork or the binder contents during the distress of an actual emergency - but they can remember words drilled into them by repetition. How do you remember the sequence and colors of the rainbow? Roy G. Biv, that's how!
What's easier for a team to learn, retain and execute on? An hour-long PowerPoint presentation of a 40-page plan, or RADICAL:
When I was running Expedia's Global Business Resiliency Office, I was once awakened at 6:00 am by the enterprise Emergency Notification System I had deployed: Text message "London Office closed, if commuting please stay away, check your email and check with your manager, next message in four hours, press 1 if you are OK, press 2 if you need assistance" (although the message went to London staff, I always copied myself on all emergency traffic worldwide). I called the BCP Manager for London and asked what the situation was. He replied, "the building had to be evacuated due to a small fire. The team rallied outside in the garden, they sent the emergency message, they are assessing whether to spin up the offsite Emergency Work Center (well, he said Centre), and they are managing the response." "That's great, but you keep saying 'them'. Aren't you the Recovery Team Lead?" "Yeah, but I'm out this week. This one's being managed by my Admin following your acronyms!"
If your org is ready for Next-Gen planning, training & exercising, reach out to us here!
What's easier for a team to learn, retain and execute on? An hour-long PowerPoint presentation of a 40-page plan, or RADICAL:
- Rally
- Assess
- Declare
- Immediate actions
- Communicate
- Continued Actions
- Lessons Learned
When I was running Expedia's Global Business Resiliency Office, I was once awakened at 6:00 am by the enterprise Emergency Notification System I had deployed: Text message "London Office closed, if commuting please stay away, check your email and check with your manager, next message in four hours, press 1 if you are OK, press 2 if you need assistance" (although the message went to London staff, I always copied myself on all emergency traffic worldwide). I called the BCP Manager for London and asked what the situation was. He replied, "the building had to be evacuated due to a small fire. The team rallied outside in the garden, they sent the emergency message, they are assessing whether to spin up the offsite Emergency Work Center (well, he said Centre), and they are managing the response." "That's great, but you keep saying 'them'. Aren't you the Recovery Team Lead?" "Yeah, but I'm out this week. This one's being managed by my Admin following your acronyms!"
If your org is ready for Next-Gen planning, training & exercising, reach out to us here!