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In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses returning to the office in the age of COVID-19.  In other words, when it's time to go "back to the office" - what will that look like for millions of employees and their companies? Topics discussed include the "new normal", potential government restrictions and regulations, personal protective equipment in the workplace, social distancing, crisis leadership, and more. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Episode #92: Novel Coronavirus Episode #94: Personal and family preparedness for Coronavirus Episode #95: Lessons learned to date from the Coronavirus fight Episode #96: Crisis leadership in the time of Coronavirus //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. As we continue through this coronavirus crisis that we're faced with globally right now, and we're recording this episode in the middle of April 2020, I think it's important to start thinking about what will things look like when we decide that we're on the other side of this challenge when we're on the other side of this crisis, and as crisis and continuity and business leaders within companies, what do we need to start thinking about in terms of going back to the office? Bryan Strawser: I want to say going back to work, but of course, most folks, our jobs, or a lot of folks are in jobs where you're able to work remotely, although we do have workers, food service, restaurants, production and manufacturing and agriculture that are continuing to go to work every single day and continuing to make this reduced economy able to continue to function. I want to recognize the sacrifices those folks are making and the challenges that they're faced with. Bryan Strawser: But as business leaders, I think we start to think about what does it look like when we get on the other side of this crisis and we start to think about returning to the office and bringing teams back into the workforce and reopening the economy as the President likes to say. First is I think that there's a number of really hard choices that we're making right now, but I also think there are choices that we have to think about over the coming weeks before we can return to the office before we can really move forward into whatever that new normal or next normal is going to look like. Bryan Strawser: There are some hard choices ahead. I mean, for example, as we've shifted, as companies have shifted to remote work, I think officially or unofficially, a couple of things have happened. We've formed some new team structures or new team dynamics. As we talked with a number of employers over the last couple of weeks, clients and others in the industry our clients are in, one of the things that have stood out is that there's been a fair amount of silo-busting that has gone on because the urgency of the situation required it. We have some of these new team structures, officially or not, about working remotely. Bryan Strawser: We also have some new rule sets on leading remotely. In some cases, I think in your own experiences, you've probably seen leaders who have excelled at this who have a really come into their own as a remote leader, as a virtual collaborative leader, and on the other side of that, I think you may have seen some leaders who perhaps excelled at the in-person collaborative leadership but struggled with the new rule set about leading remotely. Bryan Strawser: Then you probably have worked with some great leaders who were great leaders in an in-person environment and are great leaders in an online environment because they're just great leaders, but I think there have been some new rule sets established, some new cultural and societal norms within your business and across businesses more broadly about this collaborative online virtual work experience we've had. Bryan Strawser: We have companies that have had to invest in the right collaboration processes. There were companies that did not have a very good collaborative culture in terms of working remotely. They expected that meetings that were held were going to be the place where decisions were made and discussions were had, and if your butt wasn't in the seat, then you weren't a participant. You weren't a stakeholder in that. But now, the seats are gone because we've been working remotely, and so they've had to invest in technology and capabilities and have gone through some cultural change along the way. Bryan Strawser: One of the other challenges we've seen is this whole idea of you're working from home, so you're always on. Now, some of this culturally came about with the advent of the smartphone and more collaborative online technologies as email evolved, as tools like Slack and other persistent chat tools have come along that allowed for more asynchronous work, but now we're all working from home, so when are you on and when are you off, and does that line even matter anymore? How does that change when we go back to the office? Bryan Strawser: Working from home has probably led to some different productivity rules and expectations. One of our large clients, a Fortune 500 company, I remember early in the crisis their CEO saying very clearly to executives that we should not expect as much from our teams in the coming weeks because people are worried about the current situation and they've got kids in school during the day, and now, everyone's around for the whole time and you're not used to having everyone home while you're trying to work from home and there's a lack of social activities and things that you can go do, and so the expectations around productivity are probably different. When we go back to the office, does that change? What's that going to look like? Bryan Strawser: There's definitely scenario planning to consider and decisions to be made in the coming weeks about this return-to-work situation for some parts of the country. This might come earlier. For harder hits part of the country, and I'm thinking about New York and New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, Michigan, this might not come for some time. Bryan Strawser: This is also a time where there have been challenges around liquidity and what that means for the organization, what that cash management looks like as the business operating models have just been turned upside down with the economy and unemployment and a drop in spending. What does that begin to look like? Certainly, out of all of this, we likely have formed some ideas about new operating models for how the business could work, perhaps changes in how you want to structure and do the work and structure the team around the work within your organization that has been impacted through the COVID-19 crisis. Bryan Strawser: Then lastly, this situation has forced a level of transparency with customers that we haven't really seen before. Most companies, if you were providing business-to-business services, you had to be very open and honest with your clients about your capacity to lead, manage, and continue as a viable business through this crisis. Perhaps you're still having to explain that. Vice versa, it's the same relationship, the same challenge that you've been faced with likely with your own suppliers and providers of third-party services. Have they been able to continue their operations throughout the course of this pandemic and the impact it's had on your business? There are obviously other examples, but these are some of the, I think, tough decisions and current and upcoming challenges that are worth thinking about as you consider what elements need to be a part of a return-to-the-office strategy. Bryan Strawser: Then lastly, I think one of the bigger challenges we're going to see, and not just as companies, but in organizations, but I think as societies in general, and that is I expect there'll be significant mental health challenges across the board as the crisis continues and abates and we begin to transition back. For companies and organizations, nonprofits and others that are listening, I think the more that you can provide mental health resources to your team through your health care plans and benefits, I think that's valuable. I also think that the more resources that you can connect them to is good. Also, what training or guidance that you can give to your leaders about checking in on their team and about being willing to recommend or point these resources, point a team member to these resources will be important. Bryan Strawser: How will we know that it's time to go back to the office? I think this is one of the great questions that we're all struggling with right now. Three factors I think we can consider, and of course, we're a little bit subservient to the role of governments in making this decision, but we'll know it's time to go back to the office when some combination of three things happen. Bryan Strawser: The first that there's a decline in cases or a decline in new cases that gets to a level that we're comfortable saying, "Yes, I could go back and resume operations in this environment." Second, that the public health response shifts to a more relaxed posture, so the hospitals are not overly crowded, we're not having these strict public health measures and personal protective measures in place, that we see the public health response begin to shift to something more relaxed. Bryan Strawser: Then third, that there's some availability of either antibody testing so we can tell who's positive and who's not and who is immune and who's not or an effective vaccine. Of course, we're not going to see an effective vaccine for many, many months unless some miraculous effort happens, so where some combination of declining cases, shift in the public health response, and the availability of antibody testing and perhaps a vaccine vaccination will be the things that we expect to see. Bryan Strawser: It's also we're thinking about what the new normal looks like. When we return to work, when we return to the office rather, I don't think that it's going to be the way it was before the COVID-19 crisis came upon us. It will be the new normal or the next normal as some are calling it. I think that's where thinking about now, I think it's worth putting together structure about what this should look like, what this could look like now so that your organization is prepared. Bryan Strawser: I would recommend that you pull together a return-to-the-office planning group within your organization today. I would do it this week. I would look at things like what are the return-to-office options, is it that we are going to suddenly all just come back and once, which I think is unlikely, but it is it a comeback in stages, and if it's going to be a comeback and stages, what do you want to bring back first? What would make the most sense for your organization? Bryan Strawser: The second big factor is what possible public health or government restrictions, regulatory restrictions might be in place before you can return to the office? It's almost like how restrictions were put into place during the ramp-up of this a month ago where things were slowly turned off. Well, now we're going to slowly turn things back on. Is it that half of the workforce comes back to the office in the first week? Maybe it's 25%. Maybe it's even less. Bryan Strawser: Is there a social distancing requirement? For example, do you need to make sure that seats in the workspace are more than six feet apart? What does that do to your conference rooms or your cubicle and office configurations? What if only personnel that has had negative tests are allowed to return or personnel who demonstrate the existence of antibodies? Will you need to provide personal protective equipment like cloth or surgical masks or N95 masks in order for your workforce to return to the office? We don't know what government might require, and states may approach this differently, so I think it's worth considering all of the options and then where you want to plug into those options. Bryan Strawser: From a strategic standpoint, I think there are two important questions that you should ask as a business leader. One is how will your collaboration and operating models change? What's going to be different about how you operate when the workforce returns to the office? What do you want to capture from what's been going on? Second, what do you want to adopt from the work-from-home era of coronavirus? What's gone on that you've liked? What's going on that you like that you want to bring into the new era of coronavirus, this new back-to-the-office era? What's gone on that has really benefited the company that you want to make a part of this? I think it's worth thinking about that strategically and then making plans and options to be able to do that. Bryan Strawser: Then lastly, as you think about this return to the office, one of the most important things in my mind is don't forget about capturing lessons learned and use those lessons learned to your advantage. I think that this is a great opportunity for crisis management and business continuity and global security leaders to take on a stronger leadership role within their organization. The after-action process, your lessons learned process is a great opportunity to capture these lessons and then use those to get the resources that you need for your program. Maybe you're well-resourced, and you don't need to make this kind of an argument, but I think for most leaders out there, this is a great opportunity to grow your organization, raise the stature of your team and yourself, and use this to get the resources you need for that next crisis situation down the road. Bryan Strawser: Love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Drop us a note at contact@bryghtpath.com. That's it for this edition of Managing Uncertainty. We hope to have you around for the next episode. Be well.

We're just a few weeks into the fight against Coronavirus right now and we're already into unprecedented territory with how government and the private sector are engaged in the fight against this epidemic. In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal and Chief Executive Bryan Strawser talks about lessons learned from the private sector to date in the Coronavirus fight. Topics discussed include personal protective equipment, crisis communications, cleaning, reporting, pay - benefits - sick leave and other compensation topics, crisis management frameworks, and more. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Episode #92: Novel Coronavirus Episode #94: Personal and family preparedness for Coronavirus  Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive here at Bryghtpath. I'm flying solo again today. I want to talk about lessons learned in the coronavirus fight to date. I'm recording this on Saturday, March 21st, so we're really a few weeks into the heavy situation here in the United States. Bryan Strawser: I think that to set the stage for this podcast, the most sobering number that I've seen this week is that confirmed coronavirus COVID-19 cases here in the United States have grown more than tenfold over the last seven days. We're seeing increases typically between 20% and 30% per day right now across the United States with significant increases in three locations. That's Massachusetts, California, and New York, primarily centered on New York City. We're all fighting this fight right now as business continuity and crisis management and resilience leaders across the United States and throughout the world. Bryan Strawser: I want to talk a little bit about the lessons learned that we've seen about the coronavirus fight to date. I'm just going to walk through some things that we've learned that we've picked up on from talking and benchmarking with a number of companies in the United States, Canada, Europe, and China. We'll just share some thoughts here and then at the end I'm going to give you an opportunity to send in some of your thoughts for a future episode. Bryan Strawser: But let's start with some lessons learned that we've seen. One of the biggest is that companies that are working through this right now need a crisis management process, a crisis response process, that is coordinated by top management and experts within the company that really give experts and leaders in the organization the autonomy they need to implement creative and pragmatic solutions. This is where having the crisis management framework that we talk about all the time here on our podcast, but having a crisis management framework helps you do a number of things that are critical right now as you manage through the challenges presented by coronavirus. Bryan Strawser: The first is having this process in place, the framework in place. It helps you understand the crisis. You're able to get together with that crisis management team and your executive team, brief the situation on a daily basis and understand where you stand. Based upon that understanding, then you can use your framework and process to decide upon and execute those immediate strategic actions that you need to take, collaborate together and within your subject matter groups like HR, security, business continuity. You can collaborate together on other actions that align with ... Those actions that you want to line up to do that really need fit with both your organization's values and the societal norms that are going on in that moment around the coronavirus. Bryan Strawser: You might be limited by actions that your local, state or national government is taking. That's what I mean by coming to the societal norms. How do you line up the actions that you need to take within the framework right now of what is allowed and what is legal for you to do? Bryan Strawser: Then your framework allows you to deliver and monitor those actions that you're going to take. You can monitor the execution of those actions in a way that lets your organization pivot as necessary to change those decisions as you start to see the responses and make your other strategic and tactical decisions that you need to make as a company right now. Bryan Strawser: We see four critical areas that companies need to use their crisis management process for right now to center their response. These might be a little different for your organization, but pretty consistently we're seeing four areas. Bryan Strawser: The first one, and the most important one by far, is protecting your workforce, taking the actions to make sure that your team is safe as you continue the operations at your organization. In some ways, managing the pay benefits, incentive pay, sick leave, attendance situation with your team as necessary. We'll talk more about this in a few minutes. The first area is protecting your workforce. Bryan Strawser: The second area is engaging with your customers and your clients depending upon your business. But I think you want to ... Here, where you see companies really maintaining contact with your customers, ascertaining their needs. You may have to make strategic adjustments to things you're doing as an organization to make sure that you are delivering upon the things that your customers are looking for in this more difficult time. Bryan Strawser: The third is the stabilization of your supply chain. Here we're looking at, depending upon your business, your raw materials, your third party services that are being provided to you. It could be the outsourcing of work that you do to a business process outsourcer, for example, in Asia or India. But what is your supply chain? Then what do you need to do to stabilize your supply chain? What's the continuity capability, the disaster recovery capability, of your suppliers that you're dependent upon in order to do the work that your customers are engaging with you on? Bryan Strawser: Then fourth, and this is definitely more of a forward-looking issue, but really stress testing your financials, taking a look at your financial model, starting to apply stress to it to understand what happens if a key supplier drops out? What happens if we have a downturn in business in the 10% to 15% range? What happens if there are fewer medical claims if that's your business? What if there are less claims in the future because it's just going to be about coronavirus for some time. Starting to look at what those financial impacts to your organization might be as you look ahead. Bryan Strawser: In addition, we see four practices around the crisis management process that we think is important for companies to ensure are in place. The first is to establish a single source of truth for the crisis management process. As you're working through the coronavirus situation, what are you communicating about those decisions? What kind of situational briefings or understanding are you providing to leaders across the organization? Bryan Strawser: The second is to make sure that your leadership is aligned on your current scenario, your current understanding or current briefing of the situation and the scenarios that you're planning for on what might happen next. For example, if you're not already in a state that is in a lockdown shelter-in-place situation, we should anticipate that your state will eventually do something similar to that. That's a situation that you want to be planning for now. You want to have your tactics and strategies figured out so that when your State or States announce that they're moving to shelter-in-place, well then we've talked through what that means for us and what we're going to need to do. Bryan Strawser: Are you critical infrastructure or not? Will your employees be able to get to work or not? If they have to come in, can they continue their work from home? Will this create other difficulties that you or your supply chain need to deal with? That's the scenario planning that we really want to make sure that we're doing right now. Bryan Strawser: The third thing companies should look at in relation to this is establishing communication and influence channels with local, state and national political leaders and health officials. This might be as simple as making sure you're plugged into their official communication so that you're seeing policy statements, executive orders, press conferences, and those kinds of things so that you're currently on the situation in your state and across the country. But it might also be that there is a role to play for your company to influence some of these situations. I'm not sure, it's a little different by the organization, but those are the things that we want you to think about. Bryan Strawser: Then fourth, companies should establish a battle rhythm, a cadence of meetings and decision making cycles that you're using with your crisis management and executive teams all throughout this crisis. Generally, we're recommending that one of those teams meet every day and look at what is going on from a crisis management perspective. What's new with the situation and what adjustments do you need to make to your strategy? What communication may need to be published about what's happening with the situation? There's a strategic point of view on the crisis management that needs to be coordinated and in place for your top management. Bryan Strawser: Let's talk now just more tactically on some lessons learned. For the most part, right now you should have if possible, your workforce work from home. Hopefully, you have the remote tools in place, a virtual private network or VPN, collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, project management tools like Base Camp, Trello, Asana, Microsoft Project, Office 365 or others. Bryan Strawser: But obviously there's work that needs to be done in person; production lines, food assembly, retail, grocery stores. These are all things that have to be done in person. Where you have work that has to happen in person at the office, at the manufacturing site, take appropriate precautions. Bryan Strawser: As much as possible, you want to social distance the team. Think about the workplace. Can you move workspaces farther apart? What about the cafeteria and break room? Think about removing or marking off every other seat in order to create that six-foot barrier we want from a social distancing standpoint. Can you stretch out or adjust your production lines so that workers can be farther apart? In some cases, you might need to think about only having some of the workers on this shift and moving some of the other workers to another shift in order to create that social distancing space. I acknowledge that this may have an impact on productivity, but this will also adhere to the social distancing guidelines that we're seeing from public health agencies. These are important things that need to happen. Bryan Strawser: We want to see regular cleaning. Think about cleaning workstations or areas before and after each shift. Clean the facility between shifts if that's possible or at least once a day in order to ensure the virus is killed on surfaces, doorknobs, food areas, etcetera. With personal protection equipment, unless you're working in healthcare or as a first responder or in law enforcement or a role where there's usually PPE required, generally mass and things like that should be reserved right now for healthcare and first responders emergency services as much as possible in order to reduce demand on those products. Bryan Strawser: Except for certain applications, we don't recommend temperature screening in the workplace, although we're seeing this a lot for visitors coming into companies, although really you don't want to be doing much of that visitor stuff right now anyway. If you do decide to take temperature of your employees, think about maybe just doing it as a sample, sample every 10th, 12th, 15th person coming in as to not violate social distancing and not slow down your workforce, but that might be an acceptable alternative. Bryan Strawser: Successful organizations, of course, we've seen this since the virus really began to take hold here in the US, sick employees should stay home in line with the CDC's guidance. You've probably already looked at adjusting your pay, your sick leave, and attendance policies accordingly, but certainly, if you're sending someone home because they have a respiratory infection of some type, they're off for 14 days. Most companies are paying them for those 14 days before they can return to work. Many companies are also now paying incentive pay or perhaps attendance or retention pay and many companies have also increased compensation across the board during this more difficult time that we're going through. Bryan Strawser: We see a lot of value in communicating upfront to employees about your efforts and keeping them informed about your efforts. You should also tell them, particularly if they have to work in the office or a manufacturing line or elsewhere, what will you do if there's a confirmed case in that environment? You should just be pretty upfront about pausing or not pausing production about cleaning, about quarantine and self-quarantine efforts that you'll follow as a company so that they understand what that means. Bryan Strawser: We do recommend creating an internal hub of information. That might be an intranet page if that's how your employees communicate, that has fact sheets, links out to credible resources like the CDC or your state health department, that has frequently asked questions, etcetera. Make sure you cover where to report if they're sick, where they can go for more information. For factories or manufacturing facilities or food production, this might just be a bulletin board where the information is up on the bulletin board. Again, you should communicate in a way that is most effective for your organization. Bryan Strawser: We've seen a number of false reports with our clients where folks have said, "Hey, I've been diagnosed with coronavirus," and then when the client has asked for documentation, it turns out not to be true. We would recommend that you clamp down on those pretty hard from an employee standpoint, a disciplinary standpoint in order to encourage the others not to create false reports. We've also had issues where employees and contractors have made fake posts, so to speak, on social media where they're saying that their employer has a confirmed case, even though they don't. We would recommend also coming down pretty hard on those. Don't be afraid to use the libel and slander and defamation laws in order to force someone to take down a clearly false post. That's just crazy what people will do right now. Bryan Strawser: Lastly, you should continue to remind your teams, and I would talk about this all the time, about them following the guidance from the CDC and the World Health Organization and that is to wash your hands, stay home if you're sick, don't go to gatherings over 10 people. Don't play in gatherings over 10 people and avoid those that are currently sick where you can do so. Bryan Strawser: These are some of the lessons that we've learned so far in the coronavirus fight. I'm sure in the days and weeks ahead we'll learn more, but I would love to hear the lessons that you've learned. Drop us a note at contact@bryghtpath.com and share your thoughts, reactions, and your own lessons learned and we'll use them in an upcoming edition of the Managing Uncertainty podcast. That's it for now. We'll have another new episode soon.

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses what your executives are really looking for in your crisis management plans. Topics discussed include executive roles in a crisis management framework, developing crisis management plans, crisis exercises, executive interactions, and more. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Episode #4: The Crisis Team Episode #18: The Race Episode #23: Crisis Management is not a Pickup Game Episode #46: Interacting with the C-Suite Blog Post: What the CEO needs to understand about planning for a crisis //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. I'm flying solo today and we're going to do a short episode this week talking about crisis management plans, and what I want to focus on our discussion about crisis management plans, a topic that we've talked about numerous times before, is what happens when your executives get involved? When your executives are at the table, involved in your crisis process, what do they really want? What are your executives really looking for in terms of a crisis management plan? Bryan Strawser: If you remember in our previous episodes and blog posts we've done over the years about building crisis management plans and crisis management frameworks, what we've really talked about in those situations is building something that has a crisis management team that is below the executives, that really is managing that moment-by-moment action that we want to happen during a crisis. They're coordinating across the organization. They're communicating, they're collaborating, they're making those moment-by-moment decisions. Bryan Strawser: The role that we typically reserve for the executives is to support the work of that crisis management team, usually in a couple of key areas around large scale expense and capital commitment. They're making decisions about the organization's reputation, and they might be taking active steps to manage the reputation of the organization, but they're really focused in that middle area there. I'm sorry, they're focused on rather on really those big picture issues where they're supporting the crisis management team. Your crisis management team is really made up of those day-to-day managers from across the organization who are doing the real work in responding to the crisis. Your executives are there to support the work that that crisis management team is doing and making decisions on the type of things that escalate to them. Bryan Strawser: Here's my experience. My experience and I just went into this a few weeks ago with a client who is managing a data incident. The executives became involved earlier in the process than usual, and because they weren't as familiar with the process, they dove into a lot of questions and superseded, to some extent, the role that was really defined for them. I think this is common. This is something that I've seen a lot, where I see, in exercises in particular, in exercises where the executive management team begins to participate and almost without fail, we see them try to make up the process as they go along instead of following the crisis plan that has been put together and assembled with roles for their role as an executive. Most of the time, I would say, they do a good job in just the ad hoc process. After all, they're usually good networkers and good collaborators and good decision-makers, and so they're ad hoc, making it up along the way. Usually turns out okay, but they definitely miss things, and they miss things because they're not following the plan that has been outlined for them. Bryan Strawser: What I recommend, what we recommend, is we build crisis management plans is to not overcomplicate this. When it comes to the executives, I think your executives are really looking for five or six key things in a crisis plan. I'll tell you upfront when I say don't complicate it, what they're not looking for in a crisis plan is a 100, 150 pages of theory or background or governance information or 10,000 checklists that people should be following. What they're looking for is a document that is really focused, that can be easily understood, can be easily executed, and they want that in a way that is easily accessible to how they consume information. Bryan Strawser: Now that might be on paper, and some folks like things to be on paper, but that's probably not how they want it. They probably want something that they can access on a mobile device, particularly an iPhone or an Android device, or some type of tablet like an iPad or an Amazon Fire tablet or the Samsung Tab or something like that. You're probably thinking here about PDFs or other things that can be put in a secure online location that allow them to get to it. You want to make sure that you're getting it to them in a way that they're going to use and access, and by all means, as you think about how to assemble this, you might be thinking about something that's more graphical, more infographic-driven, with supporting information that really backs up that graphical description. Bryan Strawser: We would argue that there are five or six things that executives are looking for. One is a plan that is easily digestible and focused, and can be accessed in a way in which they like to access information. The second is a framework. A framework that helps them understand their position, their role in the process that lets them respond quickly and effectively, and understand where they fit in the process. The third is that they're looking for clear roles and responsibilities in what I would say are boundaries between the different entities within the crisis. What is the role of the executive team? What is the role of the crisis management team, the CMT? What decisions are authorized at each of those levels? Bryan Strawser: Again, in a simple way, I think we want to provide some means and questions, or even a severity chart or severity levels that let the executives understand how to assess the situation, or in other words, just how bad is this on the scale of not so bad to really, really catastrophically bad? What are the severity levels? Where are we today? Are we at level two and that's yellow, but we're trending towards level one and that's red, and now the survival of the company is at stake? What are those tools or methods that allow them to assess the situation? Bryan Strawser: The next, I'm not really sure ... you might think of this as checklists, or maybe it's more reminders or lists of things to consider, but I think in general for a crisis and then perhaps some different versions for some different situations, I think to remind them what some key issues are that they may have to tackle in the first four, eight, 16, 24, 48, 72 hours that are going on. For example, in a general crisis, initially, you're really concerned about the response, and you're thinking about life safety. Is the team okay? Do we need to take some steps to make sure the team is okay? What is the condition of our assets? But over time those questions become more specific and it helps you understand the broader impact. I think those questions and those key issues are important. Bryan Strawser: Then lastly, giving the executives a method for understanding what communication processes are going to be tied to this. That might be just a brief description of your crisis communications process or your outside firm that's going to get involved and assist from a crisis standpoint. Those are the kinds of things, from a communication standpoint, that I think your executives are looking for. Then lastly, the sixth thing is, I think, looking at a brief description of the after-action process, at least referencing that there is one, and how you use that to capture lessons learned to improve for the next type of crisis that you're going to be faced with as an organization. Bryan Strawser: Again, your executives are not looking for a 150, 200-page plan. They're looking for a strongly focused document that they can access in the way they like to access information, in a way that's executable, and where you can use graphics or infographics with some supporting information. That's the way to go with that. Bryan Strawser: If you've worked with your executives before on a plan and maybe they didn't buy in or they seemed confused, I wouldn't mistake their pushback as taking the stance that they don't want a plan. I think it's an opportunity to look at how the plan is constructed and is it built in a way that's easily accessible and executable at that level and easily understood, and make revisions to your plan to make sure that you're meeting what those needs are that they're articulating in their feedback or in their pushback. If you deliver a clear and concise actionable plan that's easily understood and easily executable, doesn't have a bunch of unwanted information in it, then I think you're really delivering what your executives need, and I think you're putting them in the right position within that crisis management framework that you're working on within your organization. Bryan Strawser: That's it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty podcast. We'll be back next week with another new episode. Thanks for listening.

You won't want to miss this episode. There are few things that have caught the attention of business leaders and individuals around the world right now in the way that the Novel Coronavirus outbreak in China has garnered attention.  For a virus that was unheard of prior to December 2019, as of this podcast publication, there are nearly 25,000 cases just in China alone - with hundreds of new confirmed cases each and every day. In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal and Chief Executive Bryan Strawser provides an overview of Novel Coronavirus - what it is - how it's impacting businesses, countries, and individuals, and recommended steps that companies and individuals should take right now to ensure their long-term continuity of operations. Bryghtpath Coronavirus Resources Blog Post: Bryghtpath publishes new Novel Coronavirus whitepaper & briefing Bryghtpath Briefing: Novel Coronavirus //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Related Episodes & Blog Posts Episode #4: The Crisis Team Episode #6: Personal Preparedness Episode #37: Taking care of the team during a crisis Episode #39: Travel Safety & Security Programs Blog Post: What the CEO needs to understand about planning for a crisis Blog Post: Making decisions in the midst of a crisis Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. I'm flying solo again today for this episode where we're going to talk about probably the top issue that's going on in the emergency management or crisis management world right now and that is novel coronavirus. The outbreak that began in the Wuhan province of China and has now led to what appears to be becoming a global pandemic, the likes of which we haven't really seen since H1N1 just over a decade ago. Novel coronavirus. We're going to talk a little bit about what it is. What is a coronavirus, the impact and spread of the virus, its impact on business and travel, its impact on businesses and our recommendations for businesses and individual precautions in terms of travel and medical treatment? And we'll talk about some things you should be thinking about as this outbreak continues, things you should monitor as an organization, as a crisis management or business [inaudible] leader within your organization. Bryan Strawser: Let's start by just explaining coronavirus briefly. The novel coronavirus was detected in December 2019 so not very long ago when several cases of pneumonia were identified in Wuhan city in the Hubei providence of China. The virus did not match any previously seen virus. A week later on January 7, 2020, Chinese health officials confirmed the identification of a new virus. On January 30th the world health organization or WHO declared a global public health emergency over the spread of coronavirus, citing the potential for the spread of the virus to countries that were not prepared to deal with the contagion. The US Department of Health and Human Services or HHS similarly declared a public health emergency on January 31, 2020. Common signs of infection with novel coronavirus are respiratory symptoms, fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In severe cases, this infection causes pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS, kidney failure, and even death. Bryan Strawser: The virus has been temporarily named coronavirus. It also has an acronym which is 2019-nCoV for novel coronavirus of 2019. I assume, I'm not an expert on this particular topic, but I assume this will eventually have a different name, but right now it's novel coronavirus. A coronavirus, you're probably wondering what that is. A coronavirus is a large family of viruses that can cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more serious diseases. Some of these diseases that are caused by other coronaviruses from history that you might recall are the severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS and the Middle East respiratory syndrome or MERS. So those are both other coronaviruses but that's not the same as the novel coronavirus. As of this morning, and we're recording this podcast on February 5, 2020, so our information dates from that morning, China has acknowledged nearly 25,000 cases of novel coronavirus and has acknowledged 491 deaths to date. Cases are now identified in 13 Chinese provinces and four major municipalities. Bryan Strawser: The municipalities with cases include Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai and then both special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have had cases. Hong Kong had their first death today, February 5th. According to reports, novel coronavirus has been confirmed in several countries outside of China and these include Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, the United States, Canada, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the United Arab Emirates. For our friends here in the United States 11 patients so far have tested positive for novel coronavirus. Bryan Strawser: As of February 5th 76 cases nationwide are pending test results. This information according to the Centers for Disease Control. 36 States have had patients that are presently under investigation for potentially having novel coronavirus. To date, two patients in the United Kingdom have tested positive for coronavirus. The UK chief medical officers, I think of that as a decision body similar to the CDC, has raised the risk to the public from low to moderate in the United Kingdom. The UK newspaper, The Guardian believes and reports rather than modeling that was conducted by the world health organization experts at Imperial College, London suggests that more than 100,000 people globally likely have novel coronavirus that has not yet been detected. Bryan Strawser: We have seen significant growth in the outbreak over the last several days. In one case, well going into this week, the number of confirmed cases nearly tripled over the last seven days. Let's shift gears now that we've given little basic and talk about business and travel impact. The United States Department of State advises that US citizens should not travel to China now due to novel coronavirus. In their travel advisory issued on January 30th, the State Department recommends that US citizens currently in China should consider departing via commercial means as quickly as possible. Bryan Strawser: All nonessential US government personnel have also been ordered to depart China. Travelers should be prepared for additional travel restrictions to be put into effect with little to no advance notice. Airports and immigration officials in many countries, including the United States, the UK, Japan, China, and elsewhere have begun screening incoming passengers for signs of coronavirus. Passengers could experience temperature monitoring and health-related questions at immigration, particularly if they have traveled to China in the past 14 days. Now, probably the most significant change we've seen here in the United States is that starting on the 2nd of February, so just three days ago, the US Department of Homeland Security established and implemented 11 US airports that would be the gateway locations for flights that were carrying passengers from China, meaning that those were the only flights from China would only be allowed to land at one of these 11 airports where the US government through the Department of Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control had established enhanced passenger screening and implemented quarantined capabilities that have been established there. Bryan Strawser: What their order requires is that if indications of coronavirus are found that they have the authority to quarantine travelers entering the United States for up to 14 days to determine whether or not they have novel coronavirus and other countries are now implementing similar restrictions. Often on short notice. Hong Kong has now closed the border with mainland China and has closed schools until March as the number of confirmed cases continues to rise. Supplies of hand sanitizer and N95 masks in Hong Kong have become slim and this is actually a factor we're seeing in a number of places that the personal protective equipment or PPE that you're going to want like N95 masks and hand sanitizers have become very difficult to obtain even here in the United States in cities that have not seen any impact from novel coronavirus. Singapore has stopped issuing visas to people who have Chinese passports. Bryan Strawser: They're actively denying entry to foreigners who have visited China in the past 14 days. Mongolia has announced it's currently barring visitors from China and has closed their own land border with China. We're also seeing business impact to companies who operate in China where they're enforcing longer leaves and vacations, requiring employees to work from home and suspending operations in the short term in order to minimize the spread of the virus. We assess here at Bryghtpath that companies will begin to experience supply chain disruption if they operate in Asia or if their supply chain touches Asia simply due to the rapid spread of the virus, the impact it is having on businesses and the restrictions that governments are placing on travelers and business operations. So we have a number of recommendations. I'm going to give you the high-level recommendations here on the podcast and on our website you can go to the episode page for this episode and look for our free intelligence and threat briefing on novel coronavirus and we have a significant number of other recommendations that you can consider. Bryan Strawser: But let's talk about just some high-level recommendations that could be important. For businesses, we recommend that companies that operate in or travel to the impacted areas primarily in Asia, activate their crisis management processes today and use this as a mechanism for monitoring and making enterprise-level decisions for their organizations. Get your group together and talk about what's going on and the actions that you should take. Given the current pace of the outbreak, we recommend that companies have at least one daily meeting of their crisis management team to review current information, the current state of their response to actions and discuss potential future actions. Organizations should review their current business continuity and crisis management plans. You want to make sure that you are prepared for potential disruption. In particular disruptions to the ability of your employee base to work, of your supply chain to deliver the materials, products, and services that you need for your company to operate and that third party service organizations that you use are prepared to continue the delivery of critical services. Bryan Strawser: This is important to take a look at now so you understand where there may be gaps in planning, but also to think about from a contingency standpoint, what else might you need to do around your current business continuity and crisis management plans to ensure that you can continue to operate if the outbreak continues. We recommend that companies temporarily prohibit all travel to China and restrict several other countries to essential and business-critical travel only while continuing to monitor the outbreak and what countries it has spread to in the region. Additional travel restrictions might be things you want to put into place if the outbreak continues to grow significantly beyond mainland China and again in our intelligence and threat briefing, we have a full list of our recommended travel restrictions for businesses and we have a lengthy breakdown of potential actions that should be considered as a part of business continuity and crisis management planning. Bryan Strawser: I want to shift gears briefly and talk about travel and individual precautions that you may want to consider for your employees. The Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization and our company recommends that travelers avoid all travel to China, Hong Kong, and Macau at the current time. If you absolutely must travel to an impacted country, avoid contact with people who are sick. I don't care what they're sick from, avoid contact with them. You should discuss travel to impacted areas with your healthcare provider before you make your trip. In particular, older adults and travelers who have underlying health issues should be understood to be at risk for more severe impacts if they're to become effected by novel coronavirus and there may be other action steps that your healthcare provider may want you to take. When in these countries avoid all animals alive or dead, any animal markets and any products that come from animals. Bryan Strawser: In other words, don't handle any uncooked meat or any other animal products. You should wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds and then you should carry and use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer for use when soap and water are not available. So these are if you must go to an impacted country or some of the business essential only travel countries that we talk about in our intelligence and threat briefing. If you or your employees have been to China, Hong Kong or Macau in the last two weeks and in any way feel sick with fever, cough, or having difficulty breathing, there's a number of steps you should take immediately. The first is to seek medical attention. Before you go to the doctor's office or emergency room or a clinic, call ahead, tell them where you've been and tell them what your symptoms are. Ask them what they would like you to do. Bryan Strawser: You want to avoid contact with others, including members of your own family as to not spread the disease. Do not travel. Don't get on an airplane, a train, bus. Only travel via your vehicle or an ambulance. When you are coughing or sneezing, cover your mouth and nose with a tissue or your sleeve. Don't use your hands. You will touch other things with your hands. Use the crook of your elbow, use your sleeve in order to do that or a tissue. And then again, wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds and carry and use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer if soap and water are not available. Bryan Strawser: There's a lot of misinformation out there about novel coronavirus, particularly on Facebook and Twitter from non-government entities. Individuals who are spreading fake news for lack of a better term. The places to go to get information I think are pretty simple. You can look at the World Health Organization website. They have a novel coronavirus information page and they have daily situational reports which will tell you what's happening around the world. It's fair to say perhaps some of that information that's being reported by other countries may not be 100% accurate. I know there's a lot of questions about China's motivation to share or not share, be transparent or not be transparent about what's happening with novel coronavirus but the WHO, the World Health Organization has good information on their website. It's worth looking at. The Centers for Disease Control here in the United States also has a novel coronavirus information page. Bryan Strawser: It tells you a lot about what the outbreak looks like here in the United States and actions that the US government and state and local governments are taking. Another great source for information that's giving you facts about what's going on and what to do. And then if you're in the United Kingdom or you want to get more of a European centric point of view, the United Kingdom's National Health Service has a novel coronavirus information page and the Cabinet at Number 10 Downing Street on the United Kingdom government website also has a novel coronavirus information page and then lastly you can get a copy of our intelligence and threat briefing. It's completely free. There will be a link in the show notes to obtain that or you can go to our website at bryghtpath.com and follow the link under resources to white papers and you'll find our free intelligence and threat briefing there. Bryan Strawser: It has links to all of this information that I just outlined. Whenever we update it'll be posted there. We have a number of links in the document to other news coverage. We have our recommended travel restrictions based on the information and we have a number of actions and decisions for consideration in the appendix that cover several pages of ideas about things that you may want to consider within your own business. The most important thing with novel coronavirus is to understand that it is a significant threat right now. Bryan Strawser: It is something that you want to pay attention to if you source from Asia, if your company involves in any international travel or if you're sourcing from other countries or you're reliant upon service providers who operate or are headquartered in these other countries. It's of particular importance of course if you travel or directly operate in those countries. Make sure you're operating off of factual government based information and as always, you can contact us at any time for assistance or get clear, factual information about what's going on. Bryan Strawser: That's it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty podcast. We'll be back next week with another new episode.

In this week's edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, our first for 2020, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses the recent drone strikes carried out against Iranian aligned unconventional forces, militia, and government officials by the United States - with a focus on steps that businesses that operate in the region - and globally - should consider as tensions rise and escalations occur in retaliation. Topics discussed include intelligence, monitoring threats, freedom of navigation, travel safety & security, soft target protection, detecting pre-attack surveillance, and other measures that companies should take. Editorial Note Despite knowing the proper pronunciation of Qasem Soleimani's name, I pronounced it incorrectly multiple times during this episode. My apologies for my error. -- Bryan Related Episodes & Blog Posts Episode #76: BryghtCast for the week of October 7th, 2019 Episode #78:  BryghtCast for the week of October 14th, 2019 Blog Post: Top 12 Global Risks of 2018 //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath, and I'm running solo again today. We're here to talk about Iran and the Middle East. Given recent events that have occurred over the last couple of weeks throughout Iraq and Iran and the involvement of the United States admitted, confirmed involvement of the United States on a drone strike killing an Iranian official near the Baghdad airport about a week ago. Bryan Strawser: I'm sure you're familiar with the details of the incident, but to back up a little bit, there has been for a number of months, years even in Iraq, a number of attacks on United States military interest throughout the region that have connectivity back to the unconventional forces of the government of Iran. These unconventional forces in many cases, were the Quds Force, Q-U-D-S, and the commanding general of the Quds Force. Quds is the unconventional warfare arm of the Iranian military and intelligence apparatus. The commanding general was Major General Suleimani and a week ago as he was leaving the Baghdad airport in a three-vehicle convoy with some allies of his, no Iraqi government officials but Aronian allies that operate within Iraq, his convoy was struck by a series of missiles fired from a U.S. Government Reaper drone, a more modern version of the predator. Bryan Strawser: Killed in this drone strike were General Suleimani along with some local allies as how I'd outlined before. It took a little bit of time, a few hours before this was confirmed, and then a few more hours for the United States to announce that they had made the drone striking, accepting responsibility for the strike. In addition in the following days, but the United States executed a number of other strikes, some of which our government has confirmed, some of which have not been confirmed as well as a special operation in Yemen that attempted to capture one of our top 20 wanted terrorists who was another close ally of the Iranian unconventional forces, the Quds Forces. Bryan Strawser: Now, the geopolitics with all of this are super complex. They go back centuries in some cases and certainly some of it goes back to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. There's some very strongly held differences of opinion between the two countries but the important part here is there's just no mistaking that the United States' decision to strike General Suleimani was a very significant event in terms of the current conflict in the Middle East. And General Suleimani was a leading strategist for unconditional warfare, he played a very significant role in the Middle East as the Quds Force and the Iranian government has been involved with Hamas, with Hezbollah and with other unaffiliated groups that are aligned with the government of Iran, like Iranian militias that operate in Iraq and Yemen and elsewhere. And you could connect, and the United States certainly believes this in terms of the intelligence that they have published, they believe that we could connect General Suleimani to hundreds of deaths of American servicemen and women in Iraq and else his other actions against the United States, Israel, and other allies throughout the Middle East. Bryan Strawser: So there'll be almost certainly will be escalations and we've already seen some of this as a result of the decision to make this strike. And with all of that as background, what I want to focus on is what we always talk about here on the podcast, which is what American businesses and other businesses operating in the Middle East, and throughout the world, that might be impacted. What should we do in order to make sure that our people are safe, that our business operations are secure and that we're prepared for what may come in the future in terms of retaliation and escalation from this attack? Bryan Strawser: First, I think it's important to point out the likelihood of an actual conventional war that would occur between the United States and its allies and Iran and its allies, is highly, highly unlikely. It's unlikely for a couple of reasons. The first is that although Iran has significant military capability, perhaps has evolved nuclear weapons or may have some other weapons of mass destruction and Iran has a large inactive military, the United States remains the world's really only superpower and the Leviathan as Thomas P.M. Barnett refers to, the Leviathan of the United States military would probably make short work of the country of Iran and its military forces if necessary. But I think there's also the other side of this which is that Iran is playing a long game of chess here and hoping that the United States is not playing a strategy game of chess in return. Iran's approach to the United States since the 1970's when the current government took over from the Shah of Iran, and there was the Iranian revolution and they seized the United States embassy, their approach has been almost entirely to engage in a series of unconventional warfare campaigns that impact the United States and our allies. Bryan Strawser: So, I don't think you're going to see head-on conventional military conflict between the two countries. I think what we will see is unconventional warfare, and I want to start that by saying that one of the likely areas that we're going to see from Iran will be the use of cyber attacks of various types in order to disrupt United States government interests and private sector interests throughout the world. Though they will most certainly be targeting the United States and our allies and part of that will be impacting the business community and I think we'll see that first in the cyber domain. Iran has significant offensive cyber warfare capability. They are one of the countries that U.S. Cyber Command talks about as being a significant threat along with Russia and China and North Korea and they're a significant threat with significant capability. So cyber is one area where we're going to see that. Bryan Strawser: The second area where I think we're going to see risk, the areas that are most at risk, are going to be the military targets that are in the region. And we've already seen some of that with a missile strike on U.S. bases launch from Iran. These are bases that the United States operates inside the country of Iraq. We saw that within a few days of the drone strike on Suleimani and I believe we're going to continue to see those types of unconventional attacks on United States interests in Iraq for at least as long as we're there. Bryan Strawser: The third area of risk is ocean traffic that is moving in the Persian Gulf, particularly through the Strait of Hormuz where Iran has previously, as recently as July, seized Western flagged ships. They seized a couple of ships that carried United Kingdom flags, which just means they're kind of homeported or registered with that country, but they've taken other actions over the years to engage militarily across the Persian Gulf. They shot down the United States drone and some other attacks over the last 20 or 30 years have occurred there. The United Kingdom since July has been organizing protective missions for ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The United States has also been involved in supporting that mission and I believe there are some other NATO and EU countries that have participated in this as well. Bryan Strawser: The area of greatest concern in the region from our standpoint and in real area of concern globally are our soft targets. Here we're talking about business interests, civilian populations, and would almost think about this as something that should be looked at as kind of concentric levels of risk. We think the closer that we are to the Persian gulf, the more challenges and more risk that can be seen and the farther out that you are geographically then the less risk that there are. Certainly, businesses that operate close in or in the Middle East are likely at the greatest risk. We believe the secondary risk is in Europe of both Eastern and Western Europe, and then we get into some farther afield targets even here in the United States. The way to think about the geographic risk here is that civilian populations that are massing in areas in the Middle East or in Europe and then in the United States are possible soft targets. Think about these indirect attacks like shopping malls and sporting events, movie theaters, large public gatherings, large public events, as being places that should really consider their level of soft target protection. In this time of this kind of global uncertainty, what other measures should be taken in those areas, for example, here in Minnesota, the Mall of America has long been talked about as a significant terrorist target of opportunity, and I know that the security team there who does a lot of things both seen and unseen, likely took steps, I don't know for sure, but I would predict that they took steps in response to Iran's vows of escalation and revenge following General Suleimani's death at the hands of U.S. Forces. Bryan Strawser: We haven't seen too many of these kinds of soft attacks coming from a foreign aligned group here in the United States but I will take you back to a few years ago in San Bernardino, California, where two individuals that had come to the country and had been radicalized, kind of align themselves with the ISIS/ISIL movement, a man and his wife committed a mass shooting of his co-workers at a county worker gathering in San Bernardino, and then engaged in a running gun battle with local state and federal law enforcement. Ultimately that resulted in their deaths and the subsequent investigation pointed to their close alignment with ISIS acting on their own in a lone wolf manner, but having been radicalized through the Internet and other encounters that they had had. So these kinds of attacks, certainly Iran is not publishing the kind of self radicalizing material that ISIS did on the internet, but this type of attack on a soft target is still a strong possibility. And this is the kind of campaign that the Quds Force really focused on, these unconventional attacks on softer targets throughout the world. Bryan Strawser: So what should companies do? Well, first is just to continue to monitor the threat. We want to make sure that you're looking at the news, you're looking at information from the U.S. State Department, from groups like OSAC, the Overseas Security Advisory Council, at the state department. If you're an FBI InfraGard member, you'll have access to some information there, certainly, some information that'll be more physical and cybersecurity-focused. These are things we want to make sure we're monitoring the threat that we understand what might be at risk for us as this situation continues to evolve. When you think about your soft target protection, really think about how can you engage in efforts to detect pre-attack surveillance. That almost always happens in some of these attacks. There's an attempt to surveil the target and understand the points of weakness and opportunity that they could use to strike. Bryan Strawser: I think companies should look at their travel safety and security policies, how you're monitoring geopolitical risk and what your approach is to travel in the Middle East. Do you have contingency plans for operations and business travel in the area and do you feel like in your worst-case scenario that could happen here in terms of a soft target attack or an unconventional attack on some forces where you happen to have facilities or may have travelers nearby, what does that approach look like? Certainly would look at what you're training the teams too that are traveling to these areas, but also looking strongly at what's your capacity, whether organic to your organization or through a third-party service to get folks out if the situation escalates. And again, we want to make sure that you're monitoring current events and taking appropriate actions to protect your team and your assets and your business operations. Bryan Strawser: So, hopefully, that gives you a little bit of background on the situation following the killing of General Suleimani by the United States, what that might mean for your business operations. Again, if there's anything we can help you within these areas here at Bryghtpath, we'd be happy to chat about that. Give us a call anytime at 612-235-6435 or drop us an email at contact@bryghtpath.com. That's it for this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. We'll be back next week with another new episode. Thanks for listening.

In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser takes an informal look forward to 2020 and the potential risks that are just around the corner. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Episode #26: The Top 12 Global Risks of 2018 Blog Post: The Top 12 Global Risks of 2018 //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath and this is our final episode for 2019. I'm recording this on Monday, December 30th you're going to hear this later in the day. I am running solo today as it's quite a snowfall going on here in the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota. But I wanted to take a moment and just provide a little bit of a look ahead to 2020. I believe we're going to do a more formal kind of preview of the coming year with both Bray and I. But I wanted to hit on a couple of things that are on our mind as we turn the calendar here in a couple of days to 2020 and wrap up the decade of the 2010s and look forward to the decade of the 2020s. Bryan Strawser: The first thing that is on my mind as we head into 2020 is that here in the United States at least this is a presidential election year. In addition to that, all of the United States Congress is up for election along with a third of the United States senate. So this is going to bring all of the inherent politics that come along with a situation in a calendar year like this, a presidential election year. I think it's also, just given that our society has become more and more partisan and certainly has become, I think, a little more rancorous with the current presidents and they both support and opposition for President Trump's policies, that's going to be a pretty pivotal issue in the news and how businesses and individuals react in the year to come. Bryan Strawser: The second and one that we've talked about frequently on our BryghtCast podcast and in previous episodes, in previous reviews that we've done of coming years, and talking about the top global risks, is that we appear to have come to the final decision when it comes to the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union or Brexit. That was settled pretty much in the election that occurred in Britain just a few weeks ago. Brexit, the Brexit implementation bill has passed the UK parliament. We're going to see that breakup occur, it looks like at the end of January, 2020, although that date may move around. Bryan Strawser: But really next year in terms of Brexit, not only will Brexit be implemented but now it's time for the real negotiation, and the real negotiation is, what will the relationship be between the United Kingdom and the European Union in the years to come? And there is a lot of negotiation, a lot of issues that need to be discussed and decided in the coming weeks and months. And that will have global economic implications, it'll have implications for EU citizens that live in the United Kingdom today. It looks like they'll be allowed to stay through a immigration scheme that is being developed and will be implemented. But there's a lot of uncertainty about what this is going to look like, and Brexit will certainly be on the minds of all of us who are thinking about uncertainty and disruption in 2020. Bryan Strawser: The third big one here in the United States at least, is that the auctions for the 5G wireless bands, wireless frequencies will go up for auction sometime in 2020 or 2021. Many States have passed implementing regulations around this. But the big thing is when the United States government goes to sell the actual bandwidth, goes to sell the actual frequencies and the 5G licenses that go along with that. That'll be a big deal. 5G is a significant improvement over 4G and 4G LTE, and we will see billions of dollars likely be spent during the 5G auctions to bring 5G to life. Bryan Strawser: The fourth area that's on my mind as we go into 2020 is about recreational marijuana. We expect that recreational marijuana legalization will continue to move across the United States. It's certainly a big topic of discussion here in Minnesota in our upcoming legislative session. We've seen legalization occur in several States, with, depending upon who you talk to, success or failure, which I think really goes back to just some political bent of the individuals involved. But we continue to believe that this will be an important legislative item in the months and years to come, and I think it has significant security implications for organizations, like what does this really mean in terms of drug screening and your employment base, particularly if you're in a regulated industry where federal law governs this area more so than State law? And here I'm specifically thinking about the financial services industry, healthcare, law enforcement and others. Bryan Strawser: Our fifth look going into 2020 is that the strife between Hong Kong and China will continue. We expect that it will become more violent on both the part of protesters and by law enforcement or intelligence agencies operating in Hong Kong, and also that China will become more authoritarian over time in Hong Kong. There are some treaty restrictions on China that I believe end 2047 in terms of changing Hong Kong basic law, but I don't believe that China is going to wait before they take more authoritarian steps, whether that's approved through a legal framework in Hong Kong or not, we expect that disruption will continue. Businesses that operate in Hong Kong, or have ex-pats in Hong Kong, or who travel to Hong Kong will need to continue to evaluate the situation on the ground and take the right steps for continuity of operations and safety and security of their personnel and their families as necessary. Bryan Strawser: We believe that cybersecurity will continue to be a major focus and a major area of concern by chief executive officers of organizations and by directors and others who lead nonprofit organizations. We don't believe that the cyber threat is going to be any less in the years to come. It will continue to be a significant area of focus. It will continue to have a significant reputational impact for organizations that suffer a state of breach or cybersecurity incidents, as the result of the lack of trust that goes along with that. We don't see this threat diminishing. In fact, we think it will continue to be one of the biggest challenges facing organizations. Bryan Strawser: Back in 2018, the beginning of 2018 as we forecast the top global risks for the calendar year 2018, there were three technologies that we saw as being on the rise that we believe will continue to rise in importance and focus in 2020, and those are automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Automation in that finding ways for machines or computers to automate work that's currently being done by humans. I can't tell you the number of areas in our business alone where automation has come into play in an intelligent manner, a rules-based manner, and then moving more towards an artificial intelligence type of situation. And robotics is similar, that robotics will continue to, in some cases replace work that is being done by humans. Bryan Strawser: I think these three areas of technology, automation, robotics, and AI, all are ones that companies and individuals should be monitoring. Companies from the standpoint of these are areas where they might gain efficiency and improve productivity, but also that by becoming more reliant upon technologies, the potential disruption can increase. And from a personal or professional standpoint, if you're a worker who is in one of the fields that could be most heavily impacted by automation and artificial intelligence, that you're thinking about how this might have an impact on you, and that you're thinking about how to adjust your skills and gain new skills now rather than the two or three years down the road before this may have a bigger impact in your industry. Bryan Strawser: I think just a personal example, one thing that I've seen this year as I've talked with clients, and I've toured sites, and I've gone to trade shows, and I've talked to the leaders in these areas, seeing where security robotics has evolved over the last couple of years from say five years ago where I first saw an autonomous security robot that was patrolling a single-story building at the ASIS Global Security Exchange Show in Chicago back in September, I saw my first robot that could navigate between floors, that was tied to a centralized global security operations center where they can interact with acumen via the robot, where it could access your access card data, it could do facial recognition, it could recognize what was happening around it, it could create different effects based upon the rules that it was given or programmed or learned over time. These are all fascinating increases in technology, but again, it poses rest for both individuals and companies. Bryan Strawser: And then just lastly, that we expect to global uncertainty to continue. We expect that it will be more risky, so to speak. There'll be more risk in your operations in 2020 than there were in 2019. We don't believe that that will continue. We don't believe that will decline anytime soon. From our standpoint, we live in highly uncertain times. The rule sets that once governed how the world interacts have changed before our very eyes this year, and as we've said before, remain very unsettled, they remain very unsettled these rule sets. Bryan Strawser: Companies that wish to continue their success in the year ahead are going to take the right actions to ensure their resilience against disruption. We should have a clear-eyed view of the threats and risks around us. Companies should continue to invest in their robust crisis management capability and ensure that they have well-practiced plans that can be implemented when the critical moment is upon their organization. Bryan Strawser: Again, this is our final episode for 2019. We wish you great luck and much success in the year ahead. Thanks for listening.  

In this week's episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser discusses the goals of a crisis management framework & process at your organization. Topics discussed include crisis management, frameworks, crisis teams, crisis communications, social media, reputation management, business continuity, and long-term recovery efforts. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Blog Post: What is the goal of crisis management? Blog Post: What is Crisis Management? Blog Post: An Introduction to Crisis Management Blog Post: Making Decisions in the Midst of a Crisis Episode #4: The Crisis Team Episode #23: Crisis Management is not a Pickup Game Episode #38: How do you make a plan for that which you have not foreseen? //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the managing uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath and I'm flying solo today. I'm recording this the last full week of the year, just after Christmas 2019. And the office is quite quiet today, which is a good time to do some creative work, but I want to talk a little bit about the goal of crisis management or what we're really trying to get at when we talk about crisis management processes and frameworks. Really what are we trying to go after when it comes to crisis management? Bryan Strawser: As we think about crisis management, I think it's important to ponder and understand the fact that a business can experience many different types of crises during the life cycle, the course of business that they're engaged in. Those can range from data breaches to natural disasters, to violent attacks, to executive misconduct and everything that's kind of in-between there. Bryan Strawser: The goal of crisis management as we think about it is to have a system in place to effectively address the coordinated response, the resources, internal and external communication requirements during and after the negative situation. And in fact, I would even argue that we're really trying to do this before, from a preparedness standpoint, before the boom or as Juliette Kayyem, from Harvard, likes to say left of boom. That we have this opportunity to prepare these things before the boom happens, before the critical moments. Bryan Strawser: How you accomplish these tasks as an organization will impact your organization's reputation and your ability to recover your business operations. Let's talk a little bit about just potential crisis situations. We would argue here at Bryghtpath that your crisis planning is based upon challenges, reasonable challenges, that we think your company might face. And that you should try to identify those events that are most likely to happen in order to develop an appropriate response in advance. Again, a left of boom preparedness activity. Bryan Strawser: All businesses, for example, are at risk of data breaches. The severity might be different depending upon what your particular industry is. Customer service problems, a loss of competitive advantage. There are also other risks that are inherent to specific types of businesses, manufacturing, retail service focus businesses. So we would argue that you should review your current business practices, your areas of focus, your past problems and disruptions and work to identify issues that could severely damage your organization and then make sure that you have a plan in place to address them. Keeping in mind that you may need to take some different steps or different protocols to address various situations. Bryan Strawser: Behind all of this, we look for a coordinated response. We look for a consistent crisis management framework that outlines how you will make decisions and how you will communicate the results of those decisions from your organization. Your biggest enemy during a crisis is confusion. If your team, if your leaders, do not have a clear plan of leadership and action, then mistakes can be made that will just exasperate the situation. Bryan Strawser:: So in our framework, we want to make sure that we're identifying who will be responsible for what actions and then make sure that we understand how we're going to communicate the results of those actions both internally and externally as appropriate. There's a lot of ways to set up a crisis management team and we've talked about those in other episodes of our podcast. But as you think about roles and responsibilities, here's a couple of assignments that you should consider. Bryan Strawser: You want an immediate response team when there are physical injuries or a fatality, particularly if you're in a manufacturing environment, it's kind of like your emergency response team that's at the impacted location. You might even have medical personnel, maybe you're a college or university and so you may have EMTs, or paramedics, or even emergency physicians who might respond. But what is that emergency response team, that immediate response team that needs to happen? Bryan Strawser: We want to make sure that we have defined internal communication liaisons who can collect and disseminate accurate information across the organization as well as necessary updates to those in leadership positions. But this person, or persons, is really focused on how do I tell the team the business writ large, what's going on? The external communication liaison, who is responsible for managing your interactions with the media. They're monitoring and managing your social media exchanges. They're making sure that you have a crafted and clear unified statement that you're presenting as a company externally during your disruption. Bryan Strawser: And then you may have a post-crisis team that's different than your crisis management team. Your crisis management team is managing those day to day, hour by hour, minute by minute decisions that need to be made. But you want to have a post-crisis team who is really focused on managing the recovery, the long term recovery, of what's going on within the organization. They manage the ongoing crisis management activities that could go on for weeks or months until everything is resolved. They would really be focused on the issues raised by the incident, illegal legal, health, safety, and marketing challenges. The goal of these assignments and the goal of your crisis management framework is to be prepared to be able to respond quickly and respond effectively with this coordinated effort in place. Bryan Strawser: From a resource standpoint during a crisis, you don't want your team to be scrambling for the necessary resources to resolve the problem. Instead, you want to make sure that you have plans in place for these specific scenarios that will allow your company to continue its operations despite the crisis. For example, if your building is leveled by a tornado, or there's a vendor who no longer provides a key component or service, you want to make sure that you have resource options laid out so that you can minimize the longterm effects that the crisis will have on your business. So these are resources you want to identify and have in place in advance. Bryan Strawser: The next big category is crisis communications, and this is one that's always a challenge when we think about the goals of crisis management and it's one that really is exasperated and made much more difficult by the presidents and use of social media. But that's the world we live in. So we have to be able to work with that hand that has been dealt with. So as we think about how do the goals for crisis communications, how does that line up with our overall goals here for crisis management? Well, we want to make sure that communication internally and externally is being published by your internal and external communication liaisons or individuals from your communications teams that have that authority. Because we want to make sure we're sending a very clear, consistent message. We don't want to see a mixed message or any sharing of gossip or anything like that. We want a single source of truth coming out of your crisis management team and being published internally and externally as appropriate. Bryan Strawser: We want to make sure that your message here reflects the values of your organization and is disseminated through the right media and social media challenges. We want to make sure you're using the right resources. I know for many of you that might be listening to this episode of the podcast, you might not have a crisis communications team internally. Don't hesitate to contact an organization that can help you with those services in your critical moments. In fact, I would argue that companies have really any size should have an organization that has crisis communications capability on retainer, or available. The access is guaranteed through some contractual mechanism. Bryan Strawser: When we think about the internal communication aspects of crisis communications, internal comms is the one that I think often gets ignored or minimized. But it is in my mind, vital to the success of your communication processes. Internal communication is critical because it gives your employees, your team, your peers, your leaders, accurate information. It relieves their anxiety and stress. It reinforces your corporate policies about social media and other authorized communications. It's your way of disseminating the corporate message of the crisis and it involves employees who are really serving as ambassadors of your organization and it turns them into a crisis management asset. Bryan Strawser: Your internal crisis communications begins with your crisis management plan. It should be disseminated to staff as appropriate throughout orientation and training and et cetera, and there should be ongoing training to ensure that your staff understands the process before an event occurs. We want to make sure that all of your employees understand what's expected of them in a crisis and what they can expect from the company in terms of communication, leadership and crisis management decision making. Bryan Strawser: The other side of the crisis communications puzzle is external communication. Whether you're having disruption to your manufacturing production or you've got an insider trading investigation that has ensnared one of your executives, you will likely have crisis situations where you have to share information publicly. You're going to do that through the media and social media. Bryan Strawser: Reputation management, is at the heart of external crisis communications. So here are some things, some guidelines to think about as you think about communicating externally. You want to make sure that you're responding thoughtfully rather than reacting emotionally to what's going on. You should identify one spokesperson for the event. An executive or a local business leader is a better choice than a communication professional because they're from the business. They're in the line of management of where the disruption is happening, they're the right person to be the face of what's going on. Particularly if this is a facility that is, like a branch facility or manufacturing facility. You want the local leader to be front and center for this. Make sure that you have an immediate response communication team that's identified, or a crisis communications team that's identified so that when this happens you're able to activate them to work on the messaging aspects. Bryan Strawser: You should have already identified your communication channels to inform your stakeholders. Think about key clients, key influencers, corporate sponsors, clients in that area, people that you want to notify of the crisis and its potential impact. And then put a good plan in place in terms of a cadence of updates as the situation evolves and do this unless your legal counsel tells you that you shouldn't be providing updates, you should be providing regular updates both internally and externally. External communication often, almost always, thought about and considered and a part of the plan, but it is one of the most challenging aspects of the crisis management process. So again, don't be afraid to use an outside resource to help you develop and manage these situations. Bryan Strawser: To summarize, successful crisis management from our mind begins with identifying possible disruptions that can occur and then creating a solid approach to preparedness, response, recovery, sitting on top of a foundation of having the right resources and the right communication plans. Your goal as a business leader is to be effective in managing all aspects of this crisis, to ensure the longterm success of your business and using experts where necessary as resources to develop, implement, and execute your plan in a crisis. Bryan Strawser: If we can help you in any way, our experts here at Bryghtpath have built, implemented, and managed the crisis management processes used by many fortune 100 firms, as well as small to medium enterprises around the globe. I'd love to talk with you about how you can leverage our experiences and knowledge to improve your organization's resilience. Bryan Strawser: Drop us a note at bryghtpath.com/contact or give us a call at (612) 235-6435 we'd love to help. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast. We'll be back next week with our final episode for 2019. Thanks for listening.

In this edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser submits himself to questioning from Bryghtpath Consultant Bray Wheeler on the topic of how to make the case to leadership to gain new resources, headcount, finances, or approval for a project. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Episode #21: I hope you dance Episode #81: When to bring in a consultant and use them effectively Blog Post: How to sell your business continuity program to senior executives //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Brian Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, consultant here at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: We're going to do something a little different today. We're going to... Well, I think to frame this up, Bray is essentially going to interview me about making the case to leadership, a topic that we've explored elsewhere but we haven't really talked about too much, you know, here on the podcast. Bryan Strawser: We've had this idea for this episode sitting around in the hopper for quite some time, for a year, but it really comes from my experience growing into being a senior leader at my previous employer and getting to that place where I was the subject matter expert and the leader of the team, and having to go to leadership and often going to business leadership above my direct boss in order to make the case for things you wanted to do in the process of obtaining everything from budgets, expense, and travel, and resources, to headcount, to capital dollars for software or for facilities and emergency operation centers and that kind of thing. Bryan Strawser: So I don't know the questions. Bray Wheeler: It's a mystery. Bryan Strawser: Bray has got some role written here that I can see, and we're just going to have an open conversation around these. I'll attempt to answer, and I'm sure Bray will have some color commentary along the way. Bray Wheeler: Let's do it. Bryan Strawser: Let's do it. Bray Wheeler: So yeah, I just have kind of some basic questions and they're a little bit open-ended, and kind of let you riff, and I can ask some follow-ups here. But really in terms of making the case to leadership, how is that something that's... You know, just at the start here, how do you prepare yourself for that? Bray Wheeler: You've been asked to go present on X topic. Does it make a difference in terms of what the topic is and how you prepare, or just generally how are you thinking about it? How are you preparing to go have that conversation, that presentation? Bryan Strawser: I think the context matters a little bit. I mean certainly at our last employer where we worked together prior to Bryghtpath there were formal processes in presenting to leadership about things. There was a capital expenditure committee that if you were going to ask for money over X dollars out of capital, even though your budget had already been approved you had to go in and present the request, and they were very formal. Bryan Strawser: It had to be in a certain format. They were originally on big display boards and they eventually went to PowerPoint, but you literally had like three minutes typically to make this case. Now what that meant was the real meetings were the meetings before the meeting with all the members of the expenditure committee to make sure that they had a chance to weigh in, so you're kind of time lining this stuff out, 30, 60, 45 days to get there. Bryan Strawser: So setting the formal thing aside, the real decisions were made in small group meetings or one-on-one meetings. It would be my boss and I, but it was my meeting. Like he was there... He or she was there to deal with certain things, but like it was my presentation to that senior leader. Bryan Strawser: I always kind of thought of this... And I learned this from Rob [Borsch 00:03:22], who I worked for several years. I tried to figure out like what was the catch in there that went along with whatever it was that I was about to do, the thing that would stick with them, right? Bryan Strawser: So, you know, one of the projects I led in my former life was this just massive, and I mean massive, retrofit of video surveillance equipment from VCRs in the original DVR state. I'm not kidding, VCRs in some stages to IP based video that used, you know, [inaudible] parts, commercial off the shelf systems cobbled together, so to speak, into this video surveillance system. Bryan Strawser: We definitely had to have a narrative that went along with that, because this was a big spend. This was board-level spend to get the project approved and then the year-over-year spend. Bryan Strawser: So we really spent a lot of time thinking about like what's the narrative that we want to tell around this and how do we do our due diligence around... Like what are the questions that we were going to... We started to anticipate the questions we were going to get and how do we make sure we have a good, logical, detail around how we were going to deal with those questions. Bryan Strawser: There were always questions about the business case. There were always questions about why did you pick these stores versus all stores, and we had to deal with... In some cases, you know, in a corporate leadership team, an executive team that reports to the CEO, there's usually a pretty good divergence of opinions on not necessarily the vision, but about how to do things and how do you get there. Bryan Strawser: In some cases, we had folks who were like well you should just retrofit everything to the new system. We were like yeah, I mean but you're not going to give us $450 million, or whatever. I mean it was some absurd amount of money, but like here's the logic we got to this. Bryan Strawser: You tried to present the material in a way that you got questions that you expected versus like well I don't understand why you picked these stores versus these stores. We could answer that by explaining the methodology, but when somebody started nitpicking, I mean that would be bad. You're off the topic of like I need the money to do this. Here's the business case. Bryan Strawser: I think the other thing related to this that's important to consider is it's rare to have a profit generating project out of the support function like corporate security, which was our team, global security at the time. Bryan Strawser: It's hard to bring a project forward and say hey, we're going to make money on this, so you really had to think about the qualitative business case and make sure that those things were tied to the company's strategic objectives. Like keeping people safe and having a retail environment where women were comfortable shopping at night were core parts of what our mission was because it tied directly to the guest base, the customer base of the company. Bryan Strawser: So we could emphasize those things because we knew that they would resonate as opposed to don't look over here where this project loses $40 million in net present value because it doesn't generate any cash flow. It's just a spend. Bryan Strawser: That's a pretty broad answer to your question, but that's what we went after, like what's the narrative, what questions did we think we were going to get, how do we make sure the drafts are crafted material to head off those questions or address head-on, what was the business case, quantitative and qualitative. Bray Wheeler: So kind of around that, kind of drilling into kind of those components of that, what would you say... What's the most effected elements kind of within that? So taking like the narrative itself, kind of as you're laying it out what are those kind of like key pieces in that narrative portion, or like the key moments of your presentation? What do you typically kind of default to as you're kind of setting it up or you're making the case? Bryan Strawser: I mean I tried to craft the narrative in a way that it was fricking obvious as possible that we needed to do this thing. If that meant we had to have... Sometimes we had data that backed up the position, sometimes we didn't. I really aimed to have like what's an interesting narrative to address here. That narrative needs to connect to the company's strategic objectives, and then that we made the case just in a very strong manner to get us the things that we needed. Bryan Strawser: I think for example... I was trying to think of public-facing things I could talk about. For example, one of the things at our former employer that rolled out about, well more than 10 years ago now, were vehicles for parking lot patrol. I think it was initially Segway and then later the T3 motion vehicles. Bryan Strawser: You could go... I mean I'm not telling you any trade secret here. They're out there. There was press when the company did it. The segue project was actually... It got a lot of criticism at first because people were like you're just buying some toys. Yeah, we're not. Like, look at the data. Let me show you data behind this because honestly, I didn't believe it at first, that this was going to work. It was another one of my boss' crazy ideas that had come up. But you know what? It did work. So here's the structured analysis that we did and here's the drop in parking lot crime that occurred because of this. Bryan Strawser: Now the narrative was about here's the issue with parking lot crime. Here's the perception of customers based upon a survey from a team... There was a research team that did that kind of thing. Here's what our customers tell us is important to them. Safety was like the number two thing on choosing where to shop. Here's what we're going to do to drive down the parking lot crime rate. Bryan Strawser: Essentially it wasn't crime that occurred in the stores. Crime was occurring in the parking lots. So here's how we were going to address this. And look, we piloted this in 40 some stores and here are the results we had, which the results were awesome. Actually, after the first year, our results in the actual deployment were better than our pilot. Bryan Strawser: So it kind of... I mean it led them to a place that just... It was obvious that we should do this. The other thing too is I would say just where it's possible just take advantage of the fact if you're working on something cool that you find some cool ways to share that. Honestly, part of what sold this, we took executives for a segue ride. Bray Wheeler: Really? Bryan Strawser: Yeah. I mean we took them on a... We brought the segue up to one of the floors where the execs were at and we let them ride it around. So here's the CEO riding a segue going, "That's like the coolest thing I've ever done." Great. I'm about to ask you for $1.4 million to buy more, or whatever. I don't remember what the numbers were. So look for ways to do that. Bray Wheeler: Almost make it interactive? Bryan Strawser: Make it interactive. Make it fun. But again, you got to tailor this to your- Bray Wheeler: The audience? Bryan Strawser: The audience. Right. Some folks are not into that kind of thing. Bray Wheeler: So in terms of... So say you're... You talked a little bit about kind of the pre-meetings, but then going into the kind of official meeting where say the case you're making doesn't allow for kind of the pre-meetings. How do you condense, or what are kind of the steps in terms of kind of taking that allotted time that you have... Say you have three minutes to make your case. What are you kind of shooting for in those three minutes? Bray Wheeler: Sitting around kind of that narrative in the scripting of how you're making that case, but that becomes a factor for folks in terms of I have this really great story to tell. I can't possibly tell you that in three minutes. Like how do you get it down to that three minutes to five minutes, whatever it is? Bryan Strawser: One of my former mentors who still works in the field at a different organization told me once that when you're talking to folks at this level there are just three things to remember, be good, be brief, be gone. Bryan Strawser: So three to five minutes I think to ask for capital was pretty much in the amount... Is what I recall from my time there. There's a little bit of formality at the beginning. We're requesting blah, blah, blah, blah for whatever, fully funded within our capital budget. Bryan Strawser: Then I would just switch from there to my narrative. My narrative is I'm going to say about a minute, 45 to 60 seconds on the narrative, like I've got a story to tell. I want to paint a vision or paint the problem very clearly. Here's the solution. Here's what we've seen from the tests or the pilot, or here's what it's going to look like, or whatever the answer is to that, and then here are the benefits. Bryan Strawser: Of course they're going to have a financial analysis in front of them which might paint an ugly picture. Walkthrough that briefly, or in some cases, Finance came with us and they addressed the finance questions on like on our big stuff. If you had brought the analyst along that was better in trying to explain why was the cash flow low. Well, I don't know. I'm not- Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Let the money guy talk money. Bryan Strawser: This was before I went to business school, so I was a little better at this after getting through accounting and finance classes at the grad level. Bryan Strawser: Then just the wrap-up, I would try to just end early and have questions, and there are always... There were almost always questions. Bray Wheeler: What kind of questions did you typically see? What was kind of the most frequent flyer, and then what was kind of the craziest questions? Bryan Strawser: Yeah. I mean sometimes there were some clarifying questions like so this is for 300 stores? Yes, and the 300 stores are on page four of this tab or whatever. There was always a list of the stores that were impacted or other facilities. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. Sometimes they would ask if so-and-so had seen this, like have you worked through... Yes. Have you done this? Yes. I led the design team for a while and we did a lot of stuff with the folks that built and designed, the architects and the planners. They're in the room because most of what goes on here were new store approval and remodel approval. Bryan Strawser: When they were like have you spoken with... Or what is the planning team say, I would just turn to them because they're in the room. Like your the SVP for architecture, and he would... I mean clearly if he supported it is why we were there. If he didn't, we never would have made it this far. So yeah, he would get up and [crosstalk] blah, blah, blah, blah. Bryan Strawser: A good example was security cameras on the outside of stores, right? This company was very particular about the prototype and the look and feel of a facility, and that was one of the things that architecture and planning SVP asked me to fix when I came into that role 13 years ago. It's like we built these beautiful buildings and then you hang these damn cameras on there. Bryan Strawser: So we found a way to do this better, right, and then we took it forward for retrofits or whatever. That question came up and I just gave it to him and he goes, "Well, yeah, architecturally we didn't like it, so we've worked with the [inaudible] team to come up with a better solution and this is it, and we fully support it." It doesn't get any better than that. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: I have seen... I mean, unfortunately, you know, feedback at that level, it's just very direct. Sometimes we took things in there and we had to bring them back because somebody didn't like something, and they don't like to have conflict amongst each other in the room. Bryan Strawser: Usually the conflict was financial related, so we'd have to go back and then go back to the CFO and... Mind you, we've done that once. Bray Wheeler: Sure. Bryan Strawser: But we'd always come out with a better effort I think in the end because the questions were almost always like... They were pretty valid about what to do. Bryan Strawser: This never happened to me, but I was witness to a number of individuals who just got destroyed in there, I would say because they either didn't anticipate the questions that they were going to get and therefore didn't have very good answers, or at least didn't anticipate some of the themes of the questioning, and then just sometimes stuff comes in that's just not... It's just a bad idea and it doesn't fit with the corporate objectives, but somehow it gets up to we're going to go to this meeting and just get... It was ugly. Bryan Strawser: My biggest effort that I ever took in there, the person in front of us... Because you're in the room for the two presentations in front of you, like in the next at-bat circle, in the on-deck or whatever, and you would... You'd watch the two in front of you, and the person in front of us just got pummeled over something and it just... It was a bad idea and I'm not sure why they got that far, but it got tore up, and then like, "Okay, Bryan Strawser you're up," and I'm like oh boy, don't hang any curveballs. Bray Wheeler: Right. That was actually... My next question here was just around... You started to touch on this but in terms of making a case what should be avoided? What are the bad elements? What are bad prep ideas that influence or impact the way that these presentations go? Were there common factors in there? Bryan Strawser: Yeah. I mean there's a couple. One is like what I mentioned earlier. It's don't bring bad ideas forward. You need to have some ways to be able to vet that information. You need to have some ways to vet this information upfront with the trusted partners so that you're not taking anything that's just a bad idea, that's kind of dumb, forward to the group. Bryan Strawser: You can't rely upon... I saw someone once make an argument that we needed to do something because they were professionally certified in the field and this is what we should do. I was sitting in the room as somebody who also had the same professional certification and thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. Bryan Strawser: So just because... Don't make that argument to executives. It will not resonate. You need to do this because I have my certified business professional certification. No, they will not care one iota. To me, those were table stakes to play in this field anyway. That doesn't make you necessarily better than another person or have better ideas. Bryan Strawser: So those are things I think you want to avoid. You really have to be able to just get to the point and show that you've done your homework, you understand the issue, that you're putting forward the best possible solution, that you've anticipated these questions about scope, scale, severity, spend. Can you narrow it down? Can you do more? All these things have come up to me in the approval conversation about let's do all stores, let's do no stores, let's cut this by half. You need to be able to have that discussion, but you also need to know when you've lost the point and just back off and go somewhere else. Bryan Strawser: I think good practice for this honestly is listening to US Supreme Court arguments because attorneys before the Supreme Court get 15 to 30 minutes to make their case, and they get about a minute into that before the Justices just start in. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: Right? And the questions are like... And the questions are hard. I think that's good practice for the kind of thinking about what you're going to have to do in these conversations. Bray Wheeler: How that narrative works? Bryan Strawser: Right. Bray Wheeler: How do you know... So going back to your kind of the bad idea point, how do you know what's a bad idea, given that if I'm presenting a case to you as leaders and I think this is the greatest thing I've ever thought of, how am I warning myself that it's a bad idea? What are those steps in there that should be taken for sure kind of practically for faults? Bryan Strawser: I think it is where you need good feedback partners. You need to make sure that you're working with a good leader that can guide you on these things, serve as a partner who's been down this road before. I think having peers or others that have had to do this and have them give you thoughts and ideas about what has and has not worked for them. You need someone that is willing to look at and talk through your idea and give you insight and input on where should you go with this. I think that's helpful. Bryan Strawser: I had a mixed bag there. I always had leaders who were very good at this particular topic. When I was a manager, my directors were really good at this. When I was the director, my chief security officer and the VPE was really good at this, although he would never go and do it himself. We always had to go and ask for capital, and that's fine. Sometimes he was in the room and sometimes he was like, "Have fun. Let me know how it goes." Bryan Strawser: But I think you need those folks just for your general professional development, but I think those are good folks to bounce things off of to make sure you're not just coming forward with a really dumb idea. Bray Wheeler: Do you have to go seek out like a really tough critic in some cases, or not always, or not necessarily? Bryan Strawser: I think you should have... I don't know if you necessarily need a tough critic, but I think you need to find somebody that's willing, to be honest with you about feedback. I had a former boss that I loved working for, but he was very challenging. Bryan Strawser: I like that from the standpoint that he thought I wasn't so good at things I thought I was good at, so it made me better, right? Bray Wheeler: Sure. Bryan Strawser: He would shy away from... I always went to him for advice when I wasn't working for him anymore. I never really went to him for advice when I was reporting to him. But I would go to him and we'd laugh and we'd kind of talk through something and he would be like, "Okay, well since you asked for my advice let me be honest with you," and then I would just kind of pucker. Then, "I think you're wrong and here's how I think you should think about doing this." So I found that helpful. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Kind of the last question, if you were giving the advice to somebody walking in the room with you're being that kind of honest feedback partner, what... I know you've mentioned kind of be good, be quick, be out. What advice would you give somebody walking into that room or setting up that presentation to go forward, just kind of baseline advice? Bryan Strawser: Well, one is I would repeat that advice, in this conversation you need to be good, be brief, be gone. If they're going to ask questions, they're going to ask. Give them some time to process and do so. Bryan Strawser: The second... Okay, some of this is cultural to your organization too, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt, but if you bring material, the material is an appendix to what you're going to have to say. If the material just reflects what you're saying there's no need for the meeting, you just give it to them. Bryan Strawser: I hated meeting where somebody handed me something and if I read that I knew the whole story and then there was no point in the conversation happening. I know that sounds kind of dickish, but I think it's true. If you don't have a lot of time in your day to do stuff, then that's going to come up like that. Bryan Strawser: I think you really want to think about how you're going to use the time. If you've got 30 minutes you should plan on talking for 10 or 15, and get through the one or two big things that you need to get out of that conversation. Have a leave behind in order to explain that. Bryan Strawser: But really think about the material that you're bringing. If it's a widget, bring a picture of the widget, or bring the widget for them to play with, right, and talk through the what and the why and how is this important. I would think of it in that way. Bryan Strawser: Otherwise, I think we've covered some of the other preparations, right? I mean think about your narrative and the questions you're going to get and that kind of thing. Bray Wheeler: So last question... You know, I promise- Bryan Strawser: The last, last question. Bray Wheeler: ... the last, last question. Does it make a difference in terms of what the topic of the presentation is in terms of how you're setting that up? We've talked a lot about kind of capital and business expense and kind of making the business case, but what if it's something issue related, incident related, reputationally related like it's an actual event or incident that's gone on or something that is going on or set to occur? Bray Wheeler: Does it make a difference in terms of how you're kind of teeing up that conversation or is it really kind of the same principles as making the other case, you just have to... You're customizing that narrative in a different fashion? Bryan Strawser: I think it does change the conversation a little bit in terms of what becomes important. I had a lot of discussions with senior leaders about things that have happened. A lesson that I learned early on is that you should assume they don't know anything about the incident in the context around the incident and the situation around the incident, so you need to be prepared to share what's pertinent and then let them ask questions about that. Bray Wheeler: Is that even if they've been included on communication or- Bryan Strawser: I never trusted anyone else's... To be clear, since you've worked for me, I trusted people's communication on my team because I knew what the command center was publishing. I didn't trust any other person's conversation, because I don't know if they've given them the context that as the crisis leader I thought they needed to know. Bray Wheeler: Sure. Bryan Strawser: So I would want to make sure that they knew and had the context that I thought was important. And you know what? If they know it, they're just going to cut me off, then that's fine. I can deal with that. I'll set my ego aside and take that for what it is and go on, but I think it's tough to put them in a position where they need to make decisions if they don't have what you think is the strategic context of what's going on. Bryan Strawser: A good example of this is... This is the first time that he had done this, but the CEO called me in the morning Hurricane Sandy made landfall. I was in an off-site leadership meeting and he hadn't gotten the update that he was expecting, which was kind of miscommunication on our part, but he started asking some questions about Sandy and the impact and what we didn't know. Bryan Strawser: We didn't know the answer to any of his questions because the thing had just made landfall in the early morning hours and we weren't going to get access to the locations for several more hours, like till after lunchtime or so in Minnesota. Bryan Strawser: So I was just very clear with him about here's where the storm is at and here's kind of the stage we're at and here's when we're going to know something, which is later today, and we may not have a very good picture until tomorrow because there's going to be some areas like... Which it turned out to be true, New York City, New Jersey, and Long Island, where we're probably not going to get access to the stores until tomorrow. Bryan Strawser: We might have done... I think we did an overflight, we did some [inaudible] coverage to get some ideas, but you don't know until you get in and start looking around. Bryan Strawser: I was just very clear with him about like here's the context that I think you need to know right now. Here's where it's at. Here's who we're working with. You made it clear that you want to know more, so we'll communicate with you more frequently about what's going on and you can call me at any time. If he had talked to any other leader in the organization, I don't think he would have gotten that context, but because I was the crisis leader I was able to kind of explain that. Bryan Strawser: So that context in the course of an incident, that's important to know, and I would start off with the assumption that they don't know anything about that. Bray Wheeler: Is there anything in terms of, thinking about the incident, that you want... You kind of talked about offering up kind of call me anytime, here's the next update. Is there anything else that you always like to leave that leader or leaders with kind of in those conversations as you're making the case, like kind of your final thought or offering off that conversation? Is there anything additional that is important to kind of leave with them? Bryan Strawser: I think it depends on the context. The closure I always left leaders with on a crisis was if you have questions that our normal communication isn't answering please call me or call the command center or call my boss to get that context. It's important to me that you have a few views on what's going on. Bryan Strawser: But if I was wrapping up a conversation about something I was asking for, I would probably... I would wrap that up with an additional ask around here's... You know, again I want to reiterate here's why I think this is the right thing to do, and if you have questions then I would love the opportunity to answer those or something like that. Bray Wheeler: Kind of a final summary? Bryan Strawser: Kind of your final summary, your final ask. The sales language is you're supposed to ask three times for the thing, so ask for the sale. That's kind of where I always got to at the end of those. Bray Wheeler: Awesome. Those are all the questions I had. That covered it. Thank you. Bryan Strawser: That was fun, except for not knowing the questions. Bray Wheeler: Yeah, and my final three questions. Bryan Strawser: That's it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty podcast. Tune in next week for another new episode. Thanks for listening.

In this edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser submits himself to questioning from Bryghtpath Consultant Bray Wheeler on the topic of how to make the case to leadership to gain new resources, headcount, finances, or approval for a project. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Episode #21: I hope you dance Episode #81: When to bring in a consultant and use them effectively Blog Post: How to sell your business continuity program to senior executives Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Brian Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, consultant here at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: We’re going to do something a little different today. We’re going to… Well, I think to frame this up, Bray is essentially going to interview me about making the case to leadership, a topic that we’ve explored elsewhere but we haven’t really talked about too much, you know, here on the podcast. Bryan Strawser: We’ve had this idea for this episode sitting around in the hopper for quite some time, for a year, but it really comes from my experience growing into being a senior leader at my previous employer and getting to that place where I was the subject matter expert and the leader of the team, and having to go to leadership and often going to business leadership above my direct boss in order to make the case for things you wanted to do in the process of obtaining everything from budgets, expense, and travel, and resources, to headcount, to capital dollars for software or for facilities and emergency operation centers and that kind of thing. Bryan Strawser: So I don’t know the questions. Bray Wheeler: It’s a mystery. Bryan Strawser: Bray has got some role written here that I can see, and we’re just going to have an open conversation around these. I’ll attempt to answer, and I’m sure Bray will have some color commentary along the way. Bray Wheeler: Let’s do it. Bryan Strawser: Let’s do it. Bray Wheeler: So yeah, I just have kind of some basic questions and they’re a little bit open-ended, and kind of let you riff, and I can ask some follow-ups here. But really in terms of making the case to leadership, how is that something that’s… You know, just at the start here, how do you prepare yourself for that? Bray Wheeler: You’ve been asked to go present on X topic. Does it make a difference in terms of what the topic is and how you prepare, or just generally how are you thinking about it? How are you preparing to go have that conversation, that presentation? Bryan Strawser: I think the context matters a little bit. I mean certainly at our last employer where we worked together prior to Bryghtpath there were formal processes in presenting to leadership abou

In this week's edition of the BryghtCast Weekly Podcast, Bray Wheeler, Consultant, and Bryan Strawser, Principal and Chief Executive at Bryghtpath discuss three recent events and their potential impact on private sector organizations.   Topics discussed include: NY Times:  Leaders death will damage ISIS but not destroy it War on the Rocks:  Don't kill the Caliph! The Islamic State and the pitfalls of leadership decapitation BBC:  Johnson/EU agree to Brexit extension NBC News:  California wildfires force nearly 200,000 to evacuate NY Times:  Live update on California wildfires CalFire:  Live incident map Episode Transcript Bray Wheeler: Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of BryghtCast for the week of October 28th, 2019. I'm Bray Wheeler, consultant here at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: And it's Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: So, this week, we have a few topics to talk about, the one being probably the most dominance in the news is the death of ISIS leader Al Baghdadi. Bryan Strawser: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. [crosstalk 00:00:46]. Bray Wheeler: Abu Bakr. He is no longer with us, according to the US government. Over the weekend, the US conducted a raid on the compound that they located him at and he was... According to reports, self-detonated a suicide vest after he was cornered by US special forces. Bryan Strawser: In a tunnel. In a dead-end tunnel. Bray Wheeler: In a dead-end tunnel, apparently. Unfortunately, it sounds like he took three of his children with him. However, the US was able to capture a lot of Intel out of that rate, it sounds like, according to the president who gave kind of an at-length kind of update on what had transpired over the weekend, revealing probably a little bit too much information. But needless to say, kind of around the death of ISIS's leader, there is no clear replacement. Sounds like we've also struck a couple of other targets, one being the heir apparent and the other being their primary spokesperson. Bryan Strawser: Both of whom were apparently killed this morning, US time. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: In separate actions. I think one of those I saw was perhaps done by Kurdish forces with US special operations' assistance. Definitely wound appears to have been a special operation by US military forces. I mean, this is a huge deal. I know there's been some that have been equating this to the Bin Laden raid, and I would not put it on that level because Bin Laden was someone who everyone knew in the world and was responsible for thousands of deaths here in the United States. And I don't want to downplay the role of the ISIS leader, but I don't think most people outside of this particular world that we live in knew who al-Baghdadi was. They probably just knew that there was a leader for ISIS. Bryan Strawser: I remember when this Saturday evening, not long before I was going to bed in the 9:00, 10:00 range, I was looking at Twitter and I saw the first tweet from someone claiming that we had captured al-Baghdadi, which would have been a fascinating intelligence grab, but I don't think this mission was aimed at capturing al-Baghdadi any more than the Neptune Spear operation was aimed to capture Osama bin Laden. The intent was to kill him as a legitimate target of the United States government, but it quickly broke out to, within a few hours, I think even credible folks who have been studying ISIS and the Syria issues for quite some time were coming around to it appears that we have killed al-Baghdadi. of course, there was no official confirmation until the president spoke at about 9:15 Eastern on Sunday morning from that. Bryan Strawser: There's a number of interesting things here we should unpack related to this, I think, briefly. The president stated that we had obtained information and intelligence from a number of sources and that we had the cooperation of a number of countries, and he specifically mentions Syria, Turkey, the Russians, and the Kurds as cooperating or not interfering with the operation during his press conference, then he answered several questions around that as well. Bray Wheeler: Yep. And I think some of the big reveals that kind of caused some consternation with security intelligence folks was, one, the question of airspace and our use of Russian airspace, Syrian airspace, Turkish airspace, which causes some apprehension in terms of revealing probably a little bit too much around how we're able to kind of get in, get out a little bit of how that process works. Bray Wheeler: I think that unfortunately... His press conference's announcement, unfortunately, revealed kind of too much in terms of operational details that potentially could pose some real significant challenges for kind of future operations, engagements. Certainly, part of that is to kind of protect publicly some of our cooperating partners here in the international community to have them save face a little bit. I think the president took a different approach of just trying to praise those people and kind of thank them for their cooperation, but unfortunately, that's not always very helpful. And so right now, I think it's kind of a mixed bag. Certainly, Bryan, to your point, his death is pretty prominent in terms of ISIS and kind of their future direction. Does it kind of 100% solve the ISIS problem? No, but it certainly leaves them kind of without a captain at the moment, without somewhat of a direction. And kind of to your point, the intent of probably not capturing him is to the benefit of kind of ripple effects of additional attacks and things like that. Certainly, if you know we had apprehended them and were holding him, there probably would've been- Bryan Strawser: Reprisals. Bray Wheeler: Reprisals pretty immediately. Bryan Strawser: There's going to be reprisals anyway, of course. No, I think you're right. I think it's important to look at this in the context of the broader fight on counter-terrorism. One of the things about this particular organization, ISIS as opposed to Al-Qaida is Al-Qaida was a little more decentralized than the way ISIS has operated. Al-Baghdadi has led ISIS since about 2010 or so if I remember correctly. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: There was no real clear successor, although there was a potential heir apparent, a number three, I believe it was, that is who we're claiming was killed this morning. And they had a public spokesperson who was also killed this morning. I think it's likely, although we'll probably never know, that these raids today were driven by intelligence that was captured yesterday. That's kind of a hallmark of modern-day US special forces operations in terms of immediately exploiting intelligence captured from the scene and then just increasing the OPTEMPO of raids that go on from there. Bryan Strawser: I do think it's worth mentioning briefly that there has been some counter-argument around targeting al-Baghdadi. There's an article that we'll link in the show notes from War on the Rocks, the War on the Rocks blog and website, where pretty strong argument not to decapitate ISIS because al-Baghdadi, although clearly involved in the deaths of many US citizens and others, didn't appear to be an overly competent leader for ISIS. They lost all of their territories during the last two years, two and a half years. Bray Wheeler: After pretty strong aggressive gains that were very impressive by kind of any modern standard for a non-governmental military force. Bryan Strawser: Right. I think also worth pointing out here that one other thing that ISIS had going forward it as a terrorist movements, there's a significant amount of ISIS propaganda in teaching that is available on sites like YouTube and other more Jihadi-focused social media channels that would censor that kind of content, and you've had a number of attackers, even here in the United States, who have executed the lone actor attacks and then credited ISIS or credited al-Baghdadi or credited "I learned the tactics and techniques and tools through the ISIS magazine, online magazine" or through these online lectures. Bryan Strawser: So, even without a leader in place, the propaganda lives on, and these attacks, even the ones here in the US, have been... They haven't been centrally commanded and controlled. ISIS just takes credit for it after the details come out that this person who was motivated by ISIS or was trained through ISIS online material. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. ISIS has been pretty quick to kind of claim responsibilities for a lot of different things. Certainly, if the attacker or kind of intelligence or investigative kind of evidence after the fact suggests that they were on ISIS' websites or kind of any mention of them, they're quick to say, "Hey. Yep, we're responsible for that." ISIS is certainly much more tech and social media, and their presence online is much stronger than Al-Qaida's ever was and still is. ISIS, that's kind of one of their hallmarks is how savvy they are on that front. Bray Wheeler: And so certainly losing a couple of their head guys plus spokesman certainly, organizationally, paints a different kind of picture for them, directionally. But in terms of their presence online, it doesn't necessarily change much. I think the one thing too that is kind of significant here too and around that is the... And you kind of touched on this earlier, kind of the difference in kind of recognition of al-Baghdadi compared to Osama bin Laden is his... al-Baghdadi's death is much more significant for the Middle East region than it is, say, in the US or in Europe. He was responsible for several atrocities in that region. And so, most famously, the Jordan fighter pilot who was burned alive in a steel cage and then plastered kind of across the world, awful, awful video. Awful, awful event. But those are the kinds of things that he's been responsible for. Bray Wheeler: So, in terms of kind of a... The first kind of a sigh of relief for the breadth of... I don't want to say joy, but appreciation for what's happening is really in the Middle East region, and the US and Europe are kind of secondary. Now, doesn't mean that that's not going to change or we haven't experienced some of that stuff, San Bernardino kind of being the most probably famous one for folks with an ISIS affiliation to it, but- [ Bryan Strawser: I remember that one well. Bray Wheeler: For the region, his death certainly is appreciated, I think, from several different fronts kind of across that area. Bryan Strawser: So, I think there's a couple of geopolitical implications here. One is that Bray's right. I mean, this is going to have a big impact on the Middle East. There's probably going to be a period of time here where ISIS is going to be in some disarray, at least in terms of their ability to capture land and hold land or hold cities or towns. That was really kind of driven by al-Baghdadi. I think that will be seriously degraded, but I think we should keep in mind that we're probably going to see another day or two of decapitation strikes as the United States and its allies who exploit intel that was gained during the raid. Bryan Strawser: And so I think we'll see more impacts in the days to come or maybe we won't hear about them, but they will happen. But even in doing so, it's not going to stop the lone actor or the decentralized group that's affiliated with ISIS from carrying out attacks. I saw the French National Police went on alert today about potential reprisal attacks in France. That might just be precautionary. That might be because they know something or something was gained. Bray Wheeler: Yeah, or they've been fought... They'd been tracking several cases where they have known cells that are there that they're just preparing for those to activate. Paris and Belgium have also kind of been hit pretty hard from an ISIS standpoint. So, it's not surprising that those, in particular, are kind of standing up their precautionary measures and their alertness levels. Bray Wheeler: So, on that front, so transitioning a little bit too... I don't know if it's happier news or different news is the EU has agreed to extend the Brexit deadline for the United Kingdom moving it to January 31st of 2020. So, they reached that deal here kind of in the last 24 hours. It certainly is a good thing in terms of allowing for a little bit more time to hopefully negotiate an exit that is a little bit cleaner for the United Kingdom and the EU. It throws a little bit of a wrench into Prime Minister Boris Johnson's plans for trying to get the deadline hard and fast and kind of force some of the deals, but really kind of, one, it extends the conversation and kind of the negotiation longer, but at the same time opens up more room for potential kind of exit with a plan. Bray Wheeler: So, as we've talked about last week, the UK kind of approved kind of initially the deal that was struck, but didn't approve kind of the pace at which that was going to be negotiated. So, this certainly gives that buffer of, hey, there's kind of an agreement around the deal. Now, there's a little bit of time to kind of work through that. The other piece of it is the kind of election that Prime Minister Johnson has called for in December will more than likely take place, and the results of that will probably impact the way that the negotiations go. So, there'll probably be a little bit of talk over the next month and a half, but those will probably be more aggressive after the results of that election are kind of held. And right now- Bryan Strawser: Who knows how it's going to go? Bray Wheeler: Who knows how that's going to go? Bryan Strawser: This kind of reminds me of being involved in Minnesota politics and watching the every other year biennium where we try to negotiate a state budget in a divided government because we've had divided government here for almost seven years where, currently, the Republicans control one house, the Democrats control another, and the governor is a Democrat. And you can set whatever deadlines you want. The real action is when the session ends, and now you're screwed because the government's going to shut down if you don't pass a budget. And they tried that this year with all kinds of budget dates and it just didn't... It didn't get anywhere. There was a deal at the end after the session ended. Bryan Strawser: So, I think the extension is probably helpful for the UK. I don't know if that necessarily helps Boris Johnson in the planned December general election, but at least now they're not leaving without a framework in place, which I don't know would have gone well in a number of categories. So, I don't know. I suspect this will be the last extension that the EU is going to be willing to work on, or maybe the EU is kind of like that parable of the guy that's got the death sentence over his head and he tells the King that he's going to teach his horse to talk and the King gives him two years to do it or whatever. And someone's like, "Why did you do that?" And the horse can't talk. And he goes, "Yeah, but a lot can happen in two years. There could be a new King. The horse could talk." Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: Things can happen. There might be a revolution. So, I don't... I mean, I think ultimately, this is probably good. A negotiated exit is a better path. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: They got a long way to go. Bray Wheeler: Well, I think that's always been the EU's preferences is to... As long as the UK is giving some semblance of, "Hey, we're clearly going down this road, but we're trying to do it in a somewhat reasonable fashion," the EU is probably going to go along with that to the point where if this election turns back towards Johnson and there's a bunch of hard-line stances, to your point, this will be the EU's last kind of extension of that deadline. I think it's a little... It's not necessarily that Johnson is removed from office, but I think the manner in which that kind of election goes will give the EU a little bit of a greater sense of what the UK kind of public wants to happen because right now, there's a little bit of mixed message there too. And so I think once that becomes a little bit clearer and kind of a statement, the EU will probably flex or not kind of one way or the other depending on the outcome of that. Bray Wheeler: The final topic that we have this week that's also been kind of breaking over the weekend and has been occurring here for the last several weeks has been the wildfires in California. Those are kind of continuing to kind of spread and move kind of throughout the states in different areas. Wine Country has been impacted. Los Angeles is now somewhat under threat from all these wildfires. PG&E and other utility companies have been kind of rationing power with rolling blackouts and shutting off power to kind of help prevent the spread of wildfire and damage to infrastructure and things like that. But right now, it's kind of a little bit of a mess in California with the different wildfires and kind of the high winds. There's been reported gusts of 80 miles per hour. Certainly not... Weather is not helping at the moment. So, it's kind of a little bit of a chaotic situation in California just from a "Are we evacuating? Are we not evacuating? Is it moving towards us? Is it now moving away from us?" Things like that. So, throughout the kind of significant portions of the state. Bryan Strawser: We know from wildfire experience and we've been involved in several in multiple states. High wind complicates the issue because it moves the fire faster, sometimes faster than you can build real firebreaks to contain this fire. I mean, California has got a number of challenges kind of intersecting here. California's been resistant to clearing brush that leads to strong fire conditions. PG&E has a lot of outdated infrastructure. They have tried stopping, cutting the power to broad swaths of the state in order to prevent wildfires. That's proven unsuccessful so far. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: At least unsuccessful in that we throw are having wildfires. It may have prevented additional wildfires. I guess I'm not close enough to know that, but that raised a challenge for citizens in the state because hundreds of thousands of people were losing power in some of these shutoffs, including major urban areas. So, there's... California's got a number of challenges around this right now, but on the ground right now, it's a massive firefighting operation being led by the Cal Fire folks with a lot of mutual aid from lots of different places. Bray Wheeler: And I think kind of impact-wise two organizations, certainly in California and certainly in those impacted regions, it's having likely devastating consequences to operations just from losing facilities and infrastructure and roadways and things like that. But if you are kind of in a periphery of these wildfires or working with partner organizations or you have satellite offices or other facilities, HQ facilities, etc. kind of in those regions, it's very much a time to start preparing for kind of closure of those facilities, evacuation, employee assistance funds, things like that for those areas. So, if those are things that you're not doing right now, those should be things that you are considering. If you're not in an impacted zone in California, probably best to dust off whatever those plans are and at least look at them and start thinking about what those are in addition to just monitoring kind of heavily what's going on there. Bray Wheeler: If you have... You're a big retailer and you have different stores there or you're a financial institution with different branches, you should be watching. And if you're a smaller organization, it's definitely... Especially with kind of partner organizations, starting to think about what your alternatives are to the source material or things like that in the interim. Bryan Strawser: Yeah, I think... And don't forget... I mean, Bray's got great advice on the wildfire. Don't forget that in the wildfire, one of your biggest impacts as a business is going to be to your team, and really just think about how to communicate what's going on. Make sure they have information. Make sure as the employer, you're giving them time to prepare and evacuate and that you're cognizant of the fact that when the fire's over, your team and their family and friends could be heavily impacted. And be sympathetic as an employer as you head into that in terms of time off and helping them kind of work through these situations. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Well, that is it for this week's edition of BryghtCast. Again, join us next week for our next weekly edition. Have a great week. Thank you.  

How do you build a rockstar team to drive your resiliency initiatives?  Or your cross-functional crisis management team? In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser, along with Consultant Bray Wheeler, take on these questions, using the New England Patriots as an example of how to build a rockstar team. Topics discussed include rockstar talent, working for the greater team, doing your job, helping each other succeed, cross-functional team development, and more. Related Blog Posts & Episodes Episode #20: Down the stairs to the basement Episode #47: A Crisis Team is not an Academic Debating Society Webinar: Shots Fired – Leading in an Active Shooter Incident Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, consultant at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: And I’m sure this is going to engender a whole ton of comments, but I want to confess that I am a New England Patriots fan. Bray Wheeler: I too am also a New England Patriots fan. Bryan Strawser: And I feel like I can come to this claim legitimately. I lived in New England from 1998 to 2005, and I remained loyal to the Patriots, Celtics, Bruins, and Red Sox ever since then despite living in Minnesota and being married to a Minnesota native who is not a fan of any of those teams. Bray Wheeler: No, that can’t be true. Bryan Strawser: It is true. Bray Wheeler: I, however, while born, raised, to my mother’s chagrin, from Minnesota, in terms of my allegiances she wishes I was more of a Minnesota fan, I come by it by blood. My dad grew up out there, and I still have half my family still lives out in that area, so I come to it by blood organically. Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bray Wheeler: But the reason we’re bringing that up is… Bryan Strawser: We want to talk about how the New England Patriots relate to building a team of rock stars, essentially. They were kind of the example that was on our mind as Bray and I were talking about this topic this morning as we were finalizing what we were going to talk about for the podcast. But the focus of today’s show is about really recruiting the best possible talent and building that into an effective team of rock stars. And having watched the New England Patriots just simply demolish the New York Jets last night. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. I think that this is a topic that was on our minds. Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I think one of the things that we had kind of talked about too, and we’ve talked about it in the past offline, is really around their ability to take players of all sorts of caliber and insert them into the right positions to succeed, or find what it is that they’re really good at, or something that people are overlooking, and being able to insert it into their cu

Once you've created your initial crisis management framework, how do you go about prioritizing your top risks for additional situation-based planning? That's the topic that we dive into today in this week's edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser along with Consultant Bray Wheeler talk about how to shift from your established crisis management framework and plan to situational based planning for your top prioritized risks. Related episodes of our Managing Uncertainty Podcast and articles from our blog include: Managing Uncertainty Episode #1: Shouldn't we have a plan for alien invasion? Managing Uncertainty Episode #12: When the world falls down around you Managing Uncertainty Episode #55: Crisis Leadership Roundtable Managing Uncertainty Episode #59: All roads lead to one What the CEO needs to understand about planning for a crisis Crisis Communications 201: Crisis Protocols //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. I'm Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: I'm Bray Wheeler, a consultant at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: One that we've talked about, at least, in a couple of previous episodes is this really common call or email that we get from prospective clients. It usually starts with, "I don't have any kind of crisis plan or structure, but my executives have told me I need an active shooter plan." Bray Wheeler: Yup. Bryan Strawser: We always immediately steer them towards, "You might need an active shooter plan, but if you don't have anything else, what you first need to establish is a crisis management framework. You need a plan on you're going to deal with any major disruption that establishes, here's the team, here's the process, here's how you're going to communicate, here's how you're going to make decisions, here's how you're going to escalate things." When we talk about a crisis framework, that's what we're talking about. Bryan Strawser: So, we've talked about this several times. What we want to talk about today is, what happens when you have that in place, and now it's time to take a look around the company and say, "There's probably some specific things I need to write a plan for, but what are those things? So, what do we do next?" Bray Wheeler: I think, people can get hung up on evaluating different things and scoring different things, and talking to different people. All of those things are important, and all of it needs to come into play, but you really just need to start somewhere. And some obvious places that you can start to have those conversations that kind of whittle yourself in are, "Do we have something recent that we were not prepared for that did not go well?" Say, you're a bank or financial institution, "We had an armed robbery. We didn't have anything in place." Probably need a plan for that. You know, "Something that can help guide us through that kind of situation." That's kind of an obvious starting point, but it's also looking at, what are your top enterprise risks? And start the conversation there. What's have other functions of the company, done any kind of impact, or likelihood analysis that you can borrow from. You can get way down a rabbit hole on a lot of that stuff. Bryan Strawser: You can totally turn this into rocket science. I think that's a bad route to go. You can do all this analysis of frequency, impact, whatever. Bray Wheeler: Vulnerability. Bryan Strawser: Vulnerability. You could spend months making heat maps of your risk. Bray Wheeler: That's not helpful. Bryan Strawser: It's not helpful. I remember a project once, internal to an organization many years ago, where a division came to our crisis team and said, "We wanted this detailed threat analysis of our organization so that we can plan around the biggest risk to the organization," and we all looked at them and said, "The number one phone call that we get from your division is the power is out. Can we start by having a process to deal with when the power is out?" They said, "No. That can't be the answer, it's got to be much more complicated than that." Bryan Strawser: They spent weeks doing analysis and they came back and said, "Hey, our top risk is the fact the power goes out and we don't have generators at these particular facilities." Bray Wheeler: Yup. Bryan Strawser: So, you can turn this into rocket science. Don't do that. Bray Wheeler: No. Bryan Strawser: I think Bray's got it right. What are the obvious things that you need to plan for, or what are the things that are driven by regulatory requirements that you have to do? Start there. For example, if you're a financial institution, you mentioned armed robbery, but let's go to a regulatorily driven issue. If you're a financial institution that's subject to the FDIC's and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currencies audit process, then the FFIEC guidelines say, fourteen years after H1N1, that you... I'm sorry, nine years after H1N1, you have to have a pandemic plan. So, one of the scenarios that you need to plan for, is you need to have a pandemic scenario because, from a regulatory standpoint, you're required to have it. So, that's an obvious one. Start there, because you have to have it. Bray Wheeler: Well, exactly. There's a lot of work being done, whether it's large or small organization and no matter the type of organization, there's a lot of work that's already done that's, people have prioritized these things. Business initiatives, common things that call centers to get called about, or security is getting called about, regulated information that says you need to have these different things. Those are all easy places to start. You just kind of flop them on the table and say, "Okay. What are the ones for sure we have to have? Let's start there." Then as you tick through, or other things bubble up, then you start to address them. Bray Wheeler: Say you're a mid-sized company, you have an office in the Midwest, and one smaller branch in Florida, probably don't need a hurricane plan. You just need a plan to give shelter to that office, a close-up plan, something for those employees. You don't need a full-fledged organizational plan if you don't have anything that's critical down in Florida. If most of your organization is in Minnesota, a hurricane plan probably isn't the place to start. Bryan Strawser: Right. Right. I like to tell people, we like to tell people, I should say, we want to look at the obvious risks first. The things that you know are going to happen to you. The things that you're regulatorily required to have planned around. Then I think you can start to get into the outer rings of, "Well, I've covered the things I know are going to happen. I've covered the things I have to have for regulatory purposes. Here are some things that I think are the next circle of risk here." I think you kind of keep going in circles from there as you need to have scenario specific plans. Bray Wheeler: Well, I think even as you get... As you start to build those things out and you couple years in and you have a dozen, let's say you're really doing a really good job, and you have like two dozen plans of different scenarios, it's important to go back to those plans you've already created and reassess, or "Hey, we've moved in a different direction as a company, this risk that the company is talking about generally, is becoming a bigger deal. Hey, we did a plan for that two years ago. Let's pull that back out and make sure it aligns to what it is that we're talking about, or the direction that we're going." Bryan Strawser: Update. Bray Wheeler: I just think that it's, to kind of beat on the point that we're making, it's real, real easy to go down a rabbit hole and it's real, real easy to make, even these plans, more complicated than they need to be. We've seen a lot of different organizations try to account for every little nuance of a situation. That's probably not helpful. When you get into that situation, nobody's pulling that plan out to address it. Really what you're trying to accomplish with these top risks, these more specific plans or annexes, or whatever you want to call them on top of your crisis plan to address the situation is, what are those key unique things in that situation that we need to make sure that we hit right away, or that we need to act right way, or we need to make decisions on right away? Then what are those other nuances that we start accounting for as we move through the situation? It's not another 14 pages on how to do something. That's not helpful. Bryan Strawser: We could probably do a whole episode just about how to construct plans in an intelligent and effective manner. A couple of things that you brought up that I think are worth elaborating on here, is when are talking about developing these scenario-specific plans, these really should be structured as annexes to your crisis management plan, or crisis management framework, whatever you're calling it, because essentially what you're saying is, "I'm going to take the framework by which I always manage a crisis, I'm going to add this plan content for this specific scenario or situation or type of scenario, I'm going to use that on top of my framework." Bryan Strawser: Maybe you've got specific checklists by role. Maybe you've got some specific assessment questions, you got some specific strategies you're going to follow, but all of that has to be built, that annex has to be constructed in a flexible way, because to your point, you can over-structure this, where it's too rigid, and you find yourself in the situation where the real-life scenario is slightly off of how you thought it was going to be, and now your annex is shit, because the underlying scenario is different. Or you didn't foresee the combination of factors that got you into the place that you're in. Bray Wheeler: Or you've positioned it in a way that the people that are responsible for working through those checklists, or kind of working through the process, or helping facilitate that conversation, get stuck up on what order they're supposed to be doing things in, and, "Oh. We didn't call this person, or this thing didn't get done, we can't possibly move on to the next thing." You have to keep adapting and you have to keep moving against whatever the situation is. Those plans should really be there to guide you and make sure that you're accounting for the nuances of those situations. Bryan Strawser: Part of what I think you have to account for, as well, in all of this, is that you may have developed plans for a number of different scenarios, planning annexes, for a number of different scenarios, your situation that you find yourself in now, is a combination of scenarios. Right? Bray Wheeler: Yup. Bryan Strawser: So, you're pulling two or three plan annexes out, that you got to execute. How do you make that interact? Did you plan it in that way? Do even know, the situational question, which is, do you know that there are really three things going on? You may only see two of them at the time. You may not have the awareness to know there's a third. Bryan Strawser: So, anyway, the point is, that the annex needs to be able to interoperate. Part of what you want to think about when we started getting into this complex crisis management situation, is what do you do when you have the multiple, simultaneous incidents, or you have the incident, the crisis situation, that has multiple impacts that fit your scenario? Like you've had cyber-attack, and you're under cyber-attack, and now you have a physical attack in your lobby. Okay, those are two same, might be the same crisis, you don't know it yet, but now you've got simultaneous issues going on that you've got to deal with. Bray Wheeler: As you're working through and trying to identify because I think that's an important point when you're thinking about what risks to prepare for, what's your top risk, it really going back through the annexes that you have, and, or, thinking about, "Okay. Our top risk is a data breach". Great. Okay. "So, let's start there." It's important to have that exercise too, kind of once you're done, a little bit of an after-action, or a little bit of a debrief off of it, going, "Okay. What are those other things," to your point, "That might manifest out of this or may have caused this? Is it a physical security thing? Does that need to be the next thing that we go into a little bit more detail on?" Bray Wheeler: One I always enjoy that our previous... Bryan Strawser: Our previous life. Bray Wheeler: Our previous life. Was the having an annex for a terrorist attack and an annex for a mass-casualty event? Does it really matter, as that organization, the nature of the situation? Is really what you're doing is managing a mass-casualty attack, and later on, it turns into something else. So, as you're thinking about those top risks, it's important to be clear about what it is you're trying to address, because in that case, that organization, there's no responsibility there from a terrorist standpoint. Really, you're treating it as a mass-casualty event. You don't really care what the motivation of the attacker is at that point. Bray Wheeler: So, it's being really clear as you're laying out what that annex is, what that top risk is, that you're dialing into the right thing that's going to have the impact to your organization that you're accounting for, and not something that's kind of sexy, or high profile, or gives it a different cool spin on something. It's really getting down to the nuts and bolts of what that situation is. Bryan Strawser: Yeah, I think you make an important point. This could be overdone. We've seen this. We have often seen plan annexes that we're being asked to edit, coming in as a consultant, I think we read a 170 page one back at the first of the year on a... To be fair, it was on a complex topic, and don't want to minimize that the underlying issue was a serious one, but that it was about three times as long as it really needed to be. Bryan Strawser: You've got to allow flexibility in these plans. You have to make sure they connect to the underlying incident or crisis management process, and they need to able to interoperate with other annexes when you have these multi-impact, complex, crisis situations, that we hope you never have to face, but the reality is if you're in a big company, big organization, sooner or later, you're going to run into that scenario. So, you want to make sure that your annexes and your plans all fit what those unseen possibilities are because we know it will be the combination of events that you never imagined would happen. Bryan Strawser: The whole time we've been sitting here in this podcast talking, thinking about these multi-impact events, I just keep going back to Japan and the 2011 earthquake off the coast of Natori Province, and that was one of the largest earthquakes in world history, followed by this massive tsunami, and then this rising nuclear issue at Fukushima that came after. It all interconnected, and the Japanese government just didn't have situational awareness to see the big picture, and really struggled in the response that should have been much easier for a company, or for a country rather, that was that prepared. Bray Wheeler: Well, yeah, because individually- Bryan Strawser: They nailed it. They had it. Bray Wheeler: They could execute each one of those situations, probably, brilliantly. Bryan Strawser: But not all three at the same time. Bray Wheeler: But all three at the same time, there wasn't that awareness. Bryan Strawser: So, as you think about how to plan for your top risks, as you build that crisis framework and you're moving forward, our advice, go for the obvious and regulatorily driven risks, and then start to look out from there. Whatever you do, don't turn this into rocket science. Bray Wheeler: Keep it simple. Bryan Strawser: Keep it simple. Keep your planning simple. Make your annexes interoperate. We wish you luck. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast. We'll be back with you with a new episode next week. Thanks for listening.

With this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, we're joined by all members of our consulting team at Bryghtpath, including the return of the previous co-host Jennifer Otremba, who has returned to us safely after a year of military leave. Moving forward, we plan to release two episodes weekly. A news/current events focused episode, dubbed "BryghtCast" covering challenges to the business community from current risks or upcoming events - and how companies should be thinking about these events from a physical security, crisis management, and business continuity perspective. A deep dive episode into a specific topic related to business continuity, crisis management, intelligence, crisis communications, or a related field. This is the type of podcast episode that we've typically done in the past. Look for a new episode next Monday covering the current situation in Hong Kong and steps companies should consider over the coming days and months. In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, we're covering recent developments with Wal-Mart's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) settlement with the US Government, the recent Mayoral elections in Istanbul, Turkey and its impact on national politics there, and the recent escalation in conflict and tension between the United States and Iran in the Persian Gulf. //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Welcome back to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. I want to talk a little bit about some changes that we're going to make to the podcast starting with this episode. We have decided now to release two episodes each week, and they're going to have a little different focus.   Bryan Strawser: The first episode each week, the one that you're listening to right now is going to be more of a news and current events-focused discussion. We're going to look at somewhere between three and five things that are happening in the news or are planned to happen in the coming days that are relevant to your preparedness capabilities around the world.   Bryan Strawser: So joining me for this discussion will be the rest of the Bryghtpath consulting team, Jennifer Otremba and Bray Wheeler. I'm going to have Jenn and Bray introduce themselves, and then we'll come back to me and talk a little bit about what this is going to look like. Jenn?   Jenn Otremba: Hi, I'm Jenn Otremba. I'm a senior consultant here at Bryghtpath.   Bray Wheeler: Hi, this is Bray Wheeler. I'm a consultant here at Bryghtpath.   Bryan Strawser: Why don't each of you talk just a little bit about your backgrounds for a little bit?   Jenn Otremba: Sure. I'll start if you want.   Bray Wheeler: Sure.   Jenn Otremba: So I started at Bryghtpath a few years ago now, but I took a little bit of a leave of absence. I'm also in the National Guard. I've got over 20 years experience with the military. I've been gone for about almost a year, right guys?   Bryan Strawser: Yeah.   Jenn Otremba: Over in the Middle East working.   Bryan Strawser: I like how you said you kind of took a sabbatical, but it's not this was by choice.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah. No, no a little bit of a break from Bryghtpath for my other career path there.   Jenn Otremba: I know that I have introduced myself before on the podcast, but as a reminder, I worked with Bryan for quite a long time, and Bray as well, when we were all at Target together.   Bryan Strawser: Mr. Wheeler?   Bray Wheeler: Yeah, I've been with Bryghtpath just about a year now. So before that, I worked, like Jenn mentioned, with Bryan and Jenn at Target doing a lot of different stuff. I'm brand new to the podcast. My background is everything from crisis managements in an operation center to enterprise crisis management to intelligence to corporate security. I touched just about everything [crosstalk]   Bryan Strawser: This is Bray's first episode on the podcast despite almost a year of trying to get him to do a podcast.   Jenn Otremba: So I show up, and Bray's all in.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah, exactly.   Bray Wheeler: Yep. Got to lighten the load a little bit. I got to deflect it just a little bit. Take the pressure off.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: So this change in our format came from discussions that the three of us were having at the tail end of last week. But we've kind of been thinking about this for a while. I think there's a place in the market to have discussion about more current events as they happen without going into kind of the deep dive process discussion, which is what our typical episode has been. So we hope you find this valuable. We think this is going to be an interesting conversation.   Bray Wheeler: Yeah. No, I think it brings a little bit of something different than just kind of, to your point, deep diving into something. It's a little bit more of, hey, what just happened in the last week, and what do we kind of expect?   Bryan Strawser: A little bit of interpretation   Bray Wheeler: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah, what does that mean?   Jenn Otremba: Plus, let's face it. We're all sitting around talking about what's going on in the world-   Bryan Strawser: That's right.   Jenn Otremba: ... every day anyway, so we might as well talk about it with everyone.   Bryan Strawser: That's right.   Bray Wheeler: Right.   Bryan Strawser: And I think we may bring some things to the forefront that maybe you're not thinking about. I know this is going to happen with one of the topics we're going to discuss today. Maybe it's something you should be thinking about, because it will have future impact on what we do.   Bryan Strawser: So let's move right into the topics we have for today. The first one, which I'll kind of tee up the discussion is from a Wall Street Journal article the tail end of last week. This is the announcement from the U.S. Department of Justice that Walmart has agreed to plead guilty and pay $282 million in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case involving facilitation payments that Walmart made in Brazil, China, India, and Mexico. This is at the tail end of a six-year discussion and investigation that's gone on between Walmart and the United States government to get to this settlement. It requires Walmart to pay $144 million in ill-begotten gains to the Securities and Exchange Commission and $138 million FCPA penalty to the U.S. Justice Department. It's one of the largest cases, if not the largest cases, ever.   Bray Wheeler: It's a big number.   Bryan Strawser: Huge number. This investigation started, according to this article, in 2012, which had an investigation from the New York Times about payments that Walmart had made in Mexico in order to obtain permits to build stores there. Then it expanded to Brazil, China, and India. Reactions?   Jenn Otremba: I mean, I'm shaking my head. From a business perspective, this is a huge deal, right, of crisis management. I can't imagine what they're doing in their ops center as this is starting to hit the news.   Bryan Strawser: There's certainly a reputational issue here. I mean, Walmart already has had over the years some challenges reputationally with its compliance with various aspects of law, but not necessarily recognized as a place where workers are treated fairly and a lot of various exploitation of communities and stuff that have been alleged along the way. Then here comes this massive bribery case.   Bray Wheeler: I think for Walmart, too, the amount of money probably isn't the issue for them. It's the having the largest fine ever and the reputational fallout of it is ... I mean, for companies that hurts more so than the fines, especially for a company the size of Walmart.   Jenn Otremba: And what do you guys think as far as Walmart goes? Do you think it's going to have a huge reputational impact? I mean, do you think that Walmart shoppers care about this?   Bryan Strawser: No, I don't.   Jenn Otremba: Because I don't know that I do either. I think other companies, this would be a bigger hit, but I don't know that Walmart would be as affected.   Bryan Strawser: I think we were discussing this on Friday with one of our clients just on our regular status call, that this news had just come out. This is a company that operates internationally and particularly in Asia. They're in India. I think it immediately kind of raised his hackle from the standpoint of, "Well, I wonder what we're going to do about this." Because obviously, there was heightened intensity that led to kind of this issue.   Bryan Strawser: I mean, it's kind of interesting that if you get into the article, Walmart has spent $900 million investigating this over the last seven years internally. That doesn't count the fine and the SEC payment. But at the core of the issue, in terms of what was alleged by the SEC and the DOJ is that Walmart grew significantly in the 1990s, and they didn't ramp up their systems to account for corruption risk. There's kind of a systematic accusation here that they weren't prepared to deal with the possibility that this might happen.   Bray Wheeler: Well, it's one of those, ignorance is not an excuse at that point. You're so heavily focused on expanding the business that you're not accounting for those people you're hiring on the other end, the partners you have on the other ends just awareness to that process, that it's not the same old, same old environment you're used to.   Jenn Otremba: I guess I would argue what other large corporations are also not prepared for this type of thing that have had huge growth in a short period of time, just like Walmart.   Bryan Strawser: A lot probably.   Jenn Otremba: A lot, right?   Bryan Strawser: I would think.   Jenn Otremba: Walmart's just the one that's hit the news and is getting caught right now.   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jenn Otremba: Do you think that this is going have a long effect on other corporations as this has come out?   Bryan Strawser: I mean, I think the wake-up call here is probably around, as global expansion ramps up, your compliance capability needs to ramp up with it. We have other clients that have had some FCPA challenges related to bribery in foreign countries, where the same thing happened. They grew rapidly, they spun up global operations, but they didn't spin up a compliance capability to make sure that folks were educated and that they were looking for these issues, right? I mean, that's really what the SEC is accusing Walmart of, is they didn't ramp up their capabilities as they grew so much internationally. We've been through this.   Jenn Otremba: Right.   Bryan Strawser: Both as employees and as a consulting firm. I did find the Brazilian accusations kind of interesting, because when I was in business school, our international residency was in Brazil. We were divided into groups after the two-week trip to Brazil. Each of our groups had to get up and talk about a specific aspect of what we learned in Brazil. My team got tax, which was really not that interesting. But another team had business ethics and compliance, and the subject of their presentation was ... When they got up, they put up a slide in Brazilian colors and it said, "Corruption and business ethics in Brazil, this shit is corrupt." That was the presentation. Mind you, it was our last presentation before graduation, so we may have been a little punchy.   Bryan Strawser: We all heard this in different aspects of our own careers, that you'd go to India, go to Brazil, or go to Mexico, and facilitation payments, AKA bribery, are the norm.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah.   Bray Wheeler: Yeah. [crosstalk]   Jenn Otremba: They're part of business.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah.   Bray Wheeler: Yeah, it's part of the culture. That's what they're used to. So if you go into those places relying on kind of the experts on the ground, they're going to go with what they know, and that's how they do business.   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jenn Otremba: Right.   Bryan Strawser: We had a criminal case in India once that we were dealing with in our prior life where we attempted to get some prosecution on a case. The local police commander was like, "I also would really like a bike like that one." "But we're filing a prosecution." "Yeah, but I would like a bike, like that bike, that motorbike, motorcycle." So needless to say, the person didn't get prosecuted. We didn't buy him a motorcycle.   Bryan Strawser: Jenn, what's our next topic?   Jenn Otremba: Okay, so everyone's favorite discussion, the Middle East, and Iran is basically the update. I think it's important to continue kind of keeping an eye on what's happening in the Middle East, and specifically what's happening with Iran, because some of the latest things that have come out are ... Obviously, we saw that a drone was shot down. Everyone's seen that on news now. We've seen how the United States has responded to that, or not responded depending on what your opinion is on what should be done or what shouldn't be done.   Bryan Strawser: Or who you want to believe.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah, and I've seen some discussions around cyber attacks. I've seen new sanctions that are going to be put in place for Iran. Then the reaction for what Iran's going to think about that or what their reaction's going to be towards the United States. And through not just the United States, but other coalition forces around the world.   Bryan Strawser: So two things have happened, right? There was a tanker attack now two weeks ago.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah.   Bray Wheeler: Multiple tankers.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah, two tankers. There is some dispute about exactly what happened and who's behind it. But the attack was limpet mines, which are magnetic mines that are usually placed by a diver. It's the Navy Seals' preferred way to sabotage a ship. One of the ship's crew on one of the tankers said they saw a torpedo, so maybe it wasn't a limpet mine. There's dispute, debate. I don't know, disinformation.   Bray Wheeler: There's even reports that crew members were reporting a shell somebody actually fired over the waterline.   Bryan Strawser: Like artillery.   Bray Wheeler: Like artillery shell.   Bryan Strawser: Not artillery, but like a ship to ship.   Bray Wheeler: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah. It's fascinating.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah, it is.   Bray Wheeler: Lots of accounts.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah, rumors.   Bryan Strawser: The U.S. State Department has said it was Iran that was behind it, but other countries are disputing this, I believe.   Jenn Otremba: Of course, yeah.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah. So we have that. That's two weeks ago. That ramped up some tension. Then last week, what happens? You get the drone shot down. Iran claims it was over their territorial water. We said it was in international air- I'm sorry, it was the international airspace. They claimed it was in their airspace.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah. That's common though, right? The argument of where it was exactly when it was shot down. Was it legal to shoot it down? Or was it an act of war really?   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Bray Wheeler: Well, and that's not an uncommon conversation, to your point.   Jenn Otremba: No.   Bray Wheeler: I mean, Russia and the U.S. do that all the time around-   Jenn Otremba: All the time.   Bray Wheeler: ... whether or not we're in each other's airspace or not.   Jenn Otremba: Yes. Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jenn Otremba: Exactly.   Bryan Strawser: Apparently we were going to attack Iran or retaliate by hitting some missile capabilities. I guess, it's not really clear what we were allegedly going after.   Jenn Otremba: Right.   Bryan Strawser: Then if you follow the common narrative, the president canceled the attack 10 minutes before it was supposed to go off. But he disputes that. The New York Times and the Washington Post have a tick-tock story from the weekend about kind of the play-by-play of what happened. But again, it's tough to know who to believe when there's multiple versions of what's going on.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm sure there's some truth somewhere in between, but we're not going to have all of the information.   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jenn Otremba: And we're not going to have all of the information that the executive branch has in front of them either as we're kind of making our opinions on the topic.   Jenn Otremba: But I think that this'll be interesting to continue to watch and to see how this is going to affect really all of us in the United States. But for me, it hits really close to home, understanding I still have friends right now working and operating in the Middle East. So I have a lot of concerns with how this is all going to play out.   Bryan Strawser: So the FAA has banned overflights of Iran for international flights involving American-flagged aircraft. It won't stop the Europeans and others from doing so, but it will apply to U.S. carriers anyway.   Bryan Strawser: Certainly American companies don't really operate in Iran because of decades-old sanctions. But we're everywhere else. I mean, Dubai is one of the world's big financial centers. It's right across the Strait of Hormuz from where all of this was going on. That's a common travel hub for folks going to Asia or elsewhere in the Middle East, to be fair. I mean, Emirates has pretty significant service from the U.S. to there, and then on to other locales like India.   Bryan Strawser: There's a lot of risk in disrupting the market. I think there's less issue with oil disruption because of the growth in U.S. oil production over the last decade in North Dakota and elsewhere. But there's still a lot of risk to the global economy that comes into play here.   Jenn Otremba: Well, and it's obviously a very volatile situation. So we're having this conversation of what airspace is what. You know, "We shot your passenger airplane down, because it was in our airspace." Was it? I mean, that's pretty scary.   Bray Wheeler: Well, I think to the oil price discussion too, a lot of times historically, this would have been 10 years, global oil prices have shot up. Nobody's really seeing that at the pump in the U.S. right now,-   Bryan Strawser: Yeah, right.   Bray Wheeler: ... because we've kind of buffered ourselves a little bit.   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Bray Wheeler: But I think from just the global economy piece. And then somebody did a breakdown, one of the talking heads on one of the cable networks, kind of broke down kind of the impacts of if they went to full-scale escalation and how pretty much the U.S. and its allies pretty much could beat Iran pretty easily based on just U.S.'s power.   Bray Wheeler: But they did kind of an interesting take on kind of playing out how if Iran was to really succeed in this, they would rely on their proxies. Those proxies then carry into Saudi Arabia, they carry into UAE, they carry into Afghanistan,-   Bryan Strawser: Lebanon.   Bray Wheeler: ... Iraq, Lebanon, into Israel, the Straits of Hormuz. They're pretty much going to disrupt that entire region just using their proxy network at pretty much on one order.   Bryan Strawser: That's been their game plan for the last four decades since the revolution, has been to engage in a proxy campaign against the United States and the Western allies through the ways that you just described. Direct military action has rarely been their forte. I shouldn't say forte, has been their approach against the United States.   Bray Wheeler: Yeah, because I think it's-   Jenn Otremba: For a reason.   Bryan Strawser: Well, right.   Bray Wheeler: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah.   Bray Wheeler: Because it's the only way.   Bryan Strawser: Why fight the leviathan head on if you can use proxies to do that?   Jenn Otremba: Yeah, absolutely.   Bray Wheeler: But I think it's interesting from kind of that business mindset. It's not just U.S.-Iran or Iran-Iraq kind of tensions, and all of this won't have anything or maybe it's just oil or the commodities coming through the Strait. It's, if you're doing business anywhere in the Middle East for any reason, you're at risk and should be thinking about that proxy fight and that ability for those governments and those institutions to hold up against some of that without cracking down or having to pick a side or a lot of other-   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jenn Otremba: And not just economy for the United States, but really this is a world economy issue.   Bryan Strawser: So definitely an area that businesses should be monitoring and looking, I think, for multiple sources of truth about what's going on. Because there is certainly a dispute here about what has happened; and of course, both countries will have their own version of what's going on. So I think look for multiple sources of truth from the news and get a holistic perspective of what's going on.   Jenn Otremba: Right.   Bryan Strawser: Bray, you want to take us to our last current event for the episode?   Bray Wheeler: Yeah. So this is a little bit of one to watch, because it's a little bit kind of new breaking story. But it's out of Turkey. So over the last four or five months, for sure, there's been some discrepancy in the mayors race in Istanbul. President Erdogan of Turkey, his kind of chosen candidate lost in the election in March. So he called for a recount, which was highly controversial. Then they just did the recount, or they just did a re-vote, and his candidate lost even worse.   Bray Wheeler: So now, he's having to deal with the fallout of kind of the economic pressure that he's facing in his country; but then also, his political pressure that's now amping up, because Istanbul is his home turf. His party's controlled it for pretty much like the last 25 years or something. So now, he's having to face kind of this increased pressure against his administration and against his kind of administrative policies.   Bryan Strawser: The Wall Street Journal has a pretty good dive into this from a few days ago. Well, I guess from yesterday, now that I look at the article. I mean, historically, the president of Turkey has gotten what he wants, right?   Bray Wheeler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Bryan Strawser: He might get challenged, but usually the various government agencies line up behind what he wants, even though these elections are supposed to be independent, or be not impacting on a national level. Will he accept the mayoral results? If he does, what political powers and authorities will he allow the mayor of Istanbul to keep compared to stripping them?   Bray Wheeler: Well and particularly him, getting what he wants. I mean, that's kind of has been his MO is, he's gotten what he wants.   Bryan Strawser: To your point for 25 years.   Bray Wheeler: For over 25 years he's gotten what he wanted. Now he's facing some real serious challenges to his ability to control that power.   Bryan Strawser: And I should point out, I mean, his margin of victory in this second race here was 54 to 45. It wasn't close-   Jenn Otremba: No.   Bryan Strawser: ... at all.   Bray Wheeler: No. That's way outside the margin of error.   Jenn Otremba: Right.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah.   Bray Wheeler: Even for-   Bryan Strawser: Even for what happens there.   Bray Wheeler: ... non-U.S. countries-   Jenn Otremba: Yeah.   Bray Wheeler: ... who probably don't poll as much as we do. But I think from kind of that impact and kind of why we're kind of highlighting that and something to watch is Turkey's kind of a pretty good bellwether in terms of just stability and kind of the source of truth on the ground for how everything's feeling both from that connection to Europe and the Middle East. So if there's some grumbling there, that typically kind of there's some fallout politically anyway kind of across that region, and makes everybody a little bit more uncertain as that kind of goes along.   Bray Wheeler: Turkey's also kind of a player for a lot of different U.S.-based companies, global companies. Just its proximity and its geography and its capabilities as a country, it's definitely something to watch and keep aware of as this kind of plays out. Because they're afraid to protest either there. They're not afraid to have this amp up a little bit.   Bryan Strawser: Should point out that the current president, who's been president for 25 years and will be president until at least 2023, he got into this office having previously been the mayor of Istanbul.   Bray Wheeler: Yes.   Bryan Strawser: That was his launching pad to the presidency and a national scale [inaudible 00:22:04]. Yet now he's saying that the mayor is just like a piece of shop window decoration. That was his statement yesterday.   Jenn Otremba: Well, I mean of course he is.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah, he's minimizing-   Jenn Otremba: Right.   Bryan Strawser: ... the role of mayor of Istanbul.   Jenn Otremba: Absolutely, yeah.   Bryan Strawser: He did congratulate him on Twitter though.   Bray Wheeler: Well, that's generous. While he may undercut him.   Jenn Otremba: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: From a business standpoint, lots of American businesses, lots of global businesses operate in Istanbul. I mean, our previous employer did. We dealt with a number of issues in Istanbul that went on over the years, mostly related to protests and disruption. Can't think of any instance involving violence or ...   Bray Wheeler: No, there was some terrorism stuff. That's some years back, kind of as Syria was really ramping up,-   Jenn Otremba: Right.   Bray Wheeler: ... and kind of some of those connections.   Jenn Otremba: Well, we certainly have extensive experience dealing with world protests and what happens to corporations-   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jenn Otremba: ... in those events.   Bryan Strawser: So Turkey, we view that this is one we need to watch. This is the longterm piece here to watch. Because at some point, there's going to be some kind of transition, right?   Bray Wheeler: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: I mean, the current president isn't going to live or serve for forever.   Jenn Otremba: No.   Bray Wheeler: No, and definitely he's facing some pretty tough challenges with his economy, and things like that too. This is the most pressure, kind of non-violence, non-full-out protest, pressure that he's felt. That really throughout the country, people are feeling a little bit uncertain as to the direction he's taking them in. So he's going to have to make some choices.   Bryan Strawser: Headwinds are significant.   Bray Wheeler: Yes.   Jenn Otremba: Yes, they are.   Bryan Strawser: Well, that's it for this newsy edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. Catch our other episode in a few days, where we'll be talking more in-depth about the protest movement in Hong Kong and what that means for global and U.S. businesses that are operating in Hong Kong and what those longterm impacts might be.   Bryan Strawser: Look forward to having you on the next episode. Thanks.  

In this episode of our BryghtCast edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, Senior Consultant Jenn Otremba, and Consultant Bray Wheeler take a look at three current risks and upcoming events: The continuing protests in Hong Kong - where, at the time of our recording of this episode, protestors had taken over Hong Kong's Legislative Assembly Building. They were later dispersed by police - but not before more than 500,000 protestors had taken to the streets. Recent aviation incidents in Minnesota and Texas - heightening the importance of ensuring your organization has an effective Aviation Response Plan. The wrongful death lawsuit filed by the parents of a homicide victim in Utah who made multiple reports with University Police and other officials about a man who ultimately was charged with her homicide. The incident highlights the importance of taking threats of violence seriously and the need for a robust, documented threat management process for companies and educational institutions. //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. And with me today is ... Jenn Otremba: Hi there, this is Jenn Otremba, Senior Consultant Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: Hi, this is Bray Wheeler, Consultant at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: And this is our BryghtCast news episode for the week of July 1st, 2019. We're recording this on the morning of July 1st, though you won't hear it until a bit later this week. Bryan Strawser: So, what do we got to start off with on our three major events for the week? Bray Wheeler: This morning we're going to kick it off unfortunately with some aviation events that happened, book-ending the weekend here. Bray Wheeler: On Friday, here locally in Minnesota, a medevac helicopter crashed early in the morning on Friday on the Brainerd area of Minnesota, which is about two hours north of the Twin Cities. In that crash, both the pilots and the medevac nurse were killed. The medic on board sustained injuries and is expected to make a full recovery. That occurred over the weekend. Fortunate no patients were on board, but there was foggy weather. It was late in the morning. Bray Wheeler: Jenn, you have expertise on that one here as kind of an expert. But then the other incident that happened over the weekend was a plane crash in Dallas that killed all 10 on board. It sounded like it occurred on takeoff, veered into a hangar, and then unfortunately that caused the loss of life. Bray Wheeler: I think really where our focus is this morning is just on that aviation safety, companies having a plan, even if it's just, you're a small company and you travel via commercial flight, but those things are real and they're happening. Bryan Strawser: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jenn Otremba: Yeah. Jenn Otremba: So first of all, I mean this is heartbreaking for the aviation community. Specifically, rotary wing, because this really hits close to home here since it was one of our own here in North Memorial. And we don't know the cause of either of these accidents. And generally, we won't know until it could be a year from now before accident investigations come out. So it's absolutely heartbreaking. And I always think of, "Well, I wonder what happened? What would I have done in ... ?" Jenn Otremba: For those that don't know, I'm also a helicopter pilot for the Army National Guard, and I always think, "What happened?" What the pilot could have done or couldn't have done, or what they were going through, especially in those last moments before the crash. Like Bray said, in that particular instance, I know that the weather was really bad and it was early in the morning, and all of those things lead to, in my mind, a potentially bad situation. Jenn Otremba: Really, really heartbreaking for everyone involved with that. And the Dallas incident, of course that's not as local for us, but also obviously very heartbreaking. And as Bray said, the biggest thing for us here at Bryghtpath is what kind of plans are in place for these companies that own these aircraft? And what that looks like now, moving forward, and what it looked like beforehand. Bryan Strawser: There were a couple of things that came to mind for me about the North Memorial crash, the medical transport helicopter that crashed here in Minnesota, is that North Memorial had a previous crash, fortunately not fatal, three years ago in Alexandria, Minnesota. The pilots and the paramedic, and I believe there was a nurse on board, all survived. The medic though, in particular, had significant injuries in his ... I think he considers himself very lucky to have survived the accident. I think that came back as pilot error in the NTSB investigation, but it'll be months before we know anything about what happened in the north, or in this Bemidji ... Oh, I'm sorry, it wasn't Bemidji. It was Brainerd. Jenn Otremba: Brainerd. Bray Wheeler: Brainerd. Bryan Strawser: Brainerd accident that occurred. Bryan Strawser: The other thing that came to mind, and this applies to both, it's just, the three of us have been in roles where we've had some responsibility for aviation and response in the private sector. And we had to write some pretty extensive plans around how we would respond to an aviation incident, because our previous employer-owned and operated and leased aircraft. Sometimes with their own pilots and sometimes with contracted pilots, or contracted service to do that. But we still own responsibility for that, and I think as consultants we've seen companies with a lack of aviation planning, or have some really poor plans. Bryan Strawser: So maybe we talk just briefly about what we're really looking for here when we talk about aviation planning for a company. Bray Wheeler: When I think it's even one of those things where depending on the size of the company and what kind of flight operations you have, because of even smaller companies, we have a client that's not giant, but they still have pretty extensive air travel capabilities within their company. Bray Wheeler: I think it's really about, no matter the size of that, it's really having something in place or using existing plans. You have a place for loss of life, for a tragic situation, how are you communicating with families? How are you communicating with employees? Things like that are already in place, and then you just add on depending on what the size of your company is and what your capabilities are. What other plans do you need to put into place around decision making and notification? And just being able to kind of manage through it. Bryan Strawser: Yeah, family support is a big part of this, particularly if you're operating your own aircraft, I think. Bryan Strawser: Having a process in place to be able to notify family members of your employees or others that were on board the aircraft, that there had been an incident and that there were injuries or fatalities that occurred, I think is a critically important part of the plan. And understanding how you're going to maintain contact and support the family members through this. Bryan Strawser: I think there's a reputational aspect, too. And I thought about this with the North Memorial incident just being the second crash that they've had. And certainly there's going to be an investigation, and that investigation will take time to get to an answer. But the questions from the press are not going to stop. Jenn Otremba: And they're not going to wait for an answer that's clear cut either. Bryan Strawser: No, they're not. Why did this happen a second time? Jenn Otremba: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bryan Strawser: So, anything else on ... ? Jenn Otremba: I guess I would go one step further, and aside from having plans for our own or leased aircraft, we also have some experience with travel monitoring. Jenn Otremba: So, even if they're flying a commercial aircraft or another aircraft ... Bryan Strawser: Or traveling on a commercial aircraft. Jenn Otremba: Exactly. Yup. We have all experienced, specifically around executive monitoring and knowing where they're flying to, and where they're going. So we always knew where they were at. So if something were to happen, we could keep track of that as well. Bray Wheeler: When I think you mean to your point, just having the awareness to where your employees are going so that you're not just running your day-to-day operations, and all of a sudden there's a crash and it's like, "Oh, that's too bad." Bray Wheeler: We had two employees on that plane. And you're not reacting in real time to the knowledge that you're supposed to have and be able to make those decisions and jump on it early. Bray Wheeler: I mean, reputation aside, just doing right by the employees and their families. And having that available. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: There's just a whole circle of communication around having things happen to your employees. Not only the communication to the family, which needs to be the paramount thing that happens, but there's also communication to coworkers and perhaps to the company at large. Because if you don't tell that story the way you want the story told, or the way that your employee wants the story told, they're going to get it from the press. Or they're going to get it from the rumor mill. And neither of those is a good look for your organization when you're in a crisis. Bryan Strawser: It needs to come from leadership and be communicated that way. Jenn Otremba: Right. Bryan Strawser: So, the second item of news that we're touching on today actually started early this morning, and that is more protests and disruption in Hong Kong over the extradition bill that has been under consideration there now for several weeks. Bryan Strawser: We didn't plan it this way, but today, July 1st, we released our podcast episode on what was going on in Hong Kong, and it's already out of date because of events that occurred early this morning. But the protestors, and I saw numbers 500 to 600,000, is that? Yeah. Bryan Strawser: So, up to 600,000 protesters, but they've gone a little farther this time. They have surrounded the legislative building, this is where Hong Kong's legislature meets. They got inside the building, they took over the legislative chamber. The last update we saw is that they were standing on top of lawmakers' desks and they were spray painting symbols and art inside the hall. And that's where things stand as of about 30 minutes ago. So it's quite a scene. Bryan Strawser: I mean, there's no way that law enforcement, even modern law enforcement in Hong Kong can contain 600,000 people. Jenn Otremba: Yeah. I was going to say, first of all ... Bryan Strawser: I mean, we couldn't do that here in the U.S. Jenn Otremba: Just think of that amount of ... Five to 600,000 people. I mean, what does that look like? That is unbelievable. Bryan Strawser: Right? Bray Wheeler: Well, I would actually argue that they probably weren't as prepared as they probably should have been for this one. Because what's unique about this protest today, too, is it's July 1st, which is the anniversary of the transition from Britain to China. Bryan Strawser: Oh, you're right. Jenn Otremba: Yes. Bray Wheeler: And so typically there's always peaceful protests that are going on. And for the most part it sounds like these continue to be peaceful, but with all of the protests over the last couple of weeks, probably should've been a little bit more prepared or amped up to know, because it's pretty predictable in terms of what they're doing. The size is pretty unique. Bray Wheeler: I think there was a graphic somebody had that had different estimates from whether you're an organizer, or government official, or media on site. There's only been a couple of other instances where the numbers have reached somewhere in this realm. Otherwise, they've been pretty smaller, but they happen every year. But it's probably one of those things where certain locations, certainly parliament, probably should've been a little bit more isolated than it was. Jenn Otremba: And I think too, thinking of some of the different organizations that we've worked with throughout the years and what that looks like when protesters get into the building and what ... How do you manage through that once they're already in the building? Jenn Otremba: I know for us it's always better to make sure security is doing their job and keeping the protestors peacefully outside of the premises of the building. But what happens when they get into that building? And how do you peacefully remove them from the building? And what that can look like, because that can go south very, very quickly as we've seen in the past, too. Bryan Strawser: So I think the protesters are demanding the resignation of Hong Kong's Chief Executive, right? Carrie ... Bray Wheeler: Carrie Lam. Bryan Strawser: Carrie Lam. They're demanding her resignation. She's been in office for some time, and she spent her whole career in the Hong Kong Civil Service, but no one arises to be the Chief Executive of Hong Kong without the blessing of China. So clearly she has China's support at least going into the position. I'm not sure how confident they're feeling in her leadership at this point. It's hard to say. That's a black box in terms of what we know, or at least from what we understand. Bray Wheeler: She was at least an acceptable choice. Bryan Strawser: At the time. Bray Wheeler: At the time. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. I'm really kind of curious where that goes. Bryan Strawser: So, the questions here for business are kind of the same as what we talk about in our long-form podcast today, which is, if you're in Hong Kong or you travel through Hong Kong and you're not monitoring what's going on, you're behind. They're a pretty significant set of disruption going on there, and I don't see it going away. Bryan Strawser: And if the Chinese government response, it's going to be the fascinating part of this because they've really not meddled in Hong Kong in this way before. I mean we've talked a little bit about that before, that pushing this kind of legislation is a new move for them, but they've never meddled in Hong Kong in terms of using force. Bray Wheeler: Correct. Yeah. I think it's one of those things where this is starting to probably become a little bit more real. And certainly this is, we're saying that in the context of the current situation. Who knows, this might calm down in a couple of months and resolve itself a little bit, but I think there is that simmering tension. And especially with broader relationship discussions between the international community in China and democracy at large, and where that's going globally, the protesters are making a stand and they're using timing of both the legislation and the anniversary of the date to really gain some momentum and push the issue, and push it more international than just the local, "Oh, they're protesting again. It's on July 1st." Bray Wheeler: It's a little bit more this time. Jenn Otremba: Seems to be fairly effective so far, I think. Bray Wheeler: They seem to be getting their point across. Jenn Otremba: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: Definitely have gotten their point across. Jenn Otremba: Yeah. Now what happens with that is going to be the interesting part of it, I think. Bryan Strawser: I suspect we'll see developments later this week. Bray Wheeler: It'll be interesting to see how the international community responds back into this, too. They've been relatively quiet- Bryan Strawser: And when did they start speaking out? Bray Wheeler: ... in the conversation. When do they start speaking out? When do they start pushing some different narratives that hold China back, or perhaps even embolden China with what they're doing? I think it's just a matter of time, and see where that angle takes the conversation. Jenn Otremba: I think we'll be talking about this again next week. Bryan Strawser: No doubt. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. So it appears that it was a smaller group that came into the legislative assembly building, but they broke glass doors, removed metal bars, defaced portraits of previous Chief Executives and Presidents of the chamber. So, interesting. Bryan Strawser: Let's move on then to our last story of the day. Jenn Otremba: Yeah, let's talk about that. Jenn Otremba: The last story of the day, just wanted to bring this up because last week some additional news has come out about university student in Utah who was involved with her ex-boyfriend who had killed her and himself, and why this is extremely tragic and a big deal. The biggest part of the news lately is that the parents have come out and sued the university. Jenn Otremba: Now in the past, many of these things have come out. There have been reputational issues. There are some demands for if something happened to a student that the school would take some kind of responsibility for that. Jenn Otremba: But it's becoming more and more common that that responsibility is turning into a monetary responsibility for universities, for businesses, for corporations, for states to have some major responsibility here with these violent cases. Jenn Otremba: And so I think the latest I saw was this, parents were suing the school for $56 million lawsuits against the school. Bray Wheeler: That's a big chunk of money. Bryan Strawser: So in the lawsuit, the thing that stood out to me, I didn't read the lawsuit, but the news coverage surrounding the lawsuit, she had reported to the university police multiple times about this guy's threatening actions. Was like 20 some times? Jenn Otremba: Yeah, allegedly. I've seen a few different reports as to what they're saying, but allegedly there has been several reports prior to the incident occurring itself where she has brought forth some concerning behavior. Leakage, we call it. And workplace violence. Bryan Strawser: There's always leakage. Jenn Otremba: There's always leakage. Of very threatening behavior, controlling behavior, possessive behavior, manipulative. Very, very concerning behavior that definitely pointed towards some kind of violent behavior that would come out of this. Jenn Otremba: And unfortunately, I don't know specifics around what the school had done or what actions the school had done, but the parents feel that wasn't enough, clearly. And we'll see I guess, where this one goes. When the facts come out. Bryan Strawser: I mean from having read the news coverage, I don't think the university did much at all around this. Jenn Otremba: It does not sound like it. Bryan Strawser: But of course we're getting one side of the story. The university will certainly have its chance in court or elsewhere to explain the case. Suspect this never gets to trial. Jenn Otremba: Yeah. They're saying no investigation at all occurred. No plans developed or implemented for her sake, or her safety, or those around her either, which is also concerning. Bryan Strawser: I'm a little flabbergasted by this one. Bryan Strawser: If we take the parents' story at face value, and I'm not saying that that is the hundred percent of the facts here, but universities have pretty clear regulatory and legal requirements to take action when there is a credible threat, to communicate to the broader campus community. And here I'm speaking about the requirements under the Clery Act, where they have to send this communication, either an imminent, I forget the specific term, but there's the imminent notice, emergency notification that has to go out if there's a credible threat. And then there's a duty to warn requirement that can be done in a less serious situation. But it doesn't appear that either of those were done. Bryan Strawser: Of course we don't know for sure what was communicated. Jenn Otremba: I mean, there's also the general duty clause under OSHA as well. Bryan Strawser: Under OSHA guidelines. Right. Jenn Otremba: So, even if those other things didn't exist, OSHA is always going to be in existence there with that. Bryan Strawser: Right. Bryan Strawser: I mean, I was Chief Security Officer for a university system that operated throughout North America, and in several states. Our internal requirements around this would have dictated that the action be taken and an investigation be conducted and a, if appropriate, a mitigation plan be put into place to ensure her safety and the safety of those around her. And I think that's the lesson here for a business or a university is, you have to take this stuff seriously. You need to believe the alleged victim here in this case and take action. Bray Wheeler: Is it enough to do just a threat assessment? Jenn Otremba: Well, I think it's all going to be dependent on what the facts are that come out of any kind of investigation. But from what I can see, at least what the initial reporting is, that there was no investigation conducted at all. So, in the event of nothing, I mean, I can't tell you if it's going to be enough, because we don't know what would have come out in that investigation. Jenn Otremba: I think you were doing, Bray, a little bit further digging, and didn't you find some concerning information that when they were dating and she found out he was actually lying to her about some pretty significant things? Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Well, according to a couple of the reports, really what precipitated the fall out between the two of them was, she allegedly broke up with him in October of last year after she found out that he had lied about his name, his age, and his status as a sex offender. So it turns out he's, according to some of these reports, he's actually 37 and she was 21 at the time that she was killed. So, it's pretty big. That's a pretty big age gap. Jenn Otremba: Now, I didn't see. Was he a student with her? Bray Wheeler: That I didn't see. Jenn Otremba: I haven't seen that on anywhere either. Bryan Strawser: I don't believe so. Jenn Otremba: And that could be why the university chose to not do any further action, because if he wasn't a student there, they may have been limited what they could have done, but they could have done some information sharing with local law enforcement as well. Jenn Otremba: So, there's always something that can be done, but they may have not taken the action that the parents felt that they should have because he wasn't in fact a student there. If that is the case, I don't know. Bryan Strawser: My understanding is that the university had a university police department. So I think they probably had more jurisdiction than we would typically see. Jenn Otremba: Sure. Bryan Strawser: Right? States treats this differently. Here in Minnesota, private schools don't have law enforcement and really only the University of Minnesota has campus police. But in Massachusetts, where I lived for a decade, everybody's got cops. Bryan Strawser: Private, public. Everyone's got their own department. And I think this was Utah? Jenn Otremba: Yes. Yup. Bray Wheeler: Utah. Bray Wheeler: One, it sounds like, not only did she go to university police, she also went to housing. The university housing- Bryan Strawser: Oh, interesting. Jenn Otremba: Sure. Bray Wheeler: ... and said, "I have this going on." Bryan Strawser: "I don't feel safe here in the dorm." Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: Her housing unit. Jenn Otremba: I mean, certainly regardless of the investigation, there could've been some actions put in place to help her and those around her feel safe with some safety planning for her. And, or classrooms that she is going in and out of, and the housing area that she's living in. There certainly could have been some safety precautions taken. I don't know if those were taken or not. They obviously didn't meet the standard of what the parents were expecting. Jenn Otremba: I don't know beyond that what was done, but I think like you said Bryan, this is definitely a lesson for all organizations to really take these things seriously and understand. Even if the university police didn't help, there are other information sharing jurisdictions out there that could probably step in, and keep owning your safety. Keep pushing that till you get the help that you need as well. Bryan Strawser: I mean, I feel like this is something we always keep coming back to, and that is that in the moment making the right decision. That when this threat was brought up and her safety concerns were brought up, we should believe her in the things that she's saying, pending investigation. And we should take the right action. Bryan Strawser: I mean, it kind of reminds me of the Leslie Moonves situation at CBS, where people came forward and credibly accused him of all kinds of sexual harassment and some violent-ish behavior. And the board, in the first accusation, the board of CBS just brush it off. They don't conduct a thorough investigation. They kind of half-ass it. And then when more allegations came out, they hired a different law firm to investigate it. And lo and behold, 25 years of crap comes out about the guy, right? Bryan Strawser: So again, I think from a leadership standpoint, it's about making the right decision in the moment when it's happening. And that doesn't appear to have happened here, but we'll find out. Jenn Otremba: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yup, we will. Bray Wheeler: One, and I think, to that point, in your earlier point too, it's not just about the victim, or the accuser, or the student herself. It's about the university. It's about those other students in the classroom. It's about the campus at large and these situations, that it's not just that person. Jenn Otremba: The other residents at the housing. Yeah. Bray Wheeler: Right? It's everybody else around her. And if you're getting accusations like some of these things and you don't know what people's capabilities are, if you're not taking it seriously upfront, you're exposing everybody to it instead of keeping it under control and mitigating it as much as you can. Jenn Otremba: Especially what sounds like here is a very highly volatile situation. I was just reading through some of them, what things were being reported. So, multiple concerning reports of stalking, physical abuse, emotional abuse, intimidation, dating violence, domestic violence, sexual harassment, gender-based discrimination, and other abusive behaviors. Jenn Otremba: So this isn't a one time, "He's being mean to me," kind of situation. These were repeated reports of concerning behavior. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. What was going on at the university that they didn't act? I know, we don't know. And we'll learn. Jenn Otremba: Yeah. It's hard to say. It is really hard to say. Bryan Strawser: So the lesson here is to take action when these issues come up and don't walk away from it until you've investigated what's really going on with that. Jenn Otremba: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: That's it for this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. Tune in later this week for a deep dive, round table discussion between the three of us on crisis leadership. Bryan Strawser: We'll see you then.

Once you've made the decision to hold a crisis management exercise, how should the exercise team and participants begin planning for the exercise? There's a lot to do in order to ensure that the goals of the exercise are achieved! In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser along with Consultant Bray Wheeler discuss their experiences in crafting and preparing exercise material - but also how to coach participants through preparing for the exercise that you are developing. Related Posts & Podcast Episodes: Crisis Exercises: Why are they important? Managing Uncertainty Podcast - Episode #19: Exercises are Boring How to evaluate plan effectiveness after active shooter exercises Why social media and communications should be part of any crisis exercise //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, a consultant at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: We've decided that 90 days from now, we're going to have a crisis exercise. We've scheduled it. We've sent out the invites. We've secured the room. Then it hits us. We have to prepare for this exercise. We just thought it was a good idea to have one. What are we going to do here? What do we do, Bray? Bray Wheeler: Where to begin? Where to begin? Well, I think a couple of assumptions. We've identified the scenario. We've laid out our run of play, or our outline, for the exercise. We feel pretty confident in that. I think what we're trying to drive at is- Bryan Strawser: We know who's participating and observing and evaluating and controlling, which might all be the same person. Bray Wheeler: Right. All the finer points of the nature of the exercise and what we're trying to accomplish has been laid out. But we have to get ready for it. I think there's a couple of different pockets of things, activities, that have to be done. One is as players and one is as facilitators from that exercise. From just a pure participant player standpoint, there's quite a bit that people can do that's probably fairly obvious, but not everybody does it. We do surveys a lot with a lot of our companies, and it's amazing to see that people, "Well, I brought the plan." And that's all they did. Bryan Strawser: Bringing the plan is good. It's good to have the plan with you. Bray Wheeler: Right. It's a good start, but they often don't necessarily review that plan upfront. They're not meeting as individual workstreams or things like that. There's a lot that can be done. I think we've talked quite a bit about reviewing that plan is important, but it's really looking at it from a, "I understand the general flow of how things go, that I could easily communicate that to somebody who doesn't know." Maybe that's your participants, your members of your crisis group, whatever that is, should be able to walk up to a random employee in the company and be able to succinctly explain what the general process is for that and have that person understand what they're talking about, because that means that participant gets it. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. They understand what's going on. They can speak to the context of the exercise. I think our standard practice has been, as you get closer to the exercise, seven to ten days out or maybe a little bit earlier, we're having somebody, sometimes it's us, sometimes the client's main program person is sending out an email to participants. In the email, we always include a couple of things, like, "Here's the goals or objectives for the exercise. More importantly, how you should think about preparing for the exercise." To your point, it is to review the plan, talk about the plan with others. We have them look at previous after-action reports, to look at what worked well and what recommendations work. Sometimes those recommendations are about the participants, or about the interaction from the participants or knowledge from the plan, that kind of thing. Bray Wheeler: Or a process, like accounting for- Bryan Strawser: Or a process. Bray Wheeler: ... employees, or how to engage an HR partner or something like that, that having those workstreams, whether it's communications or HR or security or something like that, get together and meet up in advance and just say, "Hey, we get into a situation where this exercise is coming up. Let's talk through our roles and responsibilities, our process. Who's going to have the ball? When do I need to pick the ball up? When are you going to pass me the ball, or when can I expect that the ball's coming my way without knowing in advance?" That, I think, speaks to just being comfortable, just generally, not only with the process but just that roles and responsibilities and understanding what other people are doing when you walk into that room. You're not breaking down, "Why to do this?" or "Don't you do this?" That you're pretty comfortable, and it's deeper questions that you're going to ask during the exercise to clarify a certain piece, rather than knowledge seek. Bryan Strawser: I think it behooves people who have been involved in a previous exercise, and they find themselves going into another exercise. Same company, same rough role, and responsibilities. I think it is important to reflect on what went well and what didn't go well in that previous exercise, and look at the formal after-action report if you have access to it, because at least the way we ponder constructing exercises, and I know our clients believe in this too, we're looking at what didn't go well last time that we said we were going to fix? Now we're going to test it again to see if it's fixed. You brought up accountability for employees. We've done a couple of exercises earlier this year with clients where that was a factor. One company had a process for that. It went into the exercise world and went well. One had never thought about it, and went, "Wow, we should figure out how to do that." Obviously, this fall when we go back there and do an exercise, we're going to be asking that. "Okay, so ..." Bray Wheeler: You've had time. Bryan Strawser: "You've had time. We're going to test it." Bray Wheeler: Do you know where your employees are? Bryan Strawser: Yeah, "Do you know where your employees are? How are you going to account for the employees in this building?" The 1100 employees [inaudible 00:05:58], and I have confidence in this particular case the HR leader will be like, "Yes, we're going to initiate our new process." Bray Wheeler: Done. Bryan Strawser: Like magic, it happens. But it behooves you to go back and look at that list of opportunities and make sure that you've addressed them before the next exercise. Bray Wheeler: Or I think to your point, in preparing for the next exercise, and even thinking about how you're going to follow up out of that exercise is that after action and those opportunities, those things that didn't go well, to your point, is it's really based on what do we want to change? How do we want to fix it? Making it actionable, those opportunities, rather than, "Well, that didn't go well. We don't have a process for that." Great. You need to take that opportunity and say, "Okay, we didn't have this and we need to put that into place and that needs to be ready for the next exercise or next event or time limit, or whatever you want to set to it." But make it actionable. Bryan Strawser: Another area, I think, in preparing for an exercise, and you mentioned this, I think you talked about it as workstreams and I agree with that context. You think about the elements of a crisis team or a data incident response team, you have people there who are representing different functions or are a particular subject matter expert. They're bringing that silo with them. But think about a client-facing business where you have multiple clients in different sizes that your organization provides services or products to, and then just think about the concept of communication in that world. You've got external comms going out to the public, like PR, you got social media. You got the investment community for publicly traded. You've got your employees, so now you got internal communications, and then you got communications for your clients. Bray Wheeler: You even have regulatory. Bryan Strawser: Good point. I left that out. You've also got communication regulators. Now you're in a crisis and you have to communicate what's going on. That is probably not just your comms team. It's probably multiple stakeholders in various workstreams to make that happen. If you go upstream of preparing for the exercise, then it might be a good idea to get your workstream together and walk through this, particularly if it's been a while since your last exercise. Do you have the inputs and outputs and the decision points nailed down? Do you need to practice this outside of the crisis environment before you get to the exercise? In some cases, yes. We have clients that should probably practice that. Bray Wheeler: Well, and especially if there have been organizational changes if there are new leaders in those positions covering those areas. Communications is a good example because it's probably one of the more complex pieces of running a crisis, because of everything we've laid out. Who's in charge of drafting the messaging? Who has that responsibility? Who's approving it? Who needs to see it first? Bryan Strawser: Where's the base factual narrative that we're all working off of? Bray Wheeler: Right. How is it being delivered, and who's delivering it? How? There's through social media. There's through, hey, we have people calling into our customer service line who may not be a customer. They may just be journalists or a general person off the street asking a question. Employees calling up. We've seen that before, where employees will call the customer service line looking for information. It's having all those different components, to your point, laid out ahead of time and knowing who's running what. Bray Wheeler: The second bucket we have been talking about ... we have the player, participants, members of the crisis team, and then there's the facilitators or the operators of the exercise [crosstalk 00:10:06]- Bryan Strawser: Controllers and exercise director, depends on what terminology you're using. Bray Wheeler: Evaluator. All those things. Bryan Strawser: Servers. Bray Wheeler: I think as we were talking earlier, there's really two ways as you're thinking about the exercise. You're running an exercise probably for two reasons. One is it's a newer function or a newer plan or generally just a new team, and really it's a- Bryan Strawser: It's a confidence builder. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. You're building confidence. You're getting them comfortable with the plan and the process and the players and each other, in a lot of cases. The second one is it's a more mature function. This one is we're going to challenge you. As you indicated earlier, introducing fog into it. Bryan Strawser: Fog of war. Bray Wheeler: Stress. Bryan Strawser: We're going to introduce noise in order to distract you from managing your scenario. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. How are you able to discern what's important, what's not important, what decisions do you need to make, all those different things. Really, as a facilitator or controller ... we'll use facilitator for conversation purposes, really with that new function, you're really guiding them. You're shepherding them through the exercise. You're a source for answers to questions. You're mediating different conversations. You're really just allowing them to talk it out and play it out to get comfortable with it. When you get into that mature scenario, your role changes. You're less the source of truth. You're a nudger. You're just poking them and prodding them along to keep the exercise moving so that they don't stall out, but really you're not giving them the answers anymore. Bray Wheeler: You need to be able to distinguish between what role you're playing in preparing for that exercise and make sure that you're clear on that, so that you're not giving too much information in a mature situation, but you're also not so abstract with the new. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. I think those are all great points. As the exercise staff, so to speak, we're really looking at are we clear upfront what everyone's roles are going to be? Are we clear on how we're going to interact? The way our approach has been, even if we're sitting next to each other during the exercise, is we use a particular channel on our internal slack to keep everybody in sync, because often when we're doing exercises, there might be two or three of us in the room, and one or two of us are mulling, who are calling in, or some other nefarious way of injecting information. We've done some strange things. But the interaction ... we're very clear that we're going to execute a move 14 now. Bryan Strawser: When I'm directing the exercise, I'll then say, based on their reaction to move 14, we'll execute move 17 or move 19. Those moves are basically the reward or the consequence of what they're doing in the move that we just called. Sometimes we have moves that we inject that we don't even bring up because the situation has superseded that. Part of what I think we do in the preparation for this is we do a pretty good job, I think, of thinking about the multiple branches that the exercise may take, and then crafting injects that are realistic that make sense in the moment that they do these things. Even if they seem far fetched at the time, we're creating them. Sometimes we're creating these in order to jump ahead in time or force an action because they haven't chosen to do something earlier. Bryan Strawser: For example, one of our internal traditions on information security, cyber security-focused exercise, is to have someone inject themselves into the scenario and pretend to be Journalist Brian Krebs, because famously, Kreb gets ignored by people sometimes and that's really not a wise move. There's always a consequence in our exercise if you respond to Krebs, then he will work with you in the exercise on the story. If you ignore Krebs, then the story's going to break a lot faster than you think it's going to, because now he's mad. Exercise Krebs is mad. Bray Wheeler: And often with a surprising level of accuracy of- Bryan Strawser: Of what actually happened. Bray Wheeler: ... what's going on to force that, because he's known for that. Bryan Strawser: But this is what you want to create, I think, in the exercise, is to play out what we were just talking about. One of the bigger decisions that you're going to make in a cybersecurity exercise when you get to the point of confirming a breach, and the breach involved regulated data, PCI, PHI, trade seeker data, you pick your issue, some of these have mandatory reporting periods attached to them. You may be in the exercise thinking, "I've got 72 hours to craft my messaging to understand the various vehicles I've got to send stuff out to my different audiences, and I've got time to figure this out." What you don't know is that phone they rang over at the comms table in the exercise was exercise Bryan Krebs, and your comms team blew him off. Bryan Strawser: To them, they're just ... At least the first time. They learn the lesson quick. The first time they do that... They're like, "Okay, well I've saved the situation because no journalist knows." The problem is, 15 minutes later in the exercise, you get the ... a new story lands in everyone's mailbox, and when they click it, it's an audio link that they've recorded by an actor blowing your story wide open by Bryan Krebs. And now you don't have 72 hours. Bray Wheeler: You do not. Bryan Strawser: You're out of time. Bray Wheeler: You're out of time. Bryan Strawser: You got to go now, and actually you're too late because the story's already out. It's not your story. Bray Wheeler: Now you're playing catch up to ... Bryan Strawser: Now you're playing catch up. Bray Wheeler: ... what's going on. Bryan Strawser: In fact, we always craft it in a way that you're going to have to correct the story. The story's right, you've had a data breach. It might be that what you know is 600,000 records, the story is 4 million, so it sounds worse than what it really is and now you got to correct it. That's going to be really hard. Bray Wheeler: Really to that point, in thinking about the different branches, you also have to be able to go into this prepared for situations where they take a different turn, or they explore a different branch than what was considered. Often, you can lay some of these out as ... some of them are more binary choices. It's a yes, no. It's a go, don't go, pay, don't pay, type of situation. Sometimes there are more branches that we think through and have prepared. But I think as the facilitator, what you really want to be able to do is be comfortable with that exercise in a fashion that if they go a different route or they don't take action on something that you assume they were going to take action on that they had done previously, that they were good at, that you assume there's no way they're possibly going to pass this up. Bryan Strawser: And they do. Bray Wheeler: They do, or it gets stalled out in a different conversation and nobody's aware that this other conversation's going on. You have to be prepared to add another inject, or on the fly put additional pressure out there so that you're forcing some of these injects you've already put into play to be played. You have to be able to improvise and adapt, even if you've done a really good job of laying out the different things. I think to that end, too, as the facilitator, you can bind yourself up in knots if you get too detailed and you get too rigid to the plan that you're trying to play out that, "Well, there's only one of two choices. If they don't pick these two choices, I don't know what to do. This exercise is a failure." It's not a failure. Bray Wheeler: You have to be able to lay it out in a way that you're allowing them to organically react to things and just prepare for them to start taking paths, but then be prepared as that facilitator or evaluator to say, "You know what? They actually went a different route and it was really effective. We didn't have to play two more injects," or "We had to add two more injects in on the fly to move the conversation or explore a different piece of the objectives that they want to accomplish with the exercise." I think that's the other piece of a facilitator, too, is to keep those objectives that you've laid out for the exercise top of mind, that really what you're trying to do is if communications is a thing, you're really playing up that communications piece of it. You're not letting that slide because the conversation went a different way. You're trying to drive them back to some of those objectives if you can. Bryan Strawser: I think you bring a really important point. Part of it is that whole idea of thinking through the storyline for the exercise, and crafting your injects to support that in branches that you've foreseen. But you're exactly right, Bray, in that there will be situations that you just didn't foresee. It doesn't mean that they're wrong, the team just chose to go a different route. As the facilitator, exercise director, you either got to decide that the path they're on is right and that's the right path for what they've decided and you're going to have to rearrange on the fly to deal with that, or you're going to have to take some actions to get them back onto your main storyline. It's hard to tell until you're in the moment and you see the direction that they're going to wind up going. Bray Wheeler: Well, and sometimes they just get hung up on a point and they just feel like, "I don't have all the-" Bryan Strawser: The wrong point? Bray Wheeler: The wrong point. Or, "I don't have enough information to make a decision. I don't know what to do. I'm making an assumption here. I don't know. I don't know." You have to be able to, as the facilitator or that exercise staff, be able to step in and just say, "This is what we know. This is the only information you have. Assume this to be true," in order to get them unhooked or unstuck off of a point that they've rallied around that says, "No. Just assume this to be true. Move on." To get them to keep moving. It's that nimbleness. It's that improvisation, that as that facilitation staff when you're preparing for it, you need to know the nuts and bolts of logistics of what's going on. But really, you just need to be comfortable in a way walking in there that you can push them and make them work through it. Whatever the goal is for that exercise, your focus is just on making sure that that happens. Bray Wheeler: Regardless of what tangent or how slow the exercise may move because they're really exploring good content, those aren't failures, if you can't get to your last inject. You crafted ten injects and you only get to eight. It's not a failure. Bryan Strawser: In the end, the number of injects doesn't matter. Bray Wheeler: No. Bryan Strawser: Do you reach the goals the director just laid out in the exercise? Bray Wheeler: Exactly. Bryan Strawser: When you're finalizing your exercise plan and you lay out, "Here's where we're going to stop. We're stopping at 3:00, or when we reach this point in the exercise, this decision has been made, or this conclusion has been reached and this is where we're going to cut it." Bray Wheeler: Call it. Bryan Strawser: Call it. Maybe you don't really have a hard time in some cases. It depends on your exercise and your company that you're doing. I think ours usually has a ... There's a point where we got to end, but we're trying to get them there in advance of that by getting them to the final decision that they need to make before this thing wraps up, or... Bray Wheeler: Or identifying the decision points you need to be able to- Bryan Strawser: Exactly. Bray Wheeler: ... walk into the execs. Bryan Strawser: Or you achieve the result. It's like your Oregon Trail game ends because you died of dysentery, or you died fording the Mississippi. Bray Wheeler: Right, your wagon axle broke. Bryan Strawser: Your wagon axle broke. Bray Wheeler: You all starved. Bryan Strawser: Whatever those events were in Oregon Trail on the exercises, we're the same way. That's it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. We wish you well in preparing and planning for your next exercise. We've got 90 days till ours, so we've got some work to do. Thanks for tuning in. Hope you'll listen next week.

Hurricane Dorian is currently making its way towards the southeastern United States at a slow one mile per hour as a category 4 hurricane. At the time of this writing, the storm is just over 100 miles from West Palm Beach, Florida.  Dorian is expected to scrape the east coast of the United States as a significant hurricane - though the storm track may yet vary over the next few days. In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser provides perspective for Hurricane Dorian based on his experience with previous hurricanes, the steps that resilient organizations take in order to best recover from a major hurricane, and actions that businesses and individuals should be taking in the coming days. Learn more about Bryghtpath's Hurricane Crisis Management Services and how we can help your organization weather the coming storm. Key Resources National Hurricane Center FEMA National Business Emergency Operations Center (NBEOC) Related Articles & Episodes Managing Uncertainty Episode #6: Personal Preparedness Managing Uncertainty Episode #7: After the Storm Managing Uncertainty Episode #15: Here comes Irma Managing Uncertainty Episode #17: Lessons Learned from the 2017 Hurricane Season Managing Uncertainty Episode #23: Crisis Management is not a Pickup Game Managing Uncertainty Episode #50: Conducting an Effective After-Action Process Blog Post: Looking back at the 2017 Hurricane Season Free Training: Crisis Management 101 Intro Course //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. And I'm recording solo today, it's Labor Day here in the United States, Monday, September 2nd, 2019. But with the impending arrival of Hurricane Dorian in the southeastern United States, I thought it was important to get an episode down, kind of quickly, that tells a little bit about our hurricane experiences, and some things that companies and individuals should be thinking about in the next week or so as Dorian begins to, what appears to be a scraping of the United State's southeastern coastline, from about the middle of Florida up to, potentially, southern Virginia, and even farther north, depending upon the storm track for the storm. Bryan Strawser: Let's just recap briefly where Hurricane Dorian is at right now, and I'm recording this at 1:15 central time on Labor Day here in the United States, so this obviously will change over the coming hours. But right now as of about 15 minutes ago, Hurricane Dorian is 25 miles to the northeast of Freeport, Grand Bahama Island of the Bahamas out in the Atlantic Ocean. It is 105 miles east of West Palm Beach, Florida, so closing in on the Florida coast. It is currently a category four storm. It has dropped a bit in intensity over the last 12 hours. It has maximum sustained winds of 150 miles an hour, and it has wind gusts that are exceeding that. Bryan Strawser: Yesterday, Dorian was a category five. It had winds in excess of 185 miles an hour with gusts up to 232. That was recorded there in Grand Bahama. The storm is not moving very quickly. It is currently moving to the northwest at about a mile an hour. This is down from five miles an hour yesterday, and eight miles an hour the day before. So the storm is slowing rather a lot. Bryan Strawser: There are now a number of watches and warnings in effect. I won't get too far into this except to focus on there's a hurricane warning in effect for Grand Bahama, obviously, in the northwest Bahamas Islands, and then in Florida, from the Jupiter Inlet to the Flagler Volusia County line. There is a hurricane watch in effect for north of Deerfield Beach, Florida to the Jupiter Inlet, and then from Flagler County line to the Altamaha Sound in Georgia. I'm sure I've just mispronounced that. And then there's a number of other tropical storm warnings and watches in the area. Bryan Strawser: The best place to go for details is the National Hurricane Center, where you can read the actual direct forecast on the storm. This is obviously extremely dangerous. It was described as a catastrophic hurricane yesterday by the National Hurricane Center. But it's not something to joke around with, and what I want to talk a little bit about are just our lessons in managing hurricane response, and preparing for hurricanes to impact your business and a little bit of advice for individuals. Bryan Strawser: For background, I think important to note, I've been managing major hurricanes since about 2005, so almost 15 years now. My first major hurricane was Hurricane Katrina, and what a baptism in the fire that storm was, followed by Rita and Wilma. And then I was out of this business for a bit, and came back in 2009, and dealt with everything from Maria, to Sandy, to Hurricane Harvey, and Irma, and many others in between. Bryan Strawser: First, I want to talk about the most important impacts here, and that just impacts to local communities and employees, and businesses have a role to play here. What you can expect to see, depending upon the storm track, is that many employees are going to have flooded, or storm-damaged homes. Even if they are not directly impacted, it is entirely possible that their loved ones, and their family, or extended family, or even their neighbors are in harm's way, and can be impacted. Employees will have a lot of questions around evacuation to make sure that you're closing your business in time for them to evacuate, but also about returning home, and returning to work. How much time will they have to be able to deal with damage or issues with their home, and how do they keep in touch with you and your business to make sure that they understand about returning to work. Bryan Strawser: Another challenge can be the lack of available communications. We can expect, due to both wind and the power situation, for cell phones to perhaps not be as workable, reliable rather, as they typically are. We can also see the normal telephone line system be flooded or damaged in a way that there's no good communication. You're also going to find that your employees are going to have to deal with a relatively complex state and federal assistance process in order to get access to individual assistance from the state and federal governments. The FEMA app is the easiest and preferred way to go on a mobile device to get access to FEMA's resources for individuals, but they may need time off, and some understanding from you as the employer, to deal with those processes. Bryan Strawser: And then lastly, our experience has taught us that personal and family preparedness efforts by your employees with your encouragement really makes a huge difference in their individual resiliency. And after all, if they're resilient as a family, and as individuals, they can more quickly return to work, and help you get your business back up and running. Bryan Strawser: Things you should think about in the days to come. One is just to encourage your employees to take personal preparedness and family preparedness efforts. There are great resources available at Ready.gov, from FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, and the Ready campaign. I would not try to reinvent this. I would just use it the way that it's intended, which is to send people there for the resources and have them be able to use those. It really keeps it simple. It focuses on making a plan, having or buying a kit, practicing that plan, making plans for communication, and then learning life-saving actions. Like, how do you turn off the gas at your home, how do you turn off the water in your home, and some of those things. Bryan Strawser: The second thing as an employer is to really make sure that you are closing your facilities in advance of the storms in a way that enable you to protect your assets, but also enables your employees to have enough time to evacuate mandatory and optional evacuation areas. The third thing you may want to look at as an employer is to think about disaster pay and assistance. What do you do if your facility has to be closed when people were scheduled to work? What if the facility has to be closed for a few weeks? Will you compensate your employees? And do you have some kind of emergency fund that they may be able to get access to in order to help stopgap some measures while they wait on state and federal assistance? These could go a long way in building loyalty with your team and are usually just the right thing to do. Bryan Strawser: Lastly, depending upon what the impacts look like, it's not uncommon for employees to return to the area, not have power, not have access to natural gas. It may benefit them to have access to air conditioning, be able to come in and charge their phones or laptops, be able to use the Internet in order to pursue assistance applications or get information. These are all great things you can do for your employees that enable them to return to work more quickly. Bryan Strawser: Almost every state and city has some type of way for you as an employer to connect in terms of public-private partnerships, and gain access to information. I would look for that with your states. For example, the state of Florida has been highly active over the last several days in terms of coordinating and communicating with the private sector, and with businesses large and small. Find ways to plug into your state partners, find ways to plug into FEMA through the Office of the Private Sector in the National Business Emergency Operations Center. These guys are holding calls every day sharing information, asking questions, making sure that businesses have the information they need in order to prepare, and then make plans to respond and recover their businesses. They're currently running calls every day at 2:00 central time, along with a persistent virtual situation room online, where there's 24/7 chat, and a lot of information being shared, like maps, and permanent and waiver information, reentry information, and things along those lines. Remember, when it comes to public-private partnerships, when you need a friend, it's too late to make one. Now is the time to make sure that those relationships are in place. Bryan Strawser: The other area I want to talk just briefly about is just some other strategies that are being used by successful companies that are resilient, that move through these hurricane situations, and be able to respond and recover, and get their business back up and running very quickly. There are really six things that companies do that we see as strong signs of success as they start to work through preparation for a hurricane. Bryan Strawser: The first is what we just talked about, which is the public-private partnership aspect. But I wouldn't hesitate to communicate and build relationships with your peer companies in the market, and at a national level. Work through your trade associations, for example, I came out of retail, so the Retail Industry Leaders Association, and the National Retail Federation. They both have disaster-focused committees, and so there's the great conversation that can happen about sharing information. And even though you're competitors, I don't think we're competing in this space. We're talking about how do we share information so that we can all reopen more quickly. Bryan Strawser: The second sign of a strong, successful company when it comes to this kind of disaster preparedness and response, is having a properly documented crisis management framework. Or in other words, how can you make sure that you have a defined way to escalate a crisis to a set group of folks who have been trained and practice together, they exercise together. And how you have a process to get those key stakeholders in the room, and talk through the decisions you need to make in a crisis, and then communicate the results of those decisions. We call that a crisis management framework, but really, it's how do you get the right leaders in the room, and subject matter experts, talk through the decisions you need to make, communicate the results of those decisions. Those teams are usually made up of folks like corporate security, and crisis management, human resources communications, facilities, business lines, legal. Perhaps there are others, and you have signed someone the responsibility for coordinating this process so that it runs smoothly, and you're able to practice and lead through that. Bryan Strawser: Another successful thing we see with companies is just the ability to communicate while they're in the middle of a crisis. This really requires the company to think about well what are audiences that we need to think about communicating to? That might be impacted employees, employees as a whole, leadership and the board, other stakeholders that are invested in our company's success, like local community leaders and other, and then your customer base, which is usually the public, or kind of a subset of industry or a sector in that. But thinking about what's the audience I'm going to communicate to, and then building the right messages around that. Bryan Strawser: One of our key takeaways here is you know the hurricane is coming, right? So if we're going to have some things to message, we should be building those communications plans now. And then as those things happen, you can update the messaging that you've already created with the right detail, and then be able to push that out through your normal communication channels. Bryan Strawser: Social media comes up a lot in these conversations. Your employees, particularly in a larger company, they're probably going to post on social media during a hurricane or other major event, and trying to stop them from doing that is pretty futile. It's just as important to post factual information about what's going on on social media than it is to just push out press releases. Just think about the kind of messaging and facts that you want to see out there. And if you have time to practice this, I would practice some fast-moving things with your communications team as a part of this. Bryan Strawser: Those are some of the factors that we see with successful companies as these major hurricanes come in. For individuals, the most important thing right now is to make sure that you've got your vehicle fully fueled, you're putting things in your vehicle, emergency supplies in your vehicle like food and water, whether that's bottled water if you got some different containers for water. Food and water are what you want to have in there, along with your luggage and other things. But keep the vehicle fueled, pay close attention to communication from your local emergency services personnel; police, fire, emergency management, and others. And when they tell you to evacuate, if they tell you to evacuate, don't hesitate, don't wait. Load and go, and make sure that you move on from there. Bryan Strawser: As I said earlier, we have pretty extensive experience in managing large scale hurricanes like Hurricane Dorian. We do provide a number of services that you might find useful at your organization. Those include custom weather... pardon me, custom monitoring and weather reporting. We use a number of open source and proprietary resources to really give you a complete picture of the current threat and impact to your organization. We build specific situational updates and executive briefings on the hurricane situation. These are written situational updates on a regular cadence that consolidate really hundreds of pages of information into a tightly written summary of the current on the ground situation. We can do these in a way that they're branded specifically for your organization's style, have custom content for your org, and integrate your internal data and other updates. We really think of these as the best way to know what's happening in the threatened and impacted area. Bryan Strawser: We also do executive and crisis team briefings that can be delivered via video conference or even through online video format where you can see us proving an update on the situation, and then some targeted content for your organization. Lastly, we're just a great, trusted crisis management advisor. We perform this role for a number of Fortune 500 organizations, lending our decades of crisis management and communications experience during their critical moment. During a hurricane like Hurricane Dorian, we're really customizing that advice to the specific needs of your company, but those commonly include 24/7 access to our team, participation in your internal calls and meetings, connectivity to key internal and external partners, and most importantly, problem-solving with your team, because we've already been through many of these situations. Bryan Strawser: If you're interested in learning more about our hurricane crisis management services as Dorian approaches and begins to impact the United States, you can learn more at Bryghtpath.com/hurricanes, or just give us a call at 612-235-6435. We'll have another episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast later this week, and if you're in the path of Hurricane Dorian, good luck.

In this episode of our BryghtCast edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast for the week of August 19th, 2019,  Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Consultant Bray Wheeler take a look at three current risks and upcoming events: Washington Post:  British government braces for economic, social chaos in event of a 'no-deal Brexit,' leaked memo shows South China Morning Post:  As it happened: Estimated 1.7 million people attend peaceful Hong Kong anti-government rally UK Independent:  Northern Ireland: Police 'lucky to be alive' after fake bomb lures them to explosion A discussion on targeted violence, rhetoric, and the run up to the 2020 elections NPR:  22 Texas Towns hit with ransomware attack in 'New Front' of Cyberassault Related Episodes & Articles Protect your Employees & your Business with an active shooter plan Managing Uncertainty Episode #2: The McDonald's Radar Screen Top 12 Global Risks of 2018 Managing Uncertainty Episode #26:  The Top 12 Global Risks of 2018 Active Shooter 101 Introductory Course //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, BryghtCast edition for the week of August 19th, 2019. This is Brian Strawser, principal and CEO here at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, consultant at Bryghtpath. So we start out this week talking about Brexit. You know, a light subject to start with. Bryan Strawser: Very light. There are no details for Brexit at all. Bray Wheeler: No, no. So the thing I think we wanted to touch on with Brexit here this week is really kind of the state of the states of where it's at, and where we likely think it's going to go. It's looking like no-deal Brexit is really the course of action, the pathway that they're pursuing. And I think the implications for companies right now is really being prepared for that. Bray Wheeler: There's a lot of economic and other kinds of issues associated with that, but there are some practical challenges with that too. Some of which include hard borders, the ability to travel and requiring different paperwork to be able to do that. Citizens of the EU who live in London, if you have employees that are- Bryan Strawser: Or anywhere in the UK, but yeah. Primarily in London, I would think. Bray Wheeler: That if they're EU citizens, there's been some conversation around some hard immigration enforcements when no-deal Brexit occurs and they don't ... Nobody really knows what that looks like. Bryan Strawser: It's interesting that we're talking about this now. Here we are in August 2019. because when we created our first global risk report for 2018, which we wrote in December 2017, we listed Brexit as one of the top 12 global risks of 2018. And here's what we said. The United Kingdom is still negotiating the terms and timetable for its departure from the European Union, a supremely political event that has already led to the downfall of one prime minister and may yet cost Theresa May her government as well. The ongoing uncertainty of the future relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union is what defines this as a top global risk for the coming year. Bryan Strawser: Theresa May is not the prime minister anymore. It's Boris Johnson. Bray Wheeler: She is not. It did cost her her job. Bryan Strawser: It did. Her entire premiership was dominated by Brexit and really nothing else. Bray Wheeler: Really nothing else. Bryan Strawser: Really nothing else. So we are on the precipice of what, about eight weeks from now, a potential no-deal of Brexit starting at the end of October, 1st of November. And to your point, it could mean that there is a hard border. The hard border question is really about the separation of Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: Because there is no border there right now because Northern Ireland is part of the UK, and the Republic of Ireland is part of the EU. They're all in the EU. So there's no hard border there today. And there would probably have to be one under a no-deal Brexit agreement. Bray Wheeler: There would be. And I think that kind of leads into kind of part two of this sort of conversation around Brexit. Really why that border matters for Northern Ireland and Ireland is that was kind of the representation of the violence that was occurring there for decades between those two sides of ... Bryan Strawser: Between partisans involved in the fight anyway, the IRA and others. Bray Wheeler: That there is a real worry that the hardening of that border will re-institute some of those feelings and that violence, which that kind of openness of that border has really ... People say has gone a long way to kind of diminish the violence and kind of hard feelings for the majority of people. Certainly, they're still kind of diehards on both sides, but you know, there's a real concern. And we're starting to see a little bit of that kind of start to pop up in conversations. Now, how much it's directly tied to Brexit isn't really clear. Bray Wheeler: But we have seen kind of reports of violence. So most recently in the last 24 hours, there was an explosion in Northern Ireland where there was kind of a deliberate, what they think is a deliberate targeting of law enforcement by setting off one explosion to draw them in, and then setting off a secondary device with the intent to hurt/kill law enforcement. Now, fortunately, it didn't- Bryan Strawser: There were no injuries, as I understand. Bray Wheeler: There were no injuries, but it comes on the heels of a bombing in July, and then kind of a booby-trapped explosive on a police officer's car in Northern Ireland in June. So we've seen a few months in a row of some explosive kind of incidents within Northern Ireland. Bryan Strawser: Well, there's a number of other... To your point, there's been a number of other similar kinds of situations. This one in particular kind of set out to us and we learned of this when they first through some new sent around by US law enforcement about a potential threat to law enforcement. But we agreed that this is probably more tied to the Brexit fight or some other issue in Northern Ireland. The interesting part of this is that there was some type of hoax device that attracted the attention of law enforcement. And law enforcement as we understand it right now, established a secure perimeter and began on this host device when a secondary device inside that secure perimeter was detonated. And obviously it was real, it did detonate. We don't know much more than that, but it reminded us of situations, exercises we've been involved with previously. Bray Wheeler: Yup. Bryan Strawser: With US law enforcement, where part of the exercise was to get law enforcement or fire EMS personnel to gather any specific location for staging or investigative purposes and then having a simulated explosive device. This is an exercise, we're not trying to really kill people. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: Then detonates and remove individuals from play for the remainder of the day, because they're dealing with injury to them. So this is a very common terrorist tactic is to have a primary device, get attention to [inaudible] personnel, and then detonate a secondary device that impacts the first responders. And this felt and read like a textbook case of that. Bray Wheeler: Yes. Yeah. And I think it's not a great sign overall, but it also contributes I think to just the broader kind of narrative that's going on. You know, just in general around escalating violence and getting into copycats and all that kind of inspiration type stuff too. Which I think is kind of our next kind of topic as well. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. Our second topic of the day is about targeted violence in the United States, so there's a couple of incidents here I think we want to mention that have all been in the news. But I think we're going to draw a connection here that's important. The first is we've had a number of mass shooting incidents in 2019, and even going back a couple of years that you could describe clearly as having an ideological motive. And that motive is targeted violence towards a specific group of people. In a couple of cases in the United States, it's been targeted based on religion and that has been aimed at the Jewish community. We saw what is the Synagogue of Life shootings in Pittsburgh. Those have been echoed by some more attempts or actual shooting incidents at a number of ... Again, targeted at the Jewish community, persons of the Jewish faith. Bryan Strawser: Second, we see this targeting of immigrants, particularly Hispanic immigrants. Appears to be the ideological motive in the El Paso, Texas, Walmart mass shooting. And to some extent, at the garlic festival in California. And so we've seen a number of instances, and these are just two of the recent ones. I think if you go farther back, there's been a number of instances of targeted violence with an ideological motive. I think there's still some question about Dayton in what the motivation was for the shooting in the bar district in Dayton, Ohio. But we have these clear examples where we have violence aimed at the Jewish community. We've got violence aimed at- Bray Wheeler: Muslim community. Bryan Strawser: At the Muslim community. We've got these shootings now in New Zealand. And then the shooting that happened in Norway, where I think that was an attempted shooting. Where that one was thwarted by a retired Pakistani air force officer that tackled the guy. Bryan Strawser: But the point here is that there are some clear instances of targeted violence in some cases coming from what the media would describe as white supremacists, or what law enforcement would describe as white supremacists aimed at different minority communities here in the United States, or in locations like New Zealand and Norway. The other warning that I think we've seen is, and we've seen this on a smaller scale, it hasn't evolved to this mass shooting level of incident yet. But we're seeing there's the threat of ... We think there'll be more of these types of attacks, particularly as the rhetoric around the issue of immigration in the United States in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. I only see the rhetoric getting worse. And with that, I think we would expect to see additional violent acts along these lines aimed at targeted groups. Bryan Strawser: We also think that the opposite is going to happen. And that is particularly around individuals who believe that or know that someone or a group of individuals are white supremacists. Or they think that they're white supremacists because of some action or comments that they've made, or because of their political affiliation, will engage in violence against those individuals. And so we only see this as becoming more disruptive and uncertain going into the 2020 election season. I think it gets worse than what we have seen over the last couple of years. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. I think just the environment and the national narrative right now kind of lends itself to this escalation of not just rhetoric anymore, but into action and then eventually into counteraction against those groups or that perception. That the white supremacists, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them, that narrative. The more frontal that gets, likely the louder the counter-voice is going to be. Bray Wheeler: And because we've moved beyond simply just discourse, even uncivil discourse around it into action, that it's very likely that the environment is just one of action by these groups. And we'll likely see more and more. And you know, Joe Q. Public is going to be caught kind of in that swirl. Bryan Strawser: So the challenge here for organizations, and even for individuals [inaudible] here is how do you take this possibility of increased risk of more of these types of incidents, and how do you factor that into your planning knowing that ... We can take the El Paso Texas incident as a good example of this. We know a lot of folks at Walmart. They run an excellent global security program, but this is not an attack that you could have foreseen happening in that environment, right? The target was not Walmart. It's just the location that the shooter went to get to the targeted audience that he wanted to commit violence against. So for the organization, what advice can we give to the folks listening on the podcast? What can you start to factor into your own planning and preparedness based on what we've witnessed here lately? Bray Wheeler: Well, I think first off you have to just assume that something like this could happen. It's reality. Now, whether or not it's intentional or not, the risk is there. You know, it could just as easily be an accident. Someone goes into diabetic shock and the car they're driving goes through the front vestibule and keeps going. It's the same type of response that you'll likely have to provide in the moment, regardless of what the nature of the ... You know, the motivation or the context of the situation is. It's being prepared for that possibility and assume that it could happen to you, and have that hat on as you're thinking through these things. I think that's just baseline. Assume that it could happen to you. And what do you have in place to prevent or mitigate or help respond to those situations? Bryan Strawser: I think it changes the narrative a little bit on the ... When you're thinking about what are those top risks that you need to plan for and what are the worst-case scenario events going to be. I think in my career, I thought about individualized acts of violence that were aimed at an individual. Or like I knew in my previous life, corporate life, that a homicide that happened at a location that I was responsible for was probably pure criminal activity, not of a targeted violence type of ... Like I've got a gang issue that bled into the workplace, and we just happened to be the place where that happened. Or it was a domestic violence situation, which was what we typically saw that came into the workplace as the location where that act was going to be committed. Bryan Strawser: I don't know that I really thought about ... It's much more likely that I was going to deal with this kind of situation than one of those two previous ones, like a mass shooting versus the other. So I think it's kind of like the pre-911 state of thought that it's time to start thinking that these kinds of things could be a reality in your place of business. Bray Wheeler: Or I think even as we get closer to election season and candidates become solidified, and lawn signs are out and commercials are out. And the narrative really starts to pick up that- Bryan Strawser: And it gets a lot more personal. Bray Wheeler: It gets a lot more personal and it feels a lot more personal to people. And I think that's where businesses, whether or not you're a retailer that's open to the public or a restaurant or something like that. Or just a closed off kind of office building, you really need to start thinking about what could happen at your location, but also what's happening in your neighborhood and being prepared for protest activity. Bray Wheeler: Violent marches, general just acts of violence, criminal activity, things like that. Just everything seems to kind of heat up, and it doesn't have to be a convention location or a speech or something like that. It could just be the Tuesday afternoon, Tuesday evening commute that groups are taking issue with. So I think it's just having that mindset of being prepared and feeling in a state of where you feel like you can be nimble but also prepared to what's happening. Bryan Strawser: We're going to do an upcoming episode specifically on kind of recent targeted violence. More to get into the details of what's happened, and what do we see from that, and what are some specific things companies should do. But we thought this was a good topic to include for today, given that we saw this targeted attack in Northern Ireland. And we've seen these other recent attacks. And we think there's going to be more to come, so this definitely kind of filters in as a big risk for organizations. Bray Wheeler: I think the one piece that kind of tied those two back together as well as it's not ... We're seeing a lot in the US and it feels very US-centric. It's also happening in Europe and other places too. Australia, there's been these things in recent years. So really kind of Western democracies, this kind of narrative and this political instability, if you want to call it that, of just these kind of countering ideas. You know, the nationalism, the white supremacy, whatever it is. That it's true kind of across those countries. So companies that are operating in those places, if you're global in that sense, don't just assume it for the US. Think about it for Europe as well. Think about it for Australia, et cetera. Bray Wheeler: So next topic we have really is kind of more recent too. Obviously, but we have reports, there's been some kind of news coverage around 23 Texas towns have been struck by a coordinated ransomware attack according to the state's department of information resources. So this kind of comes on the heels. It started sounds like Friday morning, kind of through the weekend in Texas where 23 towns were hit with these attacks. No authorities have been able to determine that one threat actor. They've stated they believe there's been one threat actor responsible for all 23. They don't yet know who's responsible. But really, this kind of comes on the heels of some other recent attacks in Maryland, New York, Louisiana, Florida. More locally for us, there was a town in Minnesota that was hit with that as well and I believe paid the ransom for it. But really, we're starting to see kind of these more bigger ransomware attacks directed at kind of state local governments. Bray Wheeler: We don't know how successful in terms of actually getting ransoms paid to that. There have been reports that ransoms have been paid, but I think just more broadly, the financial impact of those two just to shut them down, respond to them, investigate them is obviously there. Aside from just paying the ransom, there's kind of a monetary impact there. And the fact that they're kind of going there obviously could impact business activity, given that these governments are shut down right now. Kind of offline, so to speak, but also lends itself to just the general environment of ransomware and the success that one actor is having. Bryan Strawser: This conversation has come up here in Minnesota a couple of times because I think there are about 375 individual municipalities in Minnesota. Of course, there's like six cities over a hundred thousand, Minneapolis and St Paul by far being the largest. But almost all of this IT work in the state, although there are some shared services through some associations, every city kind of does their own thing, right. And some of these cities are smaller towns that have like a city manager and three or four staff members. And somebody there is in charge of information security who probably is like the water bill collector, or what have you. And I'm not casting aspirations on anybody, but I know like here in Minnesota, because we just saw media around this a few weeks ago, they've had some ransomware attacks. And at least one city coughed up $175,000 to get their computers un-encrypted. Which surprisingly they paid it, and it did get un-encrypted. Bray Wheeler: We've heard narratives through news and white papers and discussions with just various people that there really is kind of a ... There's almost a cost of doing business attitude towards some of these things lately. Or at least that's kind of where people are starting to kind of trend mindset that if, "Hey, I'm a multibillion-dollar company. If I can pay $100,000 to make this go away, well, it's a lot cheaper than trying to investigate and notify and do all these other things." Pay the $100,000 the data back, get the access back, whatever, and move on. That is a cost of doing business that's probably not sustainable, nor is it probably the right thing to do at the end of the day. But you know, that's the question that companies have to face. It is a real question now for companies on the ransom. Bray Wheeler: Do you pay it? Do you not pay it? A lot of times they come through as Bitcoin. Do you even have a Bitcoin account system set up to be able to transact that? A lot of companies don't. Bryan Strawser: Well, I'm going to be very un-hip for a minute. I didn't have a Bitcoin account of any type, but there's a website that I wanted to support that was kind of independent media. And the only way that this guy took donations was via Bitcoin. And so I had to figure out like how do I send him, you know, the $50 donation that I want to give him for the yeah if I don't have a Bitcoin account. And it was a frustrating experience to figure out like how to do that without diving into the whole Bitcoin experience. Bray Wheeler: One, it's quite the process as I understand it, to be able to even do that should the ransomware come up and should that come through. I mean, just logistically that's a challenge. Aside from just the question of to pay it, not to pay it. Being prepared to do so becomes challenging. Bryan Strawser: And in my mind, these kind of low hanging attacks are only going to become more common. To me, like cities and townships is the frontline of government. I probably shouldn't assume this, but I would think a large city like Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Bloomington, Duluth. If I'm picking cities here in Minnesota, probably have relatively robust information security capability. But like I live in a town of 25,000 people. Is that town secure? I don't know. I hope my mayor's not listening. But like is it secure? And could somebody get in there and ransomware the city? And our office is in an even smaller town next to where I live, and it could be the same situation. So I think this risk continues to be in place and is definitely something companies and public sector agencies should continue to look at. Bray Wheeler: Well, you know, kind of back to the other point. Is the $100,000,000 ransom worth the investment, rather than spending multimillion dollars trying to beef up security for a town of 2,500 people? Where's the cost-benefit there for some of these cities? I think this risk, especially because of just the inherent vulnerabilities likely in a lot of these places, just given size and resource constraints and things like that. That, you know, this will be a thing. And certainly, we can see it with smaller businesses, midsize businesses. It's the same challenges they have, is the resource constraint and the ability to constantly monitor, challenge back, mitigate. Things like that. You know, more resource-heavy corporations still face. They just have kind of a greater pool of capability to defend it, offer, rectify it. Bryan Strawser: So our last topic for this podcast is one that we've talked about several times, so we're not going to get into a lot of detail here. But the unrest in Hong Kong continues. This weekend on Sunday there was about ... It was estimated 1.7 million people came out and protested peacefully. There was no airport disruption. I don't think there's any other kind of broad disruption. It was a very peaceful protest. Bray Wheeler: Yeah, I think purposely so. Bryan Strawser: Very purposely so. They've learned some lessons from some nonviolent movements of the past. Bray Wheeler: Lots of umbrellas. Bryan Strawser: Lots of umbrellas. This protest again was quite peaceful. And I think there's no sign here that this is going to let up. This is going to continue. Their demands are the same. They want Carrie Lam to resign. They want China to keep their mainland policies on the mainland and not to interfere in the home government authority of Hong Kong. And so the dispute goes on. I think it's important to note that there's the Hong Kong population is right at about 8 million people, and 1.7 million of them came out to protest. I mean, the numbers are just incredible. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. If you see pictures and video that's come out over the weekend, I think Ian Bremmer from Eurasia Group, he's quite the Twitter person. Posted a video of ... He called it parting of the protester sea or something like that, where a fire engine was coming down the streets, but otherwise, it's full of people just covered in umbrellas. And all of a sudden, you see the gap. And then moving aside for the fire engine and just closing. Bryan Strawser: Yeah, [crosstalk] at a protest, it was an ambulance that you saw on the video doing the same thing, that the crowd parted so the ambulance could get through. And then took the street back over. Bray Wheeler: Yeah, I mean just the images of these protests. And I think certainly it was raining over the weekend at Hong Kong, so that's part of the reason for the umbrellas. The other part is likely due to the facial recognition challenges that protesters are trying to counteract. If it's just a bunch of umbrellas you can't tell, but they're pretty stunning in terms of just the scale and scope of some of the ... I mean, stretches of city blocks, stretches of roadways, full of people. So it's 1.7 million people participating. That is a sizeable group of people. It's not your couple of hundred protesters. This is a fifth of the population, a quarter of the population of Hong Kong participating in this. Bryan Strawser: We expect these kind of protests are going to continue in Hong Kong. I would assess that the protesters are definitely going to continue their move towards ... Or kind of back to where they started in terms of nonviolent protests. Bryan Strawser: I mean, we may see them occupy other facilities. I know there's a court order prohibiting them from blocking the airport, but who knows where some of that goes over time. But we certainly expect that it's going to be an ongoing challenge for some time to come between Hong Kong and China. Bray Wheeler: They've been fairly creative throughout this in finding ways to kind of create disruption and do different things. So as one door closes, they tend to have a couple more ready to open up or already open. Bryan Strawser: So that's it for this week's edition, the BryghtCast edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. We'll be back on Monday with a new topical podcast. Until then, be well.

In this episode of our BryghtCast edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast for the week of August 26th, 2019,  Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Consultant Bray Wheeler take a look at three current risks and upcoming events: National Hurricane Center:  Hurricane Dorian G7 Leaders' Summit 2019 South China Morning Post:  Hong Kong Police Officer fired a warning shot in air because he felt 'life was threatened' by protesters Related Episodes & Articles Managing Uncertainty - Episode #7:  After the Storm Managing Uncertainty - Episode #17: Lessons Learned from the 2017 Hurricane Season Bryghtpath's Hurricane Crisis Management Services Looking back at the 2017 Hurricane Season Webinar:  Lessons Learned from the 2017 Hurricane Season //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtcast edition, for the week of August 26th, 2019. I'm Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO here at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: I'm Bray Wheeler, consultant at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: We're going to start off the Bryghtcast edition today by talking about Tropical Storm Dorian, and we're recording this episode on Monday, so this information may be a little more dated by the time that you hear it, but Tropical Storm Dorian is currently in the Caribbean. It is moving at a North-Northwest track right now. It is currently several hundred miles to the southwest, southeast, rather, of Cuba and the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. But kind of four key messages here that we're hearing from FEMA and the National Hurricane Center, and that is that Dorian is expected to bring tropical storm conditions to portions of the Lesser Antilles Islands on Monday and Tuesday. Tropical storm watches and warnings are currently in effect for those islands. Bryan Strawser: Hurricane conditions are possible in portions of the Windward Islands, and a hurricane watch has now been issued for St. Lucia. Residence and companies in those areas should refer to advice from local government officials and products from their local meteorological service for more info. The National Hurricane Center expects that Dorian will produce three to eight inches of rainfall from St. Martin to St. Vincent, including Barbados, with isolated totals as high as 10 inches in portions of the Northern Windward Islands. The risk of direct impacts from wind and rainfall has increased over the last few days for Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. Interests in those areas should monitor the progress of Dorian and tropical storm or hurricane watches will be likely required later today, as in today on Monday. Any potential impacts from Dorian in the Bahamas or Florida later this week are highly uncertain given the potential for this system to interact with the high terrain of other islands. Bryan Strawser: We know that FEMA has activated the National Response Coordination Center in Washington, DC. The FEMA private sector office is activating the national business emergency ... I'm sorry, the National Business Emergency Operations Center or NBEOC and FEMA's NBEOC members now have access to the portal where FEMA is sharing information, and I know from checking in there earlier today, tons of states in the Southeast, Eastern United States, particularly Florida, are at a watch state and are carefully monitoring what's going on. And of course the governor of Puerto Rico, despite being in some recent upheaval, is also on full alert here as the storm moves in their direction. Bray Wheeler: Bryan, what are some of the typical agenda things that they're starting to talk about as they activate? Bryan Strawser: Well, it looks like they're going to have the first call tomorrow. This is FEMA with the private sector community. Those are joint calls held between the National Business Emergency Operations Center, which is at FEMA in the National Response and Recovery Center and the National Infrastructure Coordinating Center or the NICC at DHS, which kind of coordinates infrastructure protection across the United States. So these calls are typically a weather forecast, and this is straight from the mouth. It's straight from the horse's mouth. It's straight from the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service explaining what they're seeing and what they're predicting. And they can go from macro to micro on this forecast and do. And then there's usually a pretty good discussion about what FEMA and DHS are doing with the states and territories in this case. Bryan Strawser: And then there's usually some kind of update from the impacted states or territories. Although honestly during Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico didn't get on these calls. It was being relayed through FEMA's folks on the ground. Bray Wheeler: Oh, okay. Bryan Strawser: Rather than them being directly on there, at least the calls I were on, and I was on most of the Hurricane Maria calls because I had, we had clients that were impacted in Puerto Rico. And then there's usually representation from some of the DHS cross-sector coordinating council, sector coordinating councils, where a business representative usually provides some kind of update. Like we often talk a lot about, we often are talking a lot about energy, you know, utilities and electrical power. Bray Wheeler: Sure. Bryan Strawser: Healthcare. So we have ASPER from HHS, the assistant secretary for preparedness and emergency response, someone from their team over at HHS, so they own all the healthcare emergency response. Bryan Strawser: And then it just depends. I mean, when it comes to, if Puerto Rico and the other U.S. territories, the U.S. Virgin Islands, are impacted, as it appears they're going to be, there'll probably be a lot of Coast Guard because the Coast Guard is going to be focused on making sure the ports are open, the ports are safe, that we can get transportation in. And then, the big thing with Maria, the response to Hurricane Maria that was supplies needed to come in via barge or ship from the U.S. mainland. It's a thousand miles to get to Puerto Rico and the airfield was in horrendous shape. The other challenge with Maria at the time, two years ago, is that we had been in such a response mode from the two previous major, like two of the biggest hurricanes ever. Here comes Maria, which is bigger. I mean, the warehouse was empty. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: And the warehousing on Puerto Rico, in particular, had been used for a previous ... So like, for previous hurricanes. So there wasn't the kind of stuff in-theater that you would expect to have. That's not true in this case. The stuff is there. FEMA, the update I saw this morning, they had USAR task forces, that's urban search and rescue. A lot of the other kind of first-line in folks were either already in Puerto Rico or they were staged to be moved to Puerto Rico through military resources post-landfall. So I think we're in a different response situation than, as a country, than we were two years ago. But again, Puerto Rico is a thousand miles off the coast. So are the rest of the U.S. Virgin Islands. It's a long haul to that supply chain as opposed to a domestic. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: I say domestic and an incident within the lower 48. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: It'd be like Hawaii and Alaska. It wouldn't be any different. It would be hard to get resources there quickly. Bray Wheeler: Sure. Bryan Strawser: In an incident. So that's kind of what I'm seeing. I didn't go through the detailed FEMA update this morning. Bray Wheeler: Is there anything companies should be thinking about or preparing, even to kind of help assist or just have things lined up? Bryan Strawser: So I think there are a couple of things. One is to take a look at your operations in Puerto Rico and make sure that you're prepared for disruption there, not just in terms of tropical storm or hurricane coming in and what that could do to your infrastructure, but also go back to the lessons of Maria and what could this mean in terms of losing power, using utility power, water, staff, transportation and logistics. These were all big challenges in Maria. The Puerto Rican electrical utility set-up is not very resilient. Bryan Strawser: It certainly has improved from its pre-Maria days, but it's not fully rebuilt. There's a lot of challenges there. And then I think, you know, we've got to be honest. The government of Puerto Rico as a territory has been in some significant upheaval over the last few weeks. The governor resigned in the scandal. They appointed a new governor. The Puerto Rican Supreme Court ruled that that appointment was unconstitutional and tossed him. And now they have a new governor and I believe also someone refused. The lieutenant governor refused the job. Bray Wheeler: I believe so. Bryan Strawser: So we're on to governor number four. So there's just a lot of upheaval and uncertainty there. But at the same time, there's a huge FEMA presence in Puerto Rico, and there's also some really good emergency management leadership in Puerto Rico and have been there since Maria. So I'm cautiously optimistic of what ... This also doesn't appear to be ... I mean, Maria was a massive Cat-5 storm. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: This is not that either. But Puerto Rico's resiliency situation ... It's a challenge. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: So those are things companies need to be, just go back to your lessons from Maria and be prepared to manage through those disruptions. And I would plan to stage personnel and supplies that you can get in via ship or air for post-landfall. Bray Wheeler: So next up, topic wise, we just wanted to touch on the major world event that's going on right now, in particular, that's sucking up quite a bit of the news is the 2019 G7 summit that's being held in France. Some of the objectives that they had for the summit, kind of going into it, was fighting inequality, whether that's gender inequality, access to education, health services. They were also talking about reducing environmental equality through climate finance, preserving biodiversity, the oceans, strengthening social dimensions of globalization for fair trade tax development policies, taking action for peace against security threats and terrorism, and then tapping into opportunities created by digital technology and artificial intelligence. So really some of the main ... I mean that's some pretty high bar objectives, but really what they- [crosstalk] Bryan Strawser: I was going to say. That was some pretty highfalutin stuff right there. Bray Wheeler: Uh-huh. Really what they were talking about, I think what dominated the conversation was a lot of trade talk, certainly between the U.S. and China, kind of casting a shadow over those conversations. They were also talking about taxes on technology companies and that was kind of the main focus of the technology conversation. They were also talking about some of the geopolitical stuff that's going on including Ukraine, Libya. But I think where it got really interesting was Iran and the Iranian nuclear question and the promotion of peace and stability in the region, which kind of took the U.S. a little bit by surprise. They weren't expecting that an Iranian delegate was going to, was invited and showed up to the meeting. Bryan Strawser: It was the Iranian foreign minister, is that correct? Bray Wheeler: I believe so. Bryan Strawser: And my understanding, at least from U.S. media is that the United States was not told of this individual's invitation or presence. So an interesting move there by the French. Bray Wheeler: Yes. And a lot of the media conversation was kind of directed at kind of a one-on-one meeting that France and Iran had, kind of amongst the G7 agenda that was going on. And then kind of lastly, kind of a topic-wise, so really before I get to that one, really the G7, you know is that it's that major kind of annual meeting with kind of the top seven GDP economies in the world minus Russia who was kicked out. President Trump asked that they be brought back in. So that was kind of part of some discussion. But really that summit touches on a lot of topics. Bray Wheeler: It's one of the major kind of meeting points for a lot of these world leaders. A lot of folks, dignitaries from Secretary-General of the United Nations, the president of the European Union, World Trade Organization, World Bank, kind of all those major leaders are also invited to attend, and so it's a lot of kind of touchpoint on some of these issues. Next year, it's in the United States. So often what we see with the G7 summit as well is protests and an opportunity for folks that get some counter-messages out. There was some protest activity this year. There wasn't, it didn't make a whole lot of media, but definitely going into next year, hosted by the United States in an election year is a potential that, you know, could become an issue that companies need to kind of plan around depending on where it's hosted. Bryan Strawser: Do we know where it's going to be hosted? Bray Wheeler: We don't know where it's hosted yet. The president has indicated he'd like it at one of his properties. Bryan Strawser: Of course he would. Bray Wheeler: But they haven't named a location as of yet. Bryan Strawser: I recall that there was a ... Was it a G7, G8 meeting or was it a NATO meeting that was supposed to be in Chicago that wound up being moved? I think it was in the years back. Bray Wheeler: I think it was a WTO. Bryan Strawser: You're right. Bray Wheeler: It might've been a WTO, I believe, that ended up getting moved. [crosstalk] Bryan Strawser: Yeah, you're right. You're right. Bray Wheeler: But there was like some serious protest activity around that. And what was the meeting in Seattle many years ago? Bryan Strawser: WTO. Bray Wheeler: That was WTO as well? Bryan Strawser: Yeah. I could see given the president's, you know, the polarization around the president, that this could be a significant protest event in an election year if it was held in a major urban center. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Well, and especially whenever the topics of conversation end up kind of being arrived on during that time, will probably most definitely be a forum for protest. Bryan Strawser: So the Iranian conversation at the G7 was wide-ranging. You had the UK and US really want to address the issue of maritime security in the Persian Gulf. And we've talked about that previously here. You have the nuclear issue with Iran going on. We also had, there was a discussion about Hong Kong and you know Hong Kong, we're not going to dwell on the Hong Kong protest here, but there was continued escalation this weekend. It looks like the three big things that went on is that protesters formed a human chain throughout the city. There was at least one incident where it's alleged that protesters were chasing police. The police were cornered in one situation and they drew their weapons. And I have seen a photo of that. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: That I believe that was Associated Press, Reuters had out, and then in one case, , they're claiming that the police fired their weapons, not at people but like up in the air or whatever. Bryan Strawser: Definitely not a U.S. law enforcement kind of situation that you hear too much about. Bray Wheeler: No. [crosstalk] Bryan Strawser: But in addition, law enforcement was using water cannons for the first time to quell protestors and move them out of some areas. So I think that the situation of Hong Kong remains unresolved. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: There was, I thought, an interesting article over the weekend in one of the London papers about a meeting of many business leaders and former government leaders with Carrie Lam, the chief executive for Hong Kong, where they advised her she needed to find a way out of this mess. The business leaders, of course, are concerned about disruption, and they're somewhat fearful of direct intervention by Chinese authorities, and she refused to back down. She gave very succinct "nos" several times in the conversation, and this, of course, was being leaked by someone. This was not open to the press. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: One, that doesn't, it obviously doesn't bode well in the short term for protest activity, as it's getting leaked out that you know, protestors are only going to feel more passionate, probably about protesting, more emboldened. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: I think so too, in the path that they're on. Bray Wheeler: Well and even sort of kind of piggybacking on some of them, some of the activity to, there was reports that they were even beginning to cut down towers that they believed were facial recognition towers, so they're going to the point of they're taking out infrastructure that they believe is going to be used against them. Not in the intended probably positive way of what that some of that technology is, but they're definitely, you know, the use of water cannons is definitely a different tactic, which means the situation is not kind of becoming more under control as probably folks had hoped, kind of last week as things kind of calmed down and there was kind of a little bit of a mea culpa by the protestors kind of following the airport stuff that they tried to kind of calm down and kind of put a new face on everything. Bray Wheeler: Clearly that's not going to be kind of the MO going forward. The fact that police are using the water cannons, that there's the destruction of infrastructure. There is Carrie Lam's refusal to back down. You know, we've kind of been talking about it for weeks. This will likely continue for weeks. I mean the big, big piece for companies I think is just to continue to monitor and stay, stay on this- Bryan Strawser: Plan. And plan. Bray Wheeler: And plan. Bryan Strawser: Make sure that your plans or you're ready to execute. I mean when they're out in the streets with angle grinders taking down cameras that they think are facial recognition, it's not going away in the short term. Bray Wheeler: They're, they're committed to the bit. Yeah. I would just say that you know, kind of on the planning front too, for companies, be prepared with a few different scenarios. Take some time with your different teams and representatives and think through, you know, if there is another shutdown, what are we doing? If there is a Chinese insertion, what are we doing? Bray Wheeler: Just think through some of those kinds of big moments that have the potential to happen and start thinking about what would be our first few steps that we would do in that situation and that at least gives you something to start running on. Bryan Strawser: And how quickly can you execute that. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: It's not a bad time to think about a crisis exercise or a tabletop to kind of game through some of the possibilities that could happen and make sure that you're prepared and more importantly that your crisis team and your partners and your folks on the ground in Hong Kong are prepared as well. That's it for this edition of the managing uncertainty podcast. We'll be back on Monday with a deep dive into an interesting topic. Hope to hear from you then.

September each year in the United States is National Preparedness Month (NPM). National Preparedness Month is recognized each September to promote personal, family, and community disaster and emergency planning now and throughout the year. The program is managed through The Ready Campaign, an effort led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser discusses National Preparedness Month and how organizations can leverage the national campaign to push their own preparedness campaigns forward inside of their organizations. Related Articles & Episodes Episode #6: Personal Preparedness Episode #14: Are you prepared this month? Episode #33: Communication and Awareness Strategies Blog: Four steps you can take today to improve your personal preparedness Blog: Personal Preparedness - Steps you can take today to improve the safety of your family when disaster strikes //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal, and CEO at Bryghtpath. And since it's the month of September, I want to talk a little bit about National Preparedness Month here in the United States. Bryan Strawser: National Preparedness Month or NPM is an event that's been recognized for many years now as a time in September throughout the whole month where the United States government, the Department of Homeland Security and particularly the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA used the month of September to promote family and community disaster and emergency planning now and throughout the year. Bryan Strawser: The government does this through the Ready Campaign which is part of FEMA. The Ready Campaign really works to share information about personal and family and in community disaster and emergency preparedness throughout the year. They use the month of September as National Preparedness Month to really conduct activities and raise awareness of preparedness and the importance of preparedness across the country. Bryan Strawser: Their theme for 2019 is prepared, not scared. Prepared, not scared. And each week, the Ready Campaign has a new theme and material and social media and hashtags and such that are organized around those themes. This year, the first week, September 1st through the 7th is focused on saving early for disaster costs. They're trying to get folks to put money aside to deal with unexpected emergencies. Bryan Strawser: The second week, week two, September 8th through the 14th is make a plan to prepare for disasters that we could really be focused on having a plan, making a kit, practicing that and being connected, being aware of being informed of the emergencies by making sure you're signed up for alerts and things along those lines. Bryan Strawser: Week three is September 15th to the 21st. That week's theme is teaching youth to prepare for disasters. So really focused on children and the like. And then week four, September 22nd through the 30th the end of the month is about getting involved in your community's preparedness. Bryan Strawser: Now, we think here at Bryghtpath that National Preparedness Month is a great time for companies to get involved locally in preparedness efforts. Starting by just thinking about organizational relationships, public-private partnerships with your local law enforcement, fire service emergency medical providers and other groups that might be engaging in preparedness activities in the communities where you do business. Bryan Strawser: And this is a great opportunity to participate in those events, have your employees participate in those events. Gain more awareness of what goes on in your local community and how you can form better partnerships with those folks that will be first responders to incidents at your place of business, but also find out how you can help them. Perhaps there's some volunteer events that your business can engage in and things along those lines. Bryan Strawser: But we also think that it's a great month to use National Preparedness Month to drive your own communication and awareness messaging about your internal resiliency and preparedness efforts. And here, I think, there are usually two themes here that we think are good for companies to focus on. Bryan Strawser: The first is for companies to look at how they can help their employees prepare themselves and their families more strongly than what they typically do. There's always theming built-in to National Preparedness Month through the Ready Campaign about making plans to prepare for disasters and getting involved in community preparedness. Bryan Strawser: So we think there's a great opportunity to use this material that's already been created for you by the Ready Campaign and just to encourage your team, your employees to learn from that by using the Ready Campaign messaging. And you can find that at ready.gov. Bryan Strawser: But secondly, we think that this is a great chance to tell your internal story about preparedness and resiliency and things like business continuity, crisis management, and disaster recovery by including that messaging in some of the themes and material that you might share internally during National Preparedness Month. Bryan Strawser: We think that there's a great opportunity here to better tell your story around business continuity and crisis management and disaster recovery and perhaps even the other things that you do from a safety or security perspective to keep your employees safe while they work or while they travel. Bryan Strawser: So we think there's a great opportunity to really piggyback on that campaign. We often see companies just really struggle with how do you communicate what's going on with some of these programs that honestly sometimes or maybe not that interesting. It's a great way to kind of piggyback on that. Bryan Strawser: What we encourage you to do is really think about ... You don't have to get too complex with this, but you can follow the themes for National Preparedness Month for this year or you can even come up with your own themes where the themes maybe don't make sense. Like for example, this first week's theme of saving early for disaster costs. Bryan Strawser: While I think this is an important family and community preparedness issue, it might not resonate well with your employees, may not give you a good connectivity to what you're doing at your company, so you can focus on something else. Bryan Strawser: One of our clients, for example, instead of focusing on saving early for disaster costs with their team, their theme this week is to learn and practice life-saving skills, which is a theme from the 2018 National Preparedness Month, but it's a great theme to use. We're really focused here. Their messaging this week is really focused on how to maintain and protect your home during and after an emergency, looking at the flood damage and earthquakes and fires and smoke alarms. Bryan Strawser: It's about learning CPR and using an AED. It's about learning the principles of stop the bleed, helping to reduce the loss of life through traumatic bleeding, about reviewing and practicing their internal site emergency plans. And then lastly, practicing their family plan. Practicing evacuating with their family and pets so that everyone is more comfortable if they need to evacuate in an emergency. Bryan Strawser: So you can build a lot of interesting things. We really encourage folks to come up with themes that works well for your organization. Maybe you have digital screens for communication. Maybe you have an intranet site. Maybe you use something simple like Basecamp project management tool like we use here at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: But there are all kinds of different ways to do your messaging. You can use the graphics in other social media messaging that the Ready Campaign makes available for you online at ready.gov that you can use. Or you can come up with something very creative on your own or through your public relations firm or a graphic designer. Bryan Strawser: We also think that using video is a very effective way of running your communication and awareness plan throughout National Preparedness Month. Most of us have smartphones in today's world. You do not need a professional editing suite or lighting or anything like that. You could use your cellphone on a tripod or on some kind of device that holds it so you at least get a steady image and just talk for a couple of minutes about personal preparedness or whatever the topic is for your theme that week. Bryan Strawser: For example, one of our clients is shooting a video about them building their emergency kit for their car and it's just kind of walking through what's in it and why he does it and how he keeps a copy between his wife's vehicle and his vehicle. It can be something that simple. And with video, I would aim for something more authentic in a little more amateurish than something polished and super professional. Bryan Strawser: So there are a few ideas on how you can leverage National Preparedness Month, but I would encourage you to get involved. I would encourage you to think about ways that you can piggyback your internal communications and awareness at your company using the themes and material that's already out there for National Preparedness Month. Bryan Strawser: Let us know what you're doing by dropping us a note at contact@bryghtpath.com or posting some of your images or material you're willing to share on our Facebook page. That's it for this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week with another new episode. See you then.

In this week's edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Consultant Bray Wheeler, talk about some of the common mistakes we've seen during a critical moment during our consulting and professional careers. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Episode #4:  The Crisis Team Episode #17:  Lessons Learned from the 2017 Hurricane Season Episode #23:  Crisis Management is not a Pickup Game Blog Post:  Looking back at the 2017 Hurricane Season Blog Post:  Making Decisions in the Midst of a Crisis //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO here at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, consultant at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: And today we're going to talk about some common mistakes we've seen in the critical moment in a crisis during our consulting and professional careers and we both been at crisis management for quite some time, almost 30 years for me. Bray Wheeler: Not quite that long for me. Bryan Strawser: I have more gray hair. Bray Wheeler: I'm getting there. I also have more hair. Bryan Strawser: But what we want to talk about is just we've been inside of a lot of companies, and we've been in a lot of situations on our own with a lot of different teams across really around the world. And we want to talk about six or seven common mistakes that we've seen, and a little bit about what leads to those mistakes. And I'm just going to start off with the first one for me, a big one, and that is just the overreacting that happens. Bryan Strawser: The emotional response in a crisis, particularly a crisis that has personal implications for an individual or for a team. Usually where someone's been hurt, or you have this just really the extreme reputational situation, like a data breach. Things are going to have material consequences for your organization or for an individual, and just this emotional response. And this one's particularly near and dear to my heart because I so value emotional intelligence when it comes to folks that work in crisis management. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: That individuals are able to work through these situations in the moment. And to some extent, keep your emotions under control while you're managing the crisis, and then you bring that out and experience it in its full when the crisis is over. And it's such an important thing to me. Bryan Strawser: And I think that we also get there not just through folks who have high EQ, high quotients in this area. But I think we also get there by practicing and having exercises. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: And having exercises that are realistic to where people understand their roles and responsibilities, and how the team is going to collaborate to make these very difficult decisions. Bray Wheeler: Right. Well, I mean, it gets back to kind of the tried and true methods of fire drills and shelter-in-place drills. Bryan Strawser: And why do we practice these things? Bray Wheeler: You practice those things so that you feel at least somewhat comfortable or knowledgeable, or kind of confident in the next two things you're supposed to be doing. And I think a lot of times when we get into these situations, especially kind of as you were describing, what are the really novel type situations? Situations that are uncommon, we've never experienced before, have high impact, have a high consequence to them. Bray Wheeler: It's easy to get sucked into the, "I just need to react. We just need to do something. I need to do something." And the train kind of just leaves the station without any rhyme or reason other than that sense of, "We got to do something." And it's especially complicated when you have an existing process and you have something in place, and either have leaders or other teams kind of feeling the need to go address it rather than go to the mechanism that you've put in place to really kind of counter that emotional response. You have an emotional process put in place to escalate to, to be able to start working through to gather the right folks, to start putting the pieces in place to manage it in a way that the organization can feel confident about. And those individuals who are having that kind of reaction, or who are highly involved, can feel confident in. Bryan Strawser: And I think it's particularly frustrating I think for teams where you have a relatively mature crisis process in place. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: Now you're confronted with a crisis that's maybe a little bit of outside of the box, or it has such material impact on the organization that the executives, instead of valuing the process that you built, skip it and put their own process in place. And now you're outside of all the process safeguards and checklists and muscle memory of roles and responsibility and having the right players at the table and more and more and more. Bray Wheeler: Or putting players who are involved in the established process into the ad hoc process. Bryan Strawser: But the process isn't working. Bray Wheeler: But the process isn't working. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. Bray Wheeler: And so it creates confusion or it creates difficulty. And for them trying to work through it or to understand what their expectation and what their role is, because they've been hopefully trained and have, to your point, a muscle memory to that. And then all of a sudden that's gone, and they have to operate in a completely different way. At least not in a way where they have a frame of reference from. Bryan Strawser: I think this happens too in a slightly different way that's just as frustrating, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, around an active shooter incident that several of us were involved in at a previous employer long before Bryghtpath existed. But we had an industry-leading crisis process, and we were involved in a pretty significant active shooter situation. Turned out to be a false alarm, and we had some leaders show up and then try to inject themselves into the process. But they weren't part of the process. Right? Their organization was actually represented by two other people who were already involved and were already doing the right thing, and understood the process. And these two folks tried to interject themselves, and I had to spend some time getting them out of the process because they weren't part of it. Their organization, and getting them redirected to the right people in their org. Bryan Strawser: So this can happen either way. You may have a situation where executives throw your process out the window, and that's frustrating. Or you might have a situation where people show up and they're like, "Well, I want to be involved in this." And that's fine, you can be, but you have to work through your organization's rep, which are these two folks over here. The ones who have been trained and have participated in crisis management for years, work with them. Bray Wheeler: They have that ... And I think that the piece that often gets lost when people try and interject themselves in is there are norms established within these crisis response teams that your representatives know the culture and know the norms of that group and how it operates. And for someone new to step in to just insert themselves breaks norms, rubs people the wrong way, becomes a distraction to the process. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. The folks that have been involved know how to escalate. They know how to work with the peer group. They know who to talk to, they know how to surface things without wrecking the process. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: We kind of went in some different directions, but the point is that kind of emotional overreaction and not following the defined process here because you've got folks who just don't know the norms. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: What's the next one? Bray Wheeler: Lack of transparency in communication. And that kind of gets into the siloing effect of different things, or containment of information that might be important for the broader response team to know the leadership impacted business operations. Really, it just gets down to kind of a communications breakdown, but really it's not being transparent. And that could happen right at the beginning when folks know something's going wrong but they haven't escalated it, or they're only talking about certain pieces of it because of either embarrassments or other components of that. Or it's during, and you're trying to mitigate or split off or be the hero. Or it's at the end, when we're not sharing back what we've learned or what happened, or the nature and the results of what transpired. Bryan Strawser: One area where this really frustrates me that I know we're careful about how when we teach crisis communications or we talk about communicating externally from an organization in a crisis, and that is when the internal team at the company having the crisis finds out what's going on from the media. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: Because again, there's not transparency about what's happening, and the company not valuing communicating internally to their employees, to their team before they communicate externally to the community, to clients, to the investment community and other stakeholders. You've got to do both. The messages are a little different, and they very clearly need to do one before the other. It can be 10 minutes before the other. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: But you've got to let the team hear from leaders directly, and not hear from leaders through the local news anchor. That's not a good process to get into. Bray Wheeler: Well, I mean, it comes down to trust and respect. And the way that a crisis is communicated and addressed really dictates to some extent the success of how that organization recovers from that. Because if you have, to your point, the internal team going, "We found out about this from the media, this is all being hidden from us. I can't trust people. They don't trust us. What's going on?" Bray Wheeler: There's conflicting stories. They're not able to go to their family and friends who are asking like, "Hey, what's going on with that?" And being able to say, "You know what? Here's kind of what I can share and what I know, and there's some things I know I can't share." But it just comes down to they're a part of your organization for a reason, and you should be able to trust them in these situations. I don't want to liken it to a family, but it's a little bit of a ... You get into those family crisis, you got to be able to kind of trust that grouping of individuals. Bryan Strawser: So another mistake that we see a lot of is just in the response, particularly in a reputational crisis or negative news story of some type, is when the response becomes a tax on that organization or the individual instead of being about the issue. And I think this is common in today's world when it comes to political communication, where we're going to attack the other party as opposed to just talking about what the issue is. But I also have seen this in reputational conflict, where a company gets attacked over something and instead of dealing with the issue, they attack the individual in the veracity of the claim. And et cetera. And there's certainly a time and place for this, but I see more often than not, this is the response as opposed to, "Let's address the issue at hand." Bray Wheeler: Yep. It comes down to, again, how you portray yourself, how the organization portrays itself, dictates a lot of how people view it and what it is that you stand for and what your values are. That all gets lost if you go on the offensive against an entity rather than that issue. To be able to attack the issue isn't ... There's a time and place for that as part of reputation management. That's a key tool of the tool belt there. But to make it about the entity comes across as personal, and the situation becomes lost on that conversation stream rather than addressing and coming out the other side of that situation stronger than when you went into it. And that's the ultimate goal on some of this stuff, is to be able to do those things, and that gets lost immediately as soon as you go after an individual. Bryan Strawser: What's the next one you got on the list? Bray Wheeler: Escalation breakdown. Common one, and there's a certain level of ... I think it's important to remember with this one, there's a certain level of ambiguity to it. Or what's the word I'm looking for? Discretion that individuals can use and whether or not to escalate. But oftentimes we see ... And it isn't just from the person on the frontline, the security guard at the front, tech and your operations center, manager in a store, manager in a bank or something like that. Not escalating it up and trying to handle it themselves. It also comes down from the top down, that there's not a, "Hey, we have a situation and we're not appropriately putting it back to our original one, back into the process." Bray Wheeler: But that escalation breakdown really is a symptom of having folks not train lack of clarity in how those things should be communicated. A culture that we've kind of shared is over-responding, not overreacting. So making it okay for folks to communicate that stuff out without fear of punishment or being called stupid or something like that, that they made a mistake doing it. Bryan Strawser: Right. Bray Wheeler: That it all becomes a coaching and a teachable moment, rather than punishment and creating that environment. Because the more you know, the more effectively you're able to triage what's going on. And to give that person either the tips to go address it themselves or to say, "Yep, you're right. Here we go, we're going to kick the process in." Bryan Strawser: I took escalation calls for a Fortune 300 organization for six years. Almost six and a half years, and I tried really hard not to kill the messenger. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: Right? I was always cognizant. Bray Wheeler: Thank you. Bryan Strawser: Yeah, I was going to say Bray was one of the people I had to call sometimes. Bray Wheeler: Every once in a while. Bryan Strawser: But I always tried to remind myself that on the other end of the phone is somebody that really could be in their first real job, and they didn't really want to be the one that called me at 3:00 in the morning, but they had to be the one that called me at 3:00 in the morning. And so I always try to be polite in those situations because I know what it felt like when I was in the other end of that, calling my boss at 3:00 AM about a homicide. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: Whatever had gone on in one of my retail locations. But definitely I think there's a message there for leaders, that when this stuff gets escalated to you, you need to deal with it rationally and appropriately, and not sweep it under the rug and not kill the messenger and take that seriously. I think that the message at the other end of this is also you have to escalate the stuff that your company calls for to be escalated. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: You have some clear criteria so folks understand this. I went into a client a couple of years ago as a interim chief security officer and I asked the general counsel, "Hey, what do you want to know about when it happens?" And he literally had two responses. The first one was, "No one's ever asked me that question. I'm not sure." Followed by, "Well, you'll know what to call and tell me." And I'm like, "No, actually I don't." Like, I want you to tell me what's the stuff that happens that's going to be important to you? He goes, "Oh. Well, here are some things." And he goes, "Well, what would you add to that list?" Bryan Strawser: I'm like, "Well, I think you should know about these things." But this raises a question about what do you think other people want to know that you need to know before they ask you about it that has happened, and that led to some fun kind of ... Like what are your peers going to ask about things? Bray Wheeler: For sure. Bryan Strawser: That I need to make sure you know before they ask because they're going to find out through other means. Anyway, you kind of get the idea there. Bray Wheeler: Don't want them to be the last one to know. Bryan Strawser: Yeah, you don't want them to be the last one to know off of there. One of the other mistakes that we see a lot, and I can think of some recent examples of this, is just a lack of organization on action items in a crisis. I think if you're the crisis leader and you're facilitating this crisis team meeting, and I can't remember how many times we've seen this one happen, there's a lot of stuff happening. Okay? And they're facilitating, and they need a note-taker. Somebody needs to take notes for them- Bray Wheeler: You need a scribe. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. Somebody's got to scribe, you can't do that and run the thing at the same time. I know I couldn't, and I take pretty good notes. But you also need to delineate, this is some stuff that we have to do, and who's going to do it? Which org here at the table does this task belong to because it fits in your area? And if it doesn't fit in somebody's area, then decide as a group where it's going to go. That's why you have this cross-functional in a crisis organization, but you've got to track this stuff. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: And then you got to stay on top of it. And this is where I think particularly if your crisis organization is set up correctly, you're not doing everything. But the stuff that can get solved is coming to you to deal with. Like here's the obstacle or whatever. There's got to be clear paths to resolve this. I remember a specific example of this in Hurricane Sandy, where FEMA wanted to bring gas and distribute it in retail store parking lots. And I'm like, "I can tell you I don't like this idea, but I can also tell you this is not my decision. I will take it to the person whose decision it is." Bryan Strawser: And then kind of chase down the answer to that question. But that was a problem that the local retail stores weren't going to be able to solve. We had to answer this question for them because it was really a policy question. So you've got to have the mechanisms to escalate those decisions and make those decisions quickly. Bray Wheeler: We've seen organizations take different approaches with this too, where they have online virtual tools that they're tracking these things in real time. We have people who have sheets, paper sheets that they're tracking this information on. The most probably effective one, at least in the moment ... Bray Wheeler: Excuse me. Is a whiteboard, and just using the whiteboard to track as the conversation goes. That scribe is writing down key pieces of information, kind of situational components from the different groups at the table. But then those action items, and listing those out and then being able to recap at the end of that conversation or that call of, "What's next? What off this list are we going to do?" Bryan Strawser: Yeah. And there's always just a lot to keep track of in these situations. So I think that's a good one. Another example of things that we see pretty commonly, mistakes we see pretty commonly, and this one just kills me. Role ambiguity, uncertainty with roles and expectations within the crisis organization. Bryan Strawser: I attribute this sometimes to just poor planning or poor training, or more likely, you haven't really done an exercise. A good exercise, where you work a lot of these details out because you've practiced, and you've had some lessons learned out of that practicing so folks are clear on what this is. If I walk into a real crisis and people aren't sure who's in charge and who's taken notes, and who's running the meetings and who's communicating the results of those meetings, I'm usually looking at a team that hasn't had an exercise. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: A real exercise. Bray Wheeler: Safe bet. Bryan Strawser: Safe bet. And that's a really bad place to be, because you exercise in order to build that muscle memory and understanding of how you're going to collaborate so that you can do this in a crisis, and now you're in a crisis and [inaudible 00:20:21], as we say in Minnesota. Bray Wheeler: Well, and it gets to the different kinds of functional pieces of the crisis team too, that if they don't ... Team member accountability, for example. It's an important piece. Sometimes in these situations, if nobody knows who's responsible for it or teams that are responsible for it, it gets left open. Bryan Strawser: And by team member accountability, we're talking about actually accounting for your team in some type of life-threatening injury possible situation. Who's doing that, and what is your process? Is that local team, is it corporate HR? Is it the field HR group? Who does it? And by the way, and if you think this is just an HR responsibility, you're nuts. Bray Wheeler: You are sadly incorrect. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. It's a shared responsibility, but someone's got to be in charge of the darn thing. Team member accountability. Obviously, if you're listening, you're picking up on some sarcasm related to this. But part of that is just simply we see this a lot, this team member accountability as a challenge. Bray Wheeler: So the next item we have on our list, kind of the penultimate one here, but it's really about remembering to not overemphasize the kind of operational and financial impacts of the situation versus the people impacts. A lot of times I think people always know people's impacts are the right thing to address first, and the important thing to care about there doesn't always translate as you get into the conversations about what's going on with the situation. Bray Wheeler: Whatever kind of feels like the hot fire or the passion point of the thing tends to dominate the conversation. In some situations, that is for sure people impact, and that's very clear. For some other situations, that's not always the case. And especially for ones where they may happen in off-hours or it's kind of a known thing like a hurricane or severe weather where people may not be at the facility. They're at home, but there's still impacts to people. And so it's easy to kind of default into the operational or financial piece- Bryan Strawser: Too focused on the business and not enough focus on the team. I really think that the crisis has to start with, "Is the team okay?" Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: "What is the impact on the team, and what do we need to do to help them?" And then you can get to the other implications of this. Really just like it does in the public sector, emergency management starts with lifesaving rescue operations. Here, we start by thinking about life safety, and then what's the impact on the team and what do we need to do to help them through this. I think a lot of companies, and I think back to Hurricane Harvey and Maria and Irma where fortunately none of our clients had any loss of life or anything like that. But a lot of companies, they knew their team was impacted, right? But their questions were about when can I reopen the office, when can I reopen the store, when can I get the campus reopened? Bryan Strawser: We were working with a university that was impacted at a time, and I kept steering them back to, "Those are important questions, but you can't do any of that if you don't take care of the team." And the team has evacuated and they have an impact. They've lost homes, they've had an impact to their homes, they've lost pets. In one case, we got to talk about how to deal with that first, and then we'll get to the how do we get these things reopened. Because honestly, your first big impact to address is this stuff with the team. We saw companies at the time that didn't have disaster pay in mind for these situations. It was one of the questions I asked before we started some of their crisis calls was, "Are you going to continue to pay the employees who were out of work?" Bryan Strawser: Because it sounds like we're not going to get into some of these buildings for a couple of weeks because they're flooded. Are we going to pay these folks? "Well, we have an interruption policy, but that only works for three days." Okay, well, let's work on solving that issue. Do you want to do this, and then how are you going to do it? Because honestly, we need to solve that before we get to these other problems. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: And companies just don't ... I don't think they're naturally wired to think that way. Bray Wheeler: No. You want to get the storefront open as soon as possible. You know, for lack of a better analogy, you can't really get it open if you don't have anybody working in there, or shopping there or interacting with it like they're supposed to. Because a lot of times, people impact it either from a customer base or your client base or partner base too, that, "Yeah. Great. You're up and running, but nobody else is." Bryan Strawser: Right. Nobody else has set up. You haven't set up your part of the system to get everybody back online, back on their feet, back able to return to as much of normalcy as they can get to. Bray Wheeler: Right. Bryan Strawser: So our last area, our last mistake that we see, and this was kind of funny because we had just asked my wife who works here at Bryghtpath about what's the big mistake that she's seen companies do. She's been at this her whole life, longer than I have. And she brought up as she put it, "Not having enough coffee available for the team." Well, what she was really getting at was just not taking care of the team. And by the team here, we're talking about the crisis team, the folks that are dealing with work, leading your company through this situation. And I think we've said on multiple podcasts that one of the first things that we always did when activating is to order food. Right? So coffee, coffee maker, pizza, Bray Wheeler: Candy and the candy- Bryan Strawser: Have some healthier options available, of course. But, have food available for the team. The team's going to work a lot. They're going to have some odd hours. They're going to want water and caffeine of choice. I know I had somebody that only drank Diet Mountain Dew on the team, and so we always had that in there. I'm a coffee drinker, I will drink coffee any hour of the day in a crisis. So those are the kinds of things that ... Bryan Strawser: But also I think is just being aware, and we've talked about this, too. Being aware of the mental health of your team, and particularly when you're in these ... like Hurricane Harvey, Irma, Maria, that was like 35-40 days of a lot of nonstop action for a lot of folks. And we needed to have situations where we were rotating people in and out. Like, "Hey, you know what? You're going to take the next two days off, and you're not going to read your email and you're not going to answer the phone, and you're not going to participate in the calls. You're going to hand those over to me." I remember having this discussion with one of our folks and they were like, "No, I can't. We're in the middle of a hurricane." And I'm like, "Yes. And you're burnt out." Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: Right? You're headed there and you need to go home. You got little kids, you got a wife. Go be a dad and be a husband, and come back on Monday because it'll still be here. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: It's not going anywhere. I'll work this weekend. Bray Wheeler: This one in particularly, this one is one where not for ... Well, I shouldn't make the generalization, but typically I would say organizations don't really want to take advantage of their folks that are responding to these things. But these folks often get taken for granted, because the situation is so focused on the incident itself that those responders, the people who are working the issue are often ... You know, that's what they do. So they're in it. They're not necessarily going to raise their hand and bow out. They're going to keep working and keep working and go home, sleep, come back and work and work and work. Rather than take that disconnect, bump up their effectiveness. Bray Wheeler: There's only so long you can operate in one of these situations before you just are burnt out, or you're on overload. And yes, oftentimes people want to keep working, but to your point earlier, you lose your effectiveness by doing that. You lose the rhythms, the procedures, the thought process, the creative thinking, the personal interactions with people. That all suffer, and it doesn't help the situation the way that these people desperately want it to by being dedicated to what they're doing. Bryan Strawser: You lose your ability for the kind of cognitive thought that I think is required to lead in these situations, particularly where you are the leader. And a lot is incumbent upon you to see the strategic picture, the full understanding of the situation and not just the tactical understanding of the situation. And I don't think you can do that when you're fully exhausted. Bray Wheeler: No. Bryan Strawser: Mentally and physically, you need rest in order to do that. And the rest is different for different people. I require less sleep than most, but I'm even finding that difficult as I get older. But those are the kinds of things that I think when we talk about taking care of the team is watching for these things. And if you want to learn more about that, I think we'll put it in the show notes. But you can look at our podcast about the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Program, and the ideas of metal leadership and about thinking critically in a crisis I think are very applicable here. Because we are trying to keep you out of the basement, as they like to say. Kind of falling prey to that fight or flight syndrome. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: But your long term multi-day crisis situations, it's just critical to make sure the team is taken care of and that folks are getting breaks, and that gets you away from a situation. Bray Wheeler: And that you're giving them permission- Bryan Strawser: To do so. Bray Wheeler: Because a lot of times they go home, go to sleep. It sounds like go home, go to sleep, come back. Instead of go home, go to sleep, don't turn on the news. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. Bray Wheeler: Don't show up here again until Monday. You're giving them that order to stay away, find something else to do for 24 to 48 hours. Bryan Strawser: And as a leader, you need to model that behavior. Bray Wheeler: Yep. Bryan Strawser: Right? You need to be taking your own breaks, doing your own kind of thing. And when you have the right processes and you have the right people, this is easy to do. But also when you have the right people, they're highly motivated to make a difference, and you have to create that environment where, to you say, it's to give permission. You got to create that environment where they can go and do these things. That's it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. I hope you enjoyed our recitation of some of the bigger mistakes we see in the critical moment during a crisis that we've learned throughout our careers. We'll be back later this week with another episode of our BryghtCast edition of the podcast. Thanks for listening.

An OSHA report from 2018 notes that nearly two million US workers were the victim of workplace violence in recent years. A similar study from 2014 from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics pointed out that in 2014, 409 individuals were fatally injured in work-related violent attacks that year. Workplace violence was the third leading cause of death in a wide range of professions that year, including healthcare, education, media, and the legal profession. In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser tackles the issue of how to help employees recognize and report suspicious or threatening behavior. Topics discussed include the data behind workplace violence, warning signs, potential risk factors and triggers, performance problems and conduct indicators, and more. Related Blog Posts & Episodes Episode #30: Threat Management in Educational Institutions Episode #41: Threat Incident Risk Factors Episode #42: Threat Severity Levels Episode #43: Threat Management Framework Episode #49: Preventing Workplace Violence Episode #51: School Threat Assessment Teams Blog Post: Helping employees recognize and report suspicious or threatening behavior Bryghtpath's Workplace Violence & Threat Management capabilities //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. In today's episode, I want to talk about helping employees recognizing and report on suspicious and threatening behavior, focusing in on workplace violence and threat management as a topic today. I think everyone understands that workplace violence is a possibility, regardless of what industry that we work in, but there's a number of recent studies pointing to the fact that this problem might be more serious than what a lot of folks think. Bryan Strawser: According to an OSHA report recently, in 2018, roughly two million American workers were the victim of workplace violence in recent years, each year, and that only includes actual reported numbers. A similar study from 2014 from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics pointed out that 409 individuals were fatally injured in work-related attacks in 2014. That number makes up about 16% of the overall 4,821 workplace deaths during that particular year. About 16% of all the deaths in the workplace in 2014 were caused by work-related attacks or other incidents. Bryan Strawser: Workplace violence, as of 2018, was the third leading cause of death in a wide range of professions, not limited to, but including healthcare workers, education workers, media workers, and those that work at law firms. Now, it's certainly possible that technology and other physical security measures can go a long way towards really creating the safest possible environment for everyone. Employees are really our number one assets, they're the number one ... They're the part of what ... The engine that makes our companies go round. Bryan Strawser: One of the best ways to curb workplace violence is to teach people to both properly recognize and report behavior that might be suspicious or otherwise threatening, and that helps us identify problems when they're smaller, stopping those issues, in most cases, before they have a chance to become bigger and more dangerous issues down the road. We start this by understanding what workplace violence is and helping teach our employees what that behavior looks like, what suspicious and threatening behavior really looks like, and how that needs to be reported. Bryan Strawser: The United States government through OSHA and the Department of Labor defined workplace violence as any act of violence against persons or property as well as threats, intimidation, harassment, or any other inappropriate disruptive behavior that causes fear for personal safety in the workplace. That's not just a concept limited between employee/employee on violence, employee on employee violence. Bryan Strawser: This could include third-party contractors, employees from a partner or a vendor who come to your location, it could be visitors or it could be customers who come in and out of the business or you have a service worker who is in their home or business and is having that interaction offsite. There's a number of situations that can potentially trigger or cause of workplace violence. The US Department of Agriculture has a handbook on workplace violence they use for agricultural workers that has a good definition of the five key things that potentially trigger or cause workplace violence. Bryan Strawser: Those things are anger over the loss of a job or some other type of disciplinary action, resistance or even a deeply rooted resentment over regulatory actions by an employer, employee or customer. A situation where a member of the public disagrees with a policy or practice of your business. It could be violence that is based on intolerance or bigotry or other actions that are intended to harm or intimidate someone because of their race, ethnicity, religion, country of origin, or other personal characteristics and more. Bryan Strawser: These are kind of suspicious and threatening situations. They could come from anyone, anywhere, at any time, but there is an intersection with an employee of your business, or someone in a leadership position, like a manager or a customer, a family member. Again, educating your team on what to look for can help create a safer, healthier, and more productive environment. The most important thing here is that there ... You have a method for them to report this kind of behavior and you have educated them on what that behavior is. Bryan Strawser: We may laugh about it sometimes, but the US Department of Homeland Security's motto of: if you see something, say something, actually has a significant amount of truth to it in these situations. When we've trained the team to identify threatening behavior, we want them to report that threatening behavior and then within your organization we want there to be an entity, a threat assessment team, a security team, an HR team that is then taking action on that report of this kind of threatening behavior. Bryan Strawser: There are a lot of free programs out there, particularly from government agencies at the federal level, and perhaps in your state as well, that have some free workplace violence prevention programs that you can use as an ongoing educational resource to empower your employees. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services has a free ongoing educational resource that you can use that focuses in on explaining potential triggers and signs and how to understand threatening and suspicious behavior and then has the resources on how you should deal with that as a company. Bryan Strawser: All these resources should be part of employee onboarding for new hires and should be part of what you're training your existing employees on an annual or biannual basis. We would suggest ... I would suggest that management should definitely have this as a mandatory training program and that they're having to take the training on some type of annual or regular basis and then that's recorded so they understand how to take action in these situations. Bryan Strawser: Companies should have a policy that addresses workplace violence and threat management and that policy should be a very clear zero-tolerance policy in place in terms of threats of physical violence, harassment, intimidation or other violently disruptive behaviors. You need to make sure that policy is clearly communicated as a part of your training so that everyone understands the policy and the consequences that could be enforced through that. A company should also not be afraid to enlist the help of professionals. Bryan Strawser: The Association for Threat Assessment Professionals or ATAP, of which I'm a member, advises that companies should not be afraid to bring in outside help to tackle employee awareness and prevention in these types of situations. Being aware of performance and conduct issues that might seem small now, but could also be warning signs of potential trouble, it's really the cornerstone of any prevention strategy. Bryan Strawser: We want you to take the step to hire a workplace violence consultant, or other security consultants, because it gives you one of the best chances to do exactly that, to make sure that you're dealing with the situation the right way when it's necessary to do so. When you're focused on running the business and leading your team, there are small things that can happen and slip by your attention, that could point to larger issues brewing on the horizon. Bringing in these outside resources can help more easily uncover those situations and put you in a position to do something about that immediately with professional advice. Bryan Strawser: There's a number of performance and conduct indicators that you should be monitoring as an employer, things you should be on the lookout for, and this is good training for your management team as well. The first is attendance problems, people taking excessive sick leave, excessive tardiness or improbable excuses for their absences or late tardiness to work. Concentration problems, including people who are more easily distracted or have trouble recalling instructions, unusual or changed behaviors, like people who are suddenly prone to making inappropriate comments or throwing objects. Bryan Strawser: Evidence that develops that points towards a possible drug or serious alcohol use and abuse by the employee. Evidence that develops that points to serious stress in their personal lives of one or more employees and then low energy, a lack of enthusiasm or the presence of despair and negativity, all of which are major signs of a significant depressive episode. It's important to point out that if one or even all of these qualities do exist in someone, it doesn't mean that there's an imminent violent act that's going to happen. Bryan Strawser: It doesn't mean they're going to do something right now. It could just mean that someone is sick or depressed or is going through a lot of stress. We never know what's going on in someone's life outside of work sometimes, but these are still critical things that you should monitor and watch out for in the larger context of preventing workplace violence in your workplace. Bryan Strawser: The point of all of this conversation is really clear, if organizational leaders, if you as the leader or manager in the function, if you as the business owner or CEO, if you're in a better position to recognize these indicators and if you are faced with a complex situation, you bring in professional help and you have a better view of recognizing these indicators, you can more effectively train and communicate these to your team. Bryan Strawser: Your team is more aware of the signs they need to pay close attention to moving forward and that ultimately goes a long way towards an entire organization's ability to take a more proactive approach combating workplace violence. If we can help you in any way with your workplace violence prevention program, we've developed the workplace violence prevention programs and threat management teams and crisis plans for many Fortune 500 organizations, and our company has more than a century of experience in developing actionable plans to help prepare companies for the unexpected critical moment. Bryan Strawser: Our expertise also includes crisis communications and emergency procedures, and we'd love to help you develop a program, train your team, and take other preparedness steps that improve the safety and security of your workplace. That's it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. We'll be back next week with a new episode. Thanks for listening.

In this episode of our BryghtCast edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast for the week of October 7th, 2019,  Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Consultant Bray Wheeler take a look at current risks and upcoming events: BBC: Russia vows to prevent Turkey-Syria clashes NBC News: U.S. troops to withdraw from northern Syria as ISIS supporters escape amid alleged Turkish atrocities BBC: Brexit talks continue amid claims deal close Star Tribune: Protests around Target Center escalate, from peaceful chants to fire and impasse with police //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is Brian Strawser, principal and CEO here at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, consultant here at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: And this is our BryghtCast edition for the week of October 14th, 2019. And I think the biggest story on the minds of most around the world when it comes to large disruptions that are impacting companies and the world, and that is what has gone on over the last several days in Syria following President Trump's decision to remove the United States from at least northern Syria, although now he's talking about a broader. Bray Wheeler: Full-blown. Bryan Strawser: Full pull out of the country. The details of that remain to be seen, but Bray, what's happened in Syria over the last couple of days? Bray Wheeler: Yeah, there's been a lot of kind of a lot of breakdown in kind of the status quo of what's going on in Syria. Turkey has moved into the northern border and shaken up quite a bit of the stability in that region. Syria has also reasserted itself also in that area. There's the potential for kind of a tricky Syria confrontation somewhere in there. Russia has joined in saying that they'll mediate, they'll help keep people separate and have cooler heads prevail. Bryan Strawser: And I think Russia said that they would not allow fighting between Syrian forces and Kurdish forces. Bray Wheeler: Yeah. Bryan Strawser: Interesting. Bray Wheeler: They've definitely asserted themselves kind of in that region. Reports are essentially, perspective is that the Russian military has essentially replaced what the US was doing there. However, Russian interests and US interests in that area are very different. Bryan Strawser: Aren't the same. Bray Wheeler: However, that role, they've sort of taken the place of the US. Bryan Strawser: There's a couple of big complexities going on here. Syria for a long time, prior to the last couple of years was very aligned with Russia and even back to the old Soviet Union in terms of, they were never part of the Iron Curtain or the Warsaw Pact, but they definitely were buying military equipment from the Soviet Union and from Russia. They aligned themselves closely with those interests as opposed to being aligned with those of NATO or the United States. And certainly the Syrian government over the last two presidential administrations, I think we've essentially treated as a combatant. We've done a lot, the United States has done a lot in that kind of situation and now here's Russia kind of reasserting themselves in that region in a way that they haven't over the last couple of years. Bray Wheeler: Well, and countries like Syria and Iran, those are kind of well within the kind of former Soviet now Russian sort of orbit, even though they're not kind of direct states or puppet administrations of Russia. But they definitely align themselves with Russia. There is that influence that's happening within both those countries for a long, long time back to the Soviet Union. But yeah, in Syria there's a lot of concern around confrontations between the groups. Bray Wheeler: There are reports over the weekend that kind of troop movements have prompted Kurds to abandon ISIS prison camps, which there have been reports of ISIS members escaping, leaving, even in the thousands some reports are indicating. There are ISIS players back kind of returning to the field. Now, whether they go back to kind of full activity, who knows? I suspect yeah. But a lot of their families have moved into the area to kind of stay outside kind of where they're being detained and now those families are being forced to flee and things like that as these forces are coming in. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of instability, especially in northern Syria right now with all the stuff kind of playing out and kind of the worst, worst fears of what people were saying, kind of being realized, at least reportedly with ISIS being free and Kurdish forces being kind of decimated. Kind of the worst fears is being realized a little bit. It's contributing to a lot of uncertainty there and especially within Turkey and just the geopolitics of that area is really hot right now. Bryan Strawser: Well and I think that's the big question here in terms of at least what we're focused on in our podcast and that is what does this mean for broader geopolitical instability in the Middle East? What does this mean in terms of allowing ISIS a new safe haven or a new potential to reconstitute themselves? Certainly they've taken it in the shorts hard over the last few years going back to the Obama administration's involvement in dealing with them in Syria. Bryan Strawser: But I think this, there's the potential for continued disruption and the growth of ISIS. Reconstitution of ISIS as a terrorist organization. It's going to have to be carefully monitored and that will have impacts on both the broader geopolitical stability of the Middle East, but also for companies operating in that area. What that means in terms of business operations in Israel, Qatar, Saudi, Kuwait, and other nearby countries. Bray Wheeler: Well even into Europe, and other Western countries where these folks may be returning or recently freed. That they've been off the radar. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of uncertainty with kind of these developments. We kind of got to a status quo kind of with the ISIS and the terror front a little bit that, things felt somewhat under control for the moment. Now, the kind of the eight balls has been shaken up on that. Bryan Strawser: What's next? Bray Wheeler: Next Brexit discussions are happening. Kind of early this week at least we'll see how the rest of the week plays out between the UK and the European Union. They're having more formal discussions around what that looks like. Particularly kind of around the legal documentation of the different moves. Bryan Strawser: The deal. Bray Wheeler: The deal. Bryan Strawser: The deal. Bray Wheeler: And there was the deadline from the EU, I believe... Bryan Strawser: It's today. Bray Wheeler: This evening. Bryan Strawser: Yeah, we're recording this on Tuesday the 15th, you'll hear this on Wednesday the 16th but the deadline I believe from the EU for a negotiated exit is today. Bray Wheeler: And in the Queen's speech, which she gave, was it yesterday? Bryan Strawser: Yesterday. Bray Wheeler: Kind of reaffirms which... Bryan Strawser: And to be clear the Queen's speech is written by the government. She doesn't have any say in it. Bray Wheeler: She's kind of the mouthpiece a little bit for kind of reciting that based on tradition. They held the kind of government's position and the Queen's speech was they held firm to, hey, we're leaving, we're leaving the EU on October 31st, 2019. Which didn't give, it doesn't give a whole lot of wiggle room in terms of negotiations and some of the other political developments that have been happening in the UK in terms of trying to kind of negotiate or reach a deal. It's another kind of move by Johnson to kind of assert that I don't really care what happens. We're leaving on October 31st however that works, we're leaving. Bryan Strawser: There's a couple of challenges going on there too. Despite, there's the issue of Johnson has not been able to hold his, I started to say caucus, but that's not the right term. He hasn't been able to hold his members together in his current coalition. His own party has voted against him on a number of these things. He lost the first three votes that he brought to the floor of the House of Commons. There's also the issue of, the EU is pretty much done with negotiation, although there seems to be some positivity in the communication we're seeing today. Maybe there will be a deal of some type that allows for this. Bryan Strawser: The other complication for Johnson is they're headed for a general election. He said he wants a general election. There's some point they're going to call one here or they're going to hit the statutory limit on the number of years the parliament can be in session without an election. That will have a play on what happens with Brexit. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. The continued, I won't say it's instability because I don't think it's that the government is not stable. Maybe the current ruling coalition is unstable, but there's a lot of uncertainty in the UK about what all of this means. Bryan Strawser: They did come out though however, just to touch on something we spoke about earlier on a previous episode around immigration, that there will be an EU settlement scheme. If you're in the country, you can apply to stay in the country. They will not be forcibly evacuating or exiting people. But there's still, like for my fellow students at King's College, there's still a lot of uncertainty about short and long term study visas if they're not already there. For folks in my particular course who study distance learning, it remains very uncertain what that means for the EU residents and others. Bray Wheeler: Well and I'm sure part of that is the intent of that is kind of political, kind of not appeasement but kind of an olive branch out to some of that stuff to try and advance some of the other portions of the Brexit discussion. Kind of alleviates the concerns there. Because that definitely is the most kind of confusing as well as kind of impactful kind of piece, at least at the outset for individuals. Bray Wheeler: the Last item we have, we just want to kind of take some time to just kind of talk around the Trump rally that was held here locally in Minneapolis over the past week. Last week, late last week and not necessarily to go into the kind of politics and those pieces of it. Bryan Strawser: We are staying out of the politics of this issue. Bray Wheeler: We are walking away from that but just wanted to talk about just from a pure kind of political rally kind of protest standpoint, kind of the impact and the things that companies were doing here at least locally to kind of mitigate some of the disruptions to their operations as well as just safety and kind of general preparedness that they had. Bryan Strawser: And I think to set the stage for this, the rally was held at Target Center, which is a basketball arena that seats about 20,000 folks. It is right in the middle of downtown Minneapolis. The airport, Minneapolis, St. Paul International Airport is where the President, and ironically the Vice President was also here in town for a different event and appeared at the rally, they flew into the airport on Air Force One and Air Force Two, separate travel. The VP was in much earlier in the day. I'd say the airport is roughly six miles from downtown Minneapolis. Bray Wheeler: Yeah, something like that. It's pretty close. Bryan Strawser: It's more like 10 miles in terms of driving because of how you enter and exit the airport. And so what we saw with the rally and the events surrounding the rally is that the Twin Cities are very much a blue part of the state. There was a significant amount of protestors who were protesting the President's appearance and then there were about 20,000 plus rally attendees, is what I believe is what's been communicated. I would say there was roughly an equivalent number of protesters, but I never saw an official count. Bray Wheeler: I haven't either. Bryan Strawser: And the police established, there was obviously a perimeter around Target Center and there were streets that were blocked off to allow the motorcade unimpeded access in and out of the facility. But otherwise the police I thought did a fairly good job of providing space nearby to protest and then managing those protests. There was the normal, bottle-throwing and some allegations of too much force and a couple of things. Police had bicycles and the horses and all the usual kind of things you see at big protests. It went on. But what we want to talk about is companies. There are a number of Fortune 500 organizations based here in the Twin Cities, including Target, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Ameriprise Financial, I'm trying to think who else is downtown, but there's a lot of Fortune 500 companies. Xcel Energy and others that are downtown and they're all in the central business district, which is where Target Center is and where the protests were. Bray, what did we hear from some of our clients that were in the downtown area? Bray Wheeler: Yeah, kind of the main pieces that we were kind of hearing from clients was really the option to have folks work from home. There was a lot of kind of indications of don't come in if you don't have to. Particularly on rally day, which I believe was Thursday, don't come in, stay home, work remotely, leave early, avoid kind of that portion of this kind of the city, the downtown area, those sorts of things. But there was also a lot of just communication around, hey what's going on? Expectations, things like that. A lot of kind of the normal kind of precautionary things, which I think especially now heading, this is as Bryan you kind of mentioned earlier, this rally by a Republican president kind of held in a very kind of Democratic part of Minnesota. Bray Wheeler: There's a little bit more of those confrontations and things like that that were being played out here. At least locally in the news. But I think heading into, we're now heading really into being 13 months out, the 2020 election season. These sorts of things are to happen more frequently over the next 13 months just based on the nature of the politics of the country and what normally happens with these things. And then probably given a little bit more of, there are some heightened passions on either side, that these potential for more of a disruptive kind of environment to take place, especially in downtown areas, especially in these kinds of high traffic spots. And I think thinking about that in 2020 and those approaches to, hey, we're probably going to be seeing these in a lot of these areas, certainly at the convention locations, things like that, which is a whole different level of disruption. Bray Wheeler: But just for these rallies and things like that, companies really need to start kind of thinking about what they want their approach to be in terms of maintaining operations, but also just keeping people safe, minimizing kind of the disruption and the noise that happens with some of that stuff. Bryan Strawser: I think, we've encouraged clients for a while and I think we've even recorded some podcast episodes on this about major events and protests and things like that. We really encourage companies to think about as an ongoing process, what's normal look like in terms of physical security procedures? What does a heightened set of security, kind of like your orange, what does that look like in terms of how you physically protect your building? And what does red look like? What does it look like if you need to secure the place and only allow employees into the location? What does that look like? Bryan Strawser: And then you can start to think about what triggers that increase in the threat level and thus increases how you approach the physical security of your structure. I think companies in Minneapolis have had a chance to practice this, so to speak, because we had the Superbowl here in 2018 and a lot of companies had to do this. In the run-up to game day, they really kind of went to that orange stage and they secured their entrances and they did some different things. They only allowed employees in the lobby and that kind of thing. And then on game day, which of course is Sunday, so a lot of them aren't open anyway, they kind of went to red. We're shut down, we're going to secure the facility, we're not going to have people working here just to avoid all of the different issues and the target, so to speak, that the Superbowl can be. Bryan Strawser: I think that's a good graduated way to think about this. When you get to a presidential rally and there's going to be protests, you can put your building on the orange level and say, "This is how we're going to approach this. And then here are some additional things we might tweak for that particular situation." But I think there's so much potential anymore for companies to be the target of protests or there to be other major events in a city that spelling this out in that way and then the team is just used to, yeah, we're going to be at a heightened threat level, so we're at orange, so I know that these things are in place. Bray Wheeler: Well I think you raised a couple of good points in terms of for companies that aren't located here within the Minneapolis area, think about those events that your city's held you over the last 10, 11 years and what your company's done to kind of protect. Minneapolis has been fortunate. As you said, the Superbowl, here last year as well as the 2014 All-Star Game. We had the 2008 Republican convention here, so there's been a lot of big moments here in Minneapolis that have allowed some of these corporations to kind of practice. Companies out in other cities, think about those moments and what you did, what worked, what didn't work. Go back and refresh yourself against those because those things don't happen all the time. As well as, maybe some of the more minor protests, but really go back and kind of think and strategize about what you learned, what worked, what didn't work, what's changed in your organization since that moment. But yeah, it's definitely a kind of moment, especially now just to kind of start thinking about what that looks like in your area and what you need to be prepared for. Bryan Strawser: And some of you, your cities are just laid out differently. I think about Philadelphia where the sports arenas are not downtown. They're out by the airport, they're isolated in the middle of big parking lots. These kinds of events happening at one of those facilities doesn't really impact the way it does in a metro area like doing a political convention in Boston as I experienced in 2004. Where the center, where the Celtics and Bruins plays is right smack in the middle of the city, in the financial district. Or here in Minneapolis where all of the sports arenas except for hockey are in downtown Minneapolis and the Minnesota Wild are right in downtown St. Paul. Actually, they're right by Ecolab's corporate headquarters, speaking of the Fortune 50. There's a lot of challenges around this in some cities. Bray Wheeler: Well and I think to your point, it's one of those things and to your earlier point too, companies have to, you have a large group of people potentially coming into your area for either a protest, supportive protest, counter-protest, whatever the case is. But guess what? That's a large influx of people and a lot of times they're coming from around the country or even locally, and you have a captive audience for your kind of issue set. Your company may be in the crosshairs of that group as well. Hey, we're actually here for this event, but guess what? We have 100 people that can show up on your doorstep to talk about the thing that we're kind of nagging you about. Now we can protest outside your door. Bray Wheeler: Even in places like the Philadelphia or New York or Kansas City or something like that, you have an influx of people. It's very easy for them to migrate early, after, during to one of your locations. Keeping current on what your kind of issue set is for protest activity is also going to be beneficial kind of heading into the year to understand what other issues may or opportunities may knock on your door for these protestors. Bryan Strawser: That's it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty podcast. Tune in on Monday when we'll have a new episode focused on an interesting topic, business continuity, crisis management, and global risk. Hope to see you then.

In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser walks through the new Bryghtpath Global Security Framework. You could also call it a corporate security framework if that's the frame of reference you prefer to use. During Bryan's career, he spent over 21 years working as a part of the Global Security Team for a Fortune 30 organization, ultimately spending the last six years leading that organization's business continuity, crisis management, and global intelligence function. But Bryan also spent a lot of time working in and supporting different parts of the global security organization. This framework came about after working with a client here in Minnesota who was working to establish a global security capability and happened to ask us where they should start. We put this framework together from our standpoint representing "Here's our view of how we would think about building a global security program." Related Blog Posts & Episodes Episode #6: Leading during an Active Shooter Incident Episode #18: The Race Episode #26: The Top 12 Global Risks of 2018 Episode #28: Protecting your Senior Executives Episode #30: Threat Management in Educational Institutions Episode #39: Travel Safety & Security Programs Episode #49: Preventing Workplace Violence Webinar: Insider Threat - The Threat lurking inside your organization Blog: An overview of Physical Security Penetration Testing (Red Teaming) Blog: Current best practices for mailing screening In addition to the resources mentioned in this article, our friends at the Security Executive Council have a significant number of resources & knowledge available to organizations. //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast? This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO here at Bryghtpath. In this week's episode, we'd like to walk through our new framework for a global security program, or you could call it a corporate security framework if that's kind of the frame of reference that you prefer to use. During my career, I spent, prior to founding Bryghtpath, I spent about 21 years working on a global security team for a Fortune 30 organization, ultimately spending about six years leading that company's business continuity, crisis management, disaster recovery, and global intelligence function, but I had a lot of experience working and supporting different parts of the global security business. Not too long ago, we were working with a client here in the Twin Cities, who was trying to stand up the global security capability, and so we built this framework from our standpoint kind of representing, "Here's our view of how we should think about building a global security program." Let's take a look at this. Bryan Strawser: Of course, if you go to the episode page, you're able to download our Global Security framework as a graphic and able to kind of follow along as we take a look at how to do this. Starting on the left, the first category for a Global Security framework is physical security capability, and we really think about this and investigations, which is the second category here. We really think about these as being the principal, kind of foundational starting place for a Global Security framework, the ability to secure facilities in order to keep people and assets safe, and then second, the ability to investigate things that are happening that are outside the norm or that might be criminal in nature that affects the integrity of the organization. With physical security, we start with the priorities, the life safety of employees, a workplace violence prevention program, so, "How do we prevent workplace violence through training and policies, and things along those lines?" The third is threat management. Bryan Strawser: Once we've had an incident of a threat reported internally, externally, social media, email, how does that get handled? What's the threat management program? How is the threat triaged, and then if necessary, formally assessed, and then plans put into place? You can look at, or listen to our previous episodes on Workplace Violence and Threat Management Frameworks, and risk factors and escalations for ideas and more of a deep dive into that area. The fourth area under physical security is planning and design, so this is for new or remodel facilities, but what is the application of crime prevention through environmental design? Bryan Strawser: How are we planning these facilities with security requirements in mind from the beginning, et cetera? Access control. What is the approach to securing access to the facilities? This could be key control. It could be a card access system. It could be biometrics, but what is the program, the official program for maintaining and controlling access to the facility? Bryan Strawser: Next, the security presence. What's the visible security presence, whether that's security officers, plainclothes security individuals, armed security, robots or video analytics, or other things that are clearly visible that create that security presence that deters crime and kind of reinforces the right behavior? Then lastly, in physical security, just culture, and awareness, culture in terms of, "What's the culture around following the security controls that have been put into place?", and awareness around, "How is security communicating what they're doing? What kind of material is out there, intranet, digital, internal social media, external social media, posters and things like that, that help drive awareness of the security program?" That's physical security to us, one of the two major foundational elements of a global security strategy and program. Bryan Strawser: The second is investigations, the ability to investigate something that is abnormal, or something that is wrong, or something that has been reported. The first area is just investigative policies. "What are the roles and responsibilities within the organization? How are investigations conducted? What are the ground rules around that?" Bryan Strawser: The second is we expect the investigative capability of a global security team to be independent, independent in that although at the end of the day, we all have a boss, but independent in that they are driven by the security organization who also only reports to a Senior Executive, and the investigators are able to investigate with a high degree of independence. That doesn't mean they're not talking with lawyers, internal or external to the organization. It doesn't mean that they aren't taking direction, but it does mean that they're able to follow the investigation where the investigation leads. The third area here in investigations is just, "What are the investigative capabilities and technologies? Do they have the tools or case management systems or other things that they need?" Bryan Strawser: The next area in investigations is compliance and investigations around our major anti-bribery laws and our major anti-terrorism laws. This is the OFAC regulations, the Office of Foreign Asset Compliance, where we're verifying that we're not doing business with third-parties that U.S. companies are prohibited from doing business with. Then, paired with that, the FCPA, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, where we're validating that our organization is not bribing individuals in foreign governments or in foreign countries in order to do business. Next is exception reporting. "What's available to the investigation's function in order to detect and find exceptional behavior?" Bryan Strawser: By exceptional, I mean abnormal things that stand out, and they may be legit and not criminal in nature and not impacting the integrity of the organization, but there's reports that allows us to see exceptions and allows investigations to commence investigators to dig deeper into those exceptions. Then lastly, that your organization has an integrity or a reporting hotline, an integrity hotline or a reporting hotline, something that allows them or allows employees, and vendors, and parts of your supply chain and others to report unethical behavior, and that those hotline reports are then investigated and sent to the right unit within the organization to follow up on. Someone can call the integrity hotline for a sexual harassment issue that probably goes to HR, or employment relations attorneys or something like that, but something of a security nature should come to the security team for a follow-up investigation. Physical security and investigations, that's kind of our foundation for our Global Security framework. In the next section, we start dealing with crisis management. It is the first category. Bryan Strawser: Here, do we have a crisis management program? Do we have a defined crisis management team? Have we built a defined escalation process and a crisis management framework that allows for decisions to be made through a collaborative process, and then communicating the results of those decisions? To us, those three things are where we start. We have a defined crisis team with clear roles and responsibilities, we have a process to escalate things to that team, and for them to communicate upwards to executives into the board if that's applicable, and then we have a framework on how to collaborate and make decisions and communicate the results of those decisions. Once those things are in place, then we look for a specific scenario, a crisis planning. Bryan Strawser: "What are the top 10, 12, 15, 20 risk-based scenarios that we need to have specific plan annexes for?" Sometimes we build, think of something called a playbook that has all of this kind of laid out. Here's our crisis playbook, and now we're going to execute upon the things in that. Then lastly, that we have a good process, crisis management process for simulations and exercises. The next bucket is travel safety and security. This isn't always applicable to organizations, but if you are traveling, and particularly, if your employees are traveling internationally to higher-risk locations than where you're typically doing business, you probably need some element of a travel safety and security program. Bryan Strawser: It starts with a legal concept around duty to care that you are planning and making life safety and safety, and the security of your employees is important to your organization. Travel safety and security starts with the duty to care, but it moves relatively quickly into travel policies like, "What are the travel policies? Are we looking at the risk of countries, or cities, or regions that employees are traveling to, and that we understand that there is a process in place in order to restrict travel and put some guidelines in place to ensure the safety and security of our travelers?" For example, in my previous employer, we had a country risk assessment process and a travel security council. Through that travel security council, we could bar travel to certain countries or certain regions because they were not safe for folks to go to in our opinion, but again, this varies by organization. Bryan Strawser: We then look for companies to risk rate, countries whether you're working with a company like International SOS or Control Risks group to use their country risk ratings or you're doing something internally. Then, we look for monitoring for major events that are happening near where your travelers are at or where they're going. We talk about this intelligence monitoring, but it pairs closely with a travel tracking capability where you have the ability to see where your employees are at, and you're able to see the events around them that might create risk. For example, a few years ago, one of our clients, there was an Active Shooter event going on in Germany, and one of our clients, his Chief Financial Officer was there actually within about half of a kilometer of where the event was going on. We knew that he was there. Bryan Strawser: We had a travel tracking capability. We were able to quickly make contact with him and get him to a safe location, and then we're able to evacuate him safely back to his hotel. That's the kind of travel tracking an event or intelligence monitoring that you really need to have in place. Then lastly, for travelers internationally, you're going to want to have third-party medical and security support for when these events do happen or when someone gets sick. Particularly, in some parts of the world, you need a vetted medical provider or access to vetted medical providers. Bryan Strawser: You do not want your folks just walking up to the nearest hospital or clinic because you will wind up having folks in places that are perhaps not safe and where they're not getting the level of care that you're going to want them to have. That's travel safety and security. The next area talks about partnerships, and here, we're looking at, "What are the Public-Private Partnerships for an organization and their connectivity with the global security team?" We have these in several areas, and where your prioritize here would really depend upon the maturity of your organization and where you're operating and what those risks are, but some of the partnerships we should look at are with emergency management agencies, and you have these typically local county, state, and then federal across the United States, and other countries are somewhat similar to this. Some countries only have this at a national level. Bryan Strawser: Law enforcement, "What is your relationship with local law enforcement and law enforcement at different levels that may impact the business that you're in?" If you are operating, if you're a significant global operator, you will want to have partnerships with the intelligence community. You can look at the Public-Private Partnership programs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence or through the state departments, Overseas Security Advisory Council, or through the FBI's Domestic Security Alliance Council, or for smaller organizations, FBI's InfraGard, but are you getting access to the information that you need to make sure that you're making the right moves as an organization to secure your business and protect your team? You also have the opportunity to interact with peers, so this is a kind of industry connectivity through your trade groups or local, regional and state Chambers of Commerce. Then, in a really mature organization, we would look to see a public-private sector strategy and evidence of collaboration, that there's a deliberate strategic effort to build partnerships with public sector agencies where the company has something to gain in terms of information and insight, perhaps an early look at some things, and the public sector agency gains from the company's expertise and information about what's going on. Bryan Strawser: The next category here is executive and event security. We lump these together because we typically see the same leader have responsibility for both, but in a large enough organization, this is about protecting your senior executives, perhaps at home, perhaps in travel, perhaps only at company events, perhaps it's 24/7. This depends on your organization. The second part here is just major events planning, large company meetings, shareholder meetings, big vendor, financial community presentations. These are all possibilities of things that need to be planned, and then managed, and it requires a little different level of care, which is why we often see this aligned with executive protection. Bryan Strawser: Then lastly, corporate aviation, perhaps you own or lease aircraft and operate them yourselves, or perhaps you have some kind of agreement with a company like NetJets or Flight Options or something else, but just the management of the security aspects of your corporate aviation unit, we would see that program falling into this area. The next category is an operation center or a GSOC, a Global Security Operations Center or just a SOC, a Security Operations Center. In a Global Security program, we look to see the operations centers set up as a single source of truth. They're a trusted part of the organization that's communicating what's going on. They have a lot of information flowing in, and then they're pushing out to communication that is relevant and timely and impactful and provides a good overview from a situational awareness standpoint of what's going on. Bryan Strawser: In large organizations, GSOC centers like this run 24/7. They're actively monitoring a number of things going on around the country and world. They're likely the starting point for an incident management process that then escalates into a crisis management or crisis leadership process, and we see a GSOC is being a really core to that, that they're monitoring what's going on. They're kind of at the base of that crisis leadership process, even though you may have a crisis management team that comes in and does more as things go on. We also see GSOCs as being a place for centralized security operations. Bryan Strawser: They may be dispatching security officers. They may be responding to a ShotSpotter alert and things along those lines. Then, getting to the far right of our framework graphic, we see an intelligence program as an important part of a Global Security framework, particularly in a more mature organization. We typically see kind of three categories of intelligence, and then kind of a foundational element here with intelligence. The first is geopolitical intelligence, like, "What's going on around the world that may have an impact on us?", looking at major events that are playing out Bryan Strawser: May go as far as to look at just politics. I mean, as we're recording this in September 2019, there are major political earthquakes going on in Great Britain, in the United Kingdom around Brexit. There's a lot of things happening with that. There's a lot of instability that's being generated through the Brexit process in the U.K. and in London. There have been protests with thousands of people. Bryan Strawser: If you operate in the U.K. or you have U.K. companies in your supply chain, or this is your next expansion market, then this geopolitical intelligence on what's going on over there could be important to you. If you don't, it probably has nothing to do with you. That's a domain, an intelligence domain that could or couldn't be important, depending upon your business. The second area for intel is corporate and reputational intelligence that we're looking for information and intelligence that may impact our reputation. We might see an inbound threat on our intel radar screen so to speak, where an executive make a misstatement in the media, and now this is coming back at us on Twitter and gaining steam in terms of the story. Bryan Strawser: The third category is cyber intelligence. Here, we're looking at kind of a whole cyber threat picture. This may not belong in a global security team. It could be cyber intelligence is being managed by your cybersecurity organization or by your CSO, but we often find the intel component in global security. Then lastly, kind of a foundational element here is just public private partnerships in the intelligence community about your connectivity between your intel team if you have one internally and the intelligence community through some of the sources that we've mentioned before. Bryan Strawser: Then, our last category here on the Global Security framework is the supply chain. First, we're looking at end-to-end supply chain security from the dock, at your vendor's warehouse, all the way until it shows up at your organization. "What's the security of that supply chain? Who are you dependent upon to make that supply chain secure along the way?" This could be your ocean carriers. Bryan Strawser: It could be air freight. It could be big common carriers like UPS and DHL, FedEx and others. Second is just a supply chain reputation. "Are you sourcing responsively from vendors that are not going to compromise the integrity of your organization?" Sometimes that requires an investigative capability to really dig into that, or perhaps you're purchasing that information through a third-party. Bryan Strawser: There's the investigative capability within your supply chain, so if you got a truck that gets hijacked in Guatemala and it's got your product onboard, how are you going to investigate that, and do you have any loss to begin with, and then how are you going to investigate it? Do you have access to the experts that can assist with an investigation at a location like that?" Then lastly, there's the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism or CTPAT, that allows you access to the priority lanes in the U.S. ports because you're following the requirements of the CTPAT program, which are a much greater level of security of your supply chain shipments and the integrity of your suppliers and such than a normal run-of-the-mill oceangoing or air freight shipment. That's our Global Security framework. Again, we laid this out as our view of what a global security program should look like. We left out some foundational things like budgeting and IT capabilities and some of the things that are going to kind of be there as the foundation of any organization, but they're the same ... Bryan Strawser: Those are really the same across different functions of a company, not just unique to global security, but this is our view of things companies should think about in terms of the elements of a global security program. Again, you can go to our page for this episode and download the Global Security framework, and then you get a nice, pretty PDF that you can follow along with as you listen to the episode or use it for other purposes as things go along. That's it for this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. We'll be back next week with another new episode. Thanks for listening.

Continuing our three-part series on Communication - Episode #36 of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast focuses on the new product launch -- what do you do when you're ready to launch your new initiative, system, project, or product inside of a company? In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba discuss launching new initiatives and the importance of communications planning. Topics discussed include communications planning, creative collateral, building a communications plan, and related topics. Episode Transcript Jen Otremba: Communication.   Bryan Strawser: I like to communicate.   Jen Otremba: I do too. I think it's important. This is actually part three in a three-part series of communication discussions, if you will, that we've started. We started talking a little bit about kind of an overview of communication with regards to crisis and things like that. Then we went into some of the challenges, holding statements, and things like that. Now we want to talk about the launch. At some point in time, you're going to want to launch some kind of new product or a new team.   Bryan Strawser: A new application.   Jen Otremba: A new application or something along those lines. You're going to need to know how to kind of launch that, how to get that out there to people.   Bryan Strawser: We talked in part one about the fact that we've heard from many leaders in security crisis management business continuity that they think their team are doing all of these really cool things, but nobody knows about them. The launch is really an opportunity to make sure that whatever the big splash is that you're going to make, that people are going to see it. You need this one chance to kind of message this thing the way that you really want it to be. This is your opportunity to do that, and to really think about in advance of that launch what are the different ways that you can that message out?   Jen Otremba: Very much like anything else. How do you want that to be perceived? How do you want to get it out? How do you want people to know about it? That type of thing. Without any [inaudible 00:01:48] doing that, like you said, people don't know that you have these great things going on unless you're properly communicating them. In this podcast episode I guess we want to talk a little bit about planning that launch and then socializing it, and then the launch itself.   Bryan Strawser: I think first you have to start with realizing that you have a launch. I think that often leaders look at all the different things their team is doing and you see this new initiative coming in and you're like, "It's not going to be really be that big of a deal, so why pull up a big campaign about it?" But then you also have things that are so huge that it becomes obvious that you want to communicate that.   I think realizing that really any change that you're driving can be a launch to a certain extent, and how do you really take advantage of that? But I think it really starts with understanding you've got something new that you're bringing into the environment. The new strategy, the new team, the new command center or whatever. Or something boring, new access control software. Yeah.   Jen Otremba: No matter what, in all of those cases it's going to affect people, right?   Bryan Strawser: That's right.   Jen Otremba: Whether it's affecting your internal team or your external team. It's going to have an effect somehow on people, and usually we're creatures of habit and we don't like change. This can soften that messaging a little bit.   Bryan Strawser: Once you've decided that you understand that you're going to have a launch, I think what we really want you to do before you do anything else is sit down.   Jen Otremba: Like we're doing now.   Bryan Strawser: Like we're doing right now and plan. Before you send a single message, plan. A blank piece of paper. Think like we talked about in the first episode of this series, it's an editorial calendar, but you're outlining what it is that you want to message, and what are the different vehicles available to you in order to drive that message. I think we've talked before that there are some commonly used things. There are digital content.   You might have display screens or a corporate intranet where you can post things. There's posters, there's articles, newsletters, maybe you have internal blogs. Maybe there's email newsletters and announcements that you can take advantage of. I think I mentioned posters. You can think about posters in a different way. You can do stickers on columns, you can do Badge Buddies that go on an access control badge, and then you can start thinking about Swag.   Jen Otremba: Yap. People love swag.   Bryan Strawser: If it's a big campaign Swag can just be a pretty awesome source.   Jen Otremba: People love that. I think also bringing in speakers that are experts in certain areas can definitely help with a launch or get that communication across. It gets people excited kind of like the Swag. We've seen everything from very minor things to a full blown concert to launch or announce something which can be kind of neat too, but it doesn't always have to be that extensive.   Bryan Strawser: I think an important part of just thinking about this in the planning phase is you want to start this far enough out where you've got some time to kind of build, you want to build some buzz about what's going on. I think Swag is a good way to do that. But thinking about what's the right tagline or logo, or kind of creative element that helps you push this forward can become an important part of kind building up to that big moment if it's the kind of campaign that really needs that kind of a build.   Jen Otremba: I like the idea of going through and kind of thinking through all of the absolute possible things you can do whether they're realistic or not. And then once you have a budget or some kind of other restrictions, time restrictions and things like that, then you can pick through that list of things that you think would be great and fit it in into those other restrictions. First, I usually make the massive, "Here's all of the possibilities," and then I fit it into whatever that restraint may be.   Bryan Strawser: I think another avenue to consider, I think we talked about this in episode one. You might have an internal Twitter or Slack, or some variation of that. Yammer is a commonly used internal chat capability. But, there might be something out there that should also be a part of your campaign. That kind of internal social media is a good way to build buzz, because you can use some of the more guerilla marketing tactics that you see happen in your life. Or you can have different people that are advocates for your project throughout the organization, or advocates for your launch that's coming that can use hashtags and kind of build drops of messaging. It all looks kind of organic, but in reality you've planned elements of this out.   Jen Otremba: And it can be very effective too. It gets a lot of people involved.   Bryan Strawser: So, leading up to your launch you start to build that buzz, and you start to have some of these kind of initial communication elements that are going out. You brought up some events. Concerts. No, that's kind of a big splash, but-   Jen Otremba: It is. I mean, that's obviously extreme.   Bryan Strawser: You can come up with some events. Maybe you do an open house around the project, or you do a Q&A. Some of this comes down to what is the project that you're really launching. It's interesting sometimes to have, "Hey, you're launching this new application, this new product within your company," than, "Gosh, everybody else wants to know how this thing got built and what were the elements of it and what did you learn?" Have that launch and learn. Do the brown-bag lunch, whatever the right term is that your company-   Jen Otremba: Teach-outs.   Bryan Strawser: Your teach-outs. Teach-outs were a thing.   Jen Otremba: I think also it's a good time to take partnerships. We've talked about that a lot is to partner with other areas of the company. That may be everything from you may need a communications folks to take a look at your content, to approve your content, depending on your organization and what that looks like. But also you may want council to look at it. There may be some other partnerships you might want to take into consideration as you're putting together your content.   Bryan Strawser: If what you're launching is some type of center or facility, there's really obvious things you can do around having a grand opening event, doing an open house, inviting people for tours. You can do a cookout.   Jen Otremba: People love food.   Bryan Strawser: I was involved in opening an operation center in India. That was one of the projects in my responsibility when I was working for a company. The grand opening was a big deal, not just because culturally. It was very important to the team in India that this be perceived as a big deal, because we were entrusting them with this capability that they hadn't had. But the project was championed by that. The president for that entity, this was personally important to him, and this whole idea of dedication and the ceremony and a ribbon cutting is just very important. And so playing that grand opening event and ribbon cutting in the hallway, and the unveiling of a plaque that was on the wall about the dedication. Culturally, those were huge deals in India that were very important to the team and to the leaders there, and were a really important part of our planning.   Jen Otremba: An important part of the discussion too is understanding what the culture is at not just the organization, but maybe it's the internal culture for different organizations. You might have a big company but within that company this team over here works a certain way, and this team over here works a certain way. Just kind of understanding that may play a role in how this is launched as well. An infosec team is going to definitely work differently than a marketing design team.   Bryan Strawser: Totally.   Jen Otremba: Culturally, it's going to be very different I think. I would also say that when you're thinking about these launches and your organization is based in more than one country, don't forget to think about the different methods in which you need to communicate. If you're doing launch events, how do you schedule them so that your teams can participate, or at a minimum they're recorded so that they're able to watch them. It's really easy to have your global teams feel left out over the important moment in your organization's history because they're not there. The same applies for other teams in the same country too, but I think it's particularly difficult for folks that are based elsewhere.   Bryan Strawser: I agree. Or even hourly employees that may not be able to step away to go to some of the events. I want to think about how you can bring them into the excitement as well. That's sort of the content and the vehicles. Socializing events. I think that it's a good idea to have some sort of ahead of time as you're planning through this. Things like teasers of something big is coming can really help to drive that participation when the event is actually launched. Socializing it not just with other employees and people in your organization and leadership, but kind of getting that out there with emails or calendar invites. Even the teaser posters can be helpful.   Jen Otremba: We talked a little bit about the need to socialize some aspects of this. I think socializing the communications plan is pretty difficult, because depending on how your company works, there's pretty a lot of folks that had to be involved in that conversation. If you have a communications team then certainly there should be a part of this [inaudible 00:11:24], or likely to have some great ideas if you didn't think about it in terms of the communications plan overall.   But certainly you also want to involve leaders who are going to want to be involved in some aspect of this, and how can you best leverage them? Whether that's a pull quote that goes into some of your material, a post from them or a blog post from them on your internal kind of social media or websites. And then of course their general buy off in leadership up front, so that they're a part of the process and buy in to what your overall plan is.   Bryan Strawser: Right. Or even having leadership available for the launch itself, so having them introduce it even can often be helpful.   Jen Otremba: Prepare for them to ask you to write their speech for them, but that's the way it works.   Bryan Strawser: That's true. Exactly. They're going to want to know exactly what you want them to say. Usually, they're more than willing to participate, but they need some bullet points. You're going to want to give them something.   Jen Otremba: Correct.   Bryan Strawser: And then we come down to the launch itself. So, we've done all of this work-   Jen Otremba: Now it's execution time.   Bryan Strawser: Now it's execution time. I think one thing to remember for the launch itself is usually things don't go as planned, or there are some aspects of it that don't go as planned. There's the planning for the unplanned I guess which always comes [crosstalk 00:12:48]   Jen Otremba: Prepare for the unexpected.   Bryan Strawser: Or just be prepared so that you can react to things like that. Because you come up with multiple vehicles, so if one vehicle doesn't work it shouldn't be as big of a deal, right? You've all these other means of pushing this information out. I think additionally I would be prepared for massive amounts of questions. Anytime you launch something new it's usually going to create a lot of buzz and a lot of questions as to how it's going to affect me, which is mostly what people care about is the me.   Jen Otremba: I think certainly.   Bryan Strawser: How does this matter to me?   Jen Otremba: I think you're right. It gives you a whole episode just about change management and the big need that we see to communicate better when we're talking about driving change in an organization. Maybe that's part of your launch certainly. If changing something is part of your launch, you're going to want to make sure that the context for that is explained and the differences are clearly explained, and you get down to the brass tacks at what does this really mean for me?   But as you think about that final launch event or communication, really making sure that you're communicating the context as to why and what is happening. Think about this from the perspective of your most junior employee who has the least amount of strategic context of what's going on in most cases, because they're new or not as experienced. But I think really explaining that and making sure that your messaging is clear enough that people from the most senior to the most junior can really understand what you're putting in front of them for your launch.   Bryan Strawser: Especially if it's a big, big change.   Jen Otremba: Especially for a big change. Those are some thoughts we had on how to effectively kind of wrap up your communications plan going into the big launch. We hope that your launches are successful.  

What happens when you find yourself in the middle of a crisis, some of your facilities are impacted, and suddenly you need to relocate several critical teams to an alternate workplace for an indeterminate period of time. If you have planned well, then you're ready to execute your plan. But if you haven't.... In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser along with Senior Consultant Jennifer Otremba discuss alternate workplace strategies for business continuity situations. Topics discussed by the experts from Bryghtpath include the business impact analysis (BIA), effective business continuity planning, trends in alternate workplace strategies, and their own practical experience with managing large-scale business continuity situations that required the use of alternate workplace strategies. //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: A bad thing has happened. The boom has happened.   Jen Otremba: What do we do now?   Bryan Strawser: We're on the right side of the boom.   Jen Otremba: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: We're responding. We've activated our crisis process. We've realized that we've got a facility or two that has impact.   Jen Otremba: For whatever reason.   Bryan Strawser: For whatever reason and now we're activating business continuity plans for critical teams that are in those facilities and we run into the problem of alternate workspace.   Jen Otremba: Yeah. We may have planned for this or we may not have planned for this.   Bryan Strawser: We hope that we have a plan for this.   Jen Otremba: I always like it when you discussed your story about what had happened with the flooding where individuals lost their workspace because of flooding. Because oftentimes, we think about this like the tornado blew the building the over, but it's not always like that.   Bryan Strawser: Yeah. We always seem to think of the catastrophic situation, but I think we relayed it previously on the podcast many years ago. An employer of mine at the time, 50 story skyscraper building in Minneapolis where we occupied 40-ish floors of the building, there was a flood inside the building. The flood was caused by a one inch water line that ran into an ice maker that had a filter change on a Friday or a Thursday and by Saturday night it was leaking and by Sunday afternoon had proceeded to flood. I believe it was three and a half floors of the building. Now, we had 600-ish, 800-ish employees that we need to work and couldn't work because there was three to four inches of standing water in their offices and cubicles and common workspace.   Jen Otremba: They couldn't work in that space.   Bryan Strawser: Couldn't work in that space. That's correct. Important distinction. This is where this whole idea of alternate workspace comes up is if they can't work there then where can the work?   Jen Otremba: Right.   Bryan Strawser: How do we solve that problem?   Jen Otremba: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: We build a second building that just sits empty and when you have disruption, you just move people to your other $250 million skyscraper. That's how this works.   Jen Otremba: I think we've seen this come up in even less drastic situations like that and it's become more and more common to work elsewhere when there is a snowstorm and I can't get work or the transportation that the company has provided for me to get to work is not running because there's a massive snowstorm, things like that. I have to come up with an alternate plan as to where I can work.   Bryan Strawser: I made a joke earlier about the secondary $250 million skyscraper, so that was just to be clear, that was a joke since we just moved on quickly from there.   Jen Otremba: We did. Yes.   Bryan Strawser: This really starts with when we're talking about alternate workspace, what we're really talking about here is if your primary workplace is not usable, where can you go and work? We very rapidly come to another fork in the discussion, which is well, is there anything special about your workspace that really has to be there for you to be able to do your job? I don't mean do your job in comfort and luxury that you might've had in your previous, your normal workspace probably. What do you really need to do your job? I was always in jobs that I could really work from anywhere. What I needed was I need a phone, I need a computer, I need internet connectivity, I need my computer's basic set of apps, Microsoft Office and access to web and Slack and instant messenger and whatever.   I didn't really need anything special to be able to do my job.   Jen Otremba: Right. There certainly are positions that require specific tools, specific locations, specific things in order to do your job there.   Bryan Strawser: Right. If you work in a contact center ...   Jen Otremba: For instance.   Bryan Strawser: ... For any of the contact center disciplines, collection, customer service, outbound sales calls, etc., well there's some pretty specialized stuff going on there. You've got a computer with certain software. You probably have a soft phone or a VoIP phone that connects to the computer and gets information from it. You probably have a dialing system and the calls are recorded. Some of this, some of this you could probably live without. Some of this required by regulation in your [inaudible 00:04:29]. You're going to have to have it in order to continue that operation, but in almost every case, you're not going to be able to do this from home. Although, we are finally starting to see some cloud solutions come out for this sort of thing.   Jen Otremba: Yeah. We're of course not talking about things like doctors and nurses in a hospital setting that clearly need to be there in order to do their job.   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jen Otremba: We're talking about other positions that can be done elsewhere. Right?   Bryan Strawser: As we start to dig into this, there's certainly as you start to devise an alternate workspace strategy, this really starts off with data. In what's likely your business continuity life cycle, your planning process, you're asking questions about facilities, applications, technology requirements, specific workspace needs, like dolly software exam tables for a doctor.   Jen Otremba: Sure. Even those in some cases can be moved elsewhere for a temporary period of time.   Bryan Strawser: That's right. There's a lot you could do with a wireless laptop and a stethoscope and some basic medical equipment.   Jen Otremba: Sure.   Bryan Strawser: You probably don't want to be doing that out in the middle of a parking lot.   Jen Otremba: Right. You came up with a plan for that, but yes, you're right. You start with the data.   Bryan Strawser: You're capturing a lot of this data.   Jen Otremba: Right. I think this is an interesting point about the story that you told in introducing this is that that BIA data should point towards specific individuals that need a specific workspace. In that case, that was not the case. Many of those individuals were not on the BIA as critical employees in a certain location, that kind of thing, but there were still displaced.   Bryan Strawser: Right. In the example we were talking about, the flooding in the skyscraper, very few of those 800 individuals and the four or five teams they were a part of were really critical, were performing critical roles because through our process in the business impact analysis and understanding criticality, they didn't meet our criteria so they therefore did not have allocated alternate workspace, which was a defined strategy that we had. In fact, they didn't plan at all because they were not considered to be critical processes until the Monday following the ... Until Monday when we had a discussion with our leaders and we were quickly corrected of I don't really care what the BIA says, maybe we filled it out wrong or whatever, but now they're critical so they need a space to work.   Jen Otremba: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: Okay. Fine.   Jen Otremba: Being prepared for that as well [inaudible 00:06:53].   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jen Otremba: Or being prepared to have that discussion with your leadership.   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jen Otremba: On the spot.   Bryan Strawser: As you're thinking about devising alternate workspace strategies, I think we talked about dealing with the data. I think really analyzing this data and being a little challenging about why people need alternate workspace because most companies in today's day and age don't keep a spare building around and probably don't have a whole lot of space to be able to consolidate folks. First, I think you want to start with let's get this list down to what actually needs alternate workspace, who has to a physical place to work. If they can work remotely then have them work remotely, until you get through that first two, three, four, weeks of response and you and your facilities partners come up with the what's the long term answer going to be for how we deal with the loss of this, loss or damage to this facility.   Jen Otremba: Or if those positions aren't immediately critical, they can be put on hold for a period of time, too.   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jen Otremba: Really coming up with clear data on exactly what that looks like for how many people and what the workspaces may look like and having all of that information to be able to discuss with the people writing the checks. Right? Who's paying the bills here?   Bryan Strawser: Not going to be me.   Jen Otremba: Not going to be me. That's going to be a tough discussion though, I think.   Bryan Strawser: It is. I think this is actually a really difficult ... This is a really difficult thing to work through because if you've not done this before and your company is of any size whatsoever, this can be a pretty expensive proposition. I know as we've worked with clients, we've done a number of things around alternate workspace. We've seen conference rooms wired with additional ethernet jacks and a space for people to work. We've seen common areas furniture removed, tables and chairs and stuff so that folks can work. We've seen cafeterias where it's pre-wired with network and phone power so that you bring it down from the ceiling or you pull up tiles in the floor and there's the connectivity you need to relocate contact centers and critical pieces like that.   There's a lot of ways that you can approach this. We have a client that is literally building a compound where they're able to bring in vendor provided trailers for a temporary workspace and they're wiring it with fiber and power and a bathroom setup and everything that they feel like is necessary in order to provide even in the alternate situation the workspace environment that they seek to have for employees.   Jen Otremba: They have the real estate to do that.   Bryan Strawser: Correct.   Jen Otremba: [inaudible 00:09:36].   Bryan Strawser: Even this is still a ... This is a significant project for them to undertake.   Jen Otremba: Yeah.   Bryan Strawser: In all of these efforts, we've seen success where companies have taken the time to really do us a thorough analysis of let's get down to who really has to have space, let's make a good analysis of what we're going to need to fulfill those issues if these are disrupted and then what are the different options that we can go through in order to get to the best possible answer and then bring those options to your executives or your governance structure or what have you in order to talk through those.   Jen Otremba: Yeah. I think that's really the best way to be prepared for those discussions with your senior leaders is to having all of the data and also having the financial information upfront, so it's going to be very costly.   Bryan Strawser: Right.   Jen Otremba: But, having all of that information and being able to provide the financial considerations around that and also what the financial considerations could potentially look like without that if something were to happen.   Bryan Strawser: Right. It's important to look at other options too, like hotels, hotel conference rooms. If you have people that can work using a laptop and VPN and all they need is wifi, you can do a lot in a 600 person banquet room. I'm not going to pretend it's going to be cozy and that you're all going to be singing kumbaya together, but you got a place to go, there's bathrooms that's dry or it's warm or chilled depending upon what climate you're in.   Jen Otremba: Right.   Bryan Strawser: That might be a better option than having people outside in trailers for two weeks.   Jen Otremba: Yeah. Absolutely. Additionally in this, we can't really have this discussion without going back to the remote work discussion or the working from home discussion or however you want to look at that. Because in some cultures, it's absolutely normal. For instance, at Bryghtpath here, we work elsewhere all the time.   Bryan Strawser: Can't remember the last time I saw Jen in person.   Jen Otremba: I'm here now. Even you, Bryan, we work from all over the place, really.   Bryan Strawser: We do. We work from all around the world.   Jen Otremba: We travel a lot. We work from all over the world and we don't need any special equipment to do that, but we do need our laptop, our internet, our VPN, our access to our applications, and things like that. It's normal in our culture to operate this way.   Bryan Strawser: But, we work with companies who remote work is foreign to them.   Jen Otremba: Right. Introducing or potentially introducing that as a normal way to operate.   Bryan Strawser: Definitely an area of challenge.   Jen Otremba: It can be an area of challenge, yes.   Bryan Strawser: It's definitely worth talking through. If remote work is not part of your organization's culture and you're going to use remote work as an alternate workspace strategy or most of the time you're going to go to remote work before you go to alternate workspace because it is cheaper, it's faster to execute, and in many ways, it works just as well. If that's not part or your culture, that's going to be a real adjustment for folks. If the only way that your team for example knows how to collaborate is to do it in person across the table or by talking across cubicles or offices or whatever and all of a sudden they're all working from their own homes, that collaboration is not going to come easy to them. You're going to have to really work at it to make that work.   Jen Otremba: That said, it would be as part of your strategy, that's something you want to start testing and working on. Whether that be testing your VPN limits or working occasionally on a remote basis to practice that collaborative work from elsewhere.   Bryan Strawser: Right. We do think that remote work is something that's overlooked a lot in alternate workspace strategies. Certainly, something that you want to look at and dig into as you're devising own strategy and certainly not be afraid to challenge the current status quo because we think it's better to take on the remote work challenge and challenge the culture if your company really doesn't support such a thing than to go invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in an alternate workspace strategy that could really be replaced by letting 70, 80 people work from home during a disruption.   Jen Otremba: Yeah. I think another important part to think about through that if you're going to use remote work is understanding that, like you said earlier, it's cheaper and faster. If your employees can't get to an office for whatever reason being a natural disaster or something like that, but they're already at home, it's safer for them to stay at home and continue working.   Bryan Strawser: That's right.   Jen Otremba: There's really some advantages of allowing that remote work culture.   Bryan Strawser: To recap then on the alternate workspace discussion for today, understand the situation, understand the data, particularly from your BIA or business continuity lifecycle. Give it a thorough analysis. Be challenging on departments and teams and their thoughts on alternate workspace and get them down to what they truly need to have in the event of a major disruption. Pull together some options to discuss with your governance committee or your senior executives to work through the problem and then put a solid plan in place and think about the different options, including remote work, as a successful way to manage these kind of situations as opposed to setting up alternate facilities.  

Following a major incident or crisis, it's time to take stock of your plans, processes, and efforts through a thorough after-action process. In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jen Otremba talk about the need for after-action processes, the immediate "hot wash" discussion after the end of an incident, and then transitioning into a thoughtful after-action approach that will serve to help mature and enhance your crisis management program. //static.leadpages.net/leadboxes/current/embed.js Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: The boom is over. Jen Otremba:      The event happened. Bryan Strawser: The event happened. Remember, we had this bad thing, whatever it was. We activated our crisis process. We responded, a crisis team came together and interacted and collaborated and schemed and work through a difficult situation. Jen Otremba:      Outside parties came in. Bryan Strawser: Outside parties were involved. Jen Otremba:      Law enforcement maybe was involved. Bryan Strawser: Now it's over and we've started the process of recovery, which can take years. What do we do? Jen Otremba:      Now what happens? Bryan Strawser: Now what happens? How do we learn? How do we know things worked or didn't work? Jen Otremba:      I think the first step in this process would be to have an immediate hot wash. Bryan Strawser: Also, we're talking about after action processes. Jen Otremba:      After action. Bryan Strawser: We start with a hot wash, what the heck is a hot wash? Because I know the first time I heard this, I was like, "What are you talking about? This is a foreign language." Jen Otremba:      Yeah. This is something to be honest I feel like we do fairly well in the military, because we do ... I learned this from a very young age, that after a big incident, after something occurred, you do some kind of an after action. Sometimes it's involved, sometimes it's not as involved, but usually we start with a hot wash. An immediate discussion of what just happened and what went right and what went wrong. Sometimes there's emotions involved in that discussion as well. Bryan Strawser: Because it just happened, and particularly if it was a violent event or it was a traumatic event there's a lot of emotion involved. I think particularly for me, as we've talked before, my emotional and adrenaline dump happened when the disaster was over, when I knew that people were safe. It was the hardest time for me, and I think everybody's going to be different with this but I think most people that do crisis things for a living, that emotional lease comes when the incident's over. So the hot wash was always a difficult time for me, I had to really collect myself and then focus into this discussion that we were going to have. It's dependent on the incident of course. Jen Otremba:      I think we've seen over time that that's the fact for a lot of people, a lot of people go through that. Now their emotions are at an all time high during the hot wash and sometimes fingers get pointed and it's not helpful, but sometimes it's really important. Bryan Strawser: We try to keep that out of ... Jen Otremba:      Try to, yeah. Bryan Strawser: Hot wash is really more of an informal immediate after action discussion about what just happened. Are we clear on the facts of what just happened? You get into the conversation of evaluating the response from your team. It's not about individuals, it's about what worked, what didn't work. Did we do what we were supposed to do? Did we follow our processes? Or were those processes not adequate and we through them aside along the way? Which happens sometimes. It's really that question of, in the hot wash what worked that we just saw? And what didn't work? Jen Otremba:      Yeah, and then in that initial conversation, who should lead that and how long should that last? Bryan Strawser: Right. I think about the ... I think the most difficult hot wash situation that you and I were involved in when we worked together ... Jen Otremba:      In a corporate setting. Bryan Strawser: In a corporate setting, was we had an active shooter incident at a headquarters location. It was literally across the street. We've talked about this since then on a previous episode of the podcast. We did a hot wash with the incident commander from the law enforcement agency that led the response. His staff, several of our leaders and the entire SWAT, two SWAT teams actually, that responded ... Jen Otremba:      Very crowded discussion. Bryan Strawser: It was a very crowded discussion and we were fortunate to have a room that could accommodate everybody. It was a 30-ish minute, 45 minute discussion that in retrospect I think we said probably wasn't really well led because we thought the police were going to drive it and the police actually had no idea how they were going to drive this particular conversation, so we took over as it went on. That said, there were some valuable lessons that we captured from that conversation, but we also realized that in a hot wash you're looking for the immediate info of what worked and didn't, you don't get the reflective, "Hey, I've had some time to think about this and now I think this and I think this and I think this." Jen Otremba:      Hindsight, right. Yeah, or the hindsight of, "Oh, I can see why they were reacting that way, because big picture this is what they were dealing with but we were over here dealing with this and we weren't coming together." Those types of things can come out in a after action, a more organized one, a short period of time after the hot wash but enough time for people to get some rest and to think about what just happened. Bryan Strawser: Think and converse and process what went on. Jen Otremba:      Yes, and come from that high, that sort of fight or flight high that they were just on. Bryan Strawser: We always encourage the hot wash immediately at the end of the response but brief, 30 to 45 minutes. It doesn't need to be strongly led. We prefer to lead these as someone, a leader within your crisis organization or a leader from the organization that your crisis team reports to. Jen Otremba:      If available. Bryan Strawser: If available. Jen Otremba:      The incident lead is probably a good option. Bryan Strawser: Right, but it's kind of a conversation with the team and perhaps other leaders that were involved in that response or recovery, about what worked and what didn't. You need to have a scribe, you need to take those notes. That's kind of the immediate after action, is that hot wash discussion. Jen Otremba:      It's like an immediate brain dump. Bryan Strawser: Right, and then a pause. Jen Otremba:      How long? Bryan Strawser: Three days, five days, a week, 10 days. You have to judge based on what went on and when is the right time to have this discussion. Jen Otremba:      Right, because you might be having people requiring to take some time off in between the discussion. You don't want it to be so long that people are forgetting but it's a good idea if you're involved in a crisis to take some notes throughout that time. That break time between the incident and the after action, the formal after actions, to start taking some notes and jotting down some things so you can remember that during the discussion. Bryan Strawser: One thing that I learned when I went through the NPLI program at Harvard was the value in journaling during an event. We had a requirement to journal daily during the program, but something that I got immense value out of was hearing these guys who have made their life's work talking about the decisions that are made in national scale emergencies, who would go to the command centers of the Deep Water Horizon incident, and sit there with the incident commander and watch a meeting or a conference or a video conference. And then, in the lull that followed to say, "Why did you just make that decision? What drove you to do that versus the other four options that you were given? Why did you decide to pick that person to lead this effort? Why did you say this instead of perhaps these other things that you could have said?" It's the immediacy of that information that you don't remember later, but you remember it in the moment because you've just made it. Jen Otremba:      These formal after actions, let's talk about that for a second. This formal after action, who should lead it? What should we talk about? Who should be involved? Those types of questions seem to always come up. It's a little bit more formal, so there's some time to set a calendar invite to get people to start thinking about what they want to say. I usually start when I'm doing an after action is what went well. I like to start with a positive note, what went well in the situation? Bryan Strawser: What worked? Jen Otremba:      What worked? What are we going to keep for the next time? Then, once we get through that process, usually people are a little bit on a high of all the good things that they did then and sort of [inaudible 00:08:33] into the, "So now what? What can we do better? How can we fix this for next time?" Bryan Strawser: Again, these conversations are not about blame. Jen Otremba:      Not at all. Bryan Strawser: It's about, how do we be better? Jen Otremba:      But I think it's natural to feel maybe a sense of being attacked or something like that, but it's not the intent at all. It shouldn't be used against people either. [crosstalk 00:08:52] Bryan Strawser: No, no, no. Not at all. This is not a performance review or audit. It's, how do we be better at the things that we're trying to accomplish here? Jen Otremba:      As a team. Bryan Strawser: Right. Jen Otremba:      How do we grow from this and how do we fix some of the things? What are the shortcomings that we didn't see before that we now see because we experienced it? How do we fix those? Bryan Strawser: We often encourage after actions to happen in some groups? Like-minded ... Not like-minded, like-roled groups might be the best way to explain it. I always encourage them, we always did them, as the crisis team together, without other leaders or stakeholders or impacted locations. We did just the crisis team because that was a team that had been through many things together and were very candid with each other. Jen Otremba:      Very. Bryan Strawser: Very candid with each other, but that's what you want. We would do an after action meeting with that group. We did one with just our internal team that worked on crisis stuff full time. That was often about our internal processes for supporting a crisis, but it was also about the incident leader asking for feedback in a non-blameful way. Jen Otremba:      Constructive. Bryan Strawser: But, how do I be better at what I just did? Where did I do well? What did I not do well from a leadership standpoint I need to do better? I always thought those were really healthy conversations but they were held in a safe environment. Jen Otremba:      Absolutely. Bryan Strawser: Then we would do a call with the impacted leaders from the locations in that particular case that were involved in this crisis. We were able to glean, how could we better support you? Do you have adequate training for the roles that we expect you to have in a crisis? All of this flows into an after action report but they're separate conversations. In a large scale incident we often did, like the active shooter incident we've referenced before, I think we did some focus group conversations with impacted team members, employees. We met with some leaders who had people in that building based on what they had heard. We did a lot of things a little differently to capture as much feedback as possible, but also to make sure that people felt that their input was included in this very serious situation. Jen Otremba:      That's because we worked for a large scale organization where there was a lot of players. But a small organization, same concept. Maybe would be a few less conversations. You probably wouldn't need to have as many but same thing you're capturing. You have to adjust that for the size of organization that you're running. Bryan Strawser: Right. At the end of this you're writing a report of some type, a brief report we always try to get to. But we encourage and we coach our clients on a simple summary of the incident. What are the facts of what happened? The timeline that went with that? And then, here are the things that worked. Here's what went well. Here's what we saw as opportunities, things that didn't go well. Here's what we can do about it. Here's the actions that we've agreed to take as a part of this after action, and those actions should be specific, actionable to a person or a team. They should have dates associated with when they're expected to be done and a priority, like are they high? Is it medium? Is it low? Jen Otremba:      Yeah, I think there's also value to sharing that information. Bryan Strawser: Yes. Jen Otremba:      Especially in a incident like we're talking about where there were a lot of people involved, not just in the incident but were involved because their friends were over there or maybe they were in one of those rooms and they want to know what the company's going to do about it because they were unhappy about certain things. Getting their input is also valuable, and then to let them know, "Hey, this isn't just going to sleep, we have all of these processes we're improving." Bryan Strawser: Yeah. You bring up a great point about there should be a way to share this information with stakeholders, with impacted locations. There has to be some overall accountability and tracking of the action items. If you have a crisis team, that's probably the place that that should be owned but if you don't, and many of you that listen to our podcast we know don't really have teams, somebody needs to own that follow up process. Jen Otremba:      Yeah, it makes everyone feel better when they know that the place that they're working or going to school or the hospital that they're in, they know that they're working towards better things. I think that's a good thing. I have a question, after you do the working group and all of this, all of this sounds like really good stuff, right? So why isn't there one done sometimes? Why wouldn't you do an after action report? I don't understand why you wouldn't do that. I know there's a lot of times when things don't get done, and for a lot of reasons. For instance, no one maybe wants to initiate the discussion. Bryan Strawser: Right, and it can be a hard discussion to initiate. Jen Otremba:      Super hard. Bryan Strawser: You're questioning how I performed. Jen Otremba:      Yeah. Bryan Strawser: Even though I'm not. Jen Otremba:      No. Bryan Strawser: That's not the attempt, but some people will take it that way. Jen Otremba:      Yeah, and some people will mean it that way but that shouldn't be the case at all. That's hard, to point out your mistakes and other people's mistakes. That's one reason that maybe they don't get done, so you just power through that. You've got to work through that and put your emotions on the table and just say, "Okay, let's put this aside and let's have this discussion." An other reason I know that maybe this doesn't get done is there isn't someone that's assigned to initiate that conversation. I think before an incident happens it's a good idea to have somebody, whether like we talked about is the incident lead that their responsibility is to hold this after action so that it actually gets accomplished. Bryan Strawser: I think in a lot of cases this doesn't happen out of ... It's not because of malice that after actions don't occur, it's that we just get busy. Where we've had the event and now we're post-response and we're in recovery and we're thinking ahead to what's next and we probably don't do this full time. We're already thinking about, "I've got to go back to my regular job and do this other stuff." Yeah, but you need to also talk about what ... You will never get better if you don't engage in some type of after action process with some accountability. Jen Otremba:      Sometimes there's the idea that you just want to move on. Let's just put that behind us, let's just move on, let's just move on. Bryan Strawser: What was it? Who was it that said that if we don't learn from history then we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, we may as well lie down on the railroad tracks so the train of history can run over us? Jen Otremba:      Right, and everyone's been in an organization that just repeats the same mistakes. The after action is a way to correct that. Bryan Strawser: It's a way to make sure you only commit original new mistakes. Jen Otremba:      Yeah. Bryan Strawser: Which are better. Jen Otremba:      Yeah, better new mistakes that you're making, because we all make them. There's always getting better. Bryan Strawser: I think that's always ... Yeah, I was trying to think about the other discussions that I've had in my career on this. I think that particularly if you have a well oiled crisis process, the after action stuff can seem like kind of a drag. Because I remember coming out of Hurricane Sandy, where we had performed at our old employer really, really well. The CEO was thrilled and the board was thrilled. Local communities were thrilled. We had really come off of pretty phenomenal management of the situation. And then we had to sit there and go, "Yeah, but God, there's like 40 things that didn't go great." Jen Otremba:      I was going to say, and I eventually guessed, that during an after action [crosstalk 00:16:26] Bryan Strawser: Yeah, we had a whole list of stuff, good and bad and ugly, that were like, we've got to figure these things out so that we can be better. I'm not sure how we could have been better. Jen Otremba:      Except for those 40 things. Bryan Strawser: There was a list of things. There was a list of things we thought we could do better but our results ... Jen Otremba:      We needed to order the pizza earlier. Bryan Strawser: We need to order pizza early. There were so many problems, so many problems. I think that's worth bringing up, that I think a good crisis team is going to identify lots of opportunity for improvement. There's also opportunities for improvement that are big and that take time to result. I know one of the issues I recall coming out of Hurricane Sandy is we thought that we had licked this, how do we get access to a site, how do we get credentialed to gain access to get our people in and get our equipment in in order to recover a location that was critical infrastructure, and that worked. Except in one state. In that one state, the state was like, "Well yes, you can get in." So here we go, convoy of trucks and stuff going in, and then you get township officials going, "No, we're not open for business here." We're like, "Wait, but the state told us ... " We had to find a way to fix that. That took forever to figure out. You had to move some political mountains to make that happen. Jen Otremba:      Yeah. I also think too, from the outside looking in it may seem that everything went really well and everyone's giving you kudos and a slap on the back and all this. You're doing really good things. Like you said, we did all these great things during Hurricane Sandy. But you internally, your team internally knows that there are things that could be made better. Bryan Strawser: Yeah. To me, I think that that's just part of being a good crisis leader, is the ability to see that there's things that you can always be better. You're always enhancing those and figuring out how to prioritize that through a good process. Jen Otremba:      I think it should be implemented into your process, so you go through the crisis, after action is documented right in there as the next step. Bryan Strawser: Right. So have an after action process and have those difficult conversations about how to do better. Be transparent and share the information. You'll be better for it over time and so will your response.

Once you’ve created your initial crisis management framework, how do you go about prioritizing your top risks for additional situation-based planning? That’s the topic that we dive into today in this week’s edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser along with Consultant Bray Wheeler talk about how to shift from your established crisis management framework and plan to situational based planning for your top prioritized risks. Related episodes of our Managing Uncertainty Podcast and articles from our blog include: Managing Uncertainty Episode #1: Shouldn’t we have a plan for alien invasion? Managing Uncertainty Episode #12: When the world falls down around you Managing Uncertainty Episode #55: Crisis Leadership Roundtable Managing Uncertainty Episode #59: All roads lead to one What the CEO needs to understand about planning for a crisis Crisis Communications 201: Crisis Protocols Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. I’m Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: I’m Bray Wheeler, a consultant at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: One that we’ve talked about, at least, in a couple of previous episodes is this really common call or email that we get from prospective clients. It usually starts with, “I don’t have any kind of crisis plan or structure, but my executives have told me I need an active shooter plan.” Bray Wheeler: Yup. Bryan Strawser: We always immediately steer them towards, “You might need an active shooter plan, but if you don’t have anything else, what you first need to establish is a crisis management framework. You need a plan on you’re going to deal with any major disruption that establishes, here’s the team, here’s the process, here’s how you’re going to communicate, here’s how you’re going to make decisions, here’s how you’re going to escalate things.” When we talk about a crisis framework, that’s what we’re talking about. Bryan Strawser: So, we’ve talked about this several times. What we want to talk about today is, what happens when you have that in place, and now it’s time to take a look around the company and say, “There’s probably some specific things I need to write a plan for, but what are those things? So, what do we do next?” Bray Wheeler: I think, people can get hung up on evaluating different things and scoring different things, and talking to different people. All of those things are important, and

Once you’ve made the decision to hold a crisis management exercise, how should the exercise team and participants begin planning for the exercise? There’s a lot to do in order to ensure that the goals of the exercise are achieved! In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser along with Consultant Bray Wheeler discuss their experiences in crafting and preparing exercise material – but also how to coach participants through preparing for the exercise that you are developing. Related Posts & Podcast Episodes: Crisis Exercises: Why are they important? Managing Uncertainty Podcast – Episode #19: Exercises are Boring How to evaluate plan effectiveness after active shooter exercises Why social media and communications should be part of any crisis exercise Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Bryan Strawser, principal and CEO at Bryghtpath. Bray Wheeler: This is Bray Wheeler, a consultant at Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: We’ve decided that 90 days from now, we’re going to have a crisis exercise. We’ve scheduled it. We’ve sent out the invites. We’ve secured the room. Then it hits us. We have to prepare for this exercise. We just thought it was a good idea to have one. What are we going to do here? What do we do, Bray? Bray Wheeler: Where to begin? Where to begin? Well, I think a couple of assumptions. We’ve identified the scenario. We’ve laid out our run of play, or our outline, for the exercise. We feel pretty confident in that. I think what we’re trying to drive at is- Bryan Strawser: We know who’s participating and observing and evaluating and controlling, which might all be the same person. Bray Wheeler: Right. All the finer points of the nature of the exercise and what we’re trying to accomplish has been laid out. But we have to get ready for it. I think there’s a couple of different pockets of things, activities, that have to be done. One is as players and one is as facilitators from that exercise. From just a pure participant player standpoint, there’s quite a bit that people can do that’s probably fairly obvious, but not everybody does it. We do surveys a lot with a lot of our companies, and it’s amazing to see that people, “Well, I brought the plan.” And that’s all they did. Bryan Strawser: Bringing the plan is good. It’s good to have the plan with you. Bray Wheeler: Right. It’s a good start, but they often don’t necessarily review that plan upfront. They’re not meeting as individual workstreams or things like that. There’s a lot that can be done. I think we’ve talked quite a bit about reviewing that plan is important, but it’s really looking at it from a, “I understand the general flow of how things go, that I could easily communicate that to somebody who doesn’t know.”

In this episode of our BryghtCast edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Consultant Bray Wheeler take a look at three current risks and upcoming events: China’s plan to conduct military exercises off the coast of Taiwan China’s rare public statement on Hong Kong The shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival and what it means for major event planning & physical security strategy Episode Transcript Bryan Strawser: Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty podcast. This is our BryghtCast edition for the week of July 29th, 2019. Bryan Strawser: This is Bryan Strawser, Principal and CEO here at Bryghtpath. With me is- Bray Wheeler: Bray Wheeler, Consultant with Bryghtpath. Bryan Strawser: As a reminder, the Bryghtcast episode is where we take a few recent events in the news and talk about their connectivity to the private sector and issues that organizations may want to be prepared with. Bryan Strawser: We’re going to start with an announcement this morning that China’s military is holding exercises this week in waters off the coast of Taiwan. This was announced by China’s Maritime Safety Agency and came just days after the government in Beijing reiterated that it was ready to fight if there was any move towards independence for the self-ruled island of Taiwan. Of course, to the Chinese, they often refer to it as the wayward province of Chinese Taipei, which is how Taiwan is referred to in international terms at conferences and such, where both countries are present. Bryan Strawser: China claims that it is stepping up military drills in recent years, including even flying what Beijing calls Island Encirclement Exercises, and sending warships into surround international waters. Bryan Strawser: Bray, what does this mean for companies that operate in Taiwan? Bray Wheeler: Well, it certainly means that Taiwan is back in the news. Bryan Strawser: Yeah, it’s been a while. Bray Wheeler: For China, it’s been a bit quiet. Hong Kong has dominated a lot of the discussion as it relates to China, as well as some of the trade stuff, so Taiwan has been a bit under the radar here, at least for the last month or two. Bray Wheeler: Really, for companies that are in Taiwan, probably not anything direct or immediate, however, the fact those exercises are going on, [South] China Sea is still a thing that’s important. We have other activity in other important straits within the Maritime world. The fact that these are happening definitely could impact, could disrupt, could delay Maritime shipping, commerce in those areas should these escalate, be prolonged, or something happens, an accident or whatnot. Bryan Strawser: Taiwan had its own military exercises in May, both air, land, and sea. Or, I guess that’s all three, not both. They vowed to defend themselves against China’s growing threat to their independence. Bryan Strawser: China also has reiterated that it would be ready