Future Ready Corporate Security Organisation

Future ready organizations are agile, nimble, and resilient. They are like a rubber toy for babies. You can press them, squeeze them, thrash them, bend them, throw them, toss them on the ground with full force, but they slowly regain their original shape. They are like roly-poly self-balancing dolls. You roll them in any direction, they quickly re-balance their center of gravity and spring back to their upright position. They are like super tankers. They stay afloat during massive storms at the sea of business. A future-ready organization survive and thrive in all the situations. They stay ahead of the curve while others struggle to find the right approach. All credit for keeping these organizations flexible goes to the visionary people leading them.

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The leaders sitting on the driving seat of future ready organizations are proactive, pre-emptive, and preventive. They have a different mindset. In business parlance, this type of mind set is called “Hunter” mindset. How does a hunter operate? He goes out in the jungle with a gun, climbs on a machan or a raised observation platform, remains fully engaged with the surrounding environment, constantly look for the prey and go for kill at right opportunity. Majority of the security leaders have “Fisherman” mindset. How does an angler or a fisherman catches fish? He goes to a riverbank or a pond, bait his angling hook, through his line in the water, sit down and wait for the prey to come. Similarly, Security leaders also go to their respective sites periodically, carry out security risk surveys, deploy countermeasures, sit down, and wait for the crooks to fall in their trap. They don’t go after the violators and catch them proactively. Let’s consider an example to understand how hunter mindset can help security leaders in building a future ready corporate security department. The term “Black swan” or “Grey rhino” is a metaphor which is used for highly unlikely high impact event. It is considered that predicting these events is extremely difficult. Studies carried out after high impact events like World War - I, Arab Spring, 9/11 Terror attack, 2008 Global financial meltdown etc. have unearthed that all these high impact events gave our advance indicators. But those indicators were largely ignored because they were not very subtle. Security leaders require special antenna called “hunter” mindset to catch the advance signals of approaching disaster. Like a hunter, if a security leader remains fully engaged with the global security environment and constantly follow emerging geo-political situation across the globe, chances are high that they can spot the advance warnings of all the approaching high impact events. This will give security leaders some reaction time to adjust the sails of their organization and minimize the impact of the impending disaster. Future ready Security leaders have a “Hunter” mindset which keep them ahead of the curve.

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Best practices to keep Security Organizations Future Ready

It is said that “model of past cannot fix the challenges of future”. To prepare for the future, corporate security departments must trash their stone aged security operating models. They need to draft new security operating models talking about future ready security processes, onboard future ready security human capital and embrace future ready security technology to stay ahead of the curve. Let us discuss three universal strategies that can help security leaders in building a future ready Corporate Security organization:

1.?Futureproofed Crisis Management Plan: Future ready security organizations are ever ready to handle worst case scenarios. Their crisis management plans (CMP) are current, dynamic, and relevant. They constantly review and change their CMP like seasons. The famous proverb, “prepare for the worst and hope for the best”, is a guiding star for security professionals. But we face the constant challenge to finding what is worst for our business. We generally have sub-optimal CMP due to lack of imagination. Best tool to discover what all can go wrong with our business is brainstorming. During these sessions we should let our imagination run wild, allow our creative juices to flow without any restriction, visit outside our current paradigm and come up with all possible worst-case scenarios under the sky. Once we have the exhaustive list of worst-case scenarios, we should stress test our CMP in the backdrop of these scenarios, find the gaps, address those gaps, and issue a fresh revision. We must conduct brainstorming sessions after every high impact incident like “Hamas attack” on Israel or recent “earthquakes in Iceland”. Paint various scenarios like firing of thousands of rockets by Hamas terrorist to overwhelm Israel's Air Defense System (Iron Dome) or using combination of drones, rockets & snipers to neutralize the border surveillance system of Israel or over 1400 earthquakes striking in a single day in Iceland on Nov 9, 2023 due to volcanic eruption. Evaluate your corporate CMP against the backdrop of these scenarios and modify them accordingly to meet the new requirements.? ?

2.?Fired up Speed of Execution: Future ready Organisation execute their projects with lightning speed. They literally increase the clock speed. This is achieved due to super quick decision making at all levels. We can also improve speed of execution in corporate security by digitalized SOPs, unified security platform, automated workflows and quick decision making. Digital processes are now an integral part of organisations. Security SOPs is our bread and butter, and it is our prime responsibility to keep them polished, fresh, relevant, and up to date. We must get rid of our offline outdated SOPs & processes. We must make “speed a priority” by migration to unified security platform, Digitalization of all security SOP and automate workflows. There is a general tendency in security department to push decisions upward. Security leaders must delegate tactical decisions to their frontline security team. We must empower them to take routine tactical decisions. This will “turbocharge” our decision making and “fire up” our speed of response.

3.?Foster Robust Security Culture: One of the secret sauces of future ready companies is their robust Security culture. Fostering robust security culture in an organization is a journey not a destination. It requires considerable investment of time, efforts, and money. But once the culture of “collective ownership & accountability” of security takes shape, it improves resilience of the organization by several notches. The loss of limb, life and company assets during crisis situations reduces significantly. Security culture does not exist only in attractive slogans painted on the walls or in catchy email signature blocks. It is deep routed in the fabrics of an organization and manifest in behaviour of people during crisis situations. Organizations with strong security culture can work on crowdsource their Intelligence, Vigilance and Surveillance duties to their employees. In 2010, US Department of Homeland Security had launched a national campaign captioned “If You See-Something, Say Something” (#SeeSay). Through this program, DHS has educated, sensitized, engaged, and involved US citizens across the country to carry out surveillance of streets and report suspicious activities to local law enforcement. Organizations with strong security culture can also educate, sensitize, and motivate their staff and make them extended arms of security. ??

A future-ready security organization reviews and adapts its security operating model, skillset, and processes to stay ahead of the curve in all aspects of its business. Security leaders need to develop “hunter” mindset and new skills to deal with the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in today’s business environment.

#corporatesecurity #security #futureready #CMP #RelianceGCS #sanjeevmishra #captsmishra #RGSS #GCSconnect #SeeSay

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About the Author:

Sanjeev is a dynamic professional with over three decades of rich multi-sector leadership experience in most domains of physical security. He has worked for large global brands like Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), Nomura Holdings and Lehman Brothers. Before commencing his corporate journey in early 1996, Sanjeev served in the Indian Army for 6 years. Currently he is working as Senior Vice President - Global Corporate Security for RIL based in Mumbai, India. Over the years, he has been instrumental in setting the highest standards of security practice in every role and organization that he has been associated with. He is the founding member & past chairman of ASIS Mumbai Chapter and past president of Agnel Toastmasters Club, Navi Mumbai. Sanjeev was awarded coveted “Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM)” title in 2020 for demonstrated outstanding leadership and communication skills by Toastmasters International, USA. He was also conferred the prestigious “Security Professional of the Year - 2019” popular choice award and “Chief Security Officer of the Year – 2016” award for his contribution to the Security fraternity in India.

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