There is no time to waste

It’s hard to believe that it’s only 2 weeks since my last article looking at the business contingency & continuity issues to be focusing on right now.

So much has happened in such a short space of time, it’s almost too much to compute.

For my sins, my time in UK public services gave me a LOT of experience at Gold & Silver Command level emergency & crisis response, as well as significant business contingency & continuity planning. From responding to heightened terrorism threats, to managing widescale flooding across whole counties, dealing with the first Swine Flu outbreak in the UK, coping with loss of critical service infrastructure through fire & managing community impact from civil disturbance at a G8 summit - and I can safely say, I’ve never experienced anything like this before.

The speed with which the situation escalated from concerning to overwhelming in New York (as it did in Italy, Spain and sadly I suspect soon to come in the UK) has been breathtaking.

I keep hearing the word ‘unprecedented’ used – and this morning I was getting fed up with it. But I keep coming back to it myself too. We have not faced anything like this before in our modern world. We think we have, but we really haven’t.

One of the tenets of emergency response planning, is that you can’t plan in detail for every individual type of crisis. What you can do, is identify the critical questions to ask and nurture the ability to make decisions on imperfect information. You can learn to assess, evaluate, re-evaluate and pivot as situations develop & threats change. You can understand how to see through the fog of activity and keep your eye trained on the real objective, without getting distracted.

These are all things you learn and practice in emergency management & response. It’s part of what helps keep a cool head in complex fast-moving situations.

What we can’t do, is fall back on our standard operating practice.

As they say, desperate times call for desperate measures. Decisions can’t be as perfect in a crisis, there simply isn’t time. But equally they can’t be reckless. The skill is in seeing what information is available, triangulating the evidence, challenging the assumptions – and then acting, making the decision and monitoring the impact.

Communication must be consistent, honest, concise & accessible – people need to know what’s happening, what they need to do about it and what you’re doing to manage the impact. It's likely to be more direct than we're normally comfortable with.

And as leaders, we constantly have to monitor the resources at our disposal – particularly the teams that are responding, managing and delivering on the ground and in the command centre. Not only asking whether we have the right skills in the right place at the right time, but are we protecting them emotionally as well as physically? Are we making sure they don’t burn out? Do we know ourselves when it’s time to step back and take a break? And have we worked out how to hand on control?

One of the real risks in emergency response is complacency. We think we’ve planned. We think we know what’s coming. We think we’re ready. We think we’re resilient.

And worst of all, we think it can’t happen here!

Believe me, it probably will – particularly if we don’t take different & early steps to change the course & the impact.

There is only so much we can do to hold back the storm – but there is a lot we can do to be ready for its impact, and to put in place the things that will make it more survivable.

For those areas not yet hit by coronavirus, that time is now. Don’t waste another second. Take action. Get ahead of the curve. Build up the capacity – operational & strategic – now so you can plan, assess and respond now, and evaluate & pivot quickly when it hits.

You have the advantage of everyone else’s experience – don’t squander it.