The document discusses strategies for successfully managing emergency operations in a distributed organization. It recommends selling the crisis management program to gain support from all levels of the organization. It also suggests organizing the crisis response team based on roles rather than individuals, and ensuring the program has flexibility to address local conditions. The document emphasizes having open communication channels to allow flexible response, and taking a global view while empowering local crisis teams to act independently as needed.

1. Emergency Notification • Incident Management
Successfully Managing
Emergency Operations in a
Distributed Organization
Deriving value from the distributed nature of the
organization while reducing the apparent threats
Karen Dye Oakley and Malcolm Hafner

2. Successfully Managing Emergency Operations in a Distributed Organization
About the Authors Introduction
Karen Dye Oakley is the former
Most organizations are diverse—by location, function, culture, dis-
Director of Global Crisis Manage-
ciplines, expertise, time zone, market and product. During normal
ment at Sun Microsystems. She
is a well-respected authority and business operations these groups work together well because the in-
presenter on business continuity terfaces are well defined and have workflow in place to transfer work
and crisis management. Karen is a product. Yet, when an emergency strikes, the speed of the event and
CBCP and MBCI, as well as a Busi- the chaos it causes to normal, well-defined operations take their toll.
ness Continuity Maturity Model®
Most organizations treat a crisis as a series of tactical issues affect-
(BCMM) assessor. She has taken a
ing operational silos rather than reviewing the needs of the crisis
global organization from a BCMM
maturity of 2.8 to 4.5 (out of a pos- response at the organizational and strategic level. Trying to fit a crisis
sible 6). As an independent consul- response into existing organizational boundaries and operations is
tant, Karen continues to improve like the old adage of banging a square peg into a round hole.
the resilience of organizations she Unfortunately, many professionals in the business continuity crisis
works with.
management industry have a silo mentality. They incorrectly look at
Malcolm Hafner is the President crisis management as a tactical rather than strategic endeavor. This
and CEO of MissionMode Solutions. is true not only for the response, but the whole crisis management
process.
Unless there is a strategic view of crisis management across the whole
organization, failures will occur when crises happen.
Regulatory, compliance or performance reasons are making organiza-
Table of Contents tions more procedural, operating within silos. This is a continuing
1. Introduction
trend that can affect the core resiliency of the enterprise. It’s only
likely to get worse.
2. Sell the Program
Yet organizations need to become more resilient. Stakeholders de-
3. Organize Yourself
mand it. People naturally operate more in their silos yet effective
4. Program Flexibility crisis management relies on the open and speedy exchange of knowl-
5. Think Globally, Act Locally edge, information and decisions.
6. Make a Crisis Mundane The prevailing attitude often is “This is my role and I won’t go out-
7. Plans are Useless, but side it”. To integrate the members of your team, you need to break
Planning is Indispensible down the silos.
Take the above problems and multiply them by ten to understand the
scale of the problem for distributed organizations. They are diverse
by their very nature. The trick for distributed organizations is to re-
duce the downside of being distributed and increase the benefit.
Being distributed and diverse should make the organization more
resilient. There are fewer single points of failure.
However, complexities tend to take control; often it’s a lack of strate-
gic thought beforehand, and communications during a crisis, which
hold organizations back. Today, more than ever, resiliency is a basic
requirement.
A strategic view of crisis management is a key component of a resil-
ient organization. To become a resilient organization, several keys
© Copyright 2010-2012, MissionMode Solutions steps are required. These steps form the basis of this paper.
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3. Successfully Managing Emergency Operations in a Distributed Organization
Sell the Program
The fact that crises are happening more often in today’s chaotic
Employees... need to know what’s world is a double-edged sword. On the one hand the business is
in it for them and their customers. more under threat. On the other hand people recognize that bad stuff
happens; there’s an openness to change. However, it is still true that
everyone needs to see the benefit.
Employees, for instance, need to know what’s in it for them and their
customers. This should be communicated to suit the culture of the
organization. It has been expressed as succinctly as: “If you want the
company to survive so that it can employ you tomorrow, you need
Having a high-level to get on the program today!”, through to more subtle callings on
champion is key. people’s benevolent nature.
Having a high-level champion is key. The CEO, COO or CFO are
the obvious targets. Each has something critical to lose if the busi-
ness suffers an economic or reputational event. You’ll also get a good
understanding of their risk tolerance and can adapt the strategic view
of crisis management to fit.
With a little bit of investigation there are always events that have tak-
en the company, or others in the market, to the brink. Find those and
use them as cases of what might happen. Fortunately compliance,
enterprise risk management (ERM) and corporate social responsibility
(CSR) are C-level topics.
Understand how they’ll affect your organization and you’ll be well on
your way to addressing a key concern at the top of the corporate pyra-
mid.
Beyond the C-suite are a host of “influencers” that guide strategy and
direction within the company. Is your company a sales-led company,
a marketing-led company or a product-led company?
Find the answer to that question and you’ll know who the influenc-
ers are. These folk need to be working with you to sell the program.
They also have a lot to lose if they’re not resilient—they consider
themselves to be the lifeblood of the company.
But how do you reach out to all levels of the business? When you
sell your crisis management program to your employees, you need
You need to speak their language, to communicate how they and their departments will benefit. Other-
put everything in context of what’s wise you could get resistance to get involved for a variety of reasons
in it for them, and make them including: “it’s yet another task”, “it will never happen”, “what’s in it
aware of the consequences of not for me?”
getting with the program. You need to speak their language, put everything in context of what’s
in it for them, and make them aware of the consequences of not get-
ting with the program.
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4. Successfully Managing Emergency Operations in a Distributed Organization
When they get affected, they pay attention. And it needn’t be the once
in a lifetime scenario.
More and more organizations are being affected by smaller more fre-
quent crises; supply chain malfunctions are a good example.
Sometimes people are only convinced when they see your passion.
Traveling to the location to convince people is likely to be more suc-
cessful. This removes the “lecturing from head office” syndrome that
often affects the success of centrally defined initiatives.
Organize Yourself
The daily operational structure of There are some basics that need to be clearly understood here. This is
the organization is unlikely to be why a strategic view is so important.
suited to crisis management.
The daily operational structure of the organization is unlikely to be
suited to crisis management. As mentioned before, operating in silos
causes problems. The speed at which an organization needs to share
information disrupts the normal communication channels and inter-
faces. Priorities also change.
In a hi-tech manufacturing company, the product group might nor-
mally be king. In a crisis, the customer support team is more likely to
be king.
In a financial services organization, traders might normally be king.
In a crisis, ensuring liquidity is king. In a government regulator,
regulation is king. In a crisis, ensuring survival of the marketplace it
regulates is king.
Key to creating an effective crisis
management team are the roles So, to ensure the best results from a crisis response a different struc-
that need to be filled. ture and process is required. This is likely to cut across existing
departmental boundaries and functions.
Never mind. This is good news. As you exercise and familiarize the
team you’ll find that they create new relationships and improve the
way they work on at a normal operational level.
Key to creating an effective crisis management team are the roles that
need to be filled during a crisis. Define the roles and not the people.
Unfortunately, instead of choosing team members for their ability to
fulfill specific roles at time of disaster, crisis managers often choose
individuals who embody certain qualities, such as organizational
skills.
Your team is comprised of individuals, and their roles are what they
do. Your CEO might be better suited to a role which interacts with
the media rather than sifts through the detail of a crisis. The CEO
might not even be the right person in the crisis team at all!
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5. Successfully Managing Emergency Operations in a Distributed Organization
A distributed organization is helped here. You may well have many
similar functions delivered around the world by different people.
Some of these people are well suited to the roles in a crisis and should
be used shamelessly for that purpose.
Being able to respond in different time zones also provides a signifi-
cant advantage.
Distributed or not, building a matrix of roles and resources is very
useful and will provide you with flexibility to react whatever the
circumstances.
The result of this work should be a crisis management organization
which has a defined set of roles and resources and is flexible to meet
the short and intense challenges that a crisis provides.
The crisis management program
needs to be flexible to suit the local
conditions where the crisis is to be
managed from.
Program Flexibility
Having a good plan in place to suit local circumstances is key. As
much pre-thinking that can be done should be incorporated into the
plan. This is particularly true for the first few hours where time is
precious, information is often poor, and consequences of actions can
be huge.
To work, the crisis management program needs to be flexible to suit
the local conditions where the crisis is to be managed from. Processes
that will work in North America might not be effective in other loca-
tions.
The operational heads of each territory need to have sway over how
the plans are locally implemented. It may well be that in a smaller
territory some roles need to be filled by the same person.
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6. Successfully Managing Emergency Operations in a Distributed Organization
Think also about redundancy of people, roles and operations around
your sites. These resources could be made available for the division
suffering the crisis.
At the end of the day it is the operational division that is responsible
for its resilience. From a strategic viewpoint, the saying “Think glob-
ally, act locally” is very true.
The crisis plans are critical. Producing flexible impact-based plans
When developing the plans, think
rather than a multitude of cause based plans helps.
about the culture and location of
those affected. If the impact of an incident is that your site is not operational, it
doesn’t matter whether it was caused by a fire, flood, earthquake or
terrorism, you don’t have a site and that’s the issue that needs
addressing.
When developing the plans, think about the culture and location of
those affected.
For instance, in the operations division of an aviation company pro-
cesses are highly proceduralized and people work best in this way
(that is an aptitude for which they are recruited).
However, in the corporate communications group of the same compa-
ny having a plan that is very process driven would be inappropriate
and counterproductive.
Also, there are perfectly adequate plans that fit on one sheet of paper
and are not much more than a meeting agenda. This works well if the
crisis teams are well practiced and the company has a culture of rapid
Having open and flexible channels
response.
of communication will allow your
crisis team to be similarly flexible. In order to be flexible, it is important to be able to communicate freely
to those that need to know what’s happening. Being dynamic dur-
ing a crisis can make you take control of the crisis rather than forever
behind it.
Having open and flexible channels of communication will allow your
crisis team to be similarly flexible. In a distributed organization there
is a need to adopt technology suited to urgent communications.
Escalation should be flexible and communication between teams is of
paramount importance.
Finally, having the flexibility for the crisis team to make decisions
outside the scope of the plan is crucial. There are cases where slavish
adherence to a plan has caused more harm than good.
You selected the people for the roles with care, now you need to trust
them to make the right decisions.
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7. Successfully Managing Emergency Operations in a Distributed Organization
Think Globally, Act Locally
When a disaster strikes, all company employees and ancillary staff
need to know their roles, no matter where they’re located. It is essen-
tial to inform those employees who will have no role to play, and are
therefore not part of the team.
In one sense, everyone has a role to play, even if it is just pointing
media requests to the correct person.
As mentioned before, each location must have the ability to act in-
dependently for things that solely affect it. However, these actions
must be put in a global context. Crisis teams trying to manage issues
locally that should have been escalated have exacerbated the impact
of many crises.
There are many reasons for this, including over-optimism and a cul-
ture of fear. Only when it is patently clear that the crisis is out of con-
trol is the problem escalated. Keeping management and peers around
the globe informed of what is happening is good way of managing
escalation.
They are often the best judges of when to escalate since they tend to
be more objective than those close to the crisis. Having clear escala-
tion criteria helps, as does distributed communications.
Allied to this is the fact that those elsewhere in the organization can
Being able to anticipate require-
provide additional resources unknown to the crisis team.
ments across the globe is a huge
advantage in a crisis response. Being able to anticipate requirements across the globe is a huge ad-
vantage in a crisis response. Having a communication platform to be
able to do this makes the job much easier and in reach of most organi-
zations. Do this well and you’re taking advantage of the distributed
nature of the organization.
You need to define a list of critical
sites that are crucial to the short- First, though, you need to put some priority on different locations and
term value of the organization. assets. You need to define a list of critical sites that are crucial to the
short-term value of the organization. These are the ones that you’ll
find it hard to recover from an incident.
Once defined, you can assess their state of readiness by employing
something like the Business Continuity Maturity Model (BCMM®) to
define strengths and weaknesses. You can use this measurement to
define the priority and actions necessary for the crisis management
deployment.
Make a Crisis Mundane
A crisis by definition is unusual. What would be a crisis to one organi-
zation might be daily operations for another organization. It depends
on the market, the culture and the location where the organization
operates.
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8. Successfully Managing Emergency Operations in a Distributed Organization
An oil company operating offshore is likely to have more incidents
than an onshore company. However, operating offshore equips orga-
nizations more effectively because issues happen more frequently.
Also, it doesn’t take much insight to see why the UK has a mature
business continuity industry—it has had terrorism related events
since the 1970’s. So one would hope that UK companies would be
better-prepared than others that have not had these events.
Just because a crisis is unusual doesn’t mean that an organization
should be unprepared. Many organizations prepare with exercises.
This should be an important part of the crisis management implemen-
Remember, you test the plan
tation.
and exercise the people.
Remember, you test the plan and exercise the people. People don’t
fail during exercises, plans do.
Make sure your exercises are reasonable tests and test reasonable
things. There is no point in testing something that doesn’t stretch the
organization in some way.
An obvious thing to test is the flow of information and communica-
tions through the crisis management structure rather than the organi-
Another way of working successful- zational silos. Or, test “follow the Sun” crisis responses so you know
ly is to use your crisis management how the plans work when tasks are handed over from time zone to
system’s automated tools for daily time zone.
operations.
Another way of working successfully is to use your crisis manage-
ment system’s automated tools for daily operations. This makes the
tools familiar to those that need to use them during a crisis.
For example, corporate security could use the tool as a daily incident
log. This has the added benefit of keeping an audit log where a real
crisis or incident would first be reported. Information already cap-
tured can be used in the first few minutes of the crisis.
One benefit of the various pandemic concerns has been the ability
of organizations to rehearse in slow time how they would react to a
crisis. Use this to find out what would work and what would break if
a crisis hit which needs a reaction a hundred times faster than a pan-
demic. How would you cope? What would you do things differently?
Plans are Useless, But Planning is Indispensible
The history of business continuity and crisis management is littered
with examples of organizations being content with producing plans.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle, plans are use-
less but planning is indispensable.”
What’s important is the discipline of planning, and thinking about the
possibilities. Then, exercising them to assure yourself.
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9. Successfully Managing Emergency Operations in a Distributed Organization
But when the battle commences, plans don’t last long, but the prepa-
ration and discipline do. In the corporate context the discipline of
planning and exercising is crucial to make the crisis team able to
handle just about any situation.
The distributed organization can pose additional problems. However,
with preparation and automated tools to manage communication
across the organization, it can take advantage of in-built redundancy
of operations and geographic spread.
Do this well, and your organization will be internally resilient.
Beyond the boundaries of your organization is the extended enter-
prise. Reaching out into customers, suppliers and partners to collabo-
rate during a crisis should be the next phase. This can add another
dimension to complexity, maturity and resilience.
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