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Sunday, October 09, 2005

“We went to DEFCON 2.”

That’s how one insurance agent defined the two weeks surrounding Hurricane Rita. He and his staff scrambled night and day to provide the ultimate in client services.

A person in the utlity business organized a team of workers from three states to manage service restoration—a major project no one in the company had ever encountered before. Without much time for planning, he had to scramble to solve scores of logistical and personnel issues with last-minute common sense, a hope and a prayer.

My advice: institutionalize everything learned. Create a notebook, or a dozen notebooks, fully indexed, with every question, problem and situation that came up, plus the answers and their sources. With staff turnover rates, businesses and other organizations can no longer rely on institutional memory. And even if they could, under stress, details are forgotten.

So, no, it’s NOT all over now. Everything is NOT resolved. At least not until you compile that information. Because lightning DOES strike the same place more than once.

For those who don’t know, DEFCON stands for Defense Condition, a five-stage military terminology to describe progressive alert postures primarily for use between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of unified commands. DEFCON 5 is normal peacetime readiness. DEFCON 2, as described by the insurance agency, calls for further ncrease in force readiness, but less than maximum readiness. DEFCON 1 is maximum force readiness.

OK, experiencing DEFCON 2 should be perfect preparation for preventing DEFCON 1—an entirely possible happening if you don’t learn anything from your DEFCON 2 stituation. Crisis management means planning ahead so YOU manage an abnormal situation more than it manages you.

So, if you went through extraordinary stress dealing with the fallout of Hurricane Rita or Katrina, what did you learn from it? At the very least, you should have learned you don’t want to go through that again without a “how-to” book written just for you and your business or association.

Ideally, hire a crisis management expert like me to help you pull it all together. Secondarily, create an internal team to do it. Set timelines, schedule reviews, conduct exercises and rewrite your plan based on whatever deficiencies the exercise shows.

That’ll address the issues you faced with the hurricanes. Next, play “what if”. Seriously, imagine anything and everything that could go wrong. Go through the crisis management planning process with each of those, as well. The process will be quite enlightening, I assure you!

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8:51 PM | 1 comment(s)