This presentation was part of the Crisis Management in Tall and Complex Buildings Conference in London, May 2023.
Subscribe to this channel to see more great CPD presentations.

Crisisboardroom is a portable, highly resilient crisis command tool box that provides the facilities to turn a room into a functioning crisis command centre in 15 minutes.

Crisisboardroom provides training and crisis simulations to provide independent assurance that businesses and organisations are 'competent' to respond to a crisis situation. Based i the UK, Crisisboardroom has agents and offices in Australia and the US.

Contact us at www.crisisboardroom.com for more details.

Crisis command – the need for command and clarity of purpose during a crisis – is essential if a structured response is to be made. Crisis management is therefore inappropriate in the early stages of any
disruptive event, as the term ‘management’ infers a considered and consultative process that will not stand the test of short high-pressure time frames and unpredictable developments. As a skill or competency, however, crisis command can be learnt and improved through training
and practice.
Crisisboardroom is a business resilience consultancy that
specialises in conducting crisis simulations. Taking learning from more than 300 crisis simulations in various industry sectors and countries. And,
irrespective of location or industry, there are consistent learning points that emerge from every exercise. These include the fact that crisis command is not established quickly and there are long delays in answering simple questions like, ‘Who is in charge?’ Another point
revolves around the excessive time taken to deploy an effective crisis team structure and get everyone available working productively as a team. Further points include not working to appropriate priorities or avoiding
diversions and distractions, and not communicating to stakeholders in a timely and considered way. Focusing on crisis related issues and delaying responses to business recovery imperatives is another issue.
As crisis events are infrequent and the current business
environment is hectic, with restricted time and budgets, it is not always easy to release senior staff to undertake training and coaching for crisis command. Crisisboardroom’s recommendations to several of its client organisations that they should include crisis command duties in job
and role descriptions as part of a competency requirement,
have been successful. An excellent manager may be able to think on her or his feet in a crisis, but this is not a quality, auditable and repeatable outcome.
We are living in an age of reduced redundancy. Our societal, industry and personal infrastructure is being pushed to levels of capacity and utility not seen before.
For example, in the UK, we are now abandoning the hard shoulder lane of our motorways in favour of emergency lay-bys. It is is clearly an attempt to increase capacity at the expense of safety redundancy – safety
margins are being challenged by priorities that are testing how much the system can withstand. It is approach will increase the risk of combined latent failure of large interconnected processes; the potential outcome could be large-scale crisis events. The tragedy of the Grenfell Tower in London was not down to a single ignition source, but rather a sustained reduction in safety margins and redundancy across the entire design,
construction and commissioning process of large-scale building works. And the reality of such a reduction in redundancy will be increased impacts of crisis events.
In our daily lives, we rely on simple tools to overcome crises. Consider the average car embarking on a long distance journey. It is likely that it will probably contain equipment to be used in the event of an emergency,
much of it mandatory in some countries, including spare tyre and tools, a warning triangle and recovery insurance. Having recently acquired a small hatchback car, I was surprised to discover that it had no spare tyre.
Instead, the car was equipped with an aerosol can of tyre repair foam. Again, this is a reduction in redundancy.
The average office or work building will normally have available a first aid kit, fire extinguishers, emergency lighting, a means to raise alarm and an assembly point. However, none of these will help to establish
crisis command when something bad occurs. As communities, organisations and businesses come to terms with a more volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and complex working environment, they must equip
themselves with tools that will help in a crisis.
Crisisboardroom provides essential tools to establish crisis command in the early stages of any disruptive event. In essence, it is a distillation of
the learning points mentioned above.