BC: The Smell of Fear

Thinking things through with the help of a fully charged "Cogitator"

Where were we?

A couple of posts ago I put on “the cogitator” to consider the idea that Business Continuity (BC) and Organisational Development (OD) shared similar goals. In this post I muse on why it is that in many organisations BC can often appear to have more buy-in than OD.

The victory of BC

Business Continuity, with its emphasis on systems resilience perhaps pays testimony to the general victory of thinking over feeling when it comes to achieving strategic buy in to an activity. Ask an executive to reach for his Business Continuity Plan and you may well find he can locate a copy within reach of his desk, or perhaps on a memory stick or even available to him in a virtual cloud. He will have seen it, will probably have been involved in the shaping of it, and may even have tested it through an exercise or simulation. Ask the same executive to show him the organisational development or L&D plan, and you are likely to receive nothing more than a blank stare. How does BC have this status that, in many organisations, is not extended to OD?

The answer I think has something to do with the way that BC taps into fear. Consider this quote, which is pretty typical of statements made by BC books, course flyers and websites

 “An estimated 90% of organisations that can’t resume normal operations within five days of an emergency will go out of business, and that 40% of companies hit by a disaster will collapse within five years”

Disaster resilience: an Integrated Approach

by Douglas Paton, David Moore Johnston,

Pg. 249 (although what constitutes a disaster is not clarified).

Scary stuff eh?

In my experience this approach is fairly typical of BC writing. Open any text or periodical on business continuity and you will see the power of this fear. The world of BC makes lots of claims around the impact of disaster, citing many and often unsubstantiated claims about the rate of organisational failure following a crisis for which the organisation was not prepared. Textbooks, articles and websites around BC include emphasised sections reinforcing the terrible fates that might befall organisations that dare not to have a formal business continuity plan. The media too bombard us daily with stories of organisational calamity and disaster that would be enough to make critics of the best of us. Organisational failures make headline news. Their achievements on the other hand tend are often relegated to just a few column inches, if that.

No wonder then that managers and execs might seem more motivated by BC than OD.

At Poppyfish, business continuity exercises are a key part of our business. As I engage more with BC interventions I can see that it is fear of failure in the face of a crisis that drives managers to invest in BC programmes. Fear is a powerful driver. BC feeds off this fear of calamity, and BC literature –imbibed with the need to ‘sell’ BC activities does this with particular effect. Consider the image below.

 

The Wall of Terror says it all.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not for a moment saying that BC is a bad thing, absolutely and categorically not. I believe strongly that it is an essential part of organisational resilience and at the very crux of it’s impact is the enhancement of safety cultures that enable people to work in an environment where risk to personal health and safety is minimised. That is to be celebrated, but I sure do find it interesting that specialist BC literature uses a language of fear to ensure sign up.
 

Lessons?

What can OD learn from BC in this regard? Should OD consultants be shouting from the rooftops about the horrors of badly constructed L&D programmes? Well, yes maybe they should, but we must expect that it does not grab at the imagination of task focussed and cost conscious managers and execs in quite the same way as BC might. Instead, OD practitioners might see the opportunity that the enhanced status of BC can have in organisations to dovetail OD interventions into the BC plan that complement this quest for resilience. If BC and OD can work in an integrated way, where the culture, experiences, reflections and learning of BC exercises are fully integrated using the tolls of OD, then the organisation might be expected to truly maximise resilience. And what an outcome that would be.

Wearing the wired up colander on my head – “The Cogitator” - has helped me see a path here. My thinking is now much clearer. I view BC as a channel through which OD can be practised and embedded. BC can give OD a ‘foot in the door’ with execs and managers who sign up to BC plans without question. OD can help here on two fronts. In the first instance, if we can emphasise the personal, group and organisational learning that management teams think is a core part of BC programmes instead of just ‘updating the crisis plan’ then we will begin to see the penny drop between BC events and overall personal and organisational improvement. And secondly, the tools and techniques of OD , when applied to BC events and plans can augment and strengthen  the organisation to the point where calamitous events are not just prepared for, but are identified early, circumnavigated and, where possible, avoided altogether..

And as an example of this, I’m going to end my cogitations with a poem. “Autobiography in five short chapters” by Portia Nelson is normally used to talk about changing habits at a personal development level, but I feel that it also tells us about how Business Continuity and Organisational Development can combine to deliver stronger organisations:

 

I walk down the street

There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk

I fall in

I am lost…I am helpless

It isn’t my fault

It takes forever to find a way out

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I pretend I don’t see it

I fall in again

I can’t believe I am in the same place

But it isn’t my fault

It still takes a long time to get out

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I see it is there

I still fall in…it’s habit

My eyes are open

I know where I am

It is my fault

I get out immediately

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I walk around it

I walk down another street

Portia Nelson, 1993.