Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. This is Brian Strauser, principal and chief executive here at Breit Path.
Speaker 1 00:00:06 And I'm Bre Wheeler, senior consultant here at Breit Path.
Speaker 0 00:00:09 Today we're gonna talk about resilience and how resilience allows you to embrace uncertainty. And I think I'll, I'll just make a statement. The statement is, resilience allows you to embrace uncertainty. It puts you in a place where you're not afraid of uncertainty. So pick your uncertainty, technological disruption, geopolitical risk of royal roiling in the financial market, as we talked about last in our previous episode. Um, violent incidents, business model challenges, third party vendor failures, natural disasters. I'm not gonna say they don't matter cause that's not true, but being resilient allows you to absorb the shocks of these un of this uncertainty and uncertain events and disruptions.
Speaker 1 00:01:06 Well, it's what makes you elastic. It's what makes you nimble. It's the, I was sitting here trying to think of a metaphor before we started, and it's really around, you know, kind of the old adage. Toddlers are inherently elastic. They're, they can fall down, they can bump into things. They
Speaker 0 00:01:27 Have soft heads.
Speaker 1 00:01:28 They have soft heads, but they're bendy in their, you know, that's what the pediatricians always told us. They're bendy for a reason. They're elastic for a reason because they're gonna fall down. They, there's going to be a lot of bumps that are coming their way. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, this is how nature has, you know, developed them. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And I think it's true. And as you get older, you're wearing bike helmets and elbow guards and, you know, there's a reason catchers wear what they wear. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you have to be able to withstand those things. Now are, are you wearing your catcher's gear every day, all day in order to fight against all those things? No, but when you're in those situations, you've, you have those things at your disposal. That's why all of these things are in place. It allows you to do things that you normally could not do. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, or allows you to do the things you normally do in, in situations that are less than ideal.
Speaker 0 00:02:20 It's the shocks that Yes. Disrupt organizations. Right.
Speaker 1 00:02:25 Scares
Speaker 0 00:02:26 People. It scares people. They don't know what to do. They don't know how to react.
Speaker 1 00:02:30 And it's natural. It's the, it's the natural emotional reaction. It's, it's human
Speaker 0 00:02:34 Nature. It's the fight or flight thing. Yeah. Just in a, in your professional life. But it still applies. It's this thing that happens. I, I'm taken back to, you know, 20 years ago, uh, at our former employer, um, where, um, we would have these massive ass hurricanes come in. Yep. And there wasn't a good process. There weren't good plans. There was no way to organize what was going on. And then they built a crisis capability. They built a, a global security operations center, a command center. They established some accountability and responsibility for these things. And then suddenly, it's not that they weren't a big deal, they were, the swirl stopped. Right? Yep. Because there was a way to deal with it. The company became more resilient, at least to that kind of shock. And then over time, built capabilities to deal with other kinds of shocks. Right. And you get to the point where you got it all hazardous approached. You got a constant way of dealing with crises. You've got the facilities and the capabilities and the expertise to deal with it. These aren't such a big deal anymore.
Speaker 1 00:03:48 Well, I, I, I think that's a good example too, in terms of, it's not that those hurricanes diminished in any sort of impact scope, and in some cases they've got worse. We saw some of the worst hurricanes happen, but the confidence within the organization was so different that it changed the ability of the organization to rebound. And in some cases put our former employer ahead of the game in terms of the competition to be able to, to do things that they couldn't do.
Speaker 0 00:04:25 And they knew that, to just continue on this example, they knew that no matter what the incident was, if I followed this process, I had a way of dealing with it. I had a way to collaborate. I had a source of truth, I had a single source of truth. Yep. I had a way to make decisions. I had a way to escalate decisions as long as I followed the process.
Speaker 1 00:04:50 And the process allows us to do the things we need to do to solve the problem. It doesn't prescribe X, y, Z to, but
Speaker 0 00:05:00 Everything helps you, helps you get to the answer,
Speaker 1 00:05:02 But it gets you to the answer. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because all the players are at the table. It's the every, getting the right people in the right room to make the right informed decisions.
Speaker 0 00:05:14 I'm reminded of this conversation, the lecture that I'll never forget. Um, when I was in the Harvard n PLI program from, from Dr. Dutch Leonard Yeah. Where Dutch Leonard talked, we were talking about national scale disasters and his context was, was really natural disasters, cuz that's what he, his kind of expertise was. But, but really it could be any cause of disaster. And I remember very specifically Dr. Leonard talking about these things that you know are gonna happen. You plan for and because you know they're gonna happen. You can write super detailed plans about these things. You can say, Frankie needs to do X, y, Z in the first, first 30 minutes and George needs to do ABC and whatever. Yep. That the challenge was how do you deal with the things that you don't predict? How do you make sure that you've got a, a way to absorb those shocks, A way to deal with that through a consistent framework and keep your head above the cloud seeing what other threats were coming at you and how you were gonna navigate through that. Um, and I remember him specifically saying, cuz I thought about this during Covid, I even went and pulled my notes out during, uh, three years ago this month about this with Covid. And that was, there is no perfectly executable plan to a novel crisis. Correct. But you can have a framework to make decisions to collaborate, to communicate no matter how you got into that situation. And that's a huge part of resiliency as, as we know.
Speaker 1 00:06:49 Well, I mean, it comes down to even at the most basic levels and kind of touched on this right at the start, but we do fire drills for a reason. We do shelter in places in a lot of parts of the, the country for a reason. We do tuna tsunami preparations for portions of
Speaker 1 00:07:08 The nation for a reason. You know, those are very tactical examples of things, but they're therefore a reason. And that, that reason is, is it allows all of us to make better decisions in those circumstances. What does that look like for me? Where am I going? It keeps you safer. It keeps you with your options open. The more options you have, the better off you're gonna end up being because you have more choices you have. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> more avenues to maneuver rather than being boxed in. You don't want to be in a, you know, to use the chest metaphor to pile on more metaphors. You don't wanna be in check all the time. How do you, how do you stay outta check? And certainly, how do you stay outta check mate?
Speaker 0 00:07:54 We, uh, have talked before that we think about resilience as a pretty multifaceted beast. Right. And we have an article, what is resilience That goes into, into more detail about our thoughts around this. But we see this as the synergy around business continuity, crisis management, crisis communications or reputation management, physical security, travel safety and security information or cybersecurity. Probably a couple things I'm not thinking about.
Speaker 1 00:08:23 Intelligence and
Speaker 0 00:08:24 Monitoring. Intelligence and monitoring and enterprise risk are all components of this. And it might be a little different based on the industry that you're in. Um, maybe operational risk is a thing for you. Maybe financial risk, wri large cuz you're a financial services firm is a, is a thing for you. But what we definitely know that it is, is it's not siloed to any of those one things. Right. This is not just physical security, it's not just reputation. It's not just InfoSec. It's this combination of all the things. And it's not until you have a certain level of maturity across that whole spectrum, then are you really in a place where you can absorb these shocks as they happen and as you see them coming.
Speaker 1 00:09:08 Yeah. It, it takes that multifaceted approach and builds it into the culture of the organization. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, if all of those capabilities are at least in sync and aware and talking to each other and flowing between the two in some form or fashion, even if it's not ideal or perfect, cuz nothing ever is, having those in place allows the organization to do more and brings in other parts of the organization. Cuz all of those different avenues, all those re different resiliency approaches are looking at different things within the organization. Have different partnerships, have stronger relationships in some areas than others. Having those dynamics in play builds it into the culture. We always talk about culture when we're talking with our clients that we can, we can build you whatever plan you want, but if it sits on a shelf, it doesn't make you very resilient.
Speaker 1 00:10:10 Just means you check a box. But if it's baked into the culture, it means you're doing those things every day. And it doesn't really matter what the plan on the shelf says, you're already doing those things. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it just formalizes it for you. That's really where we've seen organizations that are most successful is those that embrace it within the culture and use it to their advantage. And even start to realize there's information in those BIA that we didn't know about before. Oh my gosh, I had no idea that you guys were doing this. D you they find out during a crisis and all of a sudden that becomes the norm going forward. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, those are the little things that that end up happening. But they, again, it gets back to, is your organization embracing that? Not just checking boxes. Are you elastic in the way that you need to be? Are you nimble in the way that you need to be? Is your entire organization thinking that way? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, that's, those are hard, hard challenges to address, but the ones that do it, they last longer. There's a reason some of these organizations are out there for,
Speaker 0 00:11:23 They can absorb long, long time. They can absorb these shocks that, that happen. And it's that you can't, if you don't have these things, it will be the fire drill every single time. If you don't invest in these areas, you're not, you're never gonna be resilient against every single thing. No. But having this elasticity that you talked about, the toddler level elasticity Yep. Um, is really what you're aiming for. That you're able to absorb these shocks and you've got a way to move forward and deal with these situations. That's it for this edition of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast will be back next week with another new episode. Be well.
