Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser, along with Senior Consultant Jen Otremba, talk about planning for major events for private sector companies, such as internal events (board meetings, company meetings) and external events (Super Bowl, NCAA Final Four, political conventions).
Topics covered include coordination with public sector agencies, obtaining access to intelligence information that may be available through local partners, situations that you should consider planning for, and how to best integrate your plans with existing crisis or event management frameworks.
Episode Transcript
| Bryan Strawser: | So, Jen. Major events. |
| Jen Otremba: | Major events. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Shareholder meetings. Board meetings. |
| Jen Otremba: | The Superbowl. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Board series. NBA All Star game. Major league baseball All Star game in Minnesota last year. |
| Jen Otremba: | That’s right. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Hmm (thoughtful) |
| Jen Otremba: | Red Bull’s crushed ice. |
| Bryan Strawser: | The crushed ice. Which [inaudible 00:00:43] you’re not from Minnesota, you probably have no idea what that is, but it’s an outdoor … What are they riding on? Is it snow mobiles? They’re on snow mobiles. |
| Jen Otremba: | No, crushed ice is on ice skates. |
| Bryan Strawser: | They’re on ice skates? |
| Jen Otremba: | Yeah. |
| Bryan Strawser: | See, I don’t even know … |
| Jen Otremba: | They’re crazy. |
| Bryan Strawser: | What I’m talking about. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yeah. It’s crazy exciting. |
| Bryan Strawser: | It’s by the Cathedral of St. Paul. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yes. |
| Bryan Strawser: | It’s definitely worth looking at. It’s insane. |
| Jen Otremba: | It’s a huge event. State Fair, of that matter. |
| Bryan Strawser: | The Minnesota State Fair. The largest state fair in the world, despite the fact that we’re not Texas. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yes, that’s right. The inauguration of the President. |
| Bryan Strawser: | These are huge events that happen. They don’t happen in a bubble. Companies have to deal with these events, because they cause all kinds of disruption. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yep, not just the police or the National Guard but individual companies and organizations have plans for these types of events. |
| Bryan Strawser: | The Superbowl is going to be in Minnesota next year. February 4th, 2018, at the new US Bank stadium in downtown Minneapolis. It’s going to cause absolutely no disruption whatsoever. |
| Jen Otremba: | No traffic. No traffic in Minneapolis. |
| Bryan Strawser: | There’ll be no traffic. There’ll be no security check points. |
| Jen Otremba: | That’s right. |
| Bryan Strawser: | It’s gonna be a huge disruptor. |
| Jen Otremba: | It will. |
| Bryan Strawser: | It’s gonna be a great event for the city and the state. |
| Jen Otremba: | It’s very exciting. |
| Bryan Strawser: | It’s very exciting, because I might actually get to see the New England Patriots win again. |
| Jen Otremba: | Well, maybe. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Maybe. |
| Jen Otremba: | Nevertheless, it’s going to be a huge disruption for the city and a lot of the organizations that operate inside the city. |
| Bryan Strawser: | I actually got my start in crisis management in a major event, unintentionally. This was not what I had planned on doing. I was running corporate security for our former employer in New England in 2004. 2003 and 2004. When the Democratic National Convention was held in Boston in 2004. The first post-9/11 political convention. |
| Jen Otremba: | And, there was no disruptions there at all. |
| Bryan Strawser: | No, not at all. Not at all. Everybody thought that this was going to the site of the next attack. That the world was going to end and we were going to have gas of anthrax or nukes or active shooters or … Everybody thought something just really nasty was going to happen. |
| In fact, I remember during the convention, there was an actual report that came out from the law enforcement coordination center. I forgot what it was called, but the big command center that coordinated everything came out with a communication that parachutists had been seen landing on a building near the Fleet Center, as it was called back then, and that they were actively searching for gunmen or I don’t remember. | |
| Jen Otremba: | Clearly, bad guys. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Bad guys. It’s 13 years ago. We wrote a pretty significant operations plan around this convention. Mostly, because, not only was there the security issue of this convention and a huge security zone around it, but if you know anything about how Boston is laid out, there’s 10 lane underground interstate known as the Big Dig. Interstate 93. It runs about five feet from the foundation of the Fleet Center. |
| When the Secret Service took a look at that, going into that political convention, they said, “Well, that’s gotta be closed during the convention.” To close that, you have close the feeder highways. | |
| Jen Otremba: | Everything. |
| Bryan Strawser: | To close those, you have to close the streets that feed onto the highways. The next thing you know, and I was in retail, I’ve got a whole slew of stores in the metro-Boston area that I couldn’t move freight to or from. I had people that could not get to work or come home from work during a good 13 – 15 hours of the day. |
| When I called our former employers headquarters and said, “How do we plan for this? Surely, we have a crisis management team.” | |
| Jen Otremba: | Surely, there must be a plan. |
| Bryan Strawser: | They said, “No, you should make a plan.” |
| I’m like, “I know nothing about how to do this.” But, we learned. | |
| That ultimately culminated in me coming to headquarters the following year to help build an actual crisis management team. That led us here 10 years after that, to Bryght Path. | |
| Jen Otremba: | Yep. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Major events are a huge thing. We’ve already heard from some of our local clients here about the Superbowl. What have we been hearing? |
| Jen Otremba: | That’s one of the reasons that stemmed this conversation this morning. With the Superbowl coming in 2018, a lot of our clients are looking at making plans. What do they do? They have a lot of questions around how do they prepare for such an event. It is a year away, but it’s actually not that far in crisis management planning world. As far as planning for something like that. |
| Bryan Strawser: | As we told a client last week, the time to start planning for this is now. |
| Jen Otremba: | Or, six months ago. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Six months ago probably would have been better. There’s a lot of possibilities around major events. It actually starts with, if you think about having an event like the Superbowl, one of the first challenges is, is anyone from your company going to go? Are your senior executives going to be there? |
| Jen Otremba: | Which, I venture to guess many of them will be. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Most will. Even if their name’s not on the building or they’re not directly involved in the event, it’s the Superbowl. They’re going to go. |
| Jen Otremba: | Right, so how do you protect that asset? |
| Bryan Strawser: | Right. There’s a challenge there around their transportation, their tickets, their security posture. How do they get out of there? Those are all things that if you have an executive protection team, those are things you probably should be thinking about already. |
| When you get past the people that are going to the event, these events, like the Superbowl in particular, have a security zone. There’s going to be an area around the facility that you’re not gonna be able to enter. You’re gonna have to go through security screening in order to get there. It will disrupt traffic in that area. The crowd is also going to disrupt traffic in the area. If your headquartered anywhere near one of these events … | |
| Jen Otremba: | Or, you’re running a business in the area. |
| Bryan Strawser: | You’re trying to run a business in the areas. This is either going to be the best week of sales in your life if you’re, say, a bar and restaurant across the street from the Superbowl. |
| Jen Otremba: | Or, a retailer selling Ibuprofen. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Right. Or, it’s gonna be … Post-hangover stuff. Or, it’s gonna be the worst week of your business life, because you’re simply not going to be able to operate. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, you won’t be able to get your employees there due to traffic and congestion and potentially other protests or things like that that may block traffic. Not being able to get supplies there. Not being able to get guests safely in and out. It could become a huge disruption. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Mm-hmm (affirmative) |
| There’s the other issue of there’ll be crimes of opportunity that occur throughout the area. Pick-pocketing. Depending on the events, there’ll be alcohol involved, which will likely lead to more assaults and more violent crime incidents spurring from the drinking that goes along with a sporting event or a political convention. I’m not sure which is actually worse! | |
| Jen Otremba: | That’s right. Then, the other note, while we’re planning to prevent damage or prevent violence from happening, those that cause violence are probably preparing and planning to cause violence, as well. |
| Bryan Strawser: | There’s also … Yeah. There’s the risk of deliberate, targeted attack. Terrorist attack. Lone wolf. Some individual, some other challenges that decides that this is the place where they’re going to make their stand. |
| Jen Otremba: | Right, so how do you plan for maintaining that vigilance and preparing for deterring that type of activity? |
| Bryan Strawser: | There’s certainly some of the normal, physical security things you’re going to do. I think a big part of it for companies, is how do you … Normally, when you’re thinking about physical security for your building, you probably have an open lobby. Then, you have security or receptionists that have been trained by security that are that front line of defense. You have some kind of response capability if there is an incident that escalates in your lobby. A disgruntled employee, an unhappy customer. |
| Here’s the situation where what you probably want to do is start to push your perimeter out. It depends on your footprint of your location. I know, often, what we did at our former employer is we would secure at the perimeter of the building. Then, we would put some plain-clothes people farther out so we could see and get live reports of what was going on. | |
| Jen Otremba: | Yep. Collecting intel for us. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Exactly. You think about … It’s almost counter-surveillance where you’re both looking for suspicious activity or protest activity. For us anyway, it was often more protest related than anything. You’re pushing the perimeter out and you’re putting some eyes out there on the ground where you can see what’s going on. |
| When it comes to the possibility of an attack, they’re actually also conducting counter-surveillance. They’re looking for people who are surveilling our premises. | |
| Jen Otremba: | Yep. |
| Bryan Strawser: | In order to understand what they might be … It’s an early indicator of an attack. |
| Jen Otremba: | If something looks suspect, it probably is. |
| Bryan Strawser: | It’s suspect. |
| Jen Otremba: | Exactly. The “see something, say something” the DHS version of that. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Right. Hopefully, executed a little better. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yeah. |
| Bryan Strawser: | (laughter) |
| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, well. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Then, there’s the what do you do when something happens situation. When it comes to planning, at least, we think that it’s good to have a plan in place, integrated with your existing crisis framework or event framework. How do you manage these escalated situations? I think it’s a good one to be creative in terms of what might happen. Do we need to put specific plans in place around some things related to that? |
| Jen Otremba: | Right. |
| Bryan Strawser: | It’s also a situation where, when things happen and you’re in your normal state. Like if something happened today, it’s unlikely we would think anything of that, other than we would go on and deal with the situation. |
| If something happens that week of the major event or during that timeframe, well, everything is escalated. It’s different. It could be, particularly with an attack, it could be a probe. It could be, “I’m gonna do this, and I’m gonna watch how you respond, and I’m gonna use that tomorrow when I do my actual attack.” | |
| During that Democratic National Convention in Boston, the week before the convention in Woburn, Massachusetts … There’s a large regional transit station, commuter rail, subway, bus, I don’t remember what else. Huge parking garage. Parking ramp, as we would say in Minnesota, was across the street from this retail location, and we found the security team at the store found luggage. A bag in the parking lot, which was really weird. | |
| Because it was close to the convention, we were treating anything that we saw as much more intense than we normally would, so they called the police. The Woburn police came out, and they didn’t touch the bag. They gave it an outside physical examination. It was laying on it’s front, so the back was sticking up with a luggage tag. | |
| Jen Otremba: | Okay. |
| Bryan Strawser: | The luggage tag had a phone number on it. They called the phone number, and the phone number was disconnected. The officer was not dumb. That set off every alarm bell. |
| Jen Otremba: | Mm-hmm (affirmative) |
| Bryan Strawser: | The next thing you know, we had the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad out there with a robot. Not long after that, the FBI shows up to watch. They used the robot and they blew this suitcase up in the parking log. We spent most of the rest of the day picking up someone’s dirty skivvies from around the store. |
| What I thought was interesting about this event, is that we had a little huddle right after, and we were included in this discussion out in the parking lot. We’ve got a couple law enforcement agencies, and we’ve got a bunch of FBI agents. | |
| The FBI agents said, “Hey, listen, we were just here to observe, because of the convention next week. Little heightened awareness, but the main point we want to make is, okay, so this was just a package and it’s just full of dirty underwear. It’s probably all legit. Nothing to it, but if there’s another package that we find anywhere near here, everybody’s got to do this differently. You’ve got to stage differently in the parking lot. We want the vehicles elsewhere. As a retailer, we want you to do this, instead of what you did, which was this. We want all of this done differently, and we want a whole lot more people here.” | |
| Jen Otremba: | That’s fair. You learned from the mistakes of it. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Right. |
| Jen Otremba: | You get better and better. |
| Bryan Strawser: | What they were actually getting at is that could have just been a probe. |
| Jen Otremba: | Mm-hmm (affirmative) |
| Bryan Strawser: | Now, they know how we’re gonna respond. When they come back it’s gonna be for real, so here’s how we’re gonna set up and do some things differently. |
| Jen Otremba: | Sure. |
| Bryan Strawser: | I thought that was very enlightening from them, because none of us were thinking about that at all. |
| Jen Otremba: | Right, and I think most people don’t, because it’s just not in the forefront of their mind, unless they work in this industry. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Mm-hmm (affirmative) |
| Jen Otremba: | It’s not necessarily in the forefront of their mind. They’re looking at events like that, like the Superbowl, as really fun, exciting events. They are, but they also open up a lot of room for bad things to happen. |
| Bryan Strawser: | There’s also a lot that happens with major events around public/private partnerships. Where are some places that companies could go to get information in these situations as they start to plan? What have you seen from your past experience? |
| Jen Otremba: | You can get those partnerships with your local law enforcement partner. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Right. |
| Jen Otremba: | The county or the city that you’re running a business in. You should be able to partner with those organizations to get a lot of information on what they’re doing and how you can help each other through that situation. |
| Bryan Strawser: | I know Minneapolis has already started some meetings for the Superbowl next year. |
| Jen Otremba: | They’re heavily planning, yeah. |
| Bryan Strawser: | That the emergency management department is running, but they have the police and the fire department and the city and the Vikings as the host team and the stadium staff. They’ve got a whole thing going on. |
| Jen Otremba: | Right. |
| Bryan Strawser: | That’s going well. There’s a lot of your normal partnership programs out there that it would be good to start in today if you haven’t. In advance of a major event, the FBI has InfraGuard. |
| Jen Otremba: | They do. |
| Bryan Strawser: | For Fortune 500 companies, really, there’s the Domestic Security Alliance Council, or DSAC, that has a pretty significant amount of information. The local field office may also have some other local programs that help point you in the right direction. City, State, County emergency management. City, State, County police, Sheriff’s department, State patrol, State police, agencies, all are good places to go to find this kind of information. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yep, and also your neighbors. You run an organization, you have neighbors. They have their teams, too. It’s definitely a non-competitive space, these types of things, to help each other out. To get through them. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Not helping any competitor with anything. |
| Jen Otremba: | (laughter) |
| Bryan Strawser: | I’m just kidding. We did that a lot. In retail, we talked with our competitors all the time. It always felt like … I was always warned at conferences when I was of slinking in the corner with my counterpart from another retailer, that we were creating an economic vortex of some type, over in the corner. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, trying to fend ourselves against these type of events. |
| Bryan Strawser: | We really working on price fixing baby formula. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yeah, we did it all the time, too. Especially with workplace violence. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Mm-hmm (affirmative) |
| Jen Otremba: | We partnered with many, many other organizations around workplace violence and how to prevent it. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Mm-hmm (affirmative) |
| Jen Otremba: | It’s helpful to get the take on everyone else around it, so y’all can deal with it together. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Major events are a great example of when you need, really, a separate plan integrated into your crisis process. Work your partnerships. Start early. We want you to exercise your plan around this. |
| What other closing advice would you have, Jen? | |
| Jen Otremba: | I’d say one of the biggest thing is, we can help. If you have questions around this or you need help with this, we’re here to help. We can help to plan these kinds of things. We have specific experience in these areas. |
| Bryan Strawser: | We’ve planned Superbowls and All Star games. World Series events. |
| Jen Otremba: | Shareholder meetings. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Political conventions. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yes. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Board meetings. |
| Jen Otremba: | Yep. |
| Bryan Strawser: | Still planning board meetings for some clients. |
| Jen Otremba: | Mm-hmm (affirmative) |
| Bryan Strawser: | All right. Well, that’s our take on major events. We look forward to talking with you again on the next episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast. Thank you. |
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