Business
In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal & Chief Executive Bryan Strawser asks how you can know if your business continuity program is ready for the next disruption? In other words, how can you evaluate your current business continuity program and tell if you’re ready for what’s next? Topics discussed in this episode include industry standards such as ISO 22301, business continuity program evaluations, business continuity maturity models, and more. Related Episodes & Blog Posts Blog Post: Evaluating Business Continuity Programs: Is your Business Continuity Program ready for the next Disruption? Blog Post: ISO 27031: Looking at ISO’s Disaster Recovery Standard Episode #91: Roles and Responsibilities in a Business Continuity Program Episode #93: Crisis Management Plans – What your executives really want Episode #96: Crisis leadership in the time of Coronavirus Episode Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Managing Uncertainty Podcast this is Bryan Strawser, principal and chief executive here at Bryghtpath. And in today’s episode, I want to start off by setting the stage for the discussion that we’re going to have about understanding if your business continuity program, your crisis management program, is truly ready for the next disruption. So, I want to take you back to August and September of 2017, the beginning of the most recent run of crisis situations of business disruptions around the world. We had a series of hurricanes that tore through the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. We had Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, three of the strongest hurricanes in recent memories. They took hundreds of lives and inflicted $210 billion in combined damage between the three storms, between the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. We fast-forward just two years later as we’re still recovering, in some cases, economically from the impact of those three hurricanes and even, logistically, still challenges in Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean. And now, we’re faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, March 2020. March 11th, 2020, the National Basketball Association postpones its season with no clear idea if or when that it could resume. And then within days, companies across the country and truly around the world, sent their employees home, many of them with no clear plan of how to do their job remotely, all of this due to COVID-19 and the pandemic that we’ve all been faced with the last 15 years. And that hurricane season in 2017 and the pandemic of the last year and a half are just two of many recent examples of crisis events that have drastically disrupted business operations. So the question is, in the event of a disaster, how will you respond? And nobody enjoys thinking about crisis management or disaster recovery, outside of those of us that work in this space and do it because we enjoy the work, but nobody really wants to sit and think about these things, certainly not at all your senior executives. But the questions that business leader