00:00:00:03 - 00:00:20:09
Brendan Monahan
What I think matters more once we get past the duty and obligation of completing a plan, what we really need to deliver our effective capability. You have to be able to identify that there's a triggering event. Something is happened and reach consensus that that needs the level of treatment that a crisis team might respond to. It's not always easy.
00:00:20:11 - 00:00:40:04
Brendan Monahan
Sometimes crises come with a bang, but very often they don't. And those are the most challenging circumstances. And you need to have some kind of really rapid, reliable, responsible way of escalating your organization to get the right players to the tip. And then the final set objectives against whatever it is that's going on.
00:00:40:06 - 00:01:04:07
Kyle King
I everyone and welcome to the Crisis Conflict Emergency Management Podcast, which is your platform for global perspectives and conversations about international crisis preparedness and building more resilient societies. In this episode, we'll be joined by Brendan Monahan, heavily experienced in private sector crisis management and business continuity operations to discuss crisis management and complex organizations and building meaningful capabilities in your organization.
00:01:04:09 - 00:01:18:14
Kyle King
Brendan is the author of the book Strategic Corporate Crisis Management Building an Unconquerable Organization. And we will also explore the link between crisis management and business continuity. So Brendan, thanks a lot for joining us today and welcome to the podcast.
00:01:18:16 - 00:01:21:08
Brendan Monahan
Thanks for having me, Kyle. It's great to be here with you.
00:01:21:10 - 00:01:40:13
Kyle King
So one of the things I think in terms of this topic is really interesting, and I think you draw it out in your book as well, and it's about complex organizations that are moving beyond plan dependency and sort of focusing on what you're calling meaningful capabilities, I guess. So what is what does this all mean? Can you unpack that a little bit?
00:01:40:19 - 00:01:52:21
Kyle King
And before we do that, maybe just some more context, a little bit background about yourself, where you're coming from and in terms of your experience and then how did you get into a position now of wanting to publish this book on this specific topic?
00:01:52:23 - 00:02:24:10
Brendan Monahan
Yeah, sure, sure. So so by way of introduction, I'm currently the head of US Crisis Management and Resilience for a global pharmaceutical company. I've been in that role for five and a half years or so prior to joining this organization, I was on security leadership teams at two major critical infrastructure companies. One was a energy company here in the US, in the Northeast, and the other was the largest publicly traded water utility company in the US.
00:02:24:12 - 00:03:03:19
Brendan Monahan
And in both of those organizations sort of lead and developed crisis management, business continuity and security intelligence capabilities. And prior to that, I was in the public sector. I worked for a state homeland security office as an intelligence investigator, leading teams of counterterrorism intelligence analysts. My career path was kind of been from the starting looking at that counterterrorism threat piece and how it maps to targets in the New Jersey Greater New York City area, which were, you know, at that time and probably still are very much critical infrastructure targets.
00:03:03:23 - 00:03:28:15
Brendan Monahan
And we found back then was that most of that infrastructure that was being targeted by bad guys was owned and operated by the private sector, which introduced a lot of complexity to the government's ability to respond and coordinate in planning for those types of things. So over time, I eventually moved into the private sector and started working for some of those organizations that that own the energy and infrastructure that on the water infrastructure.
00:03:28:17 - 00:03:55:08
Brendan Monahan
And and it was really, you know, was a great experience kind of seeing how all of these things come together. Now, my function is in support of a global pharmaceutical company where looking at how we can deliver continue to deliver medicines to patients that neither whose lives depend on them. We need to ensure the continuity of manufacturing production processes, the safety and integrity and security of our people and our places.
00:03:55:10 - 00:04:24:05
Brendan Monahan
So that's the focus of my work these days. First five years. To answer your question around complexity, kind of what what I mean by that, there are complex organizations and our complex response. And on I guess to unpack that word a little bit. What I mean is by complexity, more than probably most, most, practically more than you know it when you see it or it's in the eye of the beholder, which is probably the easiest way to think about it, to take it down a little bit.
00:04:24:09 - 00:04:46:23
Brendan Monahan
It's really the connection between cause and effect, right? The degree to which cause and effect can be known and the extent to which that relationship can be repeated. So the absence of a cause and effect relationship in a response or in an organization generates complexity which needs to be managed by lots of organizations that deal with complexity all the time.
00:04:47:00 - 00:05:21:07
Brendan Monahan
And they become very good at it such that they can develop processes to handle modern military studies. They have probably the most complex challenges that anyone can imagine with the highest levels of risk, you know, delivering high technology and weapons systems to some of the worst, most difficult conditions. You can imagine. But they overcome that or they cope with that complexity by inserting uniformity and repeatable processes and common training and common physical uniforms and language in the in the private sector, in the business world.
00:05:21:09 - 00:05:53:19
Brendan Monahan
It's a lot harder to enforce that level of uniformity as a coping mechanism for complex. So we need to do other things. It's just not efficient for us to do that in the same way. So so that's kind of what I look at as the problem or the challenge, especially as we see problems confronting crisis teams, especially in private sector, really evolving over the past few years for some of the things that we've seen a lot, the common security issues, natural disasters, severe weather problems.
00:05:53:19 - 00:06:06:20
Brendan Monahan
Now we're seeing a host of different types of issues that cause us to swim in lanes we haven't swum in before with teams of people and groups that we interact with less often. So that's been the focus of my work most recently.
00:06:06:22 - 00:06:18:06
Kyle King
Yeah, and that's really interesting because there's been a lot of discussions going up, well, let's say since 2022 with the changing sort of threat and hazard and risk environment that we're all facing and.
00:06:18:12 - 00:06:19:10
Brendan Monahan
Post.
00:06:19:12 - 00:06:41:10
Kyle King
Pandemic into the the Russian war against Ukraine, an end to even more complex scenarios like we see and folding these days has given everybody pause, I think, to a certain extent, and that should give people pause to think about what sort of threats and hazards their organization is facing. Because we went through this period. And I'm just sort of going from my own perspective here.
00:06:41:11 - 00:06:58:06
Kyle King
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but we went through this period of outsourcing, you know, and it's a supply chain issues. And we went all of this all together as a global society. And then we just realized how fragile it made everything. And then there's this massive push to reshore everything and to build more resilient organizations.
00:06:58:08 - 00:07:16:17
Kyle King
But I think that in many ways, while that as the global events have given us pause to think about more complex crises that we're facing, there's still an ingrained, almost institutional dependency upon plans and the way we've always done things. But I would love to hear sort of your thoughts about why we need to move away from planned dependency.
00:07:16:20 - 00:07:36:00
Kyle King
It's always been a thing in emergency management. Like a plan is just a plan. It's something that shouldn't just live on a shelf. I mean, even when we looked at the national response plan, moving to the national response framework, you know, a long time ago that there was an acknowledgment even then that we need something that's not just going to be a plan that is living in a document.
00:07:36:00 - 00:07:51:08
Kyle King
So in terms of private sector engagement, it's interesting that you pulled on sort of that thread of the military capability planning process, but how is it in the private sector and how can the private sector move beyond plans and then focus more on capabilities, I guess is my question.
00:07:51:12 - 00:08:23:18
Brendan Monahan
Yeah, Yeah, I know it's it's such an interesting debate in this world right around the extent to which plans should be dependent upon and how much confidence we should put in plans and our ability to do planning. And I think, you know, for me, I want to be clear that planning and plans are something that we have an obligation to do, but it's expected of us as practitioners to develop good sponsor plans, especially where we have regulators, where we have customers dependent upon critical products.
00:08:23:20 - 00:08:51:10
Brendan Monahan
We may have one another within an organization depending upon the expectations that are inherent in plans. So we have a duty and an obligation to do a certain planning. But I think maybe where we should exercise some caution or maybe think differently is our attitude towards those plans that they shouldn't be the be all and end all, and that the expectations of our leaders or our stakeholders is that the plan is the starting point as a point of reference.
00:08:51:12 - 00:09:11:18
Brendan Monahan
What I think matters more once we get past the duty and obligation of completing a plan, what we really need to deliver our effective capability has to be able to identify that there's a triggering event, something has happened and reach a consensus that that needs the level of treatment that a crisis team might respond to. That's not always easy.
00:09:11:20 - 00:09:33:10
Brendan Monahan
Sometimes crises come with a bang, but very often they don't. And those are the most challenging circumstances. And you need to have some kind of really rapid, reliable, responsible way of escalating your organization to get the right players to the tip and then define a set of objectives against whatever it is that's going on. If you have a plan that says how to do all that and it works every time, then great.
00:09:33:15 - 00:09:59:21
Brendan Monahan
But I would argue that that's not really a crisis management plan. It's a business process. It's something that you're able to do repeatedly regardless of what's happening. We're talking about crisis management. I'm imagining the types of events that that are so consequential that they could wipe out your organization or maybe cause your organization not to exist anymore, and that they're they're escalating at a speed and over duration faster than your existing business processes can can manage.
00:09:59:23 - 00:10:21:21
Brendan Monahan
So we're looking at an organization that is coping with something for which they have no business process. That's where I see crisis management coming by that definition, there can't really be a plan for this, but there are certain activities that you can execute well on. And to the extent that within those categories you can create linear processes that you can repeat under any conditions, that's good.
00:10:21:21 - 00:10:28:19
Brendan Monahan
You should do those. But we shouldn't rest on our laurels and think that having done that, we're ready for anything.
00:10:28:21 - 00:10:56:05
Kyle King
How do we balance what I write, rightly or wrongly, perceived to be a challenge in the private sector, in between capability based planning within the military and, say, publicly funded organizations versus capability based planning within a private organization, which ultimately a publicly traded companies. I mean, they have an obligation to shareholders to produce profit. So much like insurance, you sort of have to have something in place, but there's a cost associated with it, which you might never, ever use.
00:10:56:07 - 00:11:21:21
Kyle King
So how do we balance those to differences? Because one on the military side, defense sector side, it's a national security, national interest. This is just the cost of having a secure society on the private sector. It's different sort of argument and there's probably greater pressure on the bottom line and the cost associated with building capabilities. What is a strategy to sort of get around these difficult topic?
00:11:21:23 - 00:11:50:19
Brendan Monahan
I think the answer is somewhere in culture, right? So the public sector, the military, their readiness, their ability to do crisis management and emergency management and all these disciplines is baked into their DNA, right? There's already a natural affinity for those types of disciplines and those subject matter less so in the private sector, where your businesses in health care or manufacturing or retail, whatever your mission is, that doesn't have to do with the everyday protection of life and property and so on.
00:11:50:21 - 00:12:20:19
Brendan Monahan
So how do you achieve that where it's not maybe core your mission? And I think part of the answer lies in, in finding a way to articulate the link between crisis emergency management activities and your organization's purpose in existence. Right. The way to get there can be probably should be, especially in the bigger global organizations, a very clear policy that gives you the ability to get buy in from the relevant stakeholders who will say, yes, you know what, this is important to us.
00:12:20:21 - 00:12:44:08
Brendan Monahan
This is what this is how it links to to what we do has a trickle down effect through layers of management and leadership teams. But if you can point to a unified global or national high level policy in your organization, that makes it clear why this is core. And then from there finds what kind of what needs to be done, I think that's really helpful.
00:12:44:10 - 00:12:53:05
Brendan Monahan
You have to somehow articulate what the crisis management mission is in relation to your own companies, culture or organizations culture and its meaning.
00:12:53:07 - 00:13:14:20
Kyle King
So in your in your book, Strategic Corporate Crisis Management, I mean, you're discussing building and unconquerable organization. So is this one of these strategies that you're talking about is sort of the organizational culture behind crisis management and understanding the investment that's required to build an unconquerable organization? And then what other strategies can organizations take upon themselves in an act to become more resilient?
00:13:14:22 - 00:13:36:02
Brendan Monahan
Yeah, absolutely. The idea behind the word unconquerable was to get at the notion that things are going to happen. And while crises may not be inevitable, the unexpected will occur. So the the way to think about it in my mind is will we just allow those things to happen? You know, think about the meaning of the word disaster.
00:13:36:07 - 00:13:54:00
Brendan Monahan
It comes from like an old Italian word means bad alignment of stars. Where disaster is a bad alignment of stars is nothing I can do because those are celestial bodies outside of my control. I'm a victim of circumstances when a crisis at the origin of the word has to do with a moment of decision that pulls you in, I am.
00:13:54:00 - 00:14:21:01
Brendan Monahan
Action is required. Even if I choose to do nothing. I have done something consciously engaged in whatever's going on. To me, the idea of becoming unconquerable is to own that and say, okay, when the unexpected emerges, we're going to take some ownership of it, take some control of it, and define ourselves in relation to what's going all for an organization like a global enterprise and the things to do well, the ones that perform the best.
00:14:21:03 - 00:14:42:08
Brendan Monahan
They have a policy, they have a broad, high level consensus. This matters. Maybe even why this has happened to us before. It will never happen again. And here's what we're going to do about it. That message is compelling to a workforce that believes in the mission of whatever it is you're doing, and that's a way of connecting people to the importance of this material.
00:14:42:10 - 00:15:04:00
Kyle King
And I like it when people are able to sort of string ideas together and sort of the differences between disaster and crisis, really like we had some I wouldn't call it difficulties, but we had some challenges. But it was a natural recognition. I think initially when we started talking about in our own space, you know, between crises, conflict and emergency management, like now these things are there and they're not linear, but they are related.
00:15:04:02 - 00:15:25:01
Kyle King
And so how things escalate over time, how a disaster may eventually in turn become a crisis or a crisis into a disaster, and then how they can build into conflict in the larger man. Is there larger issues behind that and how that we actually use some principles of emergency management to help stabilize conflict? And so the on the surface, they don't appear to be connected.
00:15:25:01 - 00:15:45:02
Kyle King
But I think what we are seeing most recently in the last year to two years is that a lot of things, a lot of systems are connected, which we just had presumed or assumed that they were not in the past and that they were somehow this is a disaster here. And then that is secondary effects and third order effects will happen, but will not are not necessarily associated with me.
00:15:45:02 - 00:16:04:03
Kyle King
But then with the pandemic and the supply chain issues and everything else that started to breaking apart in the last couple of years, we started to see just how interconnected we all are. And in in terms of the organizations, what can they do in terms of realizing their exposure to these certain types of global events, for example?
00:16:04:05 - 00:16:26:04
Brendan Monahan
Yeah, you know, it's it's hard to make this real sometimes when these things seem so far away or hard to imagine. Maybe that's less the case after we've lived through COVID and now several significant global conflicts. But certainly it was the case prior to 2020 in And, you know, businesses are focused on their business. I think they have objectives, too.
00:16:26:06 - 00:16:53:21
Brendan Monahan
Sometimes hard to communicate the relevance of this. One of the most powerful ways of achieving that. My experience has been through exercises, right? We may have a duty to plan and our regulators may require or customers may require certain things about us, and we'll do all that. But to get really meaningful capabilities, place, dollar for dollar, pound for pound, there's no better way than with exercises and they can be simple table tops.
00:16:53:23 - 00:17:39:14
Brendan Monahan
It's just a way of getting the discussion started. And the focus doesn't need to be about some complex scenario involving global conflicts or swirling agendas. It can be an exercise that has an objective to calibrate how a specific business unit is going to respond to kind, unexpected and escalating situation. I've had a lot of experience doing exercises with that in my we need to figure out how do we escalate a team appropriately so that everyone's comfortable and in some of these teams experience see generalizing that specifically in the like an SOP doesn't work because you need the judgment of the people closest to whatever's happening to inform good decisions further up the chain and further
00:17:39:14 - 00:17:53:23
Brendan Monahan
up the chain. Those decisions can't be made in a vacuum. So there has to be some kind of a link and the calibration of what matters and what should get reported can really be achieved in simple, lightly exercises.
00:17:54:00 - 00:18:16:13
Kyle King
When I listen to that and you draw the theme of complex organizations, but I listen to it as somebody and I think, okay, small business, medium sized business, and then larger scale complex organization. And I can imagine that people who have smaller business businesses like myself or or others that are not involved in these fields would look at this and say, well, this just seems to be over the top.
00:18:16:13 - 00:18:40:03
Kyle King
It's not it's not something like, why would I need to exercise with this small team of ten or whatever the case is? So what are the differences here between as we talk about sort of scaling on these levels? So you have a small enterprise, but you maybe it's it's agile and it's capable of working remotely in all sorts of different independent processes and they don't need such a formal exercise and process to test their own internal systems.
00:18:40:03 - 00:19:06:08
Kyle King
And maybe it's not so a format all maybe there's no, I suppose you know, that happens as well. But how do these things scale, I guess is my point. How do these things scale from small business entities who really need probably to look at their business continuity plans? And how does this merge up into more complex organizations and where they need to really focus on, like you're saying, overall crisis management and even between different teams and different operational sectors or geographic locations?
00:19:06:09 - 00:19:29:11
Brendan Monahan
Yeah, my experience, the biggest global enterprises, the biggest national level companies are really just collections of smaller organizations or units or businesses. The sort of operate independently under a maybe a broader heading. So again, you look at any organization, it's really as a family or a combination of lots of different groups and units that are that are collaborating together for common good.
00:19:29:12 - 00:19:58:05
Brendan Monahan
So a lot of times in a big, complex organization, you have to break down the chunks and then break down those chunks even further to find where the minimum level where decisions can be made, right? The lowest level we can delegate to reasonably and then work backwards from there. It just don't know if it is practical to have an enterprise crisis team working out of an ivory tower somewhere in a global setting that can define everything with perfection.
00:19:58:05 - 00:20:21:03
Brendan Monahan
I don't think you can define everything to perfection at all, but to the extent that you can draw a line between the lowest level frontline of the organization to the intermediaries that matter the most to the senior level, I think that's where you see the most success. One of the ways of defining what those levels are is the ownership of the resources.
00:20:21:03 - 00:20:48:02
Brendan Monahan
Right? And the responsibility, like an individual site located in an individual country that's part of a global brand, probably shouldn't make decisions for the overall organization's budget. Right. Or reputation alone. Those kinds of decisions should be performed at that headquarters level. But the messaging that's coming out of headquarters really depends on that local nuance. And the details are coming up, especially if they're on the front lines of whatever's occurring.
00:20:48:04 - 00:21:12:08
Brendan Monahan
Likewise, the messaging that's coming back down skill needs to be localized. So so I think that organizations that perform best have figured out how to calibrate those levels. Right? The organization I work in now site country and global, but there's a lot of different ways to do it. It's going to be very dependent upon the organization and the organization's culture and their willingness to adopt these things.
00:21:12:10 - 00:21:38:23
Kyle King
When you are talking about sort of the vertical integration of information and almost a delegation of responsibilities at the countries and things like that, it just remind me of the importance of the leadership in terms of being willing to accept that. And then, as you said, sort of being willing to promote that type of mentality and leadership. So whatever a role, there's leadership play in building unconquerable organizations.
00:21:39:00 - 00:22:06:17
Brendan Monahan
One of the examples I like to point to is the case of Walmart. When Hurricane Katrina was bearing down the Gulf states and the CEO of Walmart recognized that what was happening was going to be unprecedented and that Walmart was going to have a unique role in many places in the US. Walmart is the food store, the pharmacy, the hardware store, the the clothing store.
00:22:06:17 - 00:22:30:06
Brendan Monahan
It's where many communities get pretty much everything that they need. And they are also one of the biggest employers in the world and certainly in the US. So it seemed as if the leadership in that case recognized their unique position there. The responsibility and the message as the story goes, that that went out from the CEO to his leadership team was what's about to happen is going to be unlike anything we've ever seen.
00:22:30:08 - 00:23:10:00
Brendan Monahan
You are expected to know what the right thing is to do and you're trusted to do it. And that message was then cascaded down from that leadership team to their leadership teams all the way down to the four allies. And what the effect of that was. After the storm hit, you had individual store managers, individual Walmart employees doing things to help the communities where they were opening up stores that had been damaged, making the pharmacy available so people could just come in and take medicine needed giving out water and other critical supplies, opening up their facilities to local law enforcement and Emergency Management agency set up and and centers all of these things.
00:23:10:02 - 00:23:37:06
Brendan Monahan
The Walmart leadership recognized knowledge and supported these actions. Honestly, in my heart of hearts, I don't know if I could give that message or receive it. You know, in any organization, that's a really tall order. And I just admire how that organization was able to do that. I think it speaks a lot to the culture that they have, to the values that they integrated into every level of the organization that they were able to execute on that.
00:23:37:07 - 00:23:43:04
Brendan Monahan
And also to point out the examples of what good looked like in progress and afterwards.
00:23:43:06 - 00:24:01:24
Kyle King
Yeah, that really makes me think that there's let me frame it this way. We often talk about leadership during crisis. We often talk about leadership in emergency management organizations. And we we have that's just even any organization. There's lots of discussions about leadership. And I think one of the most difficult things is what you've talked about, which is trust, right?
00:24:02:01 - 00:24:22:16
Kyle King
Trusting and delegating and relying and believing in the fact that people and your subsidiaries, your other organizations, will do the right thing when the time comes and that's a I mean, you actually. Right. That's a huge level of trust and in an unprecedented situation. And just so happen to turn out well, I suppose I'm sure there's cases where it didn't turn out as well.
00:24:22:22 - 00:24:27:16
Kyle King
But obviously that kind of leadership plays a pretty key role in the whole process.
00:24:27:18 - 00:24:47:21
Brendan Monahan
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's the leadership of the enterprise and then there's also the leadership within the crisis team right in there. They're not the same, but the enterprise leadership is going to speak on behalf of the whole organization. And you would hope, if you're lucky, they're they're aligned with what you're doing, but sometimes they're not in our or behind the scenes.
00:24:47:21 - 00:25:10:06
Brendan Monahan
It's it's not as easy or it may be a challenging relationship pending on where you're working. And that's a fact of life, Right? That's where the leadership within the crisis team becomes really important, too. And the ability to focus a team on objectives, what matters, who's doing what, how are we going to proceed and being very clear and transparent about how you're going to confront what it is you're dealing with?
00:25:10:08 - 00:25:30:04
Kyle King
And so in situations like this, we would find there's a lot of discussion around business continuity practices and, you know, just following your business continuity procedures to making sure that your supply chains are intact and everything that goes along with that, just as an example. But from your experience, so how are you differentiating between business continuity and and crisis management in this in this context?
00:25:30:06 - 00:25:53:06
Brendan Monahan
Yeah. So I think this is a great point and it's something we try to emphasize in every exercise and in every conversation where I work about these two topics. I think business continuity is the secret weapon of the crisis management team. The example I use when I'm talking with stakeholders in my organization that are really in this world is to imagine a tall building with one elevator and the elevator crashes to the ground.
00:25:53:06 - 00:26:20:07
Brendan Monahan
So the crisis teams role is to, you know, let's get the people out of the elevator, make sure they get medical attention, let's seal off the elevator so no one else uses it and call the elevator repair company coordinating all of that acute response. The business continuity teams will say, okay, what activities, what critical processes are going on in the building, which ones are on the upper floors that need to be relocated, which ones are on upper floors that cannot be relocated?
00:26:20:09 - 00:26:46:06
Brendan Monahan
Put up a sign so that everyone uses the stairs until the elevators communicate what's going on. To me, the relationship is the crisis team's role is really to address the acute problem and handle the transition of falling action to however low it's going to fall. The business continuity team can tell you how far that is, right, or how deep the water is going to be when you land, right.
00:26:46:08 - 00:27:15:24
Brendan Monahan
They should be able to give you some sense of what the minimum acceptable limits are and how far the loss can go before it's really going to hurt the organization. So good business continuity planning will have established kind of what the key business processes are and what the tolerable downtimes will be to maximum and minimum levels. And that's a sort of a form of intelligence that can be fed into the crisis team earlier on, maybe earlier on, than we sometimes invited.
00:27:15:24 - 00:27:40:17
Brendan Monahan
That could be really helpful in defining what your priority should be, especially in when we're talking about complex organizations. If you're dealing with complicated products and supply chains with a lot of internal dependencies, it can be difficult to know what matters. And maybe you have assumptions about what's important and what isn't that aren't necessarily true. The business continuity team knows where the skeletons are.
00:27:40:23 - 00:27:49:06
Brendan Monahan
It can help you sort of separate fact from fiction and bring some of that when I would say is really intelligence to bear. If you think of it backwards.
00:27:49:08 - 00:28:08:16
Kyle King
That makes me think of another question which I am now curious about. At what point does it does in the private sector, in these organizations, at what point or at what level do they get to to where they should really focus on having a crisis team, a crisis action team? Like what? What is that sort of level? Is that sort of income driven?
00:28:08:16 - 00:28:22:16
Kyle King
Is it complexity? Is it personnel numbers driven by what is that tipping point that makes organizations think, okay, we need to have a unit or a department or just to handle these specific scenarios?
00:28:22:18 - 00:28:45:19
Brendan Monahan
I think it's a good question. When do you create a team to focus on this? The army depends from organization to organization on their experience. Each of the companies that I've worked in, in the private sector, there was some historical precedent for the creation of a team, right? Something bad happened in the past and the company said to itself, We're not going to let that happen again, or at least not in the same way.
00:28:45:21 - 00:29:08:19
Brendan Monahan
And part of the solution to that was the creation of a policy, the creation of some kind of a resilience function. And they each had a different sort of solution, different response to it in terms of the organization, how they set up that team. But I think that's probably usually the case, right? Either an organization is able to look around of its peers and say everyone else is doing this, so we should too.
00:29:08:21 - 00:29:26:08
Brendan Monahan
But maybe that's a little less compelling. And having actually felt the pain of something happened here, your people, your products, your reputation, finances, and decided, listen, we're we're not going to let that happen again. We've got to do something about this and this is how we're going to approach it. And at that point, they may refer back to their peers or best practices.
00:29:26:10 - 00:30:02:19
Kyle King
Yeah, I think that's largely going to be, as you said, experience based. And so having living, you know, if an organization lives through an event which is very difficult for them to get through in terms of economic impact or whatever the case is, then they learn from that experience and move forward. But when organizations do decide that they want to focus on crisis management, and especially as they're growing more complex as an organization, what are some of the steps that they could take initially to start looking at this field to, as you already discussed, you know, differentiating between business continuity, which any size organization could do, but then really outreach as a process of maturity
00:30:02:19 - 00:30:13:10
Kyle King
start differentiating between business continuity and crisis management. And then what are the initial steps they can start? Take it, take it. They find that they're in a place of where they need to start focusing on this.
00:30:13:14 - 00:30:48:10
Brendan Monahan
Yeah, I mean, a good place to begin is probably looking to wherever the organization assesses and manages risk from. Maybe that's a formal risk management process, right? A public company or maybe it's in a smaller organization. It's within a leadership team that periodically reviews formally or informally the risks to its organization. Somehow or another, every organization looks at itself and said, So these are the risks that we're confronted with and these are the things we're willing to tolerate in terms of risk and the things that we can't and that somehow determines where and how they play as a business.
00:30:48:12 - 00:31:23:03
Brendan Monahan
Right? That's the discussion that this needs to sort of find itself in this topic. So if you're able to formally conduct a risk management, an enterprise risk management process or review and define like these are the pain points and this is our our appetite and our tolerance for different types of risk, then the way to articulate the need for the crisis management team or its role in that process is to say, okay, in the event of the manifestation of one of these risks in an uncontrolled, escalating manner, this is sort of our last line of defense.
00:31:23:09 - 00:31:49:20
Brendan Monahan
We have good processes, we have responsible management, we have structured reporting, we have loops and procedures, we have a risk management. And then if all else fails, we have crisis management team that's going to use a structured approach that reflects best practices. We've established a policy that somehow formalizes it within our organization and and they will guide us even without the reference to formal plans.
00:31:49:24 - 00:32:03:18
Brendan Monahan
They will have taken some responsible measures to map the organization, figure out where the key points are, who the stakeholders are, and determine how to shepherd them to a solution when the unforeseen occurs.
00:32:03:20 - 00:32:20:04
Kyle King
You just highlight some very clear steps towards that process. Now I'm curious as to where do you find most organizations are lacking in those steps where the weaknesses that you've seen in some of the sort of common denominator for these types of organizations that need to evolve and build out of crisis management team, for example?
00:32:20:06 - 00:32:47:21
Brendan Monahan
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I'm speculating, right? So I've only been inside a couple of organizations and I'll we'll talk about those. But, you know, as I look around at the other companies and I see in the news the types of crises the companies are confronted with and the ones that do well and the ones that seem not to do as well, where I think the ones that do well do best is in the seems between or key parts of the organization.
00:32:47:24 - 00:33:09:16
Brendan Monahan
If there's a risk management team that that knows what the appetite is for certain types of failures and there's a business continuity team that knows how bad those failures can get before they're catastrophic and what the manual workarounds look like and how long it will take to come back. And those two things are in far flung corners of the organization that have new way of talking to each other.
00:33:09:16 - 00:33:40:14
Brendan Monahan
Then I think that's a gap, obviously, where I think crisis management professionals can do the most good right away is by finding and unifying those disparate people. I do this every day and it's always so surprising how little an organization can know about itself, even when they work in the same setting or the same office. In today's environment, business move so fast, challenges occur so quickly that organizations think of themselves as agile or constantly changing, redefining themselves.
00:33:40:19 - 00:33:59:05
Brendan Monahan
That means when something goes wrong, it's hard to know who to turn to. And sometimes I think our value or the crisis management teams value proposition is in being kind of uniquely positioned to close those gaps, to know where they are, predict them, and sort of work around them when something's going on.
00:33:59:07 - 00:34:19:04
Kyle King
Yeah, that's interesting. And of course it's not. There's many, many organizations, I think it gets to an issue of scale that once you reach a certain level, then you become more sort of divided internally because the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. And it is just a natural sort of growth problem that occurs in larger and more complex organizations.
00:34:19:06 - 00:34:56:15
Kyle King
That has to be, you know, once it's there, it has to be resolved to a certain extent. And so that leadership driving all the way down and these processes that you're talking about, they're always built upon a foundation of good policy and procedures and business continuity planning. Do you have one question, though? Is it as we're sort of getting towards the end of our discussion, but with the changing technology and the pace of change with technology and the rapid speed of information that goes out there, and we're seeing it every day in terms of global conflict and everything else, how is this impacted your work and how would this impact organizations that are trying to
00:34:56:15 - 00:35:01:08
Kyle King
be more resilient or more unconquerable? As you mentioned.
00:35:01:10 - 00:35:35:21
Brendan Monahan
The challenge that I've encountered a few times is the the breaking news effect. If something happens. And then the question is, what are what are we going to do about this? Or what if this impacts us or what are the effects on us? And increasingly, with some of these types of problems, it's hard to really answer that question As a kind of former intel analyst person, I'm also really curious about the influence of disinformation on sort of modern media reporting and and how that's how it's impacting the way our employees and leaders think about things right through no fault of their own.
00:35:35:22 - 00:35:59:07
Brendan Monahan
So that concerns me a lot. I think, you know, it's really it's really interesting to watch the technology evolve around AI and language models and and all that kind of stuff. I think we're still in the hype cycle somewhere on it. You know, everybody that's in that business seems to need to to comment on it. I would do the same thing, but I'm not sure what it all means yet.
00:35:59:13 - 00:36:21:17
Brendan Monahan
Certainly for us, there's a lot of products out there that are making use of that technology and and I'm not sure where where the application really is. So I'm hopeful. I'm skeptical. What I'm more concerned about how some of these technologies will change society and the way in which we have to do business in those societies. That's going to impact conversation.
00:36:21:17 - 00:36:25:13
Brendan Monahan
Looks like inside the crisis room when stuff happens.
00:36:25:15 - 00:36:59:16
Kyle King
Absolutely. I believe that to be true as well. And I think one of the interesting things that I've seen, at least in my own experience, is it is, especially with the use of AI and large language models, is the ability to generate documents and plans and procedures very quickly and to be like, this is great. And then there I have my plan and you know, our business continuity because, you know, a chatbot just, you know, wrote it for me, but it never replaces the human factor in terms of the work that's required to leave your office, to go across to the other cubicle, to go to the other office or the other building, etc.,
00:36:59:20 - 00:37:18:16
Kyle King
depending on how larger your organization is, and actually talk to people to figure out like, who are you going to be talking to during a crisis? Exactly. So the speed at which we're able to develop and documents and check the box has accelerated dramatically, you could write a whole you could develop a whole organization which ATP within a couple of hours.
00:37:18:18 - 00:37:37:08
Kyle King
But the problem is the human factor still undermines everything. And I know that sounds overly negative, but what I'm saying is that you can't replace the human element inside of all that, because at the end of the day, the human still makes the decision about what we're going to do or not do, you know? And we have to be able to coordinate and talk to each other and know who your counterparts are.
00:37:37:08 - 00:37:55:24
Kyle King
So what I was sort of saying to sort of sum that up is I've seen a lot of organizations and a lot of efforts to just they can massively generate documents to be compliant but fail on actual being actually being tested in any sort of former function like that, if that makes sense.
00:37:56:01 - 00:38:20:06
Brendan Monahan
That makes perfect sense, you know, and it goes back to where we started this conversation about being dependent on plans and having the right, constructive, positive attitude about the role that plans play in our readiness, our ability to be ready for something unexpected is really dependent upon our ability to find the right people and get the right answers and decisions made when it matters as it stands.
00:38:20:06 - 00:38:35:00
Brendan Monahan
I don't know if Air Force language models offer a solution for that. I think that's still going to be always kind of a human can for for crisis practitioners and probably where we do some of our best work and most have our most meaningful outcomes.
00:38:35:02 - 00:38:47:18
Kyle King
I think the irony there is that as the speed of document development continues to accelerate and we can do things faster on paper and generate better documents, then technically that should free up our time to go talk to each.
00:38:47:18 - 00:38:50:05
Brendan Monahan
Other though I would hope.
00:38:50:06 - 00:38:57:06
Kyle King
It and then actually have the interaction. We need to be able to coordinate and build that organizational culture that you're talking about.
00:38:57:06 - 00:39:01:14
Brendan Monahan
So maybe that's the silver lining. Kyle I think I think you just summed it up well.
00:39:01:14 - 00:39:18:09
Kyle King
Let's hope so. Okay, Richard, thanks a lot for being on the podcast today. It's a very interesting conversation and I would encourage everybody to go find a book, a strategic corporate crisis management, building an unconquerable organization. And if you want to connect with Brennan, how can we best reach you and where can we find the book?
00:39:18:11 - 00:39:33:11
Brendan Monahan
Yeah, thanks, Carl. The book's on Amazon Barnes Noble. You can find it anywhere. You buy books online, and the best place to find me is linked. It slip my name there and feel free to reach out. Drop me a line. Always happy to engage with other practitioners.
00:39:33:13 - 00:39:50:11
Kyle King
All right. Okay. Thanks a lot, Brennan, and appreciate you being here. And thanks to everybody who's listening. If you enjoyed the show, we wouldn't be so kind as to give us a rating. And if you have any feedback or suggestions for future episodes, please don't hesitate to reach out to us on our website or social media channels. And of course, that's it.
00:39:50:11 - 00:39:53:07
Kyle King
So thanks a lot and stay safe and keep learning.
