The Noggin Blog

Everywhere you turn, disruptive critical events are in the news – so too, the companies they affect. Just look at the Forrester report, Take A Unified Approach To Critical Event Management: the study finds that 100 percent – yes, you read that right – of companies surveyed had experienced a critical event in the last two years. That’s not even the full extent of it. Many of those companies actually dealt with multiple incidents during that time frame: the average was four, discrete critical events in a two-year period.

A run-through of what happened

How prepared are organizations to tackle critical issues and major crises? That’s the question we at Noggin and our partner Deloitte have been posing to invited guests in our inaugural series of breakfast seminars, exploring the theme of overconfidence and crisis preparedness.

By now, most know at least the outlines of the story. In October 2018, Lion Air Flight 670 crashed into the Java Sea on a domestic route from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang in Indonesia. All 189 passengers and crew on board were killed. Weeks later, engine failure forced a Norwegian Air Shuttle flight to make an emergency landing in Iran. And more recently, on March 10, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed just minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on its way to Nairobi, Kenya. As in the case of the Lion Air crash, all 150-plus passengers and crew on board perished. The common factor between the seemingly isolated incidents? The aircraft in all three flights belonged to a relatively new line of planes: the Boeing 737 Max 8.

The LINX Group is a pretty big deal in the logistics infrastructure and solutions space. How couldn’t it be? Built on more than a century’s worth of ports and logistics experience, the company brings together the skills and expertise of four market-leading operations. As a result, it boasts customers across a wide array of industries.

Critical events have become increasingly disruptive facts of corporate life. A recent Forrester report documented that all companies experienced a critical event in the last two years. In fact, many dealt with multiple incidents, the average being more than four discrete critical events in a two-year period.

AIIMS is the Australasian Inter-service Incident Management System. The nationally recognized incident management structure in Australia, AIIMS has wide command, control, and coordination applicability in fire, land management, and other emergency situations, as well as for non-emergency incidents.

To be successful, incident managers need to get materials, supplies, technologies, and especially responders to the emergency site as quickly and efficiently as possible. But those same managers will tell you that getting resources to the right place at the right time is only half the battle. Attention also needs to be paid to ensuring the productivity of those resources once they reach the disaster. Here, however, managers and dispatchers confront capability roadblocks to effective resource management.

Government bureaucracies get a bit of a bum rap; too often, people perceive them as stodgy and resistant to change. But just like the majority of big private actors, federal governments around the world have undertaken pretty substantial digital transformation projects, adopting the latest in digital technology to make their processes and agencies more accessible to the people.

By now, we’re all aware of the growing contractor footprint on the modern workforce. In the U.S., for instance, recent projections show that contractors will constitute half of the labor force within the decade.

The Case of Australia and New Zealand

Like most advanced economies, Australia and New Zealand relied heavily on substances now deemed hazardous during industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, both countries now have relatively high, per-capita rates of hazardous waste. In response, both countries have installed relatively stringent regulatory regimes to safeguard environmental and worker safety. But some of those regimes have changed recently. This blog will provide an overview of recent changes in hazardous waste regulations.