The Noggin Blog

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.

We’ve all been following major shifts in occupational health and safety. And perhaps, no one recent change has been bigger than the introduction of ISO 45001. The new ISO standard supplants OHSAS 18001 to give organizations of any size and in any market a systematic, integrated way to manage work safety risk.

Year after year, the likelihood of a business-destroying critical event only seems to increase. Yet somehow, business continuity planning–the collection of resources, actions, procedures, and information, designed to prepare organizations to maintain essential functions in the event of a disaster or other major disruption–hasn’t made it to the top rung of C-suite priorities. 

Physical security incidents cause staggering levels of material damage and cost organizations big bucks. In the construction industry, for example, businesses lose between $300 million and $1 billion every year due to the theft of equipment and other high-value materials, according to data from the U.S. National Insurance Crime Bureau. 

Business continuity management (BCM) has been around for some time now, roughly since the 1970s, according to most accounts. Back then, the field was a mere offshoot of crisis management. But now its scope has narrowed substantially to a holistic management process for identifying potential threats to an organization and the operational impacts those threats pose.

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.

In the last decade, Australia and New Zealand launched broad-based reforms to retool their occupational health and safety systems. Australia implemented a rigorous harmonisation regime: its commonwealth Model Work Health and Safety Act now forms the basis of the majority of state WHS laws. New Zealand, then, used Australia’s Model Act as the basis for its regulations.

2019 has only just begun, and already we’ve got a strong contender for crisis management challenge of the year – queue the 2018 corporate crisis PTSD.

No doubt, you’ve heard of a team of rivals: the idea, popularized in a history of Abraham Lincoln, of recruiting your ablest rivals to positions of prominence and using their acumen in times of turmoil. Turns out, the theoretical concept isn’t that different from what actually happens in crisis management. Only, there, organizations staff crisis teams with business experts, rather than political rivals.

The business disaster data suggests yes – emphatically yes.

Organizations underestimate the emergency disaster threat to business viability at their peril. According to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, anywhere between 40 to 60 percent of small businesses never reopen following a national disaster.