The Noggin Blog

Resource management is all about getting the right people and things to the right places at the right time. Officially, it’s the organizational function dedicated to coordinating and overseeing tools, processes, and systems that help provide managers with appropriate resources in an appropriate timeframe.

How big have chat apps gotten? Just look at the data. Survey findings show that three quarters of us now prefer using chat to other forms of electronic communication. In concrete numbers, the biggest free messaging services, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger, have around a billion active users apiece. And those users aren’t just in a couple of high-income countries. WhatsApp and Messenger users, in particular, are pretty spread out across advanced and emerging markets.

They’ve done it. Your company has finally made that investment in crisis management planning. You’re one of the point people tasked with creating a crisis management plan.

What matters in your crisis preparation efforts? Well, understanding the stages of crisis management, for starters. Those, of course, include pre-crisis, crisis response, and post-crisis recovery. It’s during the vital pre-crisis stage that your crisis management team will undertake the bulk of its crisis management planning, putting in place the processes and procedures to deal with the effects of disruptive incidents.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, but under stress, you’re not exactly making the best decisions. Don’t worry, it’s not just you. A chorus of researchers in the fields of psychology, sociology, and neuroscience all agree that stress hurts our decision making capabilities, because it changes the way our brain works. It’s just chemical.

Why the differences matter

Even though crisis has fast become a fact of corporate life, too many organizations still think they’re immune. Case in point: nearly a third of companies have no crisis management plan in place. That is despite the unmistakable risks associated with crisis: harm to stakeholders, losses to the organization, or even business extinction. Why would companies take the risk?

How to structure your Crisis Management Team (CMT), and what you should consider

You’ve just seen a competitor thrown into crisis, or maybe you’ve only barely weathered your own. Either way, now you’re convinced, more than ever, that you need a full-fledged crisis management function at your own business. It’s finally time to get started. The only question remains, who serves on the crisis management team?

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.

We’re just over halfway through the year, and already 2018 has been chockfull (to bursting) with some of the worst public relations crises in recent memory. We thought we’d document the worst of the worst; but boy was it hard to choose. So in no particular order, here are the top eight public crises of the year, because you know, “eight rhymes with great”:

When it comes to incident and emergency response, effectively managing resources couldn’t be more important. Resources, i.e. materials, supplies, facilities, technologies, even people, are assets in every sense of the word. But they don’t get the job done in isolation. That’s where capabilities come in.