The Noggin Blog

The origins of the ongoing AT&T pay-for-play crisis reach back to October 2016. It was then, during the last weeks of the U.S. presidential election, that AT&T, the nation’s second-largest wireless provider and third-largest home internet provider, announced that it would be acquiring Time Warner, the world’s third-largest media conglomerate after Comcast and the Walt Disney Company.

When you ask around, people tend to know what bad business decisions look like – the botched product launch, the acquisition that went pear shaped, the bad hire, the list goes on. What’s more, upon reflection, people tend to understand the factors that contributed to those bad decisions. As a rule, we tend to scrutinize our mistakes, sometimes more than we do our successes. Things aren’t that different in the crisis management context, where the post-mortem is built into the lifecycle. But although crisis teams all know what bad decisions look like, they can’t necessarily visualize effective crisis decision making. So we’re here to help, by expanding on a few signs of effective crisis decision making.

By all indications, the threat of corporate crisis keeps growing. For one, fines for corporations across all industries have risen, signaling that further financial crisis could be in the offing. Also, crisis-related media headlines involving the Forbes 100 are up 80 percent over the last decade. All of this points to the fact that crisis has become the new normal across diverse industries and markets. So what’s going on?

In search of a central cause of corporate crisis? Look no further than a lack of situational awareness, a systemic issue across industry. But for such an important concept, it’s not that well understood. And so here’s a primer on situational awareness that answers why exactly companies need to improve theirs.

Crisis can just as easily arise from a single devastating event, as it can from a series of unattended critical events. But either way it happens, crisis can present a serious threat to a business’s core objectives, reputation – even its viability. What’s more, crisis, once underway, doesn’t just burn bright, then suddenly extinguish. That’s because crisis is by definition multilayered and multidimensional. In order to properly prepare for, manage, and recover from crisis, companies need a strong crisis management function, one that anticipates crisis. So what’s the key – continuously improving your crisis management planning and preparedness through a crisis lifecycle management approach. Let’s dive in.

Hey, Risk professionals! Heading to RIMS 2018, the best place to enhance your knowledge of emerging risks, claims, and cyber risks? Well, we’ll be there too, making some pretty big news in Crisis Management. 

I remember once seeing a tourism ad for Fiji that stated, "It's like Hawaii, before the war!" although it was clearly written by someone like my brother who lives in Fiji... not that I'm jealous or anything. 

Somewhere between “Draft 2” and “Draft 73,” it can be easy to lose control over your all-important report. It can happen as a result of having many hands in the cookie jar: multiple edits, deletions, insertions or course-corrections.

Without a proper version control system in place, and the right tools to help you keep track of changes to a document, you’ll get lost in the Bermuda Triangle of document management, potentially spending more time trying to tell the documents apart than was spent to create the original in the first place.

 
Touted as the “first ever factual thriller on British television¹,” Hunted, a ShineTV reality programme, chronicles the journey of 14 ordinary Brits, given £450 and told to vanish. The goal: evade capture for 28 days.