EkaLore posts pieces regarding agility, resilience, and sustainability for enterprises. This piece examines the idea that unforeseen worries can become real worries.
Enterprises spend the majority of their time and effort on enterprise processes that handle the regular everyday operations of business. People and resources are devoted to identified challenges that can disrupt sales, production, and compliance. In this simplest lean format, people and staff don’t worry about events and processes that are at best unlikely and in imagination unholy.
Business continuity planning handles ordinary events like violent incidents, location closures due to natural disasters like hurricanes or tornados, and some labor strife. Information technology features have created margins for staff to work remotely, functions to be decentralized, and products to be managed from afar. Business continuity is well integrated (even if grudgingly tolerated financially) to deal with many unplanned events and infrequent, if severe, interruptions in enterprise life.
“We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know…,it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.” – Donald Rumsfeld – Feb 12, 2002
Who is in charge of enterprise resilience for ‘unforeseen’ events or enterprise process stopping issues? There are catastrophic issues whose frequency is once a career or fewer. Management lore from the Swine Flu mass vaccination public health initiatives, Ebola, or Zika outbreaks may not be well known. Managers who were involved with pollutant leaks, mass street violence, or terrorist incidents may already be gone. Even as enterprises look to climate change plans and environmental sustainability simple large scale events like severe weather storms across a continent will become more common – and few enterprises plan well for those events now. Managers and executive management emphasize the routine, and deal with incidents like workplace violence or logistics interruptions, to get their work done.
Enterprises do need to charge ‘someone’ with thinking about unforeseen events and major interruptions in operations. HR policies, operational continuity, and critical logistics plans need thinking ahead of time and effective plans documented. Few enterprises have been prepared for the upheavals, changing regulatory orders, and staff disruptions of Covid-19. Most enterprises were not prepared for ripples from closing of childhood education and daycare facilities, halts of public transport, and ‘shutdown orders’ for public facilities. So, who’s in charge of these?
Our next post includes action plans for these unknown unknowns.
If you’d like to read other examples of ways to improve your enterprise’s resilience head over to www.ekalore.com/ars
If you’d like to explore how you might prepare for something unexpected, set up a free conversation with a Senior Analyst at EkaLore – www.ekalore.com/contact
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