‘Order and Chaos: Crisis Management and the Challenges of the Extreme and Rare Event’: A Master Class in Advanced Risk Management’ is the title of a masterclass in Advanced Risk Management, by David Rubens, with SMi Training, in London on March 13.
The aim: to bring academic research with case studies from some recent extreme CM scenarios such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Fukushima, Haiti earthquake, Norway’s Utoya Island massacre and the power-failure in north India that left 600 million people without electricity. The one-day will look at issues of responding to large-scale and highly complex unstructured problems, the limitations of traditional hierarchical command-and control systems, and some non-traditional alternatives, and the implications of communication, decision making and information management within an EMON-based incident. (EMON – Emergent Multi-Organizational Networks, which describes the development of ad hoc multi-agency responses in the face of chaotic crisis environments).
This seminar is aimed at senior managers responsible for any aspect of Risk Management, Crisis Management or Business Continuity within large organisations; representatives of NGO’s, specialist CM agencies, multi-national organisations, corporate multi-nationals; RM and CM strategists and policy-makers, and senior CM trainers.
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‘Post-crisis, most organisations fall into one of three groups: those that collapse and are destroyed immediately; those that manage to hang on but never truly recover; and those that are able to regroup, and through a mixture of resilience, effective management/leadership and a strong underlying foundation are able to bring a level of robust flexibility that allows them not only to survive but thrive, taking advantage of the new opportunities that the crisis brings’.
Crisis Management professionals, whether they are working within global corporations, individual agencies or at a national, regional or local government level, will undoubtedly have noted a series of recent events that have tested current CM methodologies to breaking point. In their size and scale of complexity, these situations transcend any traditional concept of crisis management frameworks or organisational jurisdictions. Whether it is the impact of a major Hurricane on a city such as New York; the power blackouts that affected 600 million people across northern India; the consequences of the Fukushima tsunami / earthquake that, within a few days, left Tokyo on the edge of being a city without food; volcanic activity in Iceland that disrupted international travel across Europe, or recent bank IT failures that left tens of thousands of people to survive purely on the money that they happened to be carrying at the time, the common factor that these real-time situations all shared was the rapidly escalating / cascading nature of the problems that they caused, and the complexity of the responses that they demanded.
The threats faced by the Risk Managers of the 21st century are indisputably larger in scale, more complex in nature, and potentially more catastrophic in impact than anything likely to have been experienced by their predecessors. The modern RM is more likely to think in terms of trans-boundary threats, trans-jurisdictional response, crisis cognition and systems dependency than simple risk assessments and SOPs.
This seminar will examine some of the concepts that are at the heart of 21st century Crisis Management, and will show how they can be utilised in developing a CM framework appropriate to any organisation.
Challenges of an Inter-Connected World
The increasing complexity, interconnectedness and inter-dependability of the various controlling frameworks that we are all entangled in means that both primary problems and secondary consequences are increasingly escalating beyond the scope of simple ‘solutions’ to rectify them . This session looks at the nature of those problems, how they can be identified, and offers an insight into the nature and scope of the challenges that they pose.
11.20 – 1.00: Limitations of the Traditional Command & Control Response Management Structure
Traditional ‘Command and Control’ structures are almost exclusively rooted in a 19th century model of hierarchical control, with clearly delineated responsibilities, tightly-bounded decision-makers and a limited ability to create innovative responses in the face of real-time challenges. The officially-mandated ‘Incident Control System’ as set out by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is only an extreme example of the centrality of the hierarchical control system to many emergency response agencies. This session look s at the strengths and weaknesses of a highly-delineated Command and Control structure, examines situations in which it might be appropriate, and then goes on to explore alternative modes of creating C&C capabilities within a rapidly evolving matrix of different response agencies and fast-mutating situations.
A New Language: Communication and Decision-Making Within Emergent Multi-Organisational Networks (EMONs)
It is an accepted truism that the first thing to go wrong in any operation is communication, and more strictly, the transfer of complex information under pressure. Carl von Clausewitz coined the phrase ‘Fog of War’ in 1837 to describe the confusion within which military commanders operate, and it is even more apt today, despite, or perhaps because of, the vast array of communication platforms that we have available to us.
EMON’s (Emergent Multi-Organisational Networks) describes how increasingly complex command and communication chains develop. This session looks at some of the issues involved in working within multi-agency and multi-organisation environments, where specialised skill sets are highly dispersed and where any cohesive response option will require a high level of cooperation and collaboration, even amongst organisations that might not share a common organisational culture, structure or command process.
4.00-5.00: Open Discussion
It is expected that all participants in this event will bring their own skills, experiences and insights to the table, and that there will be real value in sharing those experiences in a round-table discussion with other like-minded practitioners. Although the whole day will be run in an open and fully inter-active way, the last session will create a space where the participants can share their ideas, as well as identify significant points for future investigation.
About David Rubens, pictured
MD of David Rubens Associates, he has been involved in various aspects of the security industry since he was Team Leader on the Israeli Embassy security team in Munich, Germany in 1981. He holds an MSc in Security and Risk Management from Leicester University, where he is currently a Visiting Lecturer and Dissertation Supervisor on their Security, Terrorism and Policing programme. He was a Visiting Lecturer (2009-‘10), on the Strategic Leadership Programme at the Security and Resilience Department, Cranfield University, UK Defence Academy, focusing on terrorism and public policy, and the management of large-scale, complex multi-agency programmes. He is currently on the Professional Doctorate programme at Portsmouth University Department of Criminology & Justice, where his Doctorate research involves developing models of strategic management at the extremes of organisational complexity, looking at issues of capability development, decision-making and multi-agency interoperability in highly-unstable situations such as natural disasters, corporate failures and government-level crisis management scenarios.
David’s background in operational management, global corporate consultancy and high-level academic research allows him to bring a holistic understanding of the issues facing Risk and Security Managers in the 21st century, as well as the ability to put that information across in an immediately accessible manner. He has written research papers and reports on all aspects of security management, from national-level Security Sector Restructuring through to post-disaster analysis for government agencies in Japan, Russia, Dubai, Nigeria, Liberia and the UK. He is in high demand at international security events, where he is well known for the energy he brings to his presentations. He has given presentations to major conferences in London, New York, Tokyo and Moscow.
David Rubens Associates is a specialist corporate security consultancy offering security services to individuals and organisations across the world. DRA has worked with government agencies, NGOs, international conglomerates and major global events, and brings a mixture of strategic vision, operational experience and academic research to all of its projects, however large or small.
