Every year the Business Continuity Institute surveys professionals in the risk management world to see what the top business interruptions were for the previous year, and what those professionals think the top interruptions will be in the upcoming year. Yet, even with such a wide ranging survey of professionals across the world and across all industries and organization types, there are always unexpected events that hit businesses worldwide.

To get a better understanding of why it’s far more effective to plan for THE IMPACT on your business from a crisis or interruption, instead of trying to plan for every crisis or interruption that might happen, let’s take a look at how 2019, 2020, and predictions for 2021 compare.

What Happened in 2019?

In 2019, we can see that of the top 10 business interruptions, only 2 would be considered in your direct control:

Of the remaining 8 interruptions, Health Incidents could be considered to be somewhat within your control, based on the work environment and culture of your business. Which leaves 7 interruption types that are caused by other people, companies, organizations, and nature.

Could you have planned for every single one of those possibilities? If you can, I’d love to see what kind of overhead your business operates with!

What Was Predicted in 2020?

So based on what happened in 2019, risk management experts predicted that only 5 of the 10 types of interruptions from 2019 would repeat as a top 10 item in 2020. Of the top 3, both Health Incidents and Safety Incidents were left out of the prediction for 2020. Why is that? Is it because those are items that we feel like we can control? Do we tend to think business interruptions are only caused by outside forces?

What Happened in 2020?

So when we look at what ACTUALLY happened in 2020 vs what was PREDICTED for 2020, we can see that many more of the predicted types of interruptions, 6 of 10, happened. Yet, those two interruptions that were not predicted, Health Incidents and Safety Incidents, repeated as top 3 interruptions, only missing being the top 2 interruptions because of a world wide pandemic from COVID!

Perhaps there really is a tendency to minimize the impact of business interruptions we feel like we can control…..

It’s also interesting to note, that despite the prediction of Political Change being in the top 10 of interruptions, with all of the attention given to the elections of 2020, it did not end up making nearly as big of an impact as predicted. Just a reminder that because there’s lots of “news” about something, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will have a direct impact on your business.

What Was Predicted for 2021?

So now we’re working through 2021, and wouldn’t you know it, Safety is once again left out of the top 10! I’m not typically a gambling man, but I’d say that if you’re not planning for a safety incident to impact your business this year, it should become a priority in your risk management planning.

As for the other types of interruptions, we’re starting to see some more consistency in what’s been happening being expected to happen again the next year. There’s still the trend of the top 10 incidents primarily consisting of things that seem outside of your control. So what to do?

So what do we do with this information?

If you know something outside of your control is likely to happen, what can you control? How you respond to that interruption! Take the list of likely interruptions and do a Business Impact Analysis on what would happen to your business if any of these events occurred. And quantify that impact! You want to know what it could cost you in dollars, time, personnel availability, client retention, and repetitional impact. Will there be insurance impacts, regulatory requirements that aren’t met, customer contracts that get broken?

In addition to Safety and Health Incident interruptions, these additional items have been consistently in the top 10 from 2019 – 2021, so now is a great time to review or create plans for these types of interruptions:

In Conclusion

The variance between what is predicted and what happens shows us the importance of planning for how your specific business processes will be impacted if they get interrupted, vs trying to plan for specific occurrences. For example, if your business is heavily dependent on a specific building location, your goal should be to quantify the impact of not being able to get to that building. That way you can plan for such a scenario, no matter if it’s caused by a fire, tornado, earthquake, flood, pandemic, or terrorist attack. The cause doesn’t matter, only the impact to your business!

I hope this risk review is helpful to your company for planning, and if you would like help in managing your business risk, contact us and we’ll be happy to help!

Your business survived 2020, and 2021 is looking brighter. Thank goodness! Luckily, surviving means you’re doing as good as you can be. But there are a lot of businesses, including your competitors, that may have survived but you can see that they’re not going to last long. They’re struggling, getting by, making ends meet, but not thriving. They need help, and sadly, they can’t see for themselves that they need help!

It’s easy to see how other people can improve and fix their business, yet we can be blinded to our own needs for improvement, even if those needs are clear to outsiders. Looking at our own imperfections, and asking for help to fix or minimize them, is one of the most challenging actions we face daily. Multiply that challenge by 1,000% when it comes to something as near and dear to our hearts and egos as businesses we’ve built ourselves.

One of the biggest challenges with bringing the concept of Business Continuity to the world of small business is that it is often viewed the same way fitness and health advice is viewed for our personal life, i.e., “That is a great idea for everyone else, but I’m pretty good myself, thank you for asking!”

In the spirit of self improvement with the new year, let’s look at how key Business Continuity principles can be applied to your own business, instead of just to your competitors’ business, to make 2021 your best year yet!

Do a high level Business Impact Analysis / Risk Analysis / Continuity Requirements Analysis for your business.

Why is this a great place to start? Let’s look at the primary benefit of each analysis step:

  1. Business Impact Analysis (BIA) – Allows you to identify which business processes are key to your business being able to function, and quantify the value of those processes to your business. This allows you focus your recovery efforts in the event of a disaster, with the added benefit of allowing you to direct continuous improvement efforts towards the processes that will most benefit your business in day-to-day operations.
  2. Risk Analysis – Allows you to identify potential risks and their likelihood/impact level to your operations. Then you can implement risk mitigation steps, immediately improving your business’ resilience.
  3. Continuity Requirements Analysis – Allows you to prioritize which processes to recover first in the event of a disaster. In the middle of a disaster, you don’t want to waste time recovering a process that you can live without for a few days at the expense of a process you ned right now.

If you need a framework for a high level BIA/RA/CRA for your business, check out our handy resources here to get you started.

Make a list of all key people in your organization that would be involved in managing and recovering from a disaster.

This needs to be more than just roles. You have to have everyone’s name, role, phone number(s), and email(s), in order to be able to reach out them directly when needed. A disaster is a poor time to have to think about, “We need to get our head of maintenance on the phone! Who was that again?” You need a name so that you know exactly who to contact.

Share this list with everyone on it, gain their understanding as to why they’re on it, and ensure they have copies for their reference. Everyone needs to literally be on the same page when it comes to business continuity!

Schedule time, minimum quarterly, to review your BIA/RA/CRA and contact list to ensure everything is up-to-date and still relevant.

You want to make sure all the hard work you just did pays off, right? If you have a disaster, out-of-date information and plans will make managing and recovering from the disaster MUCH more difficult! Set some time aside, calendar it however you plan future appointments, so that you know you have time to review your BIA/RA/CRA and contact lists.

This is also a great time to see where you can make improvements or direct resources to improve your business overall. Remember, you’ve already quantified the value of your business processes in the BIA, so with what you know now, see if you have opportunities to improve those processes as you go through them again. It’s like a free health check for your business!

In Conclusion.

It happens every time I first have an introduction with a small business owner. Starting with the basic question of, “What in the world do you do?” By the end of the conversation the response is, “Wow, that’s awesome, you must have all kinds of businesses clamoring for your services!”

Remember, if you think Business Continuity would be great for other businesses you know of, it will also be great for your business. Put its powers to work for you. Use the steps we reviewed above to make our business stronger and more resilient for 2021 and beyond. Because your competitors shouldn’t be the only ones making their businesses better this year!

Failure. Failure. Failure. We’re all familiar with it, but few of us claim it as a friend. When was the last time you failed at something and said, “Well, I’m glad that was unsuccessful!”? How many large companies and “Forbes Richest Individuals” constantly tout their failures and mistakes? Why, the very nature of Business Continuity is how to navigate failure and minimize its effects! In modern culture, failure is not looked at as our friend and counselor, and is treated as needing to be avoided at all costs.

Yet, look around. Small businesses are facing an unprecedented onslaught, with not only market challenges due to COVID, but even remarkably widespread government backed assaults on the livelihoods of small business owners and employees! With their actions, federal, state, and local governments are actively pushing YOUR small business toward failure!

Have you ever seen a successful person or business that never made a mistake? Beyond the impacts of outside events like natural disasters and government intervention, companies have failures all the time through their own actions. The most successful companies and people in the world fail frequently and consistently:

Failures happen because not a single one of us can exactly predict the future. Think you’re good at accurately predicting the future? Then I’d love to know how much money you made predicting 2020!

Failures are learning experiences, and failures are to be acknowledged and examined and utilized to make ourselves and our companies better. Failures give us a chance to see where our approach, where our processes, and where our reactions to those failures, can be changed and adapted for the better. Failures are our opportunities to do better.

Let’s look at 3 common failure modes for businesses:

Failures in our approach

Failures in our approach give us the opportunity to reevaluate how we set-up ourselves, and our businesses, to deal with the vagaries the world will throw at us. Do you have a standby approach to situations? Does it work for every situation? Has it worked for every phase of your life or your businesses life?

While we all have a baseline way of approaching life, that approach can be adjusted and expanded to cope with ever changing world and business environments. When you find that your approach to something failed, take the time to step back and analyze why it failed. What about your approach wasn’t suitable for that failed situation?

Taking the time to reexamine your approach to a given situation after a failure is a great way to build flexibility into your approach for future situations. Think of your approach as a tool box, with a variety of options for dealing with different situations depending on what is needed. And when you’re through the failed situation, there’s a great chance you’ll have added another useful tool to that toolbox!

Failures in Our Processes

Processes are critical to both the successes, and failures, of all businesses. And the good news is, processes are the easiest of failures to fix! Often, the biggest challenge to fixing a process failures is the 3rd type of failure we’ll cover below, Failure in our Reaction, so knowing that, let’s focus on how to utilize process failures.

First of all, let’s recognize that every business process will fail at some point in time. Whether by natural events or forces imposed on you from markets and governments, it will happen. There are too many variables in your business, the market, and regulatory agencies to allow for any given process to work perfectly 100% of the time. And that’s OK! When you have a process failure, you have a great opportunity to look at the input and output variables for that process to see if they are still applicable to your current business needs. Has the process stagnated while the needs of your customers, employees, and stakeholders has changed?

Chances are your business needs have changed since the process was originally implemented, so instead of looking at the failure as a time to find blame, look at it as a time to update your process to meet your current and future business needs to continue growing your business. And as an additional benefit, you now have up-to-date information on where gaps in your continuity and crisis planning are located, allowing you to address them directly to prevent future similar events. You’re winning!

Failures in Our Reactions

The way we react to failure is a bright shining star into how well we will be able to deal with an ever changing world. Psychological science continuously reinforces the principle that we judge our own reactions to situations based on our intentions instead of our actions, while judging others based on their actions assuming they have bad intentions. And we’ve all had plenty of opportunities to monitor our reactions to unplanned/unexpected challenges to our businesses this last year.

So the first step in identifying a failure in our reaction, emphasis on “our”, as in “your own” reaction, is realizing that our reaction may not have been appropriate to the situation. Take a few minutes and put yourself in the shoes of other people involved in the situation, and think through how you would have acted if you were faced with the same set of circumstances they faced at that time. Once you’ve taken time to look at the scenario through the eyes of others, you’ll be ready to address your own reaction, and have a baseline from which to improve for the future.

Once you have your baseline, make note of what you did well, and also of what you did poorly. And get feedback on these from others involved. Utilizing your internal and external feedback, take some time each month to do a mental walkthrough of your reaction failure, as well as imagining yourself in other stressful/crisis situations. Imagine how you would react, and imagine how you think you should react. By going through these mental exercises, you’ll be training yourself to have a better reaction to the next crisis, and you’ll be building your mental toughness in a constructive way.

In Conclusion

I know it’s both cliche to say that failures are simply opportunities in disguise. And I know that it’s difficult to keep that viewpoint in the middle of a crisis. Speaking from experience with my own struggles in such situations, I know the challenges of maintaining such a view at all times.

My hope is that this information will prove helpful for you, and that you’ll be able to access it when you need it. No matter what happens in the heat of the moment of a crisis situation, including these tactics in your post-incident review process will put you in a much better position for the next crisis, and reduce not only your stress in the situation, but improving your outcomes by reducing the time, effort, and/or cost of the incident.

Here at Everyday Business Resilience Group, we’re ready to work alongside you to prepare your business for catastrophe, and ensure that you’re business is empowered and prepared for any failure, and able to utilize that failure not as an opportunity to secure your growth. Contact us for all of your Business Continuity expertise needs.

It’s ok, we use Google for our cloud services. It’s ok, our email and calendar is all handled by Google Gmail. It’s ok, we use Google Docs to ensure our documents are saved and accessible by anyone at anytime. It’s ok, I use YouTube for my video hosting because it’s always accessible by anyone. It’s ok, we use Google for our virtual classroom so kids can do school at home.

Google’s main services, including, YouTube, Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Classroom were down for roughly an hour this morning. There’s currently no official estimate on the number of people impacted by the outage, but given the reach of Google’s services, 100’s of millions of people is likely low on the scale.

The average cost of a minor IT/Telecommunications outage is $53,210 per minute. The AVERAGE COST of a MINOR outage!!! This was a Google outage, one of the largest and most widely utilized internet related service providers in the world! What was the cost to YOUR business for this outage?

It’s easy for those of us in the small business world to assume that the giant global corporations are safe places to store and access our critical information, but today’s Google outage is a clear reminder that every business needs a Business Continuity Plan in place to deal with any, and I emphasize ANY, interruption to your business’ critical processes, no matter what the cause.

While the convenience of grouped IT related service like Google provides are great when they work, there is no company or service in the world that is 100% reliable. And it’s up to us as business owners to be prepared for those times when our key vendors or suppliers fail us.

If you’re a small business looking to incorporate something as critical as Business Continuity Planning into your business, check out our seminars for how to get started, or contact us directly for a free consultation. Because here at Everyday Business Resilience Group, our mission is to empower small business, ensuring the growth of our small business community, and our community at large.

Horizon scanning, aka, observing the world for potential threats to your business. Fortune 500 companies have entire departments dedicated to this! But what about you as a small business owner? Who’s working for you to keep an eye out for threats to your business?

Below are key resources the small business community can utilize for creating a comprehensive view of local, regional, and global activity to monitor for potential impact to your business.

Local

Regional

Global

Automated Horizon Scanning Options

Based on the number of potential sources for information that can be used for horizon scanning, it can look overwhelming to take up horizon scanning for your business yourself. If you’ve taken a try at in-house horizon scanning, but are finding that you’re short on time or bandwidth to incorporate horizon scanning into your routine, there are options for automated horizon scanning provided by a variety of vendors.

Two excellent options available to businesses of all sizes include:

OnSolve

EverBridge

The added bonus of companies like these is that they provide communication capabilities for their clients that enables easy communication with your employees and key stakeholders, in both normal operations and during crisis situations.

Tips and Tricks to Optimize your Horizon Scanning Routine:

  1. Make this part of your morning routine to jump start your day. This can help you direct your energies in case there is a new development that could impact your business. And it helps to take as detached a view as you can to minimize emotional involvement in the horizon scanning process.
  2. Use a news aggregation service where possible, and if it asks you to choose your preferred sources of news, make sure you include sources that you think often conflict with your world view. This helps eliminate blind spots caused baby the algorithms that populate your news feeds, as those algorithms feed on clicks, so if your news sources are all similar, you will find yourself increasingly silo’d in your ability to observe what is happening in the world. I prefer the Ground News app, as it accounts for political bias in showing you news, allowing you to see if a potential news item would be a blindspot to you based on your political leanings.
  3. Take advantage of the trending functions of social media. Often social media will provide the first glimpse of important events as they happen, before the primary news channels get the stories out. This can give you a jump on shifts in your business environment which can help you focus your energies on better understanding potential threats to your business as the information grows and becomes more clear via normal news distribution channels.
  4. Sign up for updates from major national and global organizations where possible. Reviewing these communications will give you a sense of what the focus of various bureaucracies are, giving you, the nimble small business owner, an advantage in making adjustments to your business quickly when needed.
  5. Put your biases on the shelf when Horizon Scanning! Remember the goal is just to see what’s happening in the world that can impact your business. Our biases can create blind spots in our ability to monitor risk, so purposely try to include sources of information that challenge your views and beliefs. This is another great reason to use the news app Ground News, as it shows news from all publications across the political spectrum. Putting your biases on hold won’t be fun at first, but it will be very helpful in keeping you aware of risks to your business, and it will get easier with practice!

At the end of the day, Horizon Scanning is something that any size of business can do, and it provides increased confidence in the preparedness and resilience of your business. With today’s technology, being aware of potential risks to your business is easier than ever.

If you have tips and tricks for Horizon Scanning that you’ve found helpful, we’d love to hear them! Let us know via the comments for this blog, or reach out to us on Facebook or LinkedIn.

We’ve all fallen in to the trap of waiting for the “perfect” time to do something. From things as minor as when to get gas while running errands and when to text a friend, to things as big as when to get married and when to have kids. But every now and then, life offers up the perfect opportunity at the perfect time for something important you need to do. Now is that time when it comes to your business and its crisis preparedness.

Why is this the perfect time to update or create your Business Continuity Plan? Let’s look at the 3 main reasons:

COVID-19

We’re in a much better place in regards to COVID-19, and improving every week. Why?

We’re better at helping those with serious symptoms, as shown by the flat hospitalization and death rates across the country, even with the uptick in case counts as testing has become widespread and easily available.

States, counties, and cities are significantly reducing the use of lockdowns as a way to combat COVID-19, helping people and businesses get back to being able to make a living and do the things they love that make life worth living.

As a society we’re better overall at individually taking the basic precautions that help reduce individual risk from COVID-19, such as voluntary mask wearing and basic physical distancing and sanitation practices.

Business sanitation processes have improved by leaps and bounds, ensuring safer customer experiences when shopping, eating, and otherwise patronizing local businesses.

The Election

In case you haven’t heard, there’s an election coming up in a couple weeks. (Heavy sarcasm here, please don’t send me nasty emails).

While the political ads will keep running hot and heavy, and social media will be abuzz with why you should vote one way or another, the fact of the matter is very few people are still trying to decide who they’re going to vote for. So now is a great time to refocus your energy closer to home, where you can prepare your business for post-election time, as there are bound to be surprises and effects from the election that will impact your business.

In addition, because of the attention focused on the election, now is the perfect time to review your horizon scanning process. Are you able to glean information pertinent to your business beyond the daily news cycle? Do you have a wide range of resources to draw from for information that can directly impact you and your business? Take this time to review your sources of information, and take note of how wide the scope of coverage is that you review.

Social Unrest

It has been nearly 60 years since we’ve had this level of awareness and dialogue in our society about race and injustice. Despite the emphasis on the extremism pushed by the news, within our day-to-day lives and interactions, people are more willing than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime to actually have meaningful discussions about equality and what it means. How can you build on this willingness for meaningful discussion for your business preparedness?

By incorporating this dialogue into your Business Continuity Planning and the actions you need to take in the time of crisis. Be open with your employees and clients/customers on how your business needs and their personal needs can work together to ensure that your business thrives during a crisis and keeps all stakeholders in a positive place.

Having open dialogue with your employees and clients/customers now ensures that the help you need in a crisis is there for you. Making sure these key stakeholders are involved now means they’ll have a much better grasp of what is needed in the event of a crisis, shortening the duration and impact of that crisis.

So here’s your homework

Get out your Business Continuity Plan and make a list of all of the lessons learned from this year. 2020 has provided more opportunities and scenarios to exercise your plan than we could’ve imagined back in January.

Take this quiet-ish time for the next two weeks, and update your plan with the lessons learned you listed out. Just by taking those simple steps, you’ll be ahead of your competition to wrap up 2020, and to kick off 2021 more prepared than you’ve ever been, and ready to grow your business beyond what you though possible!

How much time you spend thinking about how you think about the world? When was the last time you challenged a strongly held belief of your own? How often in today’s world have you been surprised by how off your prediction capability of what will happen was wrong, very wrong? With everything happening in the world, we’ve all heard the call to “follow the science”. But why do we have such a tendency to follow the science only as long as it agrees with the narrative running in our minds?

If you want to be a strong leader, and you want your business to be resilient against life’s unpredictability, the science that will help you the most is the science of human psychology. We’ve all seen the communication guides discussing how each of us processes the information we receive:

And most of us spend our energy trying to understand why other people think the way they do. But if you want to understand others, first you need to understand your own biases and how they warp your view of the world. And to dive into that understanding, we’ll use the framework outlined in one of the most popular business books in the world, Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini. If you haven’t read Influence yet, I highly recommend it, especially as a way to analyze your own thinking and behavior patterns.

Influence is often referenced as a resource for persuading others, but for our purposes, we will use it as a resource for persuading ourselves, for preventing our routine mental programming from sabotaging our ability to predict, observe, and respond to crisis for our businesses. We’ll use the 6 behaviors Cialdini identifies and look at how some introspection on those behaviors on our part will help us, and by extension our businesses, become more resilient.

Reciprocation

People love to reciprocate the good deeds done for them. How often do you offer someone something to drink when you meet with them? How often do you leave small gifts, such as pens and notepads, with clients and business partners? How often do you buy products or services from someone you also want to do business with? How often do your clients and business partners do these things for you?

LIke all of the behaviors we’re discussing, reciprocity is deeply ingrained in our behavior. When someone does something nice for us, we have a natural desire to do something nice for that person in return.

So how can we apply this to the resilience of our business? Well, when your business is facing a crisis, that is also a time that you will be most likely to call on friends and business acquaintances for help. And when your friends and business acquaintances are facing a crisis in their own business, they will call on you for help. So the easy answer is, show kindness, compassion, and a willingness to help others in your network, both when times are good and when times are tough. Because a community built on reciprocity is a resilient community, a community that builds itself up and thrives, especially when facing adversity.

Consistency

People will make decisions based on your consistency before they make decisions based the latest data. We all know people, and often ourselves in retrospect, who will say and do things that contradict what everyone else sees happening, but that are consistent with previous actions.

Case in point, the challenges in updating public policy around the COVID-19 pandemic as more is learned about the virus and how it spreads and impacts people. A widespread number of policy makers are still prescribing actions for the pandemic that are based on information from 5-6 months ago, not because they’re purposely trying to follow old science, but because the innate human drive to be consistent with our previous behaviors is far stronger than our willingness to update our views based on the latest information.

As a business leader, consistency is important in providing a base level of behavioral expectations for your employees, clients, and partners to work from when interacting with you. But as you set those consistency expectations, focus on regularly updating your views/behaviors as relevant information becomes available. Great areas to apply this approach are Finance/Accounting, customer metrics such as sales/conversions, marketing feedback, and regulatory guidelines.

If you can provide a consistent approach that shows you are willing to update your plans and processes based on new and updated data, your employees and clients will be comfortable with how you approach and work through crisis, because they will know that you consistently make decisions based on the best information available.

Social Proof

When people are unsure of what to do, they look to nearby social groups for clues to what the correct action should be. And paradoxically, the more people in a group that are unsure of what to do, the more likely they will choose inaction over action, leading to confounding situations such as when someone is hurt in an accident and people just stand around, waiting for someone else to make the first move.

When your business is facing a crisis, having a clear business continuity plan in place is key to making social proof a strength, not a weakness. If the roles and responsibilities are clear and well communicated for your business continuity plan, you and your crisis team will be able to take the right actions quickly and decisively. And by moving quickly and decisively your employees and clients will be spurred to action by the power of social proof, as you show them the way forward in a time of crisis.

Liking

We all want to be liked by others, and we employ many different strategies to get people to like us. Examples include humor, complimenting others, trying to look our best in public, mimicking the behaviors of others, and perhaps most interestingly, trying to create positive associations with other people and groups that are well received. A great example from Influence, one that we’re all familiar with, is the sports fan, who frequently uses “we” as a descriptor when their favorite team is doing well, but switches to “they” when their favorite team is doing poorly. And most people are completely unaware that they do this!

The principle of Likeing can become very challenging in a crisis situation. The very nature of crisis makes it unpleasant to most people. So how can we make this automatic behavior an advantage in crisis?

Make sure your response and plans emphasize the positive direction your business is moving during a crisis, and continuously recognize the efforts and good work your crisis team members are doing. People respond very powerfully when they perceive things to moving in a positive direction, to the extent that even miserable current conditions will be ignored and brushed aside on the confidence that things are getting better. And by emphasizing the positive direction of your crisis response, people will want to associate themselves with that response, and the efforts being made to keep things moving in that positive direction.

Authority

People look to the experts when they are uninformed/under informed, and they will do things that they normally would avoid at all costs in order to appease the direction of the authority figures they see as experts. What does it take for someone to perceived as an “expert” or “authority figure”? Surprisingly little, it turns out. Titles, such as doctor, office, judge, PhD, professor, etc., whether real, or disturbingly, even when fake. Clothing and uniforms are also used to convey authority and expertise, including suits, doctors scrubs, lab coats, police uniforms, and professional attire.

Knowing how automatically people respond to the symbols of authority, for your crisis team to be most effective in driving action during a crisis, it is excellent practice to ensure that the roles and titles for the crisis team members are clearly communicated to all stakeholders, and that your crisis team “looks the part” by being dressed accordingly for the situation. By utilizing these universal signals of authority, you will drive faster action and participation by all stakeholders involved in a crisis situation.

Scarcity

If there’s not much of something, people have a stronger desire to have the scarce object or service. Take business continuity expertise for example.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, most non-Fortune 500 companies found themselves scrambling to survive the effects of the virus itself, and even more critically, surviving the government response to the virus. And because of the type of broad perspective and expertise needed for effective Business Continuity Planning, the vast majority of BCP experts are focused on and recruited by Fortune 500 companies with similarly large budgets for such planning.

This leaves precious little BCP expertise available for the 52% of the economy made up of small businesses, yet common sense tells us that these are the businesses that need this very expertise the most at this time. If you’ve survived the pandemic so far, and never want to go through such turmoil again, now’s the time for you to reach out to a BCP expert and put a plan in place that takes you from surviving to thriving during a crisis.


In conclusion, we all benefit from taking the time to better understand our unconscious thought processes, those automatic response mechanisms that we use to make processing the craziness of our days easier. And once we have a grasp of how we filter the information we receive, we are in a great position to apply it to our businesses, ensuring we’re prepared for the future, making our businesses, and our communities, more resilient than ever before.

For the COVID-19 business crisis, we’re now at the stage of the Business Continuity Process where the boulder of survival goes from being pushed uphill to being pushed along level ground as we return normal. Now is when we pick up momentum with our boulder, and use that momentum to help us clear a path to brighter futures.

By now, the tide of the pandemic is easing out. Here in the US, hospitalizations and fatalities from Coronavirus are in a consistent decline for over 6 weeks, far exceeding the common 2-week incubation period previously observed in the March/April timeframe for these lagging indicators to follow the leading indicator of positive cases.

How do you as a small business utilize this great news to build positive momentum? How do you make that pandemic boulder and asset to your growth, instead of a burden? Let’s look at a few ways to build momentum through the end of 2020.

Schedule time in September to review your Business Continuity Plans

Now is the perfect time to do a throrough review of your Business Continuity Plans. The impact and pain of the shutdowns is still fresh, but the business environment is now calmed down enough that you have the bandwidth available to incorporate new learnings and updates where needed.

If you found yourself without a Business Continuity Plan back in February and are loath to repeat that experience, now is the time to prepare a Business Continuity Plan for your unique business. Write it on your calendar and reach out for guidance in preparing such plans. You survived the pandemic, now take the time to gather the tools and skills you need so that you’ll be confident in the knowledge that you’re prepared for the next crisis, no matter what it is.

Besides preparing your business for the future, a thorough review of your existing BC plan, or the creation of a new BC plan, will provide ample opportunities for process improvements for your business. The pandemic provided every business with the chance to see what processes are critical to your ability to thrive, and what processes are just icing on the cake, aka, overhead expenses. The efficiencies discovered during the BCP review/creation will pay dividends now and for the future,

Tailor your products and/or services towards connecting people.

As the economy opens up, society as a whole will be eager to reconnect with family, friends, and peers in ways that have been difficult, if not impossible, for the last 6 months. As a business decision maker, tailoring your products and/or services towards helping enable such connections gives you an immediate audience hungry for the products and services you provide.

The economy is built on people helping people, and now is a great opportunity to get out there and help your customers, clients, and community. We’re all hungry to help, with enormous reserves of pent up energy ready to make good things happen.

Expand your sources of information, even including sources you normally don’t utilize.

One of the main traps businesses and leaders fall into is that of the echo chamber. Our psyches love to be recognized and applauded, but this can lead to our seeking approval and reinforcement to make us feel better, vs seeking information and data to help us help others to get better.

The best way to avoid the echo chamber, as countless psychological research has shown, is to push yourself to be uncomfortable and stretch your mind, and the easiest way to do that is to seek out information from new sources.

In my career in Business Continuity and Project Management, I’ve observed countless times when key decision makers and stakeholders were caught by surprise, despite being extremely intelligent and wonderful problem solvers. And every time it has been because their sources of information for decision making would gradually self-reduce, as they relied more and more on the sources of information that reinforced their existing line of thinking.

Ignore global and national news for at least one day each week.

This is a build on the previous step. This could be the most difficult step, but it also has the most potential to supercharge 4Q2020 for your business. During your once weekly sabbatical of global and national news, focus on your local community and what is happening there. These are the people who have the biggest impact on your daily life, and who are also most eager to return to normal and interact with their fellow community members.

This is an opportunity to strengthen neglected relationships, and to build new relationships with people who now realize how important local social connections are to their own community.

These are 4 basic, yet powerful, steps that any business can take to be ready for the rest of 2020 and beyond. The opportunities available to business ready to run shove that boulder of momentum down the road will be massive. The hill is flattening, we can all see it leveling out, so let’s all step forward and keep the momentum growing. The path forward won’t be straight, but together we can navigate the turns ahead, ensuring we continue to build resilient communities, one business at a time.

Shutdowns will continue. The virus will spread forever. Deaths will continue increasing at the same rate. The economy will continue to struggle. Layoffs will continue. The future is clear, and it’s not pretty!

Sales will keep rising. Homes always increase in value. The Stockmarket will continue to climb. Wages will keep going up. Goods will keep getting cheaper. Medicine and technology will continue to advance. The future is clear, and it looks great!

Welcome to what I like to call, The Law Of False Linearity. If you’re human, which I assume you are if you’re reading this blog, then you’ve likely fallen victim to this law. I know I have, and it’s a lesson I work tirelessly to incorporate into my thinking. So, let’s put a definition around The Law Of False Linearity.

The Law Of False Linearity: When the future appears to be on a relatively straight trajectory, despite all past evidence to the contrary that history travels on a straight line.

Where do we see The Law Of False Linearity making an appearance in today’s world, and how can we protect ourselves and our organizations from falling into its trap? Let’s look at 3 prime examples.

In summary, I want to emphasize that our shared tendency to see linear futures, despite chaotic pasts, can be used as a tool for positive change, and to prepare individuals and organizations to be prepared for any interruption, no matter what the direct cause is. We can use our visions of a linear future to prepare for when that linear path inevitably heads off in a different direction.

Perhaps the simplest way to incorporate The Law Of False Linearity into your operations is when it seems there is a consensus in the general population about what the future holds, pull your key stakeholders together and challenge each other with the following question, “Is our business prepared for what happens when the general consensus changes?”

In other words, as Warren Buffett said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s swimming naked,” so make sure you have on pants for when the tide changes.

When you think of your business’ resilience, how often do your company’s health benefits cross your mind? Based on conversations we’ve had with businesses, most of the efforts to survive the Coronavirus pandemic have been, understandably, focused on payroll and simply making ends meet. But now we’re in July with school and university openings coming quickly.

What do school and university openings have to do with employee benefits, you might be asking? Let’s dig into the relationship, and how it provides a window into the importance of company health benefits to your overall business resilience.

Employee health benefits makeup 30% of the average labor costs in the United States according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 30% of your labor costs go to health benefits!!! With all of the money you’re spending on health benefits, are those dollars improving your own business’ resilience, or are you just helping make the bank accounts of benefits providers more resilient? If you’re going to spend that much of your hard earned money on benefits for your employees, let’s make sure those benefits help make your employees, and therefore your business, more resilient.

Health benefits are typically looked at from the perspective of the preventative and reactive medical care needs of employees, such as preventative doctor visits, elective surgeries, and of course emergency medical care needs. But does it cover the kind of medical leave required for the 2 week quarantine periods currently demanded of people infected with coronavirus?

What about the related medical needs of the employees family? For example, your benefits package may provide sick leave for the employee themself, but does it provide coverage for sick leave for the employee in the event they have a family member that is sick and needs care? Current CDC guidelines encourage the quarantine of entire families should one member of the family become infected with Coronavirus, leading potentially to more than 2 weeks of an employee with children being unable to come to work even when they are healthy!

Is your company benefit structure strong enough to accommodate such needs for your most valuable, and expensive, asset, your employees?

This brings us to how your company health benefits tie into the upcoming school reopening. The latest data from the CDC shows that Coronavirus is spreading much more among young people now than when the virus first appeared, but that the symptoms on the whole are far milder with a large percentage of infected young people being asymptomatic. But CDC guidelines remain the same for testing, quarantine, and isolation recommendations as 4 months ago when we had far less data on the spread and overall severity of the virus. With these challenges in place, schools across the country are planning their reopening under very challenging conditions for students and teachers.

This approach will directly impact your business’ ability to stay resilient and operational. Working parents face the likely scenario of having to leave work, or work remotely where possible, for multiple weeks to care for otherwise healthy children who have to be quarantined.

Are those expensive health benefits, 30% of your labor costs, you’re providing for your employees able to cover those kinds of impacts? Are you getting your money’s worth paying for benefits for your employees that won’t provide the kind of employee support and resilience your business needs?

That’s just one situation we can all see coming. You, as the employer, are the key to keeping your best people supported to keep your business supported. With the cost of benefits already 1/3 of your labor costs, finding ways to reduce health plan costs, while maintaining high quality health benefits is the kind of competitive advantage that will put your business ahead of your competition, improving your margins while at the same time improving the resilience of your employees, and therefore the resilience of your business.

So in conclusion, there are still predictable significant, direct and indirect, challenges related to healthcare and benefits coming this year that will put strains on your business. Now is the time to plan for those challenges and make sure you have the tools in place to thrive when your competition is struggling. Some great places to start are:

These resources will have your business well on the way to being prepared for the challenges ahead.