Thinking of the 'PEAR'

The golden rule when responding to any crisis is to think of how any actions or decisions will impact People, Environment, Assets and Reputation (PEAR). The PEAR mnemonic is used in various ways throughout discussions around risk, safety and emergency management – but is useful during crisis events to ensure that senior leadership prioritise the correct responses. Senior leaders should think in terms of:

People

What is the impact of the disruption to people (both internally and externally)? How will you make sure people are safe? How will you ensure that your actions in response to the crisis don't bring about any undue risk to people?

Environment

What is the impact to the environment in which you operate? How will you make certain that you remediate any damage that may have been caused? How will you ensure that no additional damage is caused going forward?

Assets

What is the impact to your assets (physical and virtual)? Can you limit the potential damage without risking your people or the environment? How will you legally, responsibly and safely recover these assets and ensure they are operational again?

Reputation

What is the impact to your reputation? How will you go about communicating the way in which you are addressing the crisis to try and minimise damage to your reputation? How will you go about demonstrating that lessons have been learned and that your organisation is committed to improvements?

Organisations should always be concerned about people first, and reputation last

In general, an organisation that prioritises its readiness, response and recovery in this way will find that by focusing on reputation last, they will build more goodwill with stakeholders. This, in turn, will be more advantageous for protecting their reputation. Organisations must focus on the reality of getting through a crisis, and limiting the damage around it, rather than on optics in the first instance.

Readiness is more than a crisis management plan

While an important part of readiness is about having a crisis management plan in place, the plan on its own is not sufficient to say that an organisation is 'ready' to face a significant business disruption event. Organisations that have truly prepared to face a significant, strategic disruption event will have taken additional steps and asked a number of key questions, including:

Do we understand our strategic risks?

This involves undertaking and regularly updating a strategic level risk assessment to help:

• understand the risk profile of the organisation;
• identify the key threats and issues likely to face the business; and
• align the crisis and risk management approach within the business.

When was our crisis management program last reviewed?

Organisations need to perform and regularly update gap analyses and maturity assessments around their crisis management program. This will ensure that it is fit-for-purpose and that it evolves and matures with the operations of the organisation and the environment in which it operates.

How do we go about embedding our crisis management plan in our organisation?

Organisations should train those who will be involved in the navigation of and recovery from a crisis in the strategy, processes and structures that would be taken in response to a true disruption event. This would start with simple process walkthroughs to build knowledge, and work up to fully simulated crisis exercises that test capabilities of participants.

Keep crisis response processes and documentation as simple as possible

All of this should be undertaken with a view to keeping crisis response processes and documentation as simple as possible. As a general rule of thumb, we advise organisations to design a crisis management protocol that can be kept general enough to address any incident or crisis flexibly. Documentation should be kept focused and brief, with reference materials provided to help those involved navigate the process.

One of the great advantages for organisations ensuring crisis readiness is that this work can also be leveraged to bolster the overall organisational approach to business resilience.

By linking these two components together, the organisation can maximise the efficiency of the process, and will find itself better capable of making decisions regarding risk related priorities and allocation of resources.

Ensuring an efficient and effective response

Organisations that have invested time and energy into readying themselves to respond to business disruption will find that the initial stages of responding to any crisis are more efficient and effective.

However, no matter how experienced an organisation is at responding to a crisis, leadership should always challenge themselves to ascertain whether the response to this incident can be handled in a more appropriate fashion, by asking questions such as:

Have we considered the scenarios?

This is an important component of strategic management of a crisis. Leadership and advisors should spend time thinking through what the most likely and worst case scenarios are around the disruption. Then they should consider the response options available to each scenario to navigate through it, and capitalise on any opportunities that it may present.

Do we have the best people to manage the disruption working on it?

This is a critical, and often overlooked, question to ask in a crisis. This may mean you need to bring in external advisors, such as lawyers, crisis managers, crisis communicators or others, but should also be asked of your internal staff.

For example, is there someone:

• with knowledge of the area the crisis is impacting,
• who has subject matter expertise around the stakeholders the crisis involves, or
• who could help to alleviate the stress on those managing the crisis by taking over their usual duties?

Are we getting all the information we need regarding the situation?

Drawing from the adage that 'knowledge is power', organisations who successfully obtain intelligence and monitor threats during a disruption will find they have a greater capacity for navigating it.

Appropriate governance and management structure

The organisation should also ensure that all of its response is being run through an appropriate governance and management structure in order to make certain that the response is ethical and that nothing is falling through the cracks during the response. Actions should be subject to not just the 'can we?' but also the 'should we?' test. This also helps to ensure a consistency in the way in which the situation is navigated. In addition, it minimises the risk of different stakeholders getting different messages about what is happening, and what the organisation is doing about it.

Recovering and recognising opportunity

Organisations who most successfully navigate through a crisis are those who recognise that opportunity is the flip-side of every risk.

From the moment a crisis commences, the organisation should have people considering what these opportunities are, and how they can best be captured. Organisations should approach recovery as an opportunity to learn the lessons of the crisis, to implement them into business operations and demonstrate to stakeholders that the lessons have been taken onboard.

At all times, consideration should be given to how any recovery actions will impact PEAR. Senior leaders can ask a range of questions to try and figure out what the recovery options are, such as:

Are there immediate governance and compliance issues that need to be addressed?

During certain crises it is clear early on how actions may have been taken, or how approvals may have been given, that have helped to enable the crisis to happen. Where this is the case, these should be addressed as quickly as possible – either as an interim measure, or permanently if that is viable.

Can the organisation not only protect its reputation, but strengthen it?

Organisations that face crises head on, accept the blame for problems that they've caused and remediate the situation responsibly can generally leverage this to recover and build their reputation at the end of the crisis.

Are there commercial opportunities that the organisation can take advantage of?

Organisations can consider if the crisis present an opportunity or need to alter or develop commercial operations in order to capture growth in market share, revenue and value, and not simply minimise losses. For example, should consideration be given to focusing on areas of business that are lower risk, rather than on higher risk areas that appear more commercially appealing?

Undertaking a post incident review

At the end of any crisis – or at an appropriate lull in longer-term crisis events – organisations should also ensure that they undertake a detailed post incident review. This should ideally be undertaken independently so as to ensure that you understand how the situation occurred, how well the organisations responded to it and how to move forward with remediation and monitoring to minimise the risk of similar issues occurring again in the future.

Planning ahead and mitigating risk

While doing business in the contemporary world is becoming increasingly complicated, with greater risk of disruptions, planning ahead can help to mitigate some of the risk. Ensuring that an organisation is taking a strategic approach to risks – both current and emerging – and linking this with its crisis management approach will help to ensure that it is ready to respond and recover from the challenges that it faces.

Simply having a plan isn't sufficient. But through building your understanding of the possible threats to your organisation, by navigating a crisis in a responsible and ethical fashion and by looking towards the possible upsides that could emerge at the end of a crisis, organisations can aim to minimise the overall threat a crisis may present to its strategic objectives.