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only in a position to influence the plan and not the other issues. It is therefore proposed that despite the limitations, a better plan is still to be valued, even if the organisation retains several other flaws.


The plan


The rehearsals The people


Because I believe that the planning element is so important to effective resilience, I am conducting doctorate level research into the topic. The underlying hypothesis is simple: three fundamental factors, outlined in


the diagram, will determine the success or otherwise of any resilience response.


The People


The first factor, the importance of the quality of the people in the response team, is unquestionable and is a major facet of the academic analyses mentioned earlier, but it is not necessarily obvious to the organisation involved. Poor quality response staff will not implement a good plan (howsoever defined), and they will very simply fail in their task. In contrast, good staff can to some extent compensate for poor planning and use their innovative talents to achieve novel solutions not envisaged in the plan, but this will take time, which is at a premium in a crisis.


The quality of resilience planning and the corporate Cassandra


I


f it can be assumed that, conceptually at least, terrorism shares an old air force adage


of the Second World War and the Cold War, that ‘a bomber (albeit perhaps single) will always get through’; sooner or later a terrorist will succeed in bombing London or elsewhere in the UK.


When he, she or they do succeed then several companies and organisations will implement a business continuity or resilience plan of some description. The quality of the plan (amongst other factors) will now determine the destiny of that company.


Perhaps the most comprehensively authoritative single book on crisis management and the concepts that influence resilience is a collection of papers entitled ‘Key Readings in Crisis Management,’ edited by Smith and Elliot . A characteristic of all the papers is that they seek to understand crisis and offer models of explanation.


Smith considers the barriers to the recognition of crisis potential within organisations, Turner comments on major causal features that can be identified, Roberts identifies some characteristics of high reliability organisations


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and Smart and Vertinsky note the narrowing of the cognitive process in a crisis. However, very little apparent attention is given to the quality of the plan that the corporate victims of the incidents might be trying to implement at the time; the plan’s potential role in the events appears to be a relatively neglected field. The implication is that a good plan is simply the antithesis of a ‘bad plan’ that avoids the structural pitfalls that they comment upon. The whole issue is encapsulated in two remarks, the first by Elliot who states that:


…there is some agreement that crisis preparedness in the forms of business continuity plans are simply outward manifestations of inward beliefs. Effective preparations for crisis require investments at both a practical and a deeper level of culture, assumptions and beliefs.


The second is the work of Mitroff and colleagues who liken the organisational plan to the outer and visible skin of an onion, the deeper levels being core and organisational beliefs and organisational structures. This is undoubtedly correct but the planner is usually


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Interestingly, very few organisations actively select staff to serve in response teams, although some well validated psychometric tests do exist to measure people’s ability to perform under stressful conditions. Similarly, human resource departments seem averse to basing any selection of new staff on the criteria of how the person might manage an incident. This aversion is implicitly endorsed when response team duties are not enshrined in job specifications lest they attract additional funding for ‘on call’ availability. Most often it seems that the response duty is implicit in the


role of the employee rather than stated, and consequent training needs analysis for the response role is at best informal.


The Rehearsals


The next factor is a corollary of the first. Rehearsals are normally recognised as being necessary and serve, amongst other aims and objectives, to improve the performance or knowledge of the team and to familiarise them with the plan. Without rehearsals, the plan and the whole planning process is obviously futile, but perhaps worse still, the rehearsal of a bad plan serves merely to engrain false confidence and poor habits. Few companies devote much more than a day or two per annum to rehearsals and one cannot rely on such low levels of rehearsal effectively preparing a company for a major incident.


Therefore, given that one cannot usually improve the quality of staff (to any significant degree), and because the response management system will often emulate normal management structures, the people element remains, relatively speaking, fixed. Rehearsals are important in terms of face and predictive validity and frequency, but the time


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