petalpieCrisis Management is a complex subject and so I won’t...

petalpie

Crisis Management is a complex subject and so I won’t bore you to tears with the long version, I have touched on this in an earlier post and at least one of the other HC members is a specialist in this area.

But put simply what is required is to divide the team facing the crisis into two main working groups (there should be a third group handling media, record keeping, logistics, etc but let’s leave them out of the equation for now). One working group should be resolving the immediacy of the crisis and the other working group should work on the longer-term recovery. The hundreds of case studies on the subject strongly indicate that if you don’t have the recovery group in place the crisis will escalate. Those that adhere to these abbreviated principles will live another day. I have used it many times without failure.

So let me make a real example:

A couple of years ago when the mine was being built the region was hit by one of the worst flooding events in history. The mine site was always going to okay but thousands of people were trapped on the roofs of their homes in the surrounding villages or worse were stranded in the small islands of land surrounded by the rising floodwaters. It was a catastrophic situation and with no help available from others the Company immediately assembled a Crisis Management Team.

One team headed by a ‘General’ (the Exploration Manager from memory) appointed 4 ‘Lieutenants’ and set about pulling a team together to save hundreds of people from across the rivers in the area and plucked many others from the roofs of their houses. They gave them medical care and provided over 500 hot meals and about 1,100 family food pack to others. All of this was done (including the logistics, supplies and execution of the plan) within about 5 hours of the decision to act. A good job so far.

A second team headed by another ‘General’ also appointed 4 ‘Lieutenants’ but their task was the long-term recovery of the lives of the people. This team tarpaulined roofs, sand bagged houses and fields from rivers, obtained temporary shelters, clothes and bulk foods to sustain the homeless people beyond the crisis until they could look after themselves again.

Old men and women, new born babies, toddlers, children and adults all saved across raging floodwaters, fed and cared for until they could return to their homes that were also saved as part of the recovery.

So in a nutshell Crisis Management requires attention to the immediate crisis and just as importantly the recovery plan. And the Crisis Management Team must work on the issue 24/7 until the recovery is complete and the status quo returned. There are no exceptions to these general rules in CM.