Organizational Resilience and Business Continuity for the Next Pandemic, Business Interruption, Disaster, or Crisis
By Doug Bruce, Creative Safety Inc.
After over four years, most of the severe impacts of COVID-19 are behind us. However, that doesn’t mean there won’t be another pandemic or crisis in the future. Statistically speaking, it’s almost certain. When the next one hits, will your organization be prepared?
Understanding Business Continuity
Business continuity is an organization's ability to maintain essential business functions during and after a disaster. Whether it’s a pandemic, election-year uncertainty, an industry recession, civil unrest, a critical cyber attack, a natural disaster, a loss of crucial staff, or other adversity, having some level of individual and organizational preparedness will help you stand up to the challenge. It may feel like we just got over the last crisis, but we don’t get to choose when and where the next one happens.
While our industry’s big-name, resource-rich companies capture the spotlight, most entertainment organizations are considered small and medium-sized businesses. This means that most of the industry is particularly vulnerable to business continuity risks. The effects of disruption can be wide-ranging, from the loss of facilities or assets to the loss of intellectual property or core systems. It can also cause service interruptions, declines in staff productivity, and increased costs, not to mention the direct safety impacts of the disruption itself.
Business continuity planning often falls within the cybersecurity/IT framework of a large organization. Many organizations rely heavily on these systems, so this focus makes sense. However, resilient organizations take a wider approach to continuity preparedness, examining how disruptions impact all aspects of their operation, from email systems to waste management.
Business Impact Analysis
The best way to understand how your organization is susceptible is to conduct a Business Impact Analysis. There are many ways to do this, such as using the free toolkit on the Federal Emergency Management Agency preparedness website or working with a risk mitigation advisor like Creative Safety.
It is also imperative to understand the differences and onset of disasters: While the impacts of COVID-19 rolled out daily in March 2020, some disasters arrive with little to no warning. Earthquakes, wildfires, and terrorist attacks can happen without notice. Flooding, hurricanes, and critical infrastructure failures can disrupt years of planning.
Organizations must understand who their decision-makers are and what their chain of communication will be. While this may remain flexible and agile, knowing who should be in the room when a situation evolves helps reserve your effort for more important analysis and decision-making. If you’re an independent contractor or rely on a single/regular source of income, you should commit to sharpening your skills, growing your network, and having a personal preparedness plan.
To start, figure out what critical processes and functions your business provides. Most of us are in the entertainment industry and make shows happen, but the operational continuity of what we do comes down to a wide range of processes: ticketing, food & beverage, booking talent, operating venue(s), finance, administration, back-of-house maintenance, logistics, and more are all critical parts of our business continuity. All of these bring you to the most critical question of them all: What business interruptions are your “showstoppers”?
Risk Assessment
Now is an excellent time to update your organizational risk assessment. There are several resources available for conducting risk assessments, from resilience guidance to technology continuity best practices that apply to the industry. At its core, risk assessment is about determining likelihood and severity, then deciding what you can do about it.
What is the likelihood that your business could be impacted by a disaster, and if it was, how severe would it be?
What critical processes, functions, or knowledge do you need to operate?
What redundancies are in place, or are you pretty much a “one-man band”?
What can you do to mitigate that risk or prepare for the unknown?
What risks linger in the back of your mind that it might be time to address?
Remember what emergency managers call an “all hazards” approach, where the gray-sky day is less defined by the specifics of a disaster and more a readiness to meet whatever is coming at you.
Get Insight at All Levels
If you gather team members from across your organization and ask them to list examples of what can go wrong or where your vulnerabilities are, you will have an excellent, potentially imaginative list to start your risk assessment. While identifying risks, consider discussing existing plans, policies, and procedures you have in place as an informal tabletop exercise.
Discussing risk and action plans is an excellent way to increase overall organizational effectiveness. Tabletop exercises are often thought of as something we do to prepare for live event operations, but when was the last time you conducted one based on your own organizational continuity and vulnerabilities? Consider keeping them bite-sized with micro-discussions that can be part of regular meetings.
Surviving Interruption
Once you’ve completed an analysis of the services that are crucial to your organization and what the resulting impacts of interruption would be, figure out exactly how long you can afford downtime. For many organizations, especially in live entertainment, this is a challenging and uncomfortable question because it is likely expensive regardless of the scale of the production you are involved in.
How long can a tour retain staff and talent with pending cancellations, changing public health policies, or the consequences of a local natural disaster?
How can a venue employ its team if shows must be canceled or postponed?
What is your overhead, day by day and week by week?
How much does it cost to keep the lights on? What can the organization afford, and what determines your trigger point for making difficult decisions?
What processes do you rely on and perhaps “take for granted”? Some systems require regular operation to avoid damage, while others require a consistent level of throughput to maintain function (power, water, waste, fuel, etc.).
Do you have regular, recent, and readily usable backups of critical files? Are they stored on-site or at a different location?
Who’s in Charge Here?
Decide who is and isn’t leading organizational crisis decisions. It’s great to gather input, but not everyone needs to have a seat at the decision table. Figure out who your leadership is in advance, including those who control the financial resources and their key team members. It’s a good idea to identify roles and responsibilities ahead of time so everybody knows what they need to do, at least in a foreseeable crisis.
Discuss how communication is being handled both internally and externally. You may be part of an organization with a robust communications team, or you might be someone who wears a dozen hats. Either way, people are looking to leadership for credible, timely, and concise updates regularly.
Team-wide Resilience
Our industry is nothing without its workforce. We rely on talented individuals around the globe who share their skills with our entertainment community. That’s why it’s so important for live entertainment professionals to have a personal preparedness plan and a minimum of key supplies. Even if you’re traveling from show to show on the bus or catching flights, you can undertake a certain amount of personal and/or family planning to build your personal resiliency. For larger organizations, it’s important to support your staff so they can take care of themselves and their families and return to work. This reduces downtime and helps the overall health of the organization and our live entertainment community.
Recovery
After a disaster, what is your timeline for recovery? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? There’s no wrong answer, but it’s important to realize that the severity of the situation may have a crucial impact on your business function and how you serve your customers.
If you are an entertainment organization that relies on a freelance workforce that has scattered and been forced to move, how will that impact your budgeting or operational ability? What about maintaining critical resources?
How quickly can you scale your workforce?
If you lost team members, what knowledge, skills, and abilities did they have that would be very difficult to replace overnight?
Is there anyone on your team who is a one-size-fits-all solution to most problems?
Do you have alternate locations, suppliers, or vendors? If there’s an onboarding or scale-up time to work with them, when was the last time you had those discussions?
If you examine your production cycle, you may inevitably come back with questions and the identification of single points of failure. Start building resilience there.
Risk Transfer and Mitigation
Finally, a big part of managing risk, especially in the United States, comes down to the policies you have with your insurance providers. Knowing what they cover and whether your coverage is sufficient is important. Equally, it’s important to know what they don’t. Many insurers offer resources to their customers that help them evaluate their risk exposure.
Hopefully, the next crisis you face is just a matter of calling your team together, working through an adaptation of your plan (because nothing ever goes according to plan), and a successful recovery without significant loss. Should you find yourself in a more extended disaster, organizations that have had a plan in place are far more likely to recover than those that meet the disaster unprepared.
As a nation, our response to the last pandemic did not go spectacularly. Depending on where you live, the response either seemed reasonable, insufficient, or restrictive. As an industry, many of us adapted the best we could, but it’s unlikely that most of our industry could survive another pandemic without significant government or private support. Not every organization experienced the same disaster; we were all impacted, but some more than others. It’s not up to the live entertainment industry to determine the minimum common denominator among public health policies, but it is essential that we learn from past pandemics, knowing what we know about variances in public policy and human psychology's reaction to imposed orders. In fact, it’s important to study the impacts of just about any kind of likely disaster and determine how you can mitigate your risk. In other words, no one is coming to save us; no one is planning for us, and it’s up to us to have disaster action plans for survival.
We all remember 2020 and how it impacted our industry and each of us individually. Hopefully, we are more prepared the next time a disaster affects how we operate.
First, remain situationally aware. Seek factual information and avoid speculation.
Take the ESA pathogen-prepared professional course to gain training and resources.
Visit ready.gov to learn about personal & business preparedness. There are resources for team organization, personal training, disaster kits, & more.
Free templates are even available here and here. Additional training is available here.
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Doug Bruce leads operations for Creative Safety, an Austin-based event safety consultancy powered by TESS. Doug is a safety professional in the live entertainment industry with experience in crisis management and a master’s degree in emergency disaster management. He is a BCSP Certified Safety Professional and an NCS4 Certified Sport Security Professional. Doug is also a proud member of the Event Safety Alliance.