I was in Croatia when the alert went out. The first I knew about it was a flurry of messages from friends back home, then the memes, then a few clients asking whether they should be doing anything differently. Nobody’s phone in our group had gone off, because none of us were on a UK
The Wildfire Alert, and What it Raises Read More »
This afternoon, a power failure at a communications centre brought major disruption to rail services across the Midlands and north-west England. Avanti West Coast, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, London Northwestern, Northern, TransPennine Express and Transport for Wales were all affected. Not one operator having a bad day. Seven, at once, because of a single point
There’s a proposal working its way through the planning system at the moment that deserves more attention from a business continuity perspective than it’s currently getting. Peak Cluster is a carbon capture and storage scheme that would take CO2 from cement and lime works in Derbyshire and Staffordshire and move it 120-odd miles by pipeline,
Peak Cluster and the CO2 Pipeline: the business continuity conversation nobody’s having Read More »
I’ve been away for a week, which means the blog has been quiet and there is a genuinely biblical quantity of laundry currently taking over the house. The one thing keeping me cheerful through it has been the Commonwealth Games, which we went to see at Glasgow over the last six days. The Tollcross ticketing
What the Commonwealth Games Taught Me About Deploying Resource Read More »
A 74-Year-Old Wreck Just Explained Why Your Safety Briefing Exists Last month a sonar drone found the wreckage of a Pan American Airways aircraft two thousand feet down off Puerto Rico. The Clipper Endeavor had been missing since 11 April 1952, when it lost several engines shortly after take-off and went into the Atlantic with
A 74-Year-Old Wreck Just Explained Why Your Safety Briefing Exists Read More »
I spent a chunk of last weekend scrolling through risk management job vacancies, out of nothing more than professional nosiness (and a need to avoid 24/7 football). It’s not as if the confusion over what “risk” actually means was news to me — I’ve spent the best part of two decades watching it play out
Risk means different things to Different People. That’s the whole problem. Read More »
What the Sats Marking Crisis Tells Us About Third-Party Contract Handovers Every July, Year 6 pupils across England find out how they did in their Sats. This year, a lot of schools found out how their exam board did instead, and the answer wasn’t good. Pearson took over the £180 million Sats marking contract from
What the Sats Marking Crisis Tells Us About Third-Party Contract Handovers Read More »
In my experience, organisations that come to me for consultancy often share a similar story. They had a business continuity plan in place, sometimes one they had developed internally, sometimes one built by a previous consultant. Something went wrong, and nobody invoked it. Not because the disruption was trivial, but because nobody felt confident enough
Your Business Continuity Plan Exists. So Why Did Nobody Use It? Read More »
The five standards worth knowing about ISO Spaghetti: Why the Standards Landscape Is Confusing (and What to Do About It) I have lost count of the number of tender documents I have reviewed that specify ISO 22301 and ISO 27001 and ISO 31000, sometimes with ISO 22361 thrown in for good measure. Occasionally all four
ISO Spaghetti: Why the Standards Landscape Is Confusing (and What to Do About It) Read More »
The latest CIR Magazine article, Black swan risks rise amid geopolitical strain, highlights a growing concern across the risk and resilience profession: the term “black swan” is being used so loosely that it is losing all meaning. According to the Allianz Risk Barometer, 69% of UK respondents identified a global internet outage as the country’s […]
Why We Need to Stop Calling Everything a Black Swan Read More »
