Search
Close this search box.

What you need to know about crisis incidents and how HR can mitigate the risks

In his seminal work, The Black Swan, author Nicholas Nassim Taleb uses the discovery of black swans, following the European discovery of Australasia, to conceptually represent the idea of complete unpredictability.
police

In his seminal work, The Black Swan, author Nicholas Nassim Taleb uses the discovery of black swans, following the European discovery of Australasia, to conceptually represent the idea of complete unpredictability. Until that moment, ornithologists had simply taken it as a for-granted practice that all swans were white; why wouldn’t they? Up until then perceived wisdom clearly dictated that is what swans were. From Nicholas Kleanthous, Marketing Manager – YUDU.

A “Black Swan” therefore is shorthand for something unanticipated by the vast majority of people, and the more unpredictable an event – the larger, and importantly, more volatile a Black Swan it is. The events of September 11th were a Black Swan of perhaps unparalleled proportions over the past two decades, Donald Trump’s election was also a more recent Black Swan, as was Brexit.

We also have a habit, as humans, of rationalising such events ex post facto as something that everyone should have seen but were somehow, inexplicably, blinded from doing so – Taleb astutely employs the example of airport and aeroplane security particularly reinforced metal doors to the flight deck following the events of 9/11 to illustrate this peculiar quirk of our nature. Immediately after the event, the narrative across all channels became: “how did we not see the ostensibly obvious? Everyone knew that security was lacklustre, no?” when the reality was, prior to the events of that day, very few people, even in the airline industry itself, gave much mind to how well reinforced the flight-deck door was and even if they did, certainly didn’t anticipate how the planes were used on that day.

Taleb’s point in illustrating this concept is to create a corollary to idea of knowledge; that is if knowledge represents the ways in which we use a prior understanding of the world to blithely arrogate to ourselves prescience about the ways in which it could change – or not (think financial analysis as an exemplification of this sort of thinking) then antiknowledge represents “focusing on what we do not know”, perhaps in its most simple form simply by being aware to just how fragile a lot of highly complex institutions are in our world.

So why is all of this relevant to the issue of a company looking to make itself more resilient? One of Taleb’s central points early on in The Black Swan is to underscore how as the complexity of a society increases, the number of potential black swans increases logarithmically. This makes sense, as civilization has become more advanced, the number of disciplines and sub-disciplines (and sub-sub disciplines) in the STEM and other related fields (the ones that tend to drive productivity) have grown enormously. Interdependency between different “parts” of this global system that has been created has consequently increased and the result of this is that the number of unpredictable black swans events grows larger.

Compare our present circumstances to the Neolithic world, some 5,000 years ago, where the height of complexity was the adoption of crude farming instruments that were made with materials sourced almost certainly within a five mile radius. In such a world, unpredictability, while not beyond the realm of possibility (think of the boundless conquests of Central Asian nomads from the 11th century onwards), is certainly orders of magnitude below what it is today. In such an environment as ours, is there any sure-fire way of guaranteeing complete resilience to black swans? No. And anyone who tells you otherwise is surely consciously lying, or simply ignorant. What we can do is adopt some basic broad-level anti-knowledge strategies that understand the inherent chaos of unpredictability and plan accordingly.

You’re probably already familiar with the idea of redundancies; systems an organisation can invoke in the event of a major crisis or black swan event. Perhaps the most established example of a tried and tested redundancy plan is the use of papers and pencils in the event of an unexpected blackout, server outage or something similar. The reversion to this is in part because of the tangibility of these systems, they rely entirely on real world objects rather than intangible, complex and often more fragile systems. It’s a clumsy point of comparison but consider the amount of work required to maintain a piece of marble with an inscription on it to a large web server, simplicity and less interdependency with other systems is less fragile.

So the increasingly chaotic and fragile nature of corporate ecosystems is necessitating some rethinking on this matter, certainly we need software to kick in and act as a back-up in the event of primary platforms and systems going down, but what sort of software systems can act as redundancies in their own right? Logically something that exists independently of your existing security infrastructure would be well placed, but what sort of functionality should it provide?

Perceived wisdom would teach us to create redundant systems that replicate all the existing functionality of existing ones, but placing too much dependency on any electronic system is a dangerous game, so from a crisis management perspective it makes sense to only use a contingency system for the most critical of all tasks – primarily communication with staff and business continuity documentation that instructs said staff what to actually do. Consider, how much less fragile is a system that gives airline staff a simple checklist on his or her smartphone, in the form of a digital document, on how to handle passenger check-in as opposed to a secondary electronic system in its own right? Moving forward, finding that balance between the traditional and the complex may again prove to be the best way of ensuring security and resilience in businesses and organisations.

YUDU are a software firm that specialize in comms and content delivery solutions. If you’d like to learn more about crisis communication solutions then head on over to http://sentinel.yudu.com or email YUDU directly at sentinel@yudu.com

Read more

Latest News

Read More

AI’s Impact on the Workplace: A Survey of American Managers

27 March 2024

Newsletter

Receive the latest HR news and strategic content

Please note, as per the GDPR Legislation, we need to ensure you are ‘Opted In’ to receive updates from ‘theHRDIRECTOR’. We will NEVER sell, rent, share or give away your data to third parties. We only use it to send information about our products and updates within the HR space To see our Privacy Policy – click here

Latest HR Jobs

University of Cambridge – Judge Business SchoolSalary: £32,332 to £38,205 pa, pro rata

University of Cambridge – Judge Business SchoolSalary: £29,605 to £33,966 pa, pro rata

University of Oxford – Blavatnik School of GovernmentSalary: Grade 5: £28,759 – £33,966 per annum (with a discretionary range to £37,099)

Software Development Director (Exec Team Seat). Remote Working with Ellesmere Port Office-Based Minimum 1 Day Per Week. + Contribution towards membership fees. £120,000 – £140,000

Read the latest digital issue of theHRDIRECTOR for FREE

Read the latest digital issue of theHRDIRECTOR for FREE