The other day Beatriz Portela (workmate belonging to the
Tiger Team) surprised me with the following theme: “I’ve subscribed myself to a theater courses about improvisation” I immediately
ask her: “Is it possible to learn how to
improvise? , Could we use this concept in Business Continuity?”
It’s very curious
that most workmates in the industry are agree with that it doesn’t matter how
complete are the continuity plans, it doesn’t matter the level of awareness would
be the organization and it doesn’t matter the number of tests and training that
we had carried out, real scenarios usually are worst than the worse expected
scenario. Then, shouldn’t we practice improvisation?
A lot of business
continuity test and trainings are aligned with plans stabilized in the
companies, and this is OK, but being realistic, fire is not always affecting in
the same way, hurricanes doesn’t cause
the same damage and people who are supposed to act in an incident could have
the mobile out of service. So, could be the strictness of plans incompatible
with an adequate crisis management? Obviously not, but what is sure is that we
have to be prepared in order than in every moment of a crisis it could happen an
unexpected event and our response team has to be prepared to respond in the
better way.
Going deep in
the improvisation techniques, two fundamental concepts are practiced in Performing
Arts:
- Listening: It’s difficult to adapt to a situation if is not attended by oneself. In case of business continuity, we should be aware to possible changes that can be done in the plan, being aware of it at all times.
- Acceptance + proposition: understand the situation, accept it and make proposals based on it, that is, and answer that manage what has happened. In improvisation there is no room for denial; if something has happened, it’s not the moment identify why of looking for causes, but to respond in order to redirect the situation.
In a globalized world where there
are a lot of cultures close to improvisation and other cultures stricter, is
important to learn how to react in a joint way against the unexpected events
that can occur. In order to do that we
should think about convenience of introduce in the business continuity teams
training plans, improvisation practices that can help to deal with this circumstances.
Perhaps introducing these simulation activities for example different plans combining
between them or include bizarre situations, can help in real crisis scenarios to
our teams to be better prepared and react in a proper way. This can help to understand
each role and their responsibility, knowing their improvisation scope.
What is clear is that there is not possible to foresee everything and we want to provide resilience to our business, so there is no other way: we have to practice improvisation.
