An Ounce of Prevention

Allan Bonner

Description

With more than 100 check lists, diagrams, charts, tables, forms and pre-written documents, this is the comprehensive guide to a crisis plan that you need. Conversational prose makes complex concepts in risk and crisis management easily accessible. Case studies and anecdotes from real-life incidents remind readers of the dos and don'ts of crisis management.

When you hear the expression, "He wrote the book on crisis management"-this is the book. This book had its origins in the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Dr. Bonner had trained responders who went to Alaska and was then commissioned to design and execute major oil spills for the oil industry and coast guard on both coast of North America. Seeing that their crisis plans were not adequate, clients then commissioned new plans from scratch. This plan has been polished, re-written, researched and tested in the diplomatic corps, with the military, trade officials, hospitals, police forces, off-shore drilling companies, mining companies and many other high need clients on five continents over 15 years.

Sujets

• Risk Assessment
• Gestion et management
• Insurance
• Economics
• Business
• Management

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 17 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781926755083
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Also by the author:
Doing and Saying the Right Thing:
Professional Risk and Crisis Management
Media Relations
Speaking, Writing and Presenting in SOCKOs®
Strategic Overriding Communications Knowledge Objectives
Political Columns
Behind the Scenes with Powerful People
Tough Love at the Table
Power, Culture and Diversity in Negotiations, Mediation and Conflict Resolution
Political Conventions
The Art of Getting Elected and Governing

 
An Ounce of Prevention
 
First printing, November, 2010
 
Published by Sextant Publishing, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
 
© 2014 Dr. Allan Bonner, MA, MSc, LLM
 
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law and is forbidden.
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN 978-1-926755-08-3
 
 
For educational or institutional discounts or for information
about seminars and speeches, please contact:
Sextant Publishing, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
or
www.allanbonner.com
1-877-484-1667
Preface from the Publisher
Allan’s book Tough Love at the Table (Sextant Publishing, 2008) deals with conflict resolution. He begins the first chapter with the sentences: “Disputes are thieves. They rob us of time, energy and money. Disputes can even lead to death. Preventing disputes and resolving them quickly is imperative.”
Those sentences could have been about risks and crises.
It is a cliche of modern times that we are experiencing more crises than ever before. They last longer and have deeper effects. There are many reasons for this: instant communication, 24-hour news, a better educated population, workplace rights and so on.
I live in a jurisdiction with one of the most controversial energy projects in the world: the Alberta oil sands. Criticism from environmental protesters and Hollywood stars triggers multi-million-dollar PR responses from the Alberta government. That’s a crisis affecting all taxpayers and workers. It also affects energy users in the United States.
I live in a country that spent a billion dollars hosting the G20 and G8 meetings. We were on the world’s stage briefly, regrettably with images of vandalism and clashes between police and protesters.
The principles in Allan’s new book would have reduced or eliminated both problems. His notion of risk management long before an event, and the sound principles of crisis management if a problem does occur, could have saved money, jobs, image and injury. In fact Allan was interviewed for news programs about the G20 meetings and argued that they could be held on a military base, at the UN in New York or even on a floating facility ringed with security.
This book is in keeping with Sextant Publishing’s commitment to fostering intelligent discussion of important public-policy issues. But it goes a step further. This is also a prescription for staying safer, protecting property, saving lives and maintaining a positive reputation.
Long before a crisis hits, the checklists, diagrams and tables will ensure that organizations are better prepared. The companion DVD, containing many dozens of these tools, can be divided up among crisis managers to assemble a several-hundred-page plan from scratch in short order.
Your crisis plan can benefit from the many case studies in this book.
Allan has chosen some in which he was involved, some that are very well known, a few obscure ones—but all with serious lessons to teach. He also tackles the controversial issue of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the very difficult task of negotiating with stakeholders, risk communication and the aftermath of many crises—the public inquiry.
I’m pleased that the principles of effective risk and crisis management that Allan uses for his private clients can now be accessible and affordable for all organizations, regardless of size, need or budget.
J. (Ken) Chapman
K. Sextant Publishing
L. Edmonton, Alberta
Foreword
I’m not sure if I should credit luck, chance, thought or hard work for my now being in the crisis-management business. The main thing I knew in my early career as a journalist was that spokespeople needed clear, newsworthy messages to get booked on and to thrive on my radio and TV programs. Most didn’t have clear messages, and it was a mystery to me why. Within a couple of years of starting my media training business, I was training responders who went to the Valdez, Alaska oil spill and people in the chemical industry reacting to the tragic release in Bhopal, India.
Following these events, my clients asked me to conduct crisis simulations to test their abilities to respond to unexpected events. I designed and delivered oil spill, sour-gas explosion, fire and chemical release simulations in four jurisdictions on both coasts of North America.
The companies mobilized hundreds of responders.
The simulations did their jobs and revealed that corporate crisis plans wouldn’t work in real events. So I was asked to write a crisis plan that would fill in the gaps. I had hoped to find a template in a library or with an industry association. I didn’t. I’ll never forget writing the crisis plan from scratch—for about two weeks at my dining-room table. I kept thinking up what tasks would be required— especially the ones that had not been handled well during the simulations I ran. This was the beginning of my philosophy of concentrating on capabilities, not job descriptions or causes.
After this great professional-development experience, I worked with peace-keepers in Cyprus, ran an earthquake simulation in Tokyo and participated in military war games. I also conducted tabletop simulations with a broad range of public and private-sector organizations on five continents. About half of my time over the past twenty-five years has been spent responding to incidents as they happened. I get calls that begin with:
• Police are on their way to charge an employee with theft. Will you come to ... ?
• A camera crew is on the lawn of a facility that emits nuclear radiation ...
• A TV network is doing a one-hour expose in ten days ...
• A national newspaper will be exposing a same-sex sexual-harassment case in the morning ...
• A town will be gobbled up by the big city nearby in a week ...
All these experiences caused me to enrich this document every time my colleagues and I re-wrote it for new clients. My other priceless professional development experience began on a trip to the U.K. My wife, public broadcaster Lorna Jackson, handed me information about Leicester University’s postgraduate programs in Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management. I had been toying with the idea of studying risk and crisis management in the faculties of environmental studies or public policy. With Leicester, I found a comprehensive curriculum: 2,000 pages of reading, lots of books, six 4,000-word essays to write and a 20,000-word dissertation. We studied quantitative risk assessment, the history of jurisprudence, risk engineering, crowd control, systems theory and dozens of crisis cases. The interesting thing about the cases is that they were not the usual ones we study in North America. I was reading about Walton Town Centre, the Happy Valley Racecourse Fire, King’s Cross Underground, the Iranian Embassy hostage-taking, Flixborough, the Commercial Union bombing and so on.
British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said all crises are the same. He might have been exaggerating, but there are lessons to be learned from any event. There’s little difference between the fires that have occurred in theatres in Montreal (Laurier Palace) and Chicago (the Iroquois), nightclubs in Boston (the Coconut Grove) and Rhode Island over a period of about 100 years. They all featured locked exit doors, stampedes and crushes of patrons, flammable materials and so on. How people behave, responders react, lawyers sue, media report and courts rule are often common to all events.
My experience at Leicester caused more rewrites of this crisis plan. I added case studies, bullet points and the most important aspects from my essays and research. I owe Leicester a debt of gratitude. I know that readers can’t access the Scarman Centre for the Study of Public Order (SCSPO) documents I studied, but I want to acknowledge the comprehensive and inspirational character of the curriculum materials at Leicester. You can access Leicester papers on the university’s website and can listen, read and watch more through my other books, CDs and DVDs, which are outlined at the back of this book.
The best way for readers to turn this into their own crisis plans is with the companion DVD. The most exciting part of the DVD is the 80 or so pages of charts, tables, lists and documents that you can customize for your particular situation. You can also send the DVD to sites around the country or the world for local customization. The task of filling in the tables can be spread among multiple employees. One person can take responsibility for collating the results and looking for anomalies, economies of scale or problem areas. The DVD also contains some video clips for private study. Together, this book and the DVD are the most powerful tools to put a plan in place, revise it regularly, test it and respond to a crisis if needed. I hope they’re not needed.
Aversion of this work is available in French. Une version de cette oeuvre est disponible en ffamjais.
Allan Bonner
Lord Beaverbrook Hotel
Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada Summer,
2010
Introduction
An organization must recognize the need to be as prepared as possible for crises and controversies. This book, and the companion DVD, are templates to use in preparing both corporate and site-specific crisis-management plans. The DVD contains charts, tables, lists and text that y