While companies are increasingly thinking about how to handle disasters, and implementing plans designed to minimize the impact, there still frequently remains a gap between the perceptions of management, and those who will need to use those plans to react.
Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Juliette Kayyem, faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, offers some insights into how companies can truly evaluate or understand their preparedness. Focusing on three areas, positioning, access, and unity of effort, Kayyem suggests the benefits that companies could yield from better integrating security into their core leadership, noting that too often, those in charge of security are only given the power to suggest, rather than enforce changes.
Similarly, Kayyem notes it is not uncommon for communications between CEOs and key security personnel to be infrequent, creating the impression that security is not a critical function within the organization, which can lead to gaps in risk policies and oversights in security budgets.
Finally, Kayyem speaks of the importance of integrating security and risk into the unified company, ensuring that it considered in all activities, as disasters in one area can quickly cascade through other key functions, resulting in much more severe effects originally suspected.
Source:
https://hbr.org/2022/03/design-your-organization-to-withstand-future-disasters
