That Escalated Quickly

What’s the intention of running an exercise to test your organisation’s crisis management capability? How do you prepare for and run an effective exercise? What are the things you need to consider? Is there a difference between training and exercising? Who should be involved? These are some of the questions Escalate Consulting’s Josh Roach and Will Hetherington try to answer in Episode 4 of That Escalated Quickly, which we’ve called My Exercise Is Bigger Than Yours! Given his extensive experience with large-scale exercises, Josh has some insights you won’t hear anywhere else.

Crisis leadership is a very different thing to everyday leadership, so why do so many managers and business leaders just assume or expect that they’ll be able to be at their best when things go wrong? In this week’s episode of That Escalated Quickly, Simon Petie and Will Hetherington discuss how organisations need to consciously build capability in disruption management, and not only at the executive level. Many organisations might not even understand who needs to be involved in a crisis response, let alone what roles those people will need to play when the time comes... let alone whether they’ll actually be capable under pressure during a disruptive event. When you are preparing your people, there’s a significant difference between micro-simulations which allow a few staff to practice a particular response and a full-blown simulation exercise that tests every aspect of how you would handle a disruption from start to finish.

What’s a smouldering crisis and what makes it different from an unexpected crisis event? In this episode of That Escalated Quickly, Trent and Briony talk through all the things that make a smouldering crisis not only challenging to manage but potentially even more impactful than a single crisis event. While you may not be familiar with the term, there’s no doubt that you’ve been aware of some high-profile examples of smouldering crises over recent years. Trent and Briony discuss how an organisation decides when something that might be bubbling away internally reaches the threshold to be considered a crisis and the sorts of things that might trigger that designation. If you’re wondering how serious a smouldering crisis might become, think criminal charges. It’s serious and it’s scary and you simply can’t afford to be unprepared ... so don’t put off hitting ‘play’ on this fascinating discussion! Listen to Episode 2 of That Escalated Quickly now via Apple and Google podcasts, Spotify, Facebook and YouTube.

We're excited to launch the new Escalate Consulting podcast, That Escalated Quickly. Join Simon, Trent, and Briony as they discuss the basic concepts of resilience and explain how a consultant can help an organisation get started with its resilience journey. They talk about what motivates organisations to initiate resilience policies, programs, and practices, how they identify any gaps, and how they get buy-in from across the business. Taking things further, what could be the consequences of not understanding, mitigating, and managing risk in your business? And what's the danger of making assumptions that aren't grounded in reality?