Published this month, BS 11200:2014 is the new BSI (British Standards Institution) Guidance and Good Practice on Crisis Management, designed to help top managers in an organisation implement and develop a crisis management capability. It is intended for any organisation regardless of location, size, type, industry or sector.

Crisis management is the process by which an organisation deals with a major event that threatens to harm itself, its stakeholders, or the general public. Depending on its nature, a single crisis could threaten to harm one or more organisations and such harm could include physical damage and/or damage to things like reputation or brand image. Examples of a major event are the BP oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 and the Twin Towers attack of 11th September 2001.

In contrast to risk management, which involves assessing potential threats and finding the best ways to avoid them materialising, crisis management involves planning for and dealing with material threats i.e. identifying, assessing, understanding, and coping with a serious situation, particularly from the first moment it occurs to the start of the recovery process.

There are three common elements in any crisis -  

• threat to the organisation
• surprise
• short decision time

By developing a crisis management capability, the short decision time can be used to maximum effect, the element of surprise can be both reduced and made less debilitating and the threat to the organisation, whilst unlikely to be capable of complete removal, can be reduced as much as possible.

Our expert Roger Gomm was involved in helping to develop the new standard. If you would like to know more about how we could help your organisation to develop a sound crisis management capability and/or more about the standard itself please contact us. 

Our Toolkit - Enhancing Performance

Because environments and markets are continually changing, to continue to perform at optimum levels you always need to be one step ahead of the game and to understand how changes will affect your whole organisation.  Are you able to predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, how future changes, both internal and external, will impact on your organisation and its performance or could you do with some advice or guidance in this?  

We have a number of tools that can be used to help, but gaining the very best levels of performance is a complex process that cannot be achieved by the simple application of one or more off-the-shelf tools or techniques. If it were that simple, all organisations would be performing at optimum level!  

To have a look in more detail about the type of tools you could use and how we can help you use them most effectively, click here.