Crisis management

I was chatting with a former colleague over coffee yesterday, and he was recounting how his company recently went through a business continuity exercise. When I say “exercise”, I mean that his company lost power to their offices for a number of days and they had to work out what the hell to do.

They’re a smallish business, probably in the tens of staff, and so of course they didn’t have a business continuity plan. But they muddled through, got stuff sorted out, and at the end of it all it seems like they all got to know each other much better and it formed bonds which didn’t exist before. It sounds like the sort of thing that will be talked about in a fond “blitz-spirit” kind of way for many years to come. Proper team building, as it were.

Which got us speculating on a new form of team building exercise – the “Cut the Power” exercise. One morning, unannounced, some sort of major calamity is engineered and people have to muddle through, work things out, and get stuff sorted. I can’t see many companies having the balls to accept this challenge – but if you are, I’ll pop round with a JCB and a pickaxe to kill your mains supply at a data and time to be agreed…