Workshops

Our workshops get individuals and groups at all levels, to realise and practice Crisis Management, Business Continuity planning, dealing with the media or just handling people with sensitivity.

We plan with you focused sessions that exactly fit your organisation and produce tangible results. Not just talking shops about theories.

All of our workshops are designed and lead by highly experienced consultants using some of the most up to date techniques, case studies and real-time experiences applied by us since we were formed in 1995. For example:

All of us when suddenly faced with any catastrophe demonstrate the tendency from the outset to try and follow routine or familiar references, sometimes just to keep sane. A sort of displacement action in a world that has suddenly turned upside down. The more disturbing the situation the stronger the urge to take refuge in familiar procedures. Yet such procedures are going to be the most inappropriate ones to take since familiar procedures do not work for unfamiliar situations. We will help you undertand this and become much better crisis managers as a result.

Several organisations have actually increased investment potential by successfully demonstrating strong crisis leadership as a positive feature of wide scale crisis management in the 'abrupt audit' of a real drama. For example, British Midland in 1989, Commercial Union in 1992, and Nokia in 2000. We will explore with you how and why this happened.

In all cases timely, inspirational and effective crisis leadership and good communications positively enhanced the organisation’s reputation. In others, such as the Exxon Valdez or the Coca Cola contamination in Belgium, failure to properly lead and communicate did untold damage.

It is not just the actions you take but the actions you are seen to take. Often the real threat to corporate reputation has come not from what has happened but from what people think has happened.

Our internal control procedures often have a clumsy fit with reality and reveal that all too often we work in a stove pipe or silo based culture that does not unite well in a real crisis. Sometimes it seems we have no choice (e.g. regulatory requirements), but in real situations the dots need to be much more joined up to make us more resilient at corporate level. We will explain how to do this.

By far the majority of crises are still caused by otherwise preventable risks such as fires, floods, sabotage by disgruntled employees, poor communication, ignoring the rules and goodness knows how many other banana skins that are out their waiting to trip you up.