Disruption-proof Your Business - Essential Continuity Planning Tips

Marie Manning: Hello everyone, and welcome to this LinkedIn Live. I'm Marie Manning. I work in the training services division of the Red Cross. As you probably know, that's the division that handles all our training programs, first aid, CPR, basic life support, advanced life support, et cetera. I'm really glad that you're joining us today. I also want to let you know that we will be opening this up for questions at the end or even throughout the live today. And so please drop your comments if you hear something that resonates with you, put any questions into the chat box that you have on the right-hand side of your screen.

So this is our second LinkedIn Live featuring the experts who advise the Red Cross on the science behind our programs. They're members of our Scientific Advisory Council and their role on the council is to ensure that what you learn is based on the latest and best in science. So this is Preparedness Month and last week to recognize Preparedness Month, we conducted a live about the crucial first steps to take in a medical emergency. This week we're taking this discussion to business and talking about preparing for a disaster and what businesses need to do in this area.

I'm sure that there will be some overlap between things that businesses do and things that people should do, but really we're going to shine a light here on businesses. So without further ado, let me introduce you to today's guest. I'm going to read from my notes here. We're sitting here with Michael Kleeman. He chairs the Disaster Cycle Sub-council of the Red Cross Scientific Advisory Council. He's a senior fellow at the University of California San Diego, and he works with the School of International Relations and its affiliated Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation. His current activities focus on ecosystem services and sustainability, emerging markets, communications, and the utilization of mobile devices in healthcare.

That's really interesting, and I might ask you a question or two that were not on our list of prepared questions for you. So we truly will be live, Michael in that area. He's been involved with numerous technology companies in North America, Europe, and Africa as an advisor and an executive. He's also worked extensively in environmental areas advising the Natural Capital Project at Stanford and numerous firms in technology and communications.

So Michael, I think we've captured a lot of your background. You have a deep well of expertise, so I'm really glad that we were able to make the time to chat us today about business continuity and disaster planning.

Michael Kleeman: Happy to be here. Thank you.

Marie Manning: Good, good, good. So I gave a quick bio just now, but it was something I read off the page. So can I ask you to briefly describe your background again and your experience in disaster management in a way that would be easily understood and in plain English, if you will?

Michael Kleeman: Sure. So I've been involved working on issues around disaster and then resilience for around 30 years. As you read, a lot of my background has been global and working in areas related to technology and communications. And one of the things that we rely on are critical infrastructures like power, telephone service, internet, et cetera. And one of my... what I've been doing probably for this entire time, if not longer, is actually working hard to design and then build resilient communications networks that will survive when there are shocks.

And I just, in the last six months had probably the most unusual experience I've ever had. Spent the last six months working as the interim chief engineer for the largest phone company in Alaska. And we actually had a community cut off from communications because a bear decided to chew through a fiber optic cable.

Marie Manning: That's a first-

Michael Kleeman: That's a failure mode I hadn't anticipated.

Marie Manning: Well, I think you have a good background to handle that. And what inspired you to go into this line of work where you'll be meeting up with bears occasionally?

Michael Kleeman: Well, if you look at what holds our society together, there are social binds and bindings and the things that sort of keep individuals together. But all of us are deeply reliant on the set of critical infrastructures. Energy is one of them, dominantly electricity, but also petrochemical fuels. Try to heat your home without some kind of energy in the winter and you realize it's really challenging. And you can see, for instance, what's going on in the Ukraine, where attacking the energy infrastructure is literally a form of disrupting the society. And the other is telecommunications.

And it just always seemed to me that this was an important social good, connecting people digitally. And then also doing it right and economically has actually become an essential part of the fabric of our society. We take for granted that we can do this kind of video call. During COVID we had entire economies supported by telework. And if you don't have basic connectivity, you can't do this. And in fact, it's interesting, I got a notice from my internet service provider this morning saying there may be an interruption today. And if that had happened, I couldn't be on here. Luckily they called an hour ago, said they were done with the work.

So I decided this is an area I can contribute. It's interesting and fun. I get to work with a lot of really amazing and committed people around the world.

Marie Manning: That's great to hear. And I'm also glad to hear that your internet got back before this live.

Michael Kleeman: All right.

Marie Manning: It definitely is something that we wouldn't be prepared for.

Michael Kleeman: Yep.

Marie Manning: So let's talk a little bit about preparing or assessing the readiness of an organization for potential disasters. How do you do that?

Michael Kleeman: Well, so let me describe it in general first and then I'm going to do a call out to a Red Cross program, which we've been developing and deploying for decades. And so I think what happens, as I said one of the things that's really important for any business owner to understand is we are for the most part, very fortunate in that the underlying infrastructures we rely on are incredibly reliable. So we almost take them for granted. When I was doing work in South Africa, we would have rolling blackouts all of the time, and you wouldn't know when you would have power. So almost everyone had emergency generators.

But in the United States, we're really fortunate that most of our infrastructures are highly reliable and we're surprised when they go out. It's news when a hurricane destroys power for people for two weeks. I mean, if you go to some countries around the world, that wouldn't be news. It would be the day-to-day life. So what business owners need to understand is your business is dependent on a lot of these basic infrastructures and also the facilities that you operate in. And that it's worthwhile doing an exercise where you assume and think about what would happen if these were compromised, and what kinds of planning do I need to make to allow business continuity to occur even in the face of disruptions?

So it can be something as simple as, "Assume the power may go out, I'm going to get an emergency generator." Or, "Assume my basic telecommunications will go out, I'll do some kind of satellite backup." But then you've got, "What happens if my building gets severely damaged and I'm a retailer?" So you really need to think about those kinds of things systemically and then begin to make plans. And then the most important thing is to remember that every business is dependent upon the people that make it work. And so, business continuity is not just an issue around physical and technical assets, but also human beings.

Marie Manning: Right. And that probably is also one of the least able to be completely prepared for. Is that not correct?

Michael Kleeman: It's very difficult unless you do it with intention. I mean, if you look at companies that do some of these things very well, I'm going to call out the energy industry in the Gulf Coast. Big facilities, refineries, ports, et cetera, very vulnerable to storms if they have a direct hit. I mean, if you've ever seen a refinery, it is a lot of things that can get damaged. And then people that are needed to keep it running all the time. And that industry worries about the housing of its people, the transport of its people, and actually makes emergency plans in many cases to make certain that their employees and their families are safe and can rapidly cover if there is some kind of incident. And I think that they may be on the extreme edge, obviously the military thinks about that as sort of a basic function. Most companies are fortunate that they don't have to worry about that, but we all should.

Marie Manning: Yeah. All right. Let's continue discussing about business continuity, and how do you identify and evaluate potential risks? Obviously with an energy company that's down in the Gulf, the risks seem obvious. But let's say I'm a small business owner in Washington, DC. How do I start looking at it and saying, "What are my risks and how do I plan for them"?

Michael Kleeman: Well, I think that as I said earlier, there are the first step and I will actually call out the Ready Rating Program because there's some wonderful tools in that that sort of guide businesses through thinking about this.

Marie Manning: Tell me... I'm going to interject for a second, tell our listeners who may not know about the Ready Rating Program what it is.

Michael Kleeman: Okay. So the Ready Rating program, and you can actually find it if you go online to readyrating.us, is a wide range of resources. Thank you. Okay. Is it us or org?

Marie Manning: It's org.

Michael Kleeman: It's us, sorry.

Marie Manning: It's org.

Michael Kleeman: It's both.

Marie Manning: It's both. Yeah.

Michael Kleeman: You can get to it from both. But it's a wide range of resources, including checklists and videos, et cetera, aimed at a full range of different kinds of businesses that allow people to evaluate their readiness in the face of a disaster. So I think the way it was designed... So this can be an intimidating thing for anyone to face. And so Ready Rating was intentionally designed to do three things, I believe. One is make it not intimidating or frightening. These are simple steps, most people can do them, they're not really expensive and you just need to begin to think about it.

Two, to both look at the vulnerabilities that you might have. And that's one of the key skills of sort assessing where you could be at risk. That's part of the rating. And then what have you or could you do to mitigate those risks? And if you think about it as a digital resource, that is a training program, a set of checklists, a set of pointers to different resources. It's sort of a complete toolkit for a small and medium business owner to begin to evaluate how much they are at risk and then what would they need to do to mitigate those risks, and ensure their continuity of operations.

Marie Manning: So I'd like to dig into two of those three areas. The first one being evaluating your risks. How do I go about doing that if I'm a business, a small business, medium-sized business?

Michael Kleeman: Well, the first thing is to look at the activities in your business and identify some basic things. Are you a customer-facing business with a physical retail interface? Do you have physical inventory? How dependent are you on electricity? How dependent are you on... If you're a retailer and you lose your communications links, does that mean you'll have to shut down or do you have alternate ways of doing it? You could move to a credit card reader on your cell phone if you had to. So think about the different elements that make up your business. And one of the easy ways to do that, by the way, is to literally look at who do you pay bills for every month as a set of resources that you purchase.

Marie Manning: Interesting.

Michael Kleeman: Yeah. As I said, most of us are spoiled. We don't have to think about this. So if you want a mind jog, and that's why the Ready Rating checklists are so good, they'll actually walk you through it. But think about, "Okay, what are the tools that I use every day that if I didn't have them, I would have problems maintaining my normal continuity of operations in my business?"

Marie Manning: Got it.

Michael Kleeman: And then think about what could possibly compromise those. And the main thing would be a severe storm. If I'm in Washington, DC I probably have three or four risks. One is the threat of a terrorist event. DC has to be sensitive to that, which may actually cause disruption to foot traffic or other kinds of things, may not be able to get my employees in, but it may also mean your customers wouldn't go there. But then severe storms are much more likely to compromise power and communications.

And then supply chain disruptions would be the other thing. We saw during COVID that was a real issue, that that really is something. Everything could be perfectly fine in Washington, but at the warehouse that feeds your retail operation 80 miles or 100 miles away, they could be facing a severe flood, you wouldn't get a delivery. So you just really need to think about what are the things that enable you to do your business, and then what are the material threats that could compromise it? And then that's how you sort of assess your risk.

Marie Manning: Now the other part that you mentioned was mitigating or accounting for these risks. And so, what I'd like to do is are there some universal first steps that you should take in the event of a business emergency, such as what you're describing?

Michael Kleeman: Well, I think there's... First of all, there's an important concept that the people all really understand, which is this concept of all hazards. I live on the West Coast of the United States and we are blessed probably with every conceivable hazard, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, tsunamis, et cetera. Washington, DC doesn't face all of them. But the reality is preparing for any one of these probably gives you 90% of what you need to prepare for any.

And so, you need to think about what you could do that would mitigate the loss of any one of those things. So do you have battery backup for power in your facility, if the power was interrupted for eight or 12 hours, could you keep on operating? Or at the very least, if you have technologies that you're dependent on, do you have small battery backups for those things? Maybe not keep everything running, but maybe a few emergency lights and just your retail services and your credit card readers. And those are relatively inexpensive backups. So power would be one.

As I said earlier, telecommunications is another one where you need to be concerned. And then the nice thing is that mobile networks will tend to sustain much longer than landline networks if the landlines get knocked out. And so you can still communicate using your mobile, see if you can use your mobile as a backup. In periods of real emergencies, text messaging or SMS, Short Messaging Service, is probably the most reliable. So if you need to keep in touch with your employees, make sure you can text them, because that tends to be the least congested channel during a peak period.

Marie Manning: Interesting.

Michael Kleeman: So just a quick tiny metric. An SMS is around 160 bytes of data, what we're doing right now is probably two to two and a half orders of magnitude more data. And even a phone call actually is an order of magnitude more data than a text. And a text is done just once, but a phone call is continuous. So we're using thousands of times more bits than a text message right now.

Marie Manning: Right. Right. Okay.

Michael Kleeman: And so that's why, it uses sparse information and it has the ability, it's called storm forward or asynchronous. You can send a text, the message will buffer it until it can deliver it. And so that's the other advantage. So it's a good thing to think about what channels will be most reliable. And just again, on power, if you don't have a small emergency battery for your cell phone, it's a relatively inexpensive thing to get, can keep your cell phone charged for a lot longer, and then just think about the things that cause you to drain your power.

But the other thing is physical security, how much of a flooding risk do you have and what you do to mitigate against that? And that will depend upon the physical location you're in. So it's really just thinking about, "What do I depend upon? What are the nature of the risks?" And usually it's disruption of infrastructure or physical damage or incursion of water are the biggest kinds of risks.

Marie Manning: Okay. All right. Well we are about two thirds of the way through our live right now. And so whether you joined us at the beginning or joined us in progress, I encourage you to drop chats and comments into the chat feature here, and we'd love to hear from you on your thoughts. So let's turn to... We've already talked about the Ready Rating Program, which is just such a great resource for small businesses. When I was running my own consultancy, I actually filled out a Ready Rating plan. And Michael, I did some of the things that you suggested, like I got a battery backup from the cell phone. And it's proven useful when we've had a couple of electrical interruptions. So that's good.

Now, I want to switch here. We've talked a lot about businesses getting ready and we've talked about cell phones, and it was really interesting when you mentioned text or SMS messaging. What role do social media or other digital platforms play in communications during a crisis?

Michael Kleeman: Well, social media platforms can be really important because they tend to be very facile channels, very rapid channels. If you go back 20 years ago, most of us relied on broadcast media for alerts. And you'd have to wait till they came around and you couldn't access it when you wanted to. Now you can basically go into social media and probably find a lot of what you want. There are two things I think you need to be sensitive to with social media. One is, who's the source you're going to trust for your information? And in the last decade, government agencies, offices of emergency services have become very good at using social media, and they really are your trusted sources for a few reasons.

One is, they'll probably have the most current information and the most reliable information. Second, they will probably be able to communicate in a way that is really clear and not confusing. And if there's guidance of what you need to do, it'll be very simple and very explicit. And there's extremely low risk of misinformation coming from those channels. And I think that's one of the risks of social media is just be careful who you trust when you're trying to listen to someone.

Marie Manning: Well, and I would be remiss if I didn't put in a plug for the American Red Cross. We are the premier organization for nonprofit for responding to disasters. And our feeds are very active. Having worked with our social media people, I know they take their jobs very seriously, and I'd encourage everyone to follow us in the event of a disaster in their area.

Michael Kleeman: And the other thing is Red Cross has an emergency app, which is stellar. Full disclosure, I sit on the advisory group for it. I'm lucky to work with some of the most dedicated people I've ever seen. And I get alerts all the time. I get heat emergency alerts, I get storm alerts, I get other kinds of things. And they are geolocated to where I live or where I am at the time. It follows me by location service, and they are really accurate and really timely. And the app also has guidance for what you can do.

So it's not as deep as the Ready Rating Program, but if you want just a spot bit of information to think about what you want to do in case of an emergency, it's there. It's more of a response than it is a readiness tool. But it's got some of the readiness as well. But I think the app's really first-rate.

Marie Manning: It is. It is. I love it. I have it on my phone and you can download it from the different play stores by searching Red Cross emergency and it should pop right up. It has an exclamation point on it for the icon, and I encourage you to download it.

All right. You've talked a little bit about how energy companies, especially those located in the Gulf are really prepared. Are there other examples of companies or organizations that are doing it right?

Michael Kleeman: Yeah, I mean-

Marie Manning: Or if you want to expand on the energy companies?

Michael Kleeman: No, look, I think they're... Actually one of the more remarkable groups, and we're lucky enough to be able to work with them is the insurance industry. They actually know that if there is a significant event, they're going to be called on. And they actually build capabilities to operate when major infrastructures are compromised. Their people can go out in the field, they have multiple forms of communication, they can continue to do their work even when most of the core infrastructures are not available. So if you go to a shelter, a Red Cross shelter after a major fire or storm or something, you will very often see local insurance companies there, and they're also providing cell phone charging, et cetera. But they actually figured out, "How do I work when things fall apart?" And so they do a really good job, especially with their field agents to deal with these kinds of things. The other companies that have become extremely good at it are the big cyber infrastructure firms, what we call the hyperscalers, Google, Microsoft, Meta. They build resiliency into everything they do.

And it's literally to the point that we are surprised if our Google search, if we're using Google isn't instantaneous every time, all the time. But if you understood the nature of the complexity of the infrastructures they have. Google runs the largest fiber optic networks in the world connecting all of their data centers. And Meta and Microsoft are probably close behind. So they've really invested in that and their people and the ability to keep people working remotely when they need to.

And then lastly, obviously the public safety organizations because they assume things will fail and they have to keep on operating. So they have multiple channels of communications, satellite trucks, etc., and emergency generators. And if you want to talk to someone who's worried about it and has to have continuity, go to your local fire station and talk to them about, "Tell me what you do to keep things up and running." And they'll tell you and they know what it's like.

So it's those kinds of people that have to worry about this. And luckily those are the very institutions we're dependent upon for our safety and for the social media that you mentioned.

Marie Manning: Right. Right. I have one more question, then we'll go take a few questions from our listeners. So we're getting more and more disasters because of what we call climate crisis. And the disasters are... Well, actually the disasters are just as frequent as they were. They're just more intense. So what do you foresee as the role of disaster management? How do you see it evolving in the next five to 10 years?

Michael Kleeman: Well, I think people can take a page from emergency services in California and also the Red Cross in their thinking. We used to talk about a fire season. We don't talk about a fire season anymore. We used to talk about intermittent response. We'd have a fire season, then a storm season, then we'd have a calm in between, etc. We are on a continuous response footing now at the Red Cross.

And I think it's really important for business people to think that, "I have to have this as one of the things I worry about on an ongoing basis to be successful and resilient and reliable business, and to avoid the risk of significant business failure." And so you just have to worry about your customers and your products and your people. You need to add this to the list of, "I got to make sure I take care of this."

And I mentioned the insurance industry as well. Your insurance agent... Ready Rating is a great tool. Also talk to your insurance agent about, "What do I need to do to make sure that I mitigate or minimize the risks of business disruption?" Because it's in their interest to make sure that you keep on working. And this has to be something that every business owner assumes is a factor in the success of their business. And they cannot take for granted that it will not happen. They have to assume problems like this will occur.

Marie Manning: Okay. Well if we can have you for another five minutes, I know we're at the bottom of the hour, but I have two questions in that I'd love to get to if possible. You good for that?

Michael Kleeman: Please.

Marie Manning: All right. So the first one actually touches on what you just talked about, which is keeping plans. How do you keep plans up-to-date when things like weather are constantly changing? And I would add to that, when there are no more fire seasons, it's a spread out and weather events happen one on top of the other?

Michael Kleeman: Well, I think as I said earlier, the all hazards logic is really quite compelling. But one thing that you mentioned I think is important for people to be sensitive to, and that is both the complex... We have something called cascading failures where you may have a storm and then you may have a power outage, or and then you may have a communications outage. And I think those kinds of things, along with the duration of events are likely to become much more common and longer events will be more consistent. Phoenix had over a hundred days this year of extreme heat consistently, no one would've planned for that 25 years ago. And so, we need to think that events will have longer durations, more severe effects, and they may have compound vulnerabilities that get exposed. Power, communications, etc. That's one thing. Same thing with storms, I spent all week working with NASA reviewing proposals on disaster mitigation and remote sensing. And one of them talked about atmospheric rivers, and the fact that they are much more common and they tend to come in swarms. Where they used to be something that were really rare, the West Coast of the United States has seen massive landslides because of these kinds of atmospheric rivers just coming through. And California was worried about a drought the last year so, that's not been the main concern. It's been dealing with those things. And so I think, as I said, if you assume this is just part of your business operation and not an external anomaly, I think it'll just really... If you get into that mindset, most people are really agile and really smart. They'll figure out how do they adapt. If you assume it is something that you can ignore and it's just not going to happen, then you'll be surprised and the impacts will probably be negative on your business and you and your employees. So I just think it's just saying, "Look, this is what's going to happen." The reason we put smoke detectors in our house is because fires happen, right? And we want to extinguish them quickly or get out when we have to. And so just assume that storms will be there, business disruption may occur, power may get knocked out for a while and get prepared for it.

Marie Manning: Okay. This next question is, and we'll end on this, very interesting one, which someone's asking about you personally, how do you handle the stress and the emotional impact of disasters and disaster management?

Michael Kleeman: Boy, that's a hard one.

Marie Manning: Yeah.

Michael Kleeman: No, no. I mean, look, it is a real issue. First of all, we are social beings, I could not do it without the other people around me. We help each other, we talk about the stresses, etc. You need to find a rhythm so you don't get... In the same way soldiers get battle fatigue, you can have disaster fatigue. And most of us in the field are really mission-oriented and many people, not me, think we're super creatures and that nothing will ever stop us. And I've seen every one of those people get to the point of burnout and then they're not effective at supporting people. So you need to pace yourself. You need to have trusted friends and colleagues that will tell you when you're pushing yourself too hard and you need to build a network of resources because the situations and problems that we as a culture are facing are bigger than any one of us, any one organization can respond to. So it really does take a village, it takes a community working together and people supporting each other. And I think that's how you get through it.

And the flip side of it is, for any of us that have been in a disaster response, as hard as the work is, the emotional response and the emotional feedback you get from your colleagues, from the people that you're helping, et cetera, is literally its own reward and feeds you. So that's the upside of it. When you're working with people and you make a little bit of progress and someone says, "Thank you." It's a very big deal.

Marie Manning: That's very inspiring. Thank you for... I'm glad that question came in and I'm glad we're closing on it. I think this was a fascinating conversation and I appreciate the time that you spent with us to do that. And to our viewers as well, whether you joined from the beginning or joined us midway. And if you're listening to this on demand, appreciate your tuning in.

Next month we have two lives planned, a very special one for World Restart a Heart Day, which is October 16th. We're going to be talking to a cardiac arrest survivor and his wife who was on the scene when it happened and will tell us a bit about how the save went down. And then we're bringing in another member of our Scientific Advisory Council for a discussion on toxicology from the perspective of an emergency department physician. So stay tuned and keep your eyes on our LinkedIn channel for info on the dates and times on that.

We hope you enjoyed this episode and we will see you next month in a new live. Thank you.