 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's webinar express crisis leadership how to lead effectively in the toughest of circumstances. This webinar is organized by CIM South West. If you are a university student attending today's webinar you may want to sign up for the CIM Marketing Club newsletter. It'll keep you up to date with the latest trends innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. All you need to do is take a photograph of the QR code you see on screen at the moment and that will take you straight to the sign up page on the CIM website. Okay so now I'd like to hand over to Tim Johnson from Deloitte's Crisis and Resilience Practice who is our guest speaker today. Over to you Tim. Lovely well thank you very much indeed. It's a huge pleasure to talk to you this afternoon and I hope as many of you as possible are enjoying this from the comfort of your garden or somewhere at least where the sun is shining. So look a very brief introduction to me. My name is Tim Johnson and I started my career about 20-25 years ago working for a big US owned public relations business and from there I moved after several years to a small boutique called Register Larkin really where I wanted to focus in on my love of crisis and issues management. Help the organizations both public and private when they were facing pressure really when they were facing problems when they were to use the word crisis. That was a business I thought I'd be in for about 12 months about 12 years later I was still there. We sold that business into Deloitte in December 2016 and that's where I am now and I need what we call our crisis reputation and resilience practice there and effectively within that within that practice what we do is three things. We help clients with all sorts of communications and reputation management challenges whether that's big programs or whether they are facing a situation that requires particularly sensitive or acute management. We help clients with crisis and resilience challenges so we help clients to implement the ways of running their organization should they find themselves facing an unexpected shock and we also help clients as well to do that when they face real shocks as well so we go into client organizations to help them manage the response to crisis and finally we get involved with clients enterprise risk management initiatives which we're almost first to and I'm going to focus over the course of the next half an hour. Now during my career it's been my absolute privilege to work with public and private sector organizations on instance ranging from major cyber attacks, industrial accidents, terrorist incidents, public health emergencies and product recalls through to sensitive mock exits, restructuring programs and allegations of misconduct and it's some of the thinking and experience that I've gained in doing that over the course of the last 20 to 25 years that I'd like to to share with you. What I can't do unfortunately is talk you through lots of different exciting and swashbuckling stories what happens in the crisis management room needs of course to stay in the crisis management room but what I'd like to do really is take you through a few frameworks ways of thinking about things but I hope to start to unpick this concept of crisis. Crisis is a word that is used a little bit like strategy like leadership like culture but it's often used without discipline and without forethought to what it is that we're actually talking about and a lot of that is because business is a social science organizations in general are social sciences and so what I'd like to do during these presentations is give a few ways of thinking about things that might help you as marketers when you're helping your organization I'm really really going to show you three or four slides over the course of the next 25 minutes but I hope they bring to life some of the ways in which I try and think about things and hopefully they will be obvious to you. I would like you to ask yourselves when the last time was that you usered the immortal words what they need to do is and these are words that we all use whenever we are reading a newspaper article we're watching the news on television we're scrolling through our Twitter feed and we find ourselves reading about an organization for possibly for all of the wrong reasons finds itself at the source of a crisis it finds itself under the spotlight for potentially all of the wrong reasons and our immediate thought is to say what they need to do is after which we list a very elegant and very simple sets of solutions that in our mind would relieve them of the situation that they face themselves into the current time. Now that is a time of great fun and in the days when we were all able to go to to dinner parties and interact with each other in a rather more easy way than we are at the moment it promotes great dinner table conversations but from my perspective whenever we're looking at crisis management we're looking at a series of trade-offs and there are two principles that I go into every single crisis management we're with and the first principle is this that if there were a simple solution to the crisis then those leaders in charge of the response they usually would have found it and that's based on two facts number one leaders of large complex organizations they're not daft they wouldn't be in the position that they were in where they're not able to grapple with complex problems and number two they don't want bad things to happen organization leaders do not want to be in the spotlight for the wrong reasons and generally speaking they do not want to find their organization in conflict with stakeholders that expect something of them nevertheless they are in the situation in which they are in but it's a profoundly interesting point because next time a crisis emerges onto our tv screens or onto the front page of the newspapers ask yourself how quickly you ask yourself the question what they need to do is and then please bear in mind what it is that we're about to talk about and ask yourself really whether we might want to cut them some slack but we might want to understand some of the very very complex issues that those leaders are going through. What I've done here is give a pretty academic definition of of a for crisis situation what we're actually talking about what we're talking about a crisis and the reason I like this quote is that like every good piece of prose every word carries a semantic weight every part of it gives us partially an answer to the conundrum that crisis providers with and I want to just step through it now in very swiftly. So what is a crisis? A crisis is an organizational crisis is a low probability high impact event that threatens the viability of the organization is characterized by ambiguity cause effects and means of resolution as well as by belief the decisions must be made swiftly. Well let's try and dissect that a little bit and then try and to unpick some of the challenges that leaders face when they find themselves leading during the toughest of circumstances. The first is that a crisis is a low probability high impact event when in the management of any situation most leaders like to try to turn to experience they like to try to look back on the moment in which they have faced something similar and draw upon that experience in order to find their way through the situation or this is a low probability event this is a situation unlike any that those that they've probably faced before so therefore their their ability to draw on that experience becomes much less solid than it would have been on a day to day basis. Not only that the stakes are very very high that the the viability of the organization itself is under threat or at least there is a perception that the viability of the organization is under threat and moreover it gets worse because the situation is characterized by ambiguity of course affecting by means of resolution we don't know what caused it and by cracking we certainly don't know what's going to resolve the situation and it gets even worse than that not only is there ambiguity of course affecting resolution but there's also belief that decisions must be made swiftly therefore viability organization is at stake I don't know what's happened I don't know how to fix it but I need to come to a decision very very quickly and as we all notice that organizations don't move quickly particularly not large complex organizations in fact most large complex organizations are deliberately designed to slow them down so this kind of here a little bit dry though it may be starts to bring to life what a crisis actually is and some of the problems that leaders face in trying to tackle them but of course a crisis is not a crisis a crisis is not a thing in its own right a crisis has a cause okay and whenever I'm thinking about crisis I like to try like any good consultant to put crisis into one of four individual boxes for the simple reason that they start to unpick some of the dynamics some of the specific challenges that leaders face when they are facing different types of crisis now this is the matrix that I typically like to use when I'm thinking about different types of crisis I'm going to work to your left and over to you to your right and the first is really what we will refer to as as incident led crisis and those on the right hand side of what we call issues led crisis so incident led crisis tend to fit into one of two buckets they are either operational or they are security led so operational usually means a failure in safety whereas security can can typically relate either to something cyber related or often events of national environmental led situations that organizations are facing on the right hand side there are what we refer to as issues led crisis and generally speaking they fall again also into into two brackets there are those crises that we return to refer to as performance led crisis usually that's in relation to leadership or management or a failure of governance in some way shape or form and the other area is usually what we refer to as policy related crises and policy related crisis is probably the most intractable of all types of crisis because usually what it means and I'm going to come back to this a little bit later is the organization's behavior has departed company with what it is that our stakeholders expect us to do there's a differential there between performance and expectation and there's a need therefore to close that gap there's a possibility also typically trying to define those into situations that have occurred from within side the organization and those situations or crisis situations that occur outside the organization to which we need to to respond the big difference between the left hand side and the right hand side though is time and time can be a very very false friend in most crisis situations on the left hand side there is clearly a deficit of of time there is no doubt that an intervention needs to be made there is no doubt that leadership needs to do something lives or the environment may be at stake and therefore action is required and so there's a sense that we have to move often without thinking and to just act on the right hand side time there is a false friend because there's a sense that we have plenty of time to fix whatever it is that to make ultimately galvan to be the source of that crisis but we don't take that time we don't make the change that's required and change is an important word because avoiding issues that crisis nearly always requires change changes exhausting changes expensive and change usually brings conflict so we tend to avoid that and that's why issues tend to bubble along until they reach a point of which they themselves become a crisis in their in their own life so those are typically the four areas where crises tend to emerge from including dynamics and managing both of those different sets of crises are very very very different indeed and one of the the lines that's not drawn across this matrix that of course is a perennial challenge in any crisis is the concept of of a villain and those to whom harm has been done and we live in a world of free medium and free speech of course we do and therefore generally speaking it is our instinct as human beings to find a villain of the piece and and usually organizations need to understand what their role is in the crisis and that can also bring profound problems which I like to touch on a little bit in the next slide but I hope that's a helpful way for you to think about where crises come from what their sources are and some of the differentials and the different characteristics of the way in which they tend to emerge for organizations the question then becomes well what do we as leaders do about it or we could even back up further than that and say our crises inevitable can they be avoided and of course the chances of a crisis happening can be reduced steps can be taken and we spend a huge amount of our time with our clients looking at their organization was in broader terms in order that they are able to mitigate the potential impact of the crisis or even move it all together but I typically tend to stand behind the fact that accidents will happen there are two kinds of theories in the world there is the higher reliability organizational theory which says that we can reduce the chances of crisis having to almost zero I mean there's a normal accident theory which says that organizations these days are so complexly interactive that at some point something will break and having been in enough crisis management rooms over the years stood by the side of the leader where he or she says to me I never thought this could have happened I'm firmly in the camp that says that a crisis can and will at some point happen for most organizations so what do leaders do then need to do to to respond to to all of that well clearly there's a huge amount of preparedness work that can be done and many of you will be familiar from that within your own organizations there are typical structures that are put in place which look at the tactical operational and strategic response teams created at three levels usually to respond to crises of different escalations in magnitude but ultimately it is people who manage crises and not processes those processes are vital to enable people to be set up for success but it is the leader at the center of all of that whose view we're going to try and look through over the course of the the remaining sort of 14-50 minutes that we have in this presentation and I'd like to pose the question first of all what is it that leaders have to do to respond to crises effectively I'm not going to say well good or bad I'm going to say effectively or ineffectively because generally speaking in a crisis we're dealing in the management of trade-offs there isn't a good solution for if there were or there wouldn't be a crisis in the first place so let me outline now what it is that I think the four things are that crisis leaders need to do effectively and when you're thinking about these things I want to imagine yourself that you are in a room and you are surrounded by 10, 12, 15 people and all of their eyes are on you for a sense of direction and for decisions and to help make those trade-offs which are inevitable and there are four things when you find yourself in that position which sound terribly easy but are phenomenally hard to execute so from my perspective there are four things that leaders of each of those individual teams of those teams that you are now imagining that you are running need to do and I list them in order in chronological of importance actually so the first is a need to establish situational awareness what on earth has happened what are the impacts that are being felt on our organization now leaders in most crisis situations in my experience they don't tend to panic but they do tend to be two responses to most crises that I have seen in leaders the first is a desire to immediately issue an action we must do this we must do that we must do this we must do that and all they find themselves unable to make a decision unable to forge a path forward and that's a biological reason for that when our brains start to feel stress we relegate the prefrontal cortex the place in which we start to make rational decisions that all gets removed and fundamentally we go into fight or flight that can then lead to a premature instruction of a series of set of actions which actually fix the wrong problem rather than the right problem this need to create situational awareness therefore becomes absolutely paramount and any leader in any organization facing a crisis should say to themselves this situation is not going to manage me I am going to lead through it and therefore a series of systems and structures need to be set up in place and all of that that leader can listen to their organization because the organization and the outside world will be speaking to them and that will be a dynamic process it will be happening around hour by hour day by day process and it will be conflictual and finding our way through that situation will be absolutely vital it sounds terribly simple but the amount of crisis management team meetings I have sat in on where there is a difference of opinions between the leader and his or her followers around the table is innumerable that is why we write things down on a piece of paper in fact sometimes what I do with the clients is I I read out a scenario I get them each to write down what it is that I've said a group of 10 to 12 people and then I get all the papers as a paper back and what you'll find is a profoundly different series of interpretations of what I've said establishing situational awareness cannot be more important the second point is to define purpose what are we here to do and that exists about an organization but also exists at a team level as well crisis situations provoke all kinds of different reactions some of them which are well-meaning but often there can be a duplication or a miss of different actions that are that are required so defining what individual teams are there to do and most importantly what they are not there to do becomes incredibly important on a day-to-day basis differences of opinion emerge within leadership and management for whole time and we step over those differences on a day-to-day basis the crisis won't allow us to do that it forces a limelight on certain relationships where we are required to say to each other you are doing this and I am doing that are we all absolutely agreed that there is a wider organizational angle on that as well which is very very interesting particularly in the context of COVID-19 in most crisis most most crises there is a requirement for a whole range of different organizations to get involved in the response and again that can bring the possibility of duplication and frankly organizations trading on each other's toes we have to know what it is that we are there to do and one of the most interesting observations I had during COVID-19 was finding for example several rotellers starting to make protective clothing and finding perfume manufacturers over in France starting to make antibacterial hand gel so that was a fantastic moment of creativity which I'll return to in a minute but it was all defined by purpose in the fact that what is it that we can do what is it rather than we have to do I asked you the question what would happen if several rotellers started to make antibacterial hand gel defining the purpose becomes key setting objectives also becomes very very important what is it that we are trying to achieve in our response to this crisis again it sounds terribly simple but the key Achilles heel is for most organizations those that particularly haven't faced a crisis before is they start to lose sight of what is in their control and what is out of their control we cannot uncrash a plane we have to deal with the situation as it stands at the moment and mitigate the impact on those who have been affected and having a clear set of objectives written on a board or written on a virtual note board whatever it might be becomes absolutely vital because that is our north star and for your leader that becomes an absolutely vital north star because there will come a moment during that situation when he or she is required to make a decision upon which there is no clear answer and writing down what your objectives are will give them that golden opportunity to be able to say I know what the answer is right now but number one based on the information that I've received which is my situation awareness number two knowing what it is that we are here to do and number three knowing what it is that we are trying to achieve the only direction I can give is as follows setting objective slowing the pace bringing it right back down to what it is that we feel we can achieve in response to a crisis becomes absolutely vital and then the final point is sounds even more simple and that's around setting actions. There are a couple of points I would make around this. First of all particularly when we are dealing with a crisis whereby there is a geographically located set of people who are impacted there is absolutely no doubt that the crisis is best managed close to where the impacted communities people or environment actually are. Most organizations are not structured like that now we work on global business lines we are globalized in the structures that we sit in so finding out who is going to do what when why and how becomes actually not quite as straightforward as it should be. Moreover for many organizations the concept of a meeting is something that is not as disciplined as it needs to be during a crisis how many of us have been to a meeting about a meeting because of a meeting to go to tomorrow we better just have a meeting because we can't really remember what the actions were that we agreed from the previous meeting that cannot happen in a crisis who is doing what by when and with what resources absolute discipline is is required and simple as it may sound those are the four things that I command any leader needs to do during a crisis. Now the point that you will all I hope makes that is well why is that different from what a leader does on a day-to-day basis and the answer is it isn't but being a leader on a day-to-day basis is not simple where it's simple then we would all be leaders what I'm asking leaders to do during the crisis usually is to do what they would do on a day-to-day basis just to do it against immeasurably more difficult circumstances and with the scrutiny of the external world and many people saying what they need to do is let's just quickly go over to the next slide because it's not just a case of what it is that leaders need to do it's how they should do it as well well I spend a lot of my time coaching leaders either during live crisis situations or in anticipation of them about the sorts of behaviors that they need to demonstrate as well and generally speaking when organizations will call me and they will say can you teach our leaders to be more command and control in the way in which they operate during crisis to which my response is well I can but it's a little bit more nuanced than that and I prefer to call the directive collaboration for the simple reason that there is a danger of a more authoritarian approach to leadership during the crisis which is absolutely the opposite to the one that we need to take the leader that sits at the head of a table if you imagine yourself still there and dishes out orders without listening to others is the leader that is destined to fail the person at the end of the table who may be having a psychologically more difficult response to the crisis but may well have an answer to give or an option to give needs to be listened to and needs to be heard to that meeting discipline of working around the room becomes vital but so too are the behaviors that the leaders need to demonstrate and I've listed here and 10 different behaviors that for me all combined and no leader ever does all of these start to get to the heart of what and how an effective crisis leader. Number one they're open minded to possible solutions if there's ambiguity of course affecting resolution and there has to be a whole raft of options that they can call upon in order to fix this situation so they need to go into that situation in a way that's over minded. Number two they need to be creative there is a danger in a crisis situation that we start to see the world in black and white and there's a simple reason for that and that's because usually the media commentary app asks us to see the world in those simplistic terms of black and white but the world is not black and white an answer between two extremes generally is the answer to go for. Number three a leader needs to be empowering and there's absolutely no way that a crisis is the moment for a leader to decide that they want to be involved in every single action that is undertaken by every single member of the team there has to be an element of trust there has to be an element of empowerment that goes on there. Number four they need to be communicative they need to be communicative yes to the outside world but also to the internal world as well and the internal world is a world that is often forgotten during the crisis an explanation of what is happening and why it is happening becomes absolutely vital now it's not the moment to go and disappear into an office and try to figure out the problem on your own. Number five is about being externally focused I'm going to leave that for now because I'm going to come back to it for a moment but understanding what it is about how the world perceives the way in which you are responding of course becomes absolutely vital. There's an element of bravery that's always involved in a crisis the easiest position in the room is to be the number two to the leader the answer then is always obvious put yourself in that seat and ask yourself to take a decision which is against protocol which is against any sort of standard operating procedure that you've worked to in the past which is against anything the organization has ever done in the past and then we start to understand the levels of bravery sometimes that leaders take across both the public and the private sector leading themselves accountable and responsible for that decision leaders need to be controlled there's a difference between why and why there's a difference between now and now we need to understand what our emotional responses are to the information that we receive followers would always look to the most microscopic responses from the leader when they are given bad news does his or her eyes move what's their facial expression we need to make sure that we are controlling our own behaviors around those who need to see us being in control or not when the moment comes for it but we need to decide how to behave not to have ourselves behave in an uncontrolled fashion we have to be empathetic we have to understand that people's personal lives when they're operating on those crisis teams and they do not need their personal lives at home by no means and all of the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis do not disappear they remain with them and therefore being empathetic to those members of that team is an even greater requirement frankly that it is on a day-to-day basis there's something that I called the walking around the block moment and nearly always when a crisis leader has been brave and made a decision there is something that's called post-decision dissonance and that is a moment of have I really made the right call here because there wasn't perfect information because there's ambiguity of course affecting resolution so a crisis leader needs to be constantly reflective it doesn't need to be constant U-turns on decision-making but that does need to be a constant self-praise and self-criticism of could we have done that better and then finally clearly a crisis leader needs to be resilient but for many crisis leaders with whom I work they are simply not used to the levels of external scrutiny the could or would or shoulder that is constantly presented to them in the media but perhaps politicians are and so therefore finding ways of being resilient becomes absolutely important whether that's sports games whether it's families whether it's having an independent third party to talk things through with but clearly that definition of personal resilience therefore becomes very personal but it has to be something that the leaders find themselves. I started my life as a communications professional and still very much am I communications and corporate affairs professional and then communications is often a key part of what I'm engaged in helping the client to think about as they go through as they go through a crisis usually in their chief of staff or as an external third party advisor. The origin point I would like to make here is that the words are incredibly important and positioning is extremely important particularly when sensitive matters have to be conveyed to communities or individuals who are suffering great pain but but we cannot communicate our way out of the crisis we have to act our way out of the crisis it's as simple as that. Reputational damage occurs quite simply in social media and in traditional media when the difference between what a stakeholder expects us to do and what we achieve grows we expect a plane to cross the Atlantic without crashing we expect our client-based services to deliver without falling over we expect very many things and when that performance falls away then a gap starts to to emerge and closing that gap does require communications of course it does but it also requires the organization to think about what it is doing and how it is doing it and how to close that gap just as quickly as it possibly can do. There are clearly ways of communicating during a crisis there is absolutely a need to demonstrate care and concern for those who are affected there is absolutely a need to demonstrate control we have mobilized everything we can to put the situation right and there is clearly a need to demonstrate a broader commitment to ensure that it won't happen again but fundamentally I like to bring the role of communications during a crisis down to three key points. The first is helping to set stakeholder expectations sometimes particularly on that policy crisis that we talked about earlier there is an expectation of organizations far beyond those at which they can actually achieve is that good is that bad it's often a combination of the two it's the day-to-day tussle that brings organizations and particularly business organizations into line with the expectations that the communities have of them but helping to set expectations is an absolutely critical role of any crisis leader particularly in those early stages. The second is a role that we really must never shy away from and that is to represent stakeholder attitudes and expectations to align organizational performance when something has gone wrong. We as communicators need to be able to present those views back to the leadership and all of those trade-offs can be made and all the problem can be rectified just as quickly as we can that doesn't involve putting pen to paper that involves listening and involves making a judgment and it involves being fearless actually in bringing to the leader a series of problems potentially or challenges that he or she has to face that is about the broader concept of reputation management rather than just communicating during a crisis but then the final point clearly is actually engaging empathizing and explaining to stakeholders what it is that we are doing about the situation how we feel about the situation and what it is that we are doing in what kind of time frame in order to alleviate those concerns and there is because we are all human always a tendency to want to say a situation is going to be fixed faster than perhaps it can be so having an element of restraint in there becomes absolutely vital as well again a judgment call but one that ever crisis requires and just looking on to the final slide and I guess just to sort of regroup as we as we hit sort of 34 minutes past the hour is to say that I hope some of the concepts there that I've given you are useful they are not the answer but I'm hoping that when you are faced with a crisis situation you can start to deconstruct it a little bit using some of the concepts that I put forward there to you which I've honed over many years of sitting next to and holding the slightly sweaty hand of a crisis leader as they seek to navigate their way through organizational crises from wherever they may have come from and with that I will pause I think because I'm right up at time and hand it over to to any questions okay thanks Tim that's that's really great thanks for a really thought-provoking presentation okay so we're now going to have a short Q&A session there's still time to submit questions if you want to and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next 10 to 15 minutes so Tim the first question is does a crisis management team take the lead in reviewing a company's operations and procedures to seek out potential crisis in advance so mitigating the opportunity of failure yeah is this is the is the short answer I mean for most organizations that there will absolutely be a need to to rehearse the crisis management team at least once a year usually in in full turnouts and for many organizations they do it twice a year as well in order to ensure that the those people who are taking a role of deputy on the order crisis management team also have an opportunity to to to rehearse their roles in the crisis as well crisis management teams need to learn how they're going to operate in the periods of great stress and great great great great scrutiny anything I would say is that there tends to be in my experience a desire to sort of fight the last war to thinking about different kinds of organizational crises that that might converge on the horizon as well so the short answer is yes just make sure we're always forward focused rather than just necessarily being backward focused on other organizations okay thanks Tim there's a related question here in your experience are crisis management core teams more effective when they are smaller in number more focused or larger groups with greater breadth of views so what a great question so in in my experience it's a little bit like sort of centralization and decentralization debate what what typically happens is that crisis management teams start off very very small and then they tend to build out over a period of years before a recommendation is made to trim it right back down to the to the to the core again there was a trend a few years ago to be very very reductionist by the way in which of your crisis management team and to review the core team down to three roles which was a decider so the leader person that has to make a decision and a lawyer because there is nearly always a requirement for a lawyer in a crisis situation and and thirdly also a communicator as as well and then everything else is going to build around that so I mean you know there's a danger of generalizing here I am more of an advocate of a smaller crisis management team but for me that probably is a little bit too small and there is a requirement for a greater breadth of greater breadth of views to be brought to the table again it all depends on the individual organization I'd give a few helpful remarks okay thanks Tim I think this question relates to one of the earlier parts of the presentation so is how our policy issues external or is it referencing external policies i.e. from the government? Yeah I think sort of just interpreting that that that question clearly organizations have a role to play in being involved in the in the policy debate that there is a need for them to have their voice heard in order that that their their needs and interests are heard everybody's a policy view to the to the left will clearly be different to the policy view to the right and therefore there is a there is a trade off but but generally speaking large organizations have a requirement to make sure that they are constantly listening and wherever they can getting ahead of that that that policy debate and also you know succumbing where they where they are need to and also to changes to the direction that needs to be that need to be taken and the biggest danger is a is a head in hands or head in the sand approach which said this is not relevant to me and it isn't going to happen it just can't happen and that is entirely the the wrong approach we absolutely have to be agile to to what the future might might bring and we just completed a report with the National Preparedness Commission and and Cranbridge University or the leaders in organization resilience thinking and point number one of the seven part process is to free your mind to think about what could happen to your organization so as I say those policy the crises that originate in a policy tend to involve change and it's an uncomfortable period of of moving an organization to a new way of thinking and but that doesn't mean that they can be ignored. Okay thanks I guess Tim there's an evidence that we've had questions around COVID so I'm gonna sort of read out three together so with the current COVID crisis its scale and complexity is there anything unique to a global pandemic that should be considered in addition to the points you've talked through that's the first question what changes do you think organizations should make to their crisis management strategy in light of COVID is the second question and the third question somebody asked what organizations have done well have responded the best to COVID but whether you I don't know if you can mention organizations I'm just wondering if there are any industry sectors that you think have done well at this crisis or in responding to this crisis. What is unique about this is it's sort of fascinating isn't it because I mean there are I think there are there are two key points about about about the pandemic and everybody on this call will have a different view of this not the right answer just an answer to the most unique things about the pandemic but number one that it affected everybody that just literally wasn't anybody in the world who wasn't affected by this particular situation and number two it was hard certainly in the early days to pin points someone to blame that our desire as human beings to find a villain is in built within us and that was very very hard to do in these early stages of this pandemic and so what I very much enjoyed seeing when I raised a couple of the generic examples earlier is organizations being all in it together to look to the wider good to the broader health of nations and the international community as as well while also ensuring that our own organizations were well we're better down and able to do with just such extraordinary speed I remember saying you know to to a client I was both bringing some media training there's no way I can remedia training online in a remote format I need to be in the room well of course a pandemic issues that I do need to be and and it's moved at all at such a great pace and that is of course you know what a crisis can bring and it's now become a bit of a tri-phase but before the pandemic we always used to say well you know a crisis can bring a new normal and I've yet to say the word unprecedented and I'm certainly don't intend to you know we used to say that crisis leaders of organizations during crises have two options at the extremes number one they can repair the future that the followers once thought they might have and the crisis has dislocated them from that future or they can resume to a new future and the answer often lay somewhere in the middle and again the answer would lie somewhere in the middle I'm thinking here in terms of the ways of working remote working flexible working etc but those changes that we have brought have been completely fascinating from a scientific from a sociological from a commercial perspective as as as well what organizations done well well just that point I mean we've all moved online and what was unthinkable 18 months ago has become daily it's what we it's what we now what we now do I do think that for most organizations certainly that I've been involved over the course of the last 12 to 18 months the role of the HR function and human capital as some would like to call it has been extraordinarily well done and it is called into question their role on the crisis management team which isn't forgotten almost but can can sometimes be overlooked it relates to that important around internal communications but that is just one example of them the creativity that I talked about earlier that I think has been absolutely astonishing that the course of the last 12 to 18 months I think this question sounds like it comes from the heart so if the leader of an organization responds in the wrong way to a crisis how can you build influence to change response from senior management level when there has not been a proper crisis team set up or is that not possible with crisis due to the urgency so basically how can others help in a crisis if the leader is failing yeah I mean the the the reality to that one is that most of the of the preparedness work does need to be done in in advance anything I would say about that it is incumbent on the leader him or herself to go out and seek counsel from others and and often if crisis leaders are struggling sometimes there can be a tendency to shoulder the entirety of the situation on their own shoulders and perhaps not open their mind and to the vast array of different views that might be out there selecting who you ask to give those views of course clearly becomes absolutely vital but but the the effective crisis leader I think spends 80 percent of their time listening and 20 percent of their time speaking and directing okay thanks um you recommend complete transparency during a crisis or base it on a need to know basis um communications in some crises particularly public health emergencies is an incredibly important discipline because of course the welfare of those that are hearing the message is at stake as well so there is no single answer to that I'm afraid that doesn't mean organization should hide things the start point for any message any narrative is what is the truth but at times that desire to tell the truth has to be treated with huge responsibility and care so I'm afraid I'm not I'm not going to be able to give that one a yes or no answer it really does depend on the situation and and again back to your objectives what are we trying to achieve here and for the good not just of our organization but also for the stakeholders as well as well who depend upon it um so I'd just like to say thank you to Tim for today's presentation and to the CIM Southwest for organizing the event we do hope you've found it interesting and worthwhile our next webinar express doing good things driven by data is on Wednesday the 30th June at 1 p.m hosted by CIM Wales you'll find further details listed on the events page on the CIM website where you'll also be able to register for the session so on behalf of CIM thank you once again Tim for a really good presentation and thank you for joining us we hope you enjoy the rest of your day goodbye