7 Mar Decision making on the frontline
Posted at 10:40 in Flood Resilience by Adler & Allan
At BERG (Business Emergency Resilience Group) we are constantly looking to help businesses improve their readiness for the unexpected.
Businesses often consider regular emergency procedures like fire drills and have procedures in place to protect people and assets etc.
However, when a crisis happens in the business like a major flood or spill, you often find out how good your frontline people are at recognising what is important or not.
Crises are indiscriminate in who they choose to affect and place key decision making upon. When disaster strikes the decisions made in the moment by the people you have on the frontline may be worth thousands or even millions of pounds.
Most of the people who are unwittingly entrusted with these decisions haven’t been trained in any way and you will be reliant on their intuition, intelligence and priority stack.
Intuition and intelligence is down to your hiring process and the parameters of each role, but a priority stack can be learned. The priority stack – what to think about and how to think about it – can be written down, scenario planned and group discussed. For every business it will be different but group involvement and discussion will tease out what your issues will be.
For the sake of a small amount of executive priority planning and a set of structured discussions, businesses can arm their frontline people with a set of priorities that will improve their decision-making and inform them, should the unexpected happen.