In 1971, the well known, erudite and gentile American talk show host, Dick Cavett, had on his show the 72 year old Jeremy Rodale one of the earliest advocates of organic farming.  He believed, as many now do, that healthy organic foods and natural remedies were the keys to longevity.  During his interview, Rodale said, “I’m in such good health that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday and I laughed all the way,” ”I’ve decided to live to be a hundred,” and  ”I never felt better in my life!”

Whilst interviewing another guest, the New York Post columnist Pete Hamill, Rodale made a snoring noise.  Hamill leaned over to Cavett and said, “This looks bad.” Though he later disputed it, Cavett was reputed to have said, “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?”  Rodale had just died of a massive heart attack.  The show was never broadcast.

Two factors seem to lie at the root of that decline.

• Much closer scrutiny of costs in the past two years caused all budgets to be reviewed for value for money.
• The increase in home working and hot desking have obviated the need for traditional office environments.

The biggest concern in the survey regarding home working was network load – network traffic at the last mile and in the server room.  I can’t help but think that capacity will rise as demand increases to a point where, if disaster strikes, provided it doesn’t affect everyone (in which case, our problems are bigger than our businesses) and provided the company has mirrored IT, there will be sufficient bandwidth at both ends to cope with spikes.

On June 24,  1982 British Airways Flight 9  en route to Perth, flew through the ash cloud of Mount Galunggung, Indonesia losing all four engines for 13 minutes before managing to restart one, then all four, then losing one again, before landing in Jakarta with a badly damaged plane, abraded leading edge surfaces and obscured windscreen.  On July 13, another 747, a Singapore airlines plane, was forced to shut down 3 engines in the same area.   Since then authorties have developed strict guidelines, that we find in retrospect were (hopefully) too harsh. We didn’t know what the safe levels of ash were and now that we have much more data gathered over the past week, the aviation authorities have come up with a level that they feel represents a safe threshold. 

But weather patterns are fickle, and volcanoes are even more so.   Eyjafjallajökull is a mere pup compared to its next door neighbour, Katla.  The last three times Eyjafjallajökull erupted, Katla also erupted shortly after. Iceland’s President Olafur Grimsson this week referred to the recent event as a small rehearsal for what will happen when Katla comes alive.  Suddenly risk managers and business continuity professionals have something new to consider – or rather something very old, but overdue.  The past six days has also demonstrated that unless we have a balanced, reasonable approach to risk, we endanger the mechanisms of our society and commerce through excess caution.

Business continuity pros help organizations mitigate and deal with incidents, things that happen when an organization’s luck runs out – a power failure, an explosion, a flood, a large systems outage. They put plans into place, they exercise and they educate. Frequently their budgets get cut. They may work for an organization for a couple of years, get frustrated and then go into consultancy for a few years then go back into another organization. Lifers are rare. It is a comparitively young profession, but an old ethos.

Resilience is a board level responsibility. The board has a duty to shareholders to protect as well as grow shareholders’ wealth. To understand organizational risks fully and stay prepared, they need to contemplate some very unpleasant possibilities and consequences. Many are completely incapable of doing so.

To understand why, one needs to consider how an organization’s senior executives got into their positions. It was through a combination of ability and luck – but mostly luck. The unlucky ones – the ones with equal abilities who experienced an organizational failure or a disaster that had serious ramifications – aren’t in those powerful positions any longer. Business continuity managers sell their wares to senior levels. They talk about bad luck to the lucky. What a tough sell that must be! They don’t get heard, they don’t get budgets, they get frustrated and leave, leaving and the unheeding organization vulnerable. The more lucky an organization is, the more likely it is to suffer badly from the consequences of a disaster when its luck runs out.

“Pish posh!” said Nasrudin, who had grown weary of their boasting.  “In the third Battle of Baghwahram, a mighty warrior as tall as three houses one on top of each other, drew his sword, easily the length of three of yours.  The fierce giant, in a single lightening swipe, lopped off my head.  My prowess as a fighter is such that I called to my sightless body, to place my head back on  my shoulders, which it then did,  whereupon I continued to fight as though nothing had happened.”

Launched two months ago, Prezi is a Hungarian made tool that helps prevent you, the presenter, from falling into the PowerPoint, glazed eyeballs rut. Last week at a seminar to government and financial services types, I used it for the first time in public instead of PowerPoint.

Getting used to how you create a presentation was a little bit of a challenge for someone like me who has been building decks of slides for a couple of decades. Things like drag and drop from the desktop just aren’t there. It is a hosted service. Behaviours and functions you expect in a desktop application don’t work.

To build a presentation, imagine a large canvas you want to stick objects to – pictures, words or movies to support your talk. You lay all your objects on the canvas then create a path to go from one object to another – your presentation. Though it can be a little distracting, the presenter guides you from object to object by zooming out and in. By zooming out all the way, you see the entire presentation’s content on one slide. That is how the presentation begins and ends. The audience gets an overview about what is to be presented and, at the end a reminder of what has been presented. Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.

During editing, there are some oddities. Prezi carries the zooming paradigm a little far by presenting commands and editing modes as a series of circles (the “Bubble Menu”). Another very odd wheel (the “Transformation Zebra”) allows you to move, rotate and size an object. You must remember my brain is wired to doing things differently, and I am sure a child would grasp Prezi very easily. “Frames” allows you to group objects so you can view multiple objects in the same way you might see them on a slide.

Now for the parts that would trip up a six year old. To insert a graph, you first have to convert it to an image file and then import it. I ended up using PowerPoint as an editor, creating the image and adding it to that canvas. Right off the bat, that was extra work.

Because you can zoom, the tendency is to overdo things, creating too many transitions that could distract an audience. This is especially true of text. A normal text slide has a title and bullets you see in their entirety. Its build transitions are usually minor. With Prezi, the temptation is to zoom on a phrase or word, then into another phrase, and so on. People could get dizzy and turned off by gimmickry.

To be able to play the presentation offline, Prezi creates an executable for you. Sharing that file afterwards has its pluses and minuses. You assign rights to individuals or make it public on the Prezi site – which can be impractical for many inhouse corporate uses. The obvious step would be for Prezi to make an on premises version.

The main lesson I learnt was to keep the presentation simple. Because the tool is so new, your presentation will stand out anyway and that project might get more support. The extra effort in creating that Prezi file could well be worthwhile. www.Prezi.com

Elastic thinking is the ability to recognize new priorities quickly, to broaden peripheral vision, to make fast decisions and to act appropriately.  If appropriate, security gives way to expediency, best guess becomes good enough,  quick and dirty wins over detailed and thorough.   Elastic communications is the ability to switch media to minimize the loss of your normal media choices.  If your corporate email is down, can you easily switch to a public mail system such as Google Mail? If it is necessary to communicate two way rapidly with employees and their loved ones over public instant messaging or SMS, can that be easily done in a Starbucks? Do you even have those instant messaging addresses on your laptop?  Are they a facebook or LinkedIn group? If your continuity plans are held on internal servers, are they also on third party servers “in the cloud” or on usb sticks, or handhelds?  How would you use Twitter to broadly disseminate information and solicit rapid feedback in a crisis? 

Elasticity is the least expensive path to build resilience.  It is provides a higher return on investment than building infrastructure.  Bespoke infrastructure contingencies are expensive.  Using multiple, off the shelf, public services are cheaper.  Elasticity builds agility. An elastic organization is a more open one, one that listens to customers better, responds more quickly and works more collaboratively with suppliers.   The benefits of elasticity go far beyond those of organizational resilience and the ability to withstand large seismic shocks.

Speak first, said the King to Nasrudin “Bring me pens and paper,” said the Mullah The pens and paper were brought. Give them to each of the first seven wise men. They were handed out. “Have them each separately write an answer to this question: “What is bread?” This was done.

The papers were given to the King who read them out loud. The first said, “Bread is a food.” The second said, “Bread is flour and water.” The third said, “Bread is a gift from God.” The fourth said “Bread is baked dough” The fifth said, “That depends on what you mean by “bread”.” The sixth said, “Bread is a nutritious substance.” The seventh said “No-one really knows.”

“Once they are able to decide what bread is,” said the Mullah, “then they can decide on other things, for example whether I am right or I am wrong. Can you entrust serious matters of judgement to men such as these? Is it not strange that they cannot agree on something that we eat every day, yet they are unanimous that I am a terrorist?”