15 Minute Foreplay™ Conversation with Andrew Blades.

In this conversation Bronwyn Williams and Tumelo Mojapelo talk to Andrew Blades about how to prevent and navigate our way through disaster. 

Bronwyn Williams: Hi, I’m Bronwyn Williams and we’re back with the 15 Minute Foreplay™ Conversations where we are speaking to interesting thinkers about the foresight and futures field from all across the world. And today our expert and our guest is Andrew Blades, who has worked in both the public and the private sector and indeed in the military too. And as such, he’s the perfect person to ask about risk and strategy in practice rather than just in theories, as many of our other guests are experts in. 

So to start with, Andrew, a really big question, in fact is going to be a two part question which really gets to what we want to get from you. The first thing is, how do we prevent catastrophe as leaders, as we all know if we’ve watched any of those sorts of Netflix specials that dive into crises and disaster. We know that disaster is seldom simply just one simple mistake on one particular day, rather there’s a whole sort of chain of events and a culmination of many mistakes that results in an absolute disaster. So the first question is, how do we prevent disaster? What are some of the practices we should be putting into place to, if not eliminate, at least minimise the chance that things are going to go catastrophically wrong in whatever domain it is that we’re looking after. 

And the second key question is, okay, so you’ve done your best, you’ve tried your best to mitigate things and yet still you woke up on a Tuesday morning and the proverbial poo has hit the proverbial fan. What do we do then? What are the best practices when you find yourself in a moment of crisis? What do you do to make sure that you don’t make things worse by your decisions? Those are really our two questions for you today and after we’ve given you a good go at it, we’ll get Tumi to come at you with a bit more specifics. 

Andrew Blades: Great. Thanks for that, Bronwyn. I think that’s the big question that people are increasingly asking is how do we prevent these disasters? And it won’t surprise you to know that my comments around that will be, a lot of this is around scanning and a lot of it’s around watching what’s happening within a system. ‘Cause you pointed it out, we love to look for cause and one cause. Well, there’s not one cause. There are multiple causes and most senior leaders aren’t used to looking at multiple things happening simultaneously. So if you build your manufacturing facility or your house or your whatever, it happens to be on a floodplain, don’t be surprised when it floods. Now it may not have flooded for the last 100 years, but the indications are you have built on a floodplain and therefore you could have a one in 100-year flood or you could have a larger flood than we’ve ever seen before. 

So it’s about looking at what are the links in the chain and how do the various elements start to come together. And we’ve got to move away from this or the probability. Well, probabilities… great in an environment where yesterday is going to be an outstanding example of what’s going to happen tomorrow. But I go to a lot of presentations and I listen to a lot of senior executives talk about how volatile their world is, that they’ve got increasing complexity. There’s an increasing number of disruptions. And then they tell me that they’re going to run a standard probability risk assessment. It doesn’t work. Like the data is not there and we’re asking people to make decisions in a data-poor environment or the data is unreliable. And that’s something a lot of people are very uncomfortable about because we talk about big data. We don’t talk about small data and that small data is we’re seeing things on the radar that say perhaps things aren’t the way they are. 

So a couple of questions that I suggest people ask. There is no evidence that this is going to happen tomorrow. Great. Show me the evidence that it will not. So when you’re in those areas of really poor data and you want to make evidence-based decisions. You’re looking for evidence that says this will not happen. And if there’s no evidence that it will not happen, then you have to accept that it could happen. And I think Trump’s first election is a great example of this. Oh, there’s no way you could possibly win. There’s two people running. One of them has to win. He has a chance. So you’ve got to look at that as an option and we see that elections are a great place for this to happen or you’re bidding for a contract and it’s well look we’ve bid for it but there’s no way we’re going to get it. And then all of a sudden you do and the consequence that you’re managing is a really good things happened, we’ve got all this extra work but we’re struggling for capacity. We didn’t think through what this would mean and this is our breakthrough contract. We’ve got to take it. Okay, so how are you going to manage that so it doesn’t all fall apart around you. 

So I’m big on the horizon scanning and really looking forward to what are the weak signals? What’s the small data? What are the things out there that look unusual? They’re anomalous. And most people… we want to apply the confirmation bias. These are the things that we know. These are the things that we stick with and increasingly we need people who are serious lifelong learners. Now part of being a serious lifelong learner is having the humility to know that every day you go to work you’re going to learn something different.So, Bronwyn, when you know I’ve got five master’s degrees at the end of five master’s degrees what I know is there’s a lot out there that I know nothing about because each one of those universities is probably taught 50 to 60 master’s degrees. And if I’ve only done one of them, there’s a whole heap of knowledge out there about which I have no knowledge. So one of the things here when we’re moving forward and looking at this is to say there are things about which I know absolutely nothing and therefore can’t don’t even know that I need to ask questions. 

There are also things out there that I think I know a lot about but the world has moved on. As a colleague of mine who’s a chemist and managed to trap me in a car for two hours on a trip, explained to me in great detail how the periodic table had changed since I was at school. So there’s things that you think but the world hasn’t changed. There’s laws of physics and chemistry but the way we understand the world has changed and we’re seeing a reduction in a half-life of knowledge. So I think that’s the next thing, being open to the fact that you really need to be learning every day and you need to recognise that there are people who work for you who know vastly more than you do about a particular topic, particularly as you become a very senior leader. You just don’t have the time to be dealing with all this, different technical areas of expertise. I think that’s an area that we see people struggle. Particularly, I don’t struggle with the area of technology. I recognise I know not much about it. So when I’ve got younger people working for me, say younger, they’re 30 years younger than me, that are coming in and saying, oh, there’s a new piece of technology that does this. I’m open to the fact I don’t know anything about that. I’ve just got to ask a lot of questions and try, and ask sensible questions so that I can extend my knowledge and recognise that they can fix some of those problems faster than I can. And you’ve got to have an element of trust in your people in that space. 

So if we move into that next piece about what do we do when you wake up in the morning and everything has gone pear shaped. So there’s a whole area of thought now, which is called consequence management, and it’s about how do we manage the consequences. So strategy in this space really comes back to being able to answer four questions. What the hell is going on here? What is actually happening? Let’s get some sense of what is occurring in the space. So there’s people, talk about situational awareness. This is what is happening. That’s great. My next question is, and what does that mean to you? So what’s the sense making? What does this mean to me as my organisation, my team, my shareholders, my clients, my staff, my suppliers, my financiers, my regulators, particularly? And what are they likely to do? Then it’s that strategy decision about and what are we going to do now? How are we going to position ourselves to mitigate the negatives? And if there are any opportunities, how are we going to capitalise on those? How are we going to leverage those? And from a communication space, and I’m not a specialist in public affairs, you’re trying to do two things. You’re trying to protect your reputation, your organisation, and you’re trying to promote the things that you’re doing well. 

So we see organisations that are on the front foot. We don’t know what’s happened. This is what we’re doing. This is what we would like you to do, and we’re going to give back to you in two hours. This is when we’re going to run our press conference, as opposed to just going dead silent. We’ve seen that with some cyber attacks. Nobody has anything for four days. You can’t access your bank account or you’re being told that potentially your information’s been stolen or you can’t access… Nobody knows what’s going on. Sometimes you just need to stand up and say, we’re not sure what’s happening, but we’re working through this and we think it’s going to take this amount of time. 

Then that final piece is what are your operational and tactical plans that you’re going to put in place? So strategy is crisis management, and that is a strategic tool. That’s where you want your senior executives and in many cases, your board. So there’s a new international crisis management standard, came out in 2022, provides a definition of crisis. Not everybody agrees with it, but we’ve now got a common agreement. We’ve got a commonly understood definition that sort of everybody can dislike equally. And that provides it with, this is out of the blue. We weren’t expecting this. 

So you’re not going to have your routine playbook of pull off the shelf and do ABC and D. So a lot of people are used to dealing with emergencies within their organisations or incidents within their organisations. You can’t just say crisis is a much bigger emergency because it’s a different beast. It functions differently. So you’re now starting to make strategic decisions. And this means we’re going to reallocate resources from project A to project B, which is managing this crisis. Up front and before you even get to that, when I talk to people about their crisis plans, it’s not a step by step thing. It’s about who do you need in the room to start making decisions and what those decisions look like. Again, we pay our executives good money to make strategic decisions and we’re asking them to come to the table. One of the questions I always have is who have you invited to your table? How much diversity of thought is there? Because we saw in Covid where governments were making decisions and we’re listening to public health officials, which is good. But there are other doctors and other areas of medicine that are saying, and these are the problems that we’re going to have as a result of these types of actions in three years’ time. So whether lockdowns were right or wrong, we had a lot of lockdowns here in Victoria. My concern is more how much forethought did we put into how these might play out? 

So humans aren’t particularly good at consequential thinking. They do action, result, right? The next question is, and what are the three results that could come from that action? Because your cause has had an effect. That effect is now a cause. It causes three separate things and each one of those is now a cause. So, it’s how do we track what could happen and fighting the optimism bias? Because people… I will get this done in 12 hours and they won’t. This is going to take far longer than you expected. And in many cases, those senior executives don’t have lived experience in dealing with those really strategic crisis issues. So you see people who have come through and they’re familiar with dealing with incidents. They may have had computer outages. They may have had tactical business continuity planning issues. That’s not this. This is not the playbook. This is where we’re asking people to make decisions. 

So I was running an exercise with one organisation and the CEO who was sort of watching the exercise went very pale at one stage. He said, if this actual event was happening, he said, we’ve got a major contract that we’re signing off on. This event could kill that contract. He said, and we’re not talking millions. We’re talking bigger figures than that. He said, so we’re now, we’re making tactical decisions with strategic ramifications. And I have to get, I’m going to have to move people around. I would have to make people move people around in a real event to make all this work, including people being flown overseas to be face to face with clients to explain what we’re doing. 

So whilst the plan said follow the bouncing ball, the ball was going to bounce all over the place. It wasn’t a standard approach. And that’s the struggle for a lot of people. And when they do exercise for it, they run one, maybe two exercises a year for four hours. And then everybody has lunch, which is great. But these events don’t just go for four hours. They go for days, weeks, some of them go for months, some of them even go for years. We’ve got airlines that have had aircraft incidents. And the courts are still sorting it out 10 years later. And that’s still part of that process and managing your reputation because it keeps reappearing every two, two years, three years, four years until the matter is resolved. 

And as I’ve mentioned before, the media doesn’t come out with, today everything went well. Nothing to see here by our papers and we’ll tell you it’s a great, great day. The media will come out with these are the key issues and these are the stories that make the world unpleasant because that’s what people are going to buy. They’re not going to buy, it’s all been great today. Nothing to see. It’d be a very short paper. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Thank you. I just wanted to ask you. You mentioned how leadership bring people to the table and to mobilise teams and stuff. Are there instances where leaders shouldn’t communicate? They shouldn’t bring people to the table because it will just make the situation worse. Have you had instances where a leader just had to lock themselves up in a room and make unilateral decisions and basically have to deal with whatever the consequences were of those decisions because if they had to bring people to the table, it would make the crisis or the situation worse than it already is?

Andrew Blades: So one of the things that we do see is when you’re in the chaos stage of the crisis, we don’t know what’s happening. Never mind trying to understand what it means to the organisation. You’ve got to do things and then start saying, “Well, we’ve done this. Is it working? Is it not working? How do we make adjustments with that?” 

Very few leaders in a modern organisation have got the technical skills to be able to make a whole series of decisions by themselves. So to have the idea, almost the idea of the hero leader making one-off decisions, it works in some settings, but it doesn’t work in many. So if your background is finance and you’re having to make decisions about what we’re going to do operationally, that can be really difficult. I’ve watched senior finance people when they’ve been exercising so it’s a safe environment, that are really struggling with the fact that they’ve just been told, “Your companies kill 5,000 people.” There are other people that are quite comfortable working with that type of information. Some people, it just overwhelms them when they start to think about those types of deaths. So a lot of this is down to an individual, their knowledge of the organisation, and their knowledge of the situation, but also their ability to make decisions that they can live with. And many organisations are very keen on training their leaders to make decisions by consensus and cooperation, so they’re not used to taking command and giving instructions. The military doesn’t function like that. The military trains its leaders that at some point in time you’re going to have to make decisions. Hard decisions and you’re always going to be able to talk to everyone about it. Ships’ captains are the same. There are some areas, and again you look at those organisations that you would say are high reliability organisations, nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, you get to a point that people have to make a decision, and there are going to be consequences and we’re going to have to live with that. And increasingly they will then face trial by jury, and that’s really the hard yards for them. Sorry, trial by media, not trial by jury. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Okay, so you mentioned normally in the military or in more, like, high risk situations, or in government or industries that actually have high stakes, what kind of principles do they operate with? I’m very curious to see … I mean not every business leader faces a crisis every single day, but in those high-stress environments, what is different to their training that they receive so that they’re able to make unilateral decisions in those situations? 

Andrew Blades: So some of the things you see is those people have a very good understanding of the operations of the organisation. So again, if you’re a ship’s captain, you weren’t running the marketing department four weeks ago. If you’re a military officer, you weren’t working in an engineering company two years ago, you’ve streamed up. So they have a very good understanding of their organisation, they have a very good understanding of their operational requirements. They also have the humility to recognise that they need to learn as they go. So they have the humility to know, this is what I do know, but there will be other people who know stuff and I need to be able to access that information. So you go away and you get that information for me so I can make decisions. And they have a much higher awareness of failure and the fact that not everything goes well all the time. 

So the military famously quotes various people, but probably, you know, like the elders, the one that they all know that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy”, partly because the enemy has a vote that’s largely true in business, your competitors have a vote. They may have other ideas about how they’re going to interact with your particular plan. 

So this idea that everything you do, it’s about adaptive planning, the plans are not just going to follow the linear process that you want. So they’re trained to think in those settings and that’s one of the key differences that you see with them. And they train to be in very stressful situations because the expectation is as a military officer, as a ship captain, as a pilot, running an air traffic control system, running a nuclear power plant, one day something will go wrong and when it goes wrong, you’re going to have to manage it. So we talk about ‘expect the unexpected’ and then expect to have to manage it. There’s no opportunity so we’ll just pause now. And I use this example often when I’m talking to people, so what about fatigue management? When you’ve got a ship that’s on fire, you can’t just say, look, we’re going to sink. So look, everybody just take a break because it’s going to sink whether you take a break or not. So there’s these issues of around how do you do these things? We also know that the research tells us that in a lot of crisis situations, having a team that’s been working together and in decision making, fatigue is often less of an issue than the fact that teams moved into a rhythm. 

So these aren’t people that are on the end of a fire hose or stacking sandbags or actually doing operational activities. They’re decision makers, so their fatigue factors are different. And often what we try to do is say, well, you know, an eight hour shift is a standard shift. That’s true for people that are out there doing physical work, but it’s not necessarily true for those that are making decisions. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: So what is a normal hours? This is very interesting by the way. So if I feel,like, if you feel, like, I’m going down a rabbit hole. 

Andrew Blades: No, no, I fill your boots… 

Tumelo Mojapelo: So for someone who does physical level, it’s an eight hour is a standard, like, day for them. So for someone who actually has to make strategic decisions, what is the standard hour, like, what in hours is required of them mentally? 

Andrew Blades: I think it’s difficult to talk about the number of hours because it’s the cognitive processing that you have to do. So I support people using checklists to the extent that it says, let’s remove the cognitive load. Let’s not be thinking about which document that we have to look at. Just have those available for people. The process now is for somebody to say, as I went back to, what is actually happening here? And it’s not there’s a fire or there’s a flood or we’ve had a plant explosion. What does that mean? Like what is actually happening here is we’ve lost production capability. We’ve lost staff. Our actions have resulted in the injury and worst-case death of clients, stakeholders. Now, whether that’s a product tampering incident or whether it’s an explosion in a plant, whether it’s a natural disaster. The strategic issue is what does this mean for our stakeholders and what’s going on for them? And they’re all going to have very different views. So one of the things we often look at is, is this your fault? Or is it an extent of things have happened that you couldn’t control? 

Now, I can’t control the rain, but I can control the fact that I’ve built on a floodplain. So an element of that is something that I can control. Maybe I should have looked for somewhere else to build, but I can’t change the fact that things have flooded. So when we look at the Ever Given, when it got stuck in the Panama Canal, if I’m relying on the, sorry, the Suez Canal, if I’m relying on that supply chain, then I can’t change the fact that it’s blocked, but I can have set it up so that it’s not my only source of medication or key things that I require. Now, the reality is there are some things that can only be moved by ship just because of their size and weight, but there are a lot of things that you need to be thinking about, particularly if it’s medication or things like that. What’s our alternative if our supply chain breaks? How do we find another way of moving that material? Can we ship it by aircraft? Can we use a different route? Can we send it by land? 

Australia is an Island really, we’re highly reliant on either shipping or planes. Other places got options, trucks, trains, there’s various ways of doing things. And we’ve moved into this space of it’s all about just in time. Now, the same consultancies that we’re telling the world, it’s all about just in time, and now saying, “Oh, but you’ve got to think about just in case as well.” So Covid’s really woken a lot of people up to running very lean. It means that in a crisis you reduce your options and your ability to make decisions. 

So I talk about this as the decision making piece of cheese. It’s a nice big triangle. You want to be making decisions right back at the big fat bit. You don’t want to be making, having to make decisions at the pointy end that really you could have taken a couple of weeks to make that decision. And it comes back to this idea of what’s out there that could upset and disrupt us. And again, that could be in a competitive sense. It could be in disruption to supply chain. It could be natural disasters. And the question for a lot of executives that they need to be asking at the beginning of this process rather than on the day, who are the people in our organisation that think like that and are we listening to them? Because even the fact that they’re talking about, well, what’s a Carrington event mean to us if we have a solar flare and satellites are disrupted and we lose communications and positioning and navigation? What does that mean to us? Well, to me personally, it might not mean anything, but my supply chain relies on that. So what’s the impact? How long is that impact going to be? And that’s this whole idea of consequential thinking and consequence management, working out what does a four-day disruption in my supply chain mean? So it may mean nothing, but it may mean everything depending on how short and how fast that supply chain is. 

And increasingly people are… we’re going full circle for those of us that are old enough to have been working during the Cold War. You look again, you go, this looks remarkably similar. And there are another group of people saying we never see anything like this. History repeats itself. There’s a lot of things we’re seeing today that if you look back in history, you go, we’ve been here before. And sometimes we have people in the organisation with lived experience of that history. How are we accessing that knowledge? Because a lot of them are going to be leaving the workforce in the next 10 years or so. And when they do, you’re going to have people that are learning from scratch because we lost knowledge. And it’s this whole idea of knowledge decay. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Thank you so much. We could continue this conversation forever about how you manage risk and chaos. I really like… I could ask you more questions, but my time is up. For those who are new subscribers, please follow, subscribe, look at previous 15 minute conversations that we have so that you can keep abreast and just keep with the flow. And thank you so much for your time. 

Andrew Blades: And Bronwyn  knows I could be here all night happily talking about it.

Tumelo Mojapelo: True …

Andrew Blades: Thank you. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Thank you.

By Flux Trends 

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