In this week’s bulletin, Charlie gives an insight into Lucy Easthope’s book which provides some useful takeaways for dealing with an incident.

I have been off for the last couple of weeks and have been trying to do some reading. I have been working through Lucy Easthope’s book, Come What May: Life-Changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis, and wanted to share some thoughts on the book with you.

When I started in emergency planning in the late 90s, as I was new to the profession, I attended a lot of conferences and seminars. The profession in those days was fairly new, so there was a lot of learning going on. I was Emergency Planning Manager for Anglian Water, so I was learning how to deal with villages and towns without water or with contaminated water. The local authority emergency planning managers were talking about or learning about how to deal with disasters during the initial response and then how to look after people in the long tail of recovery after the incident. Dealing with the long-term recovery of individuals and communities after incidents was relatively new and there was much work being carried out and learning to be done.

I rather contrast this now with my learning as a business continuity consultant. All the chat at conferences and the ubiquitous webinars are all about AI, cyber, and new legislation, but there are very little about people. I know that our role on the whole is not about mass casualty events or about the long-term recovery of communities, but in an incident, we are expecting people to respond, and the incident we are dealing with could have a long-term impact on our staff. I sometimes think we don’t think about people; we think about activities, processes, RTOs, but we don’t consider the impact on the people who have to deliver them. In most of the plans I have read, there is little regard for the impact on staff. Even losing your place of work can be quite traumatic, and a cyber attack on an organisation can make the staff and senior managers feel violated, angry, anxious, and helpless.

This is why I think business continuity managers should read Lucy’s book. Lucy Easthope is a professor, expert, and adviser on emergency planning and disaster recovery. She has worked on every major incident in the United Kingdom, and involving UK citizens abroad, since 2001, including 9/11, the London bombings, Grenfell Tower, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The book covers her experiences in dealing with disasters and what she has learned from dealing with them.

I am halfway through at the moment and there are two outstanding chapters for me, the first chapter ‘Walking the Path’, is on the grief curve that communities have to go through after experiencing a disaster, and if you recognise this and understand where they are on the curve, you can tailor your help and support to them. The second which resonated with me was the ‘Bad Help’ chapter. I remember this happening at Grenfell, the well-meaning items of help for the survivors who had lost everything, which people sent by the van load immediately after the fire. They clogged up space and almost the majority of the items sent were not needed. Lucy talks about bags of dirty and unwashed clothes (including underwear), ‘donated’ out-of-date food, inappropriate items such as scuba masks and dangerous domestic appliances, that were all sent. Dealing with all these items took time and effort from the responders which could be better spent dealing with the needs of the survivors.

I think that all business continuity professionals should read Lucy’s book and remind themselves, or discover for the first time, some of the issues that they should consider when dealing with an incident. You may have an instance where a staff member loses their home to fire or flood and then, using your takeaways from the book, don’t get colleagues to provide replacement items, but if they want to do something, start a fund which they can donate money to. Meaningful and considered gestures go a long way in looking after people after an incident and can go some way to helping their personal recovery.

Lucy’s book is available on Amazon, and if you don’t like reading, listen to her interview on Desert Island Discs on BBC Sounds.