In this week’s bulletin, Charlie discusses global issues and gives an insight into what is meant by ‘Maximum Scale of Incident’.

I was listening to the news in the middle of the night and I very much felt, in the words of Bob Dylan, “The times they are a-changin”. We have the likelihood of tariffs, which are going to disrupt international trade, and that will impact, to a greater or lesser extent, the organisations we work for. Russia, with the 90-minute phone call with President Trump, seems to be ‘coming in from the cold’, and we do not know how that will affect the security of its neighbours. The radical new suggestion of a Gazan Riviera and its displacement of 2 million Palestinians is a completely new solution to Middle Eastern issues. We have yet to see how countries react to this new possible world order and ways of working, and if they sooner or later take their own measures in retaliation.

In business continuity, we have the concept of Maximum Scale of Incident — this refers to the largest plausible impact an incident could have on an organisation, considering worst-case scenarios across operational, financial, reputational, regulatory, and strategic dimensions. It represents the upper boundary of disruption, not what could happen, but what our plans have been developed to deal with. So, we have plans to deal with the loss of our only office building, but we do not have plans to deal with a scenario where all staff are in the building, and an aeroplane crashes into it, killing all staff except the one person who is sick that day. We do not have a plan for how the organisation will rebuild the company.

I have always said that one of the roles of the business continuity manager is to horizon scan and monitor the external environment the organisation operates in, ensuring that new risks are identified and hopefully mitigated before they have a major impact on the organisation. So, in this very changing world, as business continuity people, we need to revisit our assumptions and look at the Maximum Scale of Incident  we are preparing for and see whether this needs to change — and whether we should be preparing for larger and more extreme incidents.

We may be in the eye of the storm, and in an attempt to change the world order we are used to, the system may self-correct and we may go back to the system we have become used to since the end of the Cold War. Or, this is just the very beginning of a new world order and we have to change and prepare our organisations as the system around us changes.