Tim Van Achte, Author at PM Risk-Crisis-Change

Memorable quotes from a 60 person team playing our Zombie Crisis Game

In May 2018 we had the first large scale run of our brand new crisis game for teams. As part of an innovative teambuilding day, 60 team members from the ‘Webcomm’ units of the European Parliament joined Tim Van Achte, Mike Lauder and me (Robbert Meulemeester) in Brussels to save the world in an apocalyptic and chaotic scenario. Not only did we have lots of fun, as expected we also recognised many actual crisis management challenges about awareness, coordination, communication and team dynamics. In this blog post I’d like to share a few (already legendary) quotes of the day.

Prelude for the game: Since May 2014 we know that the US Department of Defence wrote in 2011 “CONPLAN 888”. It’s a crisis preparedness plan, but it is unlike any other crisis plan you have heard of: CONPLAN 888 prepares the Pentagon and the US Defence forces for zombie outbreaks! In its extensive risk assessment section, the document covers pathogenic zombies (classic zombie type that is created via infection), but it also covers special measures to be taken for less known species such as space zombies and even chicken zombies. Today, however, we are not dealing simply with a predefined plan to organise communication in any unanticipated crisis, like the Pentagon did in this project back in the days. Today, the exercise of that day is actually turning into a reality! Today, we are actually confronted with this unanticipated event, normally only regarded as the scope of a blockbuster scenario.

Robbert

I'm a crisis adviser and strategist at PM Risk-Crisis-Change. I'm also founder, managing partner and certified marketeer of my own agency “De Witte Raaf”. I'm addicted to American football and riding roller coasters.

http://www.pm.be

Conversations in a crisis: article in the magazine of the Business Continuity Institute

How to transform conversation into strategies

At the BCI World 2017 Conference (London), PM team members Stijn & Tim held an exciting duo presentation covering various new insights on establishing solid crisis management strategies based on useful informal conversation and sentiments.

The content of this presentation sparked the curiosity of two Business Continuity related outlets: both the Continuity Magazine and the Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning asked us to write an article about this fascinating subject for their readers. As we firmly believe in spreading our ideas not only by presenting at international symposia but also in written form, we immediately said ‘Yes!’ to both requests.

Stijn Pieters

Stijn Pieters is a crisis strategist who specializes in risk and crisis management for companies and governments. He is co-founder and managing partner of PM and co-founder of the CIP Institute.

http://www.pm.be

Preparing our crisis exercise platform for heavy duty workloads to come

To provide a realistic environment in which organisations can veraciously apply resilience principles and test crisis processes; this has always been a number one priority of PM, particularly in our crisis simulations. Last summer, our developer Tim (yes, this is a tool we develop ‘in house’!) worked hard on getting our crisis exercise platform CIP Simulator ready for another massive series of crisis workshops and exercises that this software is going to facilitate this year.

Over the years we have made this online tool a core component of most of our services. Awareness sessions, table tops, all kinds of trainings, any type of crisis exercise, remote drills, challenging operational simulations, all of them are supported in one way or another by the platform. The main reason why we put efforts into this tool: providing an automated feed of inserts during an (simulated) escalating situation gives our consultants the freedom to focus on what they love: to make observations, recommendations and to provide advice, guidance, tips and tricks in real time, based on the performance and shown skills of the exercise participants, these poor chaps who must muddle through a well staged mayhem of complex circumstances and events.

Tim Van Achte

I'm a crisis adviser, researcher and developer at PM specialised in crisis management, crisis intelligence, sentiment analysis and crisis simulations. I'm involved in several research projects such as the EU-funded E2mC project. I'm also co-founder of CIP Institute, a global non-profit dedicated to the field of crisis.

http://www.pm.be

Trello as a supporting tool for crisis management: article in magazine for emergency managers

You might have heard about Trello as a useful tool to manage projects and teams, but did you know it has equally proved useful for a different purpose in Belgium’s emergency management circles?

Tim Van Achte

http://www.pm.be

Do these 3 crisis communications questions sound familiar?

In april 2017, we (Tim and Robbert) gave a guest lecture at the University of Leuven. We explained how we apply the Crisis Communication Work Process (CCWP) as a framework for crisis advisors. Focussing on social media as a valid point of reference for the students, we took a closer look at the role of social media in crisis management. Discussing various cases and sharing expertise, we advocated for leveraging social media for analysis, editorial and other roles in crisis teams.

During such talks we strongly encourage interaction and we were happy to have our notepads filled with relevant crisis communications questions when heading home. We want to share some of those questions, the ones that really stuck with us. And we wonder: do these discussions sound familiar to you as a crisis professional as well?

Q: Are crisis advisors afraid that they might have given bad advice?

We actually love this question! The underlying question here is how the advisor built that advice in the first place. You see, communication is anything but a hard science. We’re not like any other disciplines managing a crisis or emergency. Firemen, medical services and police for example, all of these make decisions and act based on data: they see smoke, do measurements, examine the wounded, collect field information and use extended databases and validated facts as a reference. This approach can never align with how a communication department works, no? Well, it turns out that it does align perfectly!

We at PM always advocate advice that is not merely based on what our good old intuition tells us. We are aware that our intuition is flawed and heavily biased, especially in unforeseen circumstances. For communication, a thorough external perception and sentiment analysis should form the one and only basis that any advice is built on. Approaching crisis communication from a data driven perspective has been proven to result in more effective crisis communication efforts.

Read More

Tim Van Achte

http://www.pm.be

#BrusselsAttacks: Crisis communication, social media and sentiment analysis (Dutch)

How to organise crisis communication on the federal level? How to cope with the challenge of keeping citizens informed in uncertain and complex circumstances?

Tim Van Achte

http://www.pm.be

Memorable quotes from a 60 person team playing our Zombie Crisis Game

Conversations in a crisis: article in the magazine of the Business Continuity Institute

How to transform conversation into strategies

Preparing our crisis exercise platform for heavy duty workloads to come

Trello as a supporting tool for crisis management: article in magazine for emergency managers

Do these 3 crisis communications questions sound familiar?

#BrusselsAttacks: Crisis communication, social media and sentiment analysis (Dutch)

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Conversations in a crisis: article in the magazine of the Business Continuity Institute