We continue making international roster moves! To continue providing our range of services to a growing amount of clients, we recently welcomed Julien Draillard Losada and Dr. Mike Lauder to our team. Their knowledge and expertise will help us to keep delivering the high-value advices and impactful crisis preparedness projects our clients praise us for, in Belgium and abroad. In this blog, Mike and Julien briefly introduce themselves.
Early August 2018, Stijn Pieters gave an interview in the radio show De Wereld Vandaag on the Flemish public radio station Radio 1. Crisis communication about a famous event being talked about around the globe, and how to react when you suddenly find yourself in the head of the storm. Those were the topics.
Begin augustus 2018 gaf Stijn Pieters een interview in het radioprogramma De Wereld Vandaag op de Vlaamse publieke radiozender Radio 1. Crisiscommunicatie bij een gebeurtenis die wereldwijd over de tongen rolt, en hoe reageren als je dan plots onder vuur komt te staan, dat waren de gespreksonderwerpen.
In April we spent more than a week at the Argenta headquarters in Antwerp to provide acute crisis management and crisis communications support. Belgians fifth largest bank was affected by a large IT crisis after a system migration, causing their online applications to be unavailable for multiple days in a row. They called our team for assistance and we jumped right in.
Even for us, the Metro crisis at Argenta was a rather long one. Colleague Stijn Pieters and myself were on location in Antwerp for about a week and afterwards colleague Hugo Marynissen and myself were involved in the follow-up phase. Additionally, we always had our back office team on stand by in Ghent for when we needed support. We’re talking about two weeks of crisis here!
PM Risk•Crisis•Change is the kind of organisation that firmly believes in spreading relevant ideas and thoughts by different means. For instance, we like to make sure we can present our findings and best practices at various international conferences each year. In the same spirit, we also like to take the time to publish in depth papers. In 2018, PM team members Stijn & Tim published a peer reviewed article in the Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning.
Their 13 page paper covers a wide range of topics, all related to two basic questions:
These questions were also the core ideas discussed at Stijn & Tim’s exciting duo presentation at BCI World 2017 Conference (London) and in a follow up article in Continuity Magazine.
Looking for a job in crisis consulting and want to know what it will be like working at PM? Then keep on reading! My name is Verona Custers and since two weeks I am part of the PM team. I would like to give you a sneak peek of my experience at PM so far. I can already tell you that no day is the same at PM. So, if there are other potential crisis consultants reading this: make sure to get at the end of this post, there’s a nice opportunity hidden there.
The rest of this blog post is written in Dutch. So hang on, we’re switching to Dutch now…
Tim Van Achte, one of PM’s longest standing employees, is off the payroll and into the PM’s pool of freelancers. After having collaborated with Managing Partner Stijn Pieters for over half of their lives (20 years!) Tim has signed up for a challenging career at the ‘Foresight’ team of Digipolis, City of Ghent. Tim realises that this might leave some of his contacts with a question: what about the PM contributions and ongoing projects?
Tim: “Well, becoming part of PM’s pool of freelance consultants, I am able to continue the activities that I have come to love at PM, be it under a reduced time investment. I intend to keep up the good work: perform sentiment analysis for PM clients in need, collaborating on PM’s newest innovations (such as the Zombie Crisis Game), even working with the team on the business development side of things, … Yes, I want to witness how the PM story evolves and I am going to continue contributing to the various specialisms I’ve become notorious for after all those years. It shouldn’t stop here. Together with PM I intend to further develop the field of sentiment and perception analysis, social media and tools in crises, crisis intelligence, etc.
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.
For this guest post, Manu Steens from the Flemish Government shared a short piece with us. He has just written an interesting review of our latest book for Be Prepared, the leading Belgian magazine on emergency management published by Die Keure. The publisher granted us permission to provide the full version of his review (read further for link to PDF).
Manu is crisis manager at the ‘CCVO Department of Chancellary and Public Governance’ at the Flemish Government and project officer business continuity management. He frequently reviews books and shares relevant insights related to business contunity on his blog.
When in crisis, the main question for organisations is: what do you need to handle the situation thoroughly?
From his position as Academic Director of the Executive PhD programme of Antwerp Management School, our Senior Partner Hugo Marynissen is invited as one of the speakers at an event in May 2018 in Antwerp: Can we actually manage a crisis? organised by Antwerp Management School.
