Helen Molyneux

Yellow and black pipeline warning marker post in a grassy field with dry stone walls and Peak District hills behind, marking the route of the proposed Peak Cluster CO2 pipeline

Peak Cluster and the CO2 Pipeline: the business continuity conversation nobody’s having

There’s a proposal working its way through the planning system at the moment that deserves more attention from a business continuity perspective than it’s currently getting. Peak Cluster is a carbon capture and storage scheme that would take CO2 from cement and lime works in Derbyshire and Staffordshire and move it 120-odd miles by pipeline, […]

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A small business leadership team of four reviews a recovery plan together around a meeting table, discussing priorities calmly and analytically

What the NCSC’s new incident recovery guidance gets right, and where it falls short

On 29 July, the NCSC published What To Do When Cyber-Attacks Disrupt Your Organisation, a detailed framework covering the first hours of a disruptive attack through to the months of rebuild that follow. It’s well timed. Attack volumes are up, and the guidance is clear-eyed about something many boards still underestimate: recovery from a serious

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Covered walkway to the SEC, Hydro and Armadillo arenas in Glasgow, with green mould and slime staining the outer panels

What the Commonwealth Games Taught Me About Deploying Resource

I’ve been away for a week, which means the blog has been quiet and there is a genuinely biblical quantity of laundry currently taking over the house. The one thing keeping me cheerful through it has been the Commonwealth Games, which we went to see at Glasgow over the last six days. The Tollcross ticketing

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A bound stack of aged manila case files tied with string, beside a pair of reading glasses, on a wooden desk

A 74-Year-Old Wreck Just Explained Why Your Safety Briefing Exists

A 74-Year-Old Wreck Just Explained Why Your Safety Briefing Exists Last month a sonar drone found the wreckage of a Pan American Airways aircraft two thousand feet down off Puerto Rico. The Clipper Endeavor had been missing since 11 April 1952, when it lost several engines shortly after take-off and went into the Atlantic with

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Close-up of a woman's wrist wearing a fitness tracker at a kitchen table, illustrating everyday wearable data collection

Who knew you were pregnant before you did?

Who knew you were pregnant before you did? There’s a story doing the rounds this week about a woman whose fitness tracker flagged her pregnancy weeks before a test did. Elevated resting heart rate, a shift in temperature, the usual pattern. It’s a nice human interest story, and it’s also, if you sit with it

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Mont Blanc and the French Alps, the destination behind a lesson in contingency planning

None of It Was Mine to Fix: What a Trip to the Alps Taught Me About Contingency Planning

None of It Was Mine to Fix: What a Trip to the Alps Taught Me About Contingency Planning I’ve just got back from a few days in the Alps, and the getting there and back was, in its own small way, a masterclass in exactly the thing I spend my working life advising other people

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Venn diagram showing three overlapping types of risk — financial risk (ACA/ACCA), project risk (PMI/APM) and operational risk (ISO 22301) — with their small area of overlap labelled 'Risk: one word, several meanings

Risk means different things to Different People. That’s the whole problem.

I spent a chunk of last weekend scrolling through risk management job vacancies, out of nothing more than professional nosiness (and a need to avoid 24/7 football). It’s not as if the confusion over what “risk” actually means was news to me — I’ve spent the best part of two decades watching it play out

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Relay baton dropped mid-handover, illustrating a failed third-party contract handover

What the Sats Marking Crisis Tells Us About Third-Party Contract Handovers

What the Sats Marking Crisis Tells Us About Third-Party Contract Handovers Every July, Year 6 pupils across England find out how they did in their Sats. This year, a lot of schools found out how their exam board did instead, and the answer wasn’t good. Pearson took over the £180 million Sats marking contract from

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what makes a supplier risk assessment

What Makes a Supplier (And When a Tool Is Not Simply a Tool)

What Makes a Supplier (And When a Tool Is Not Simply a Tool) Every organisation I’ve worked with over the years has a supplier list. It sits somewhere in a spreadsheet, gets reviewed once a year around audit time, and contains the names you’d expect: the IT support company, the payroll provider, maybe a facilities

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