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This section contains useful general information on Business Continuity, Information Security and Crisis Management. All of our resources are free to download — no sign-up required
Business Continuity Management
1. Business Continuity Management: Getting Started for SMEs
A straightforward starting point for smaller businesses taking on business continuity for the first time — what a Business Impact Analysis actually tells you, and the handful of steps that get a workable plan in place without needing a big budget.
2. Business Continuity Management in Manufacturing Companies
Practical lessons from years of working with manufacturing clients — why the back-office functions get overlooked in continuity planning, and how to bring factory floor and office teams together when it matters.
3. Business Continuity: The Cost Of Disruptions in your business
A look at four separate academic studies quantifying what disruption really costs — from security breaches to supply chain problems — using share price data to put a number on the damage.
4. Business continuity and operational resilience – how different are they really?
A response to the ongoing debate about business continuity versus 'operational resilience' — questioning whether the newer term adds anything beyond duplicating work that good business continuity already covers.
Crisis Management
1. Health Emergencies
A checklist for pandemic and public health emergency planning, covering everything from remote-working capacity to supplier contingencies and staff travel policies.
2. Crisis Communications
The fundamentals of crisis communications — knowing your stakeholders, preparing key messages in advance, and handling media and social media without losing control of the narrative.
3. Building on the Basics
Helen's own step-by-step guide to planning and running an incident management desktop exercise — from setting clear objectives and building a realistic scenario, to managing the room on the day and writing up a proper post-exercise report.
4. The cost of Disruptions
Same article as the Business Continuity Management version above, deliberately cross-listed here as the cost data is just as relevant to crisis management planning.
5.Crisis Management | Hanging on the Telephone
Using a simple queuing model to show just how quickly incoming call volumes can overwhelm a crisis response team — and why pooling resources into one team copes far better than several small ones.
6. The Nature of Crises: Explaining some Myths
Looking at three of the most persistent myths about crises — why 'it will never happen to us' is a dangerous mindset, and why a real incident is actually harder to manage than any exercise.
7. Crisis Management Training Exercises as a Tool
Why running the same crisis exercise across different teams, then comparing how each one responded, teaches far more than the usual single scenario-and-debrief format.
8. Crisis Management Teams - Some Danger Signs
Drawing on over a hundred facilitated exercises, this looks at the warning signs to watch for in a crisis team — from a lack of diversity in the room to the overconfidence that comes with expertise.
9. Is your Crisis Management Training Effective?
Questions whether crisis training budgets are aimed at the right level, arguing that middle-management 'Silver' teams need far more attention than the executive 'Gold' teams usually get.
10. Exercise Mountain Lion
A short scenario-based exercise built around a mountain rescue dilemma — a good way to get a team practising time-pressured decision-making away from their usual office context.
11. Black Swan Events: Why Misuse of the Term Undermines Risk Management and Resilience
A detailed look at why so many events labelled 'black swans', including Covid-19 and the 2008 financial crisis, were actually foreseeable — and why the distinction matters for how organisations prepare.
12. Why Aviation Learns From Disaster – And Most Industries Don't
A 1952 plane crash, rediscovered on the seabed this July, explains why every flight now starts with a safety briefing — and why most industries, unlike aviation, keep relearning the same lessons instead of actually learning them.
Information Security
1. ISO 27001 Implementation - Information Security
Practical, no-nonsense tips for organisations starting the ISO 27001 certification journey, including a reminder that actually reading the standard properly is rarer than you'd think.
2. ISO 27001 and Data Protection - Information Security
Where an existing ISO 27001-certified ISMS falls short of full GDPR and Data Protection Act compliance, and the specific areas — breach notification, data portability — that need extra attention.
3. ISO 27001 vs ISO 22301: The On-Going Debate – Information Security
Settles the long-running debate about whether ISO 27001 alone covers business continuity, and why the two standards, despite real overlap, don't fully substitute for each other.
4. ISO Spaghetti - A Practical Guide to Risk and Resilience Standards
A plain-English breakdown of the five standards that keep cropping up in resilience, risk and security work — ISO 22301, 27001, 22361, 31000 and 22316 — what each one actually covers, where they overlap, and a straightforward way to work out which ones your organisation genuinely needs.
Product Recall
1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Four decades of product recall case studies, from Tylenol's textbook handling in 1982 to the Ford-Firestone dispute that ended a hundred-year partnership, with the lessons that still apply today.
2. The Scale of the Problem
Data on just how common, and how costly, product recalls have become across sectors, including why a recall's impact on share price is usually far smaller than the headlines suggest.