Control de Cambios en la Configuración

Move 3 may have seemed like piling on, but unprece-dented things happen in the real world as well as the one conjured by creative

wargamers. A month after the California earthquake, a large bomb explodes in the lobby of the bank’s main of-fice building in New York.

Damage is extensive.

In bank terms, the 80-20 rule can and should inform behavior at every level of the institution. Employees must ask themselves:

What do I need in my grab-and-go packet? Preplanning and pre-packaging have to be tested on a regular basis, and leadership must convey its commitment and a sense of urgency to the exercise or it will fail. Business as usual is now a nonstarter.

THE BIG IDEA A plan for crisis management and mitigation

—a must for transnational companies—should be made clear and transparent to all employees. It should be simple, with clear lines of authority, and it should be drilled often enough that responses are confident and automatic.

The list of additional takeaways is a long one. The following six are key:

• Roles and responsibilities in a CM2 plan must be clear and un-derstood at every level of the organization. Decisions in the first hours and days of a crisis are key, and confusion may lead to chaos, slowing or even crippling the bank’s response and poten-tially endangering the bank’s human, physical, and financial as-sets. Decision rights are critical: Every manager cannot be in charge; in a crisis, egos must be checked at the door.

• Lines of succession must be transparent so that a bank leader who is not available during a crisis can be replaced by someone with fully vested authority. In the game, the California quake provided a vivid example of why this is absolutely necessary. The CM2 planning had designated someone to run California oper-ations in the event of a natural disaster. But as the scenario un-folded, a participant on the enterprise leadership team who was playing the designee demurred. In a paraphrase of his remarks:

“You people don’t understand. I’ll be dead. And if I’m not dead, I’ll be looking for my family or trying to find food and a place to

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sleep, or all of the above. Look, I’m not going to be able to run this.” Everyone else said, No, no, you’re in charge. It was an orga-nizational disconnect: He was the designated guy in theory but not in fact.

• Unless people are trained in exactly what they are supposed to do in a crisis, they will fall back on what they know. In HerculesBanc and other global financial institutions, this idea is countercul-tural. Such banks thrive on local entrepreneurial action that ben-efits from—forgive the oxymoron—creative repetition, which is another way of saying business as usual. A clear command-and-control structure is a sine qua non in a crisis. That said, war-game participants noted how well the bank had assimilated new acquisitions by using transition teams to cut across business lines. The suggestion—a good one—was to adapt what works well in the bank’s culture to the new age of crisis management and mitigation, or CM2.

• CM2 can and should minimize the confusion and differences among existing crisis-response plans. As a global enterprise with offices in hundreds of cities and countries and a tradition of ceding authority to its local and regional entrepreneurs, Hercules-Banc has more than 2,000 independent business continuity plans. Their sheer number, limited integration, and variability mean an inevitably slowed response in a crisis. The CM2 plan would replace this hodgepodge with one basic crisis manage-ment and mitigation framework that is adaptable to address de-tails in a specific crisis.

• The CM2 plan, in its construction and explanation to employ-ees, should employ KISS principles: Keep it simple, stupid.

Without a clear understanding of how the plan is supposed to function, rank-and-file employees and even bank leaders may find themselves flummoxed in a crisis. When the plan goes live, it should be communicated to one and all in brief summary form—no more than two pages—and scrubbed to remove any and all jargon.

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• Communication, internal and external, is of paramount impor-tance. Transparency, information sharing, explanations of deci-sions, clear guidance—all these things and much more should be part of a communications process that is disciplined, timely, and concise; serves to calm the bank’s constituents without de-ceiving them; and supports the brand as the bank responds to the crisis.

There is more, of course. It was especially heartening that the participants thought the bank in a crisis could serve purposes be-yond its own successful responses. Indeed, it could even distinguish itself. How? If the bank could use CM2 to protect and stabilize it-self, there might be opportunities to reach out beyond its own uni-verse of employees and customers to assist the broader community or a troubled competitor. In other words, even in adversity, corpo-rate citizenship need not be sacrificed, indeed, should not be sacri-ficed.

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P A R T

III

GLOBAL