blog post – second quarter 2025
living in a glass house
Every business resilience professional has been in a situation where people outside the organization made comments about something you did during an incident or crisis response. And every one of us said at the time, ‘they would not be saying that if they knew the full story.’
So I found it amusing and disappointing when so many business resilience professionals began proactively judging the London Heathrow Airport resilience team after the airport shut down operations as a result of a nearby fire at a power substation.
How could they be dependent on a single power source? Was a shutdown written into their procedures for this kind of a crisis? Why would an airport of this size not have a better backup plan?
Not that these are not fair questions. In fact, I was actually asked one of these on Facebook by a friend who knows I do resilience for a living. I answered from a generic best practices perspective.
Just take a moment and revisit your own moment of judgment as shared above. None of us were in the room where Heathrow’s discussions were taking place. None of us know what complicating factors they were facing. None of us had to decide a course of action based on limited information available at a specific moment in time. But we all been in that situation.
A public enquiry will shed light on what happened and why. Maybe mistakes were made in advance of or on the day. Maybe part or all of the decisions made will be fully justified. We will find out in due course, and it will definitely be enlightening to know.
I just hope that people in the resilience business would refrain from instigating speculation, which is what anything is unless you know the answer. It makes our jobs very difficult when people – industry colleagues no less – start coloring the public’s perception of what happened before any of us know for certain.
Let’s keep asking the necessary questions. Let’s just do it in appropriate forums, which do not include publishing promotional posts about our best educated guess.
Rather, let’s focus on helping people to …
Be different. Be ready.