blog post – first quarter 2024
never saw it coming
Thousands of tourists flock to an annual festival held in the city in which I live. This is a major cultural event where people come from all around the world to enjoy days of activities, spending money on food, drinks, and the iconic items unique to this event.
Major vendors certainly accept credit cards and automated payment systems during this time, but a lot of transactions take place in cash, especially at the hundreds of stalls that line the streets.
This year, I went to the bank the day after the festival ended to exchange the large denomination notes the ATMs dispense for smaller notes that businesses prefer. “Sorry, we don’t have any money,” the teller told me. She showed me her cash drawer, which looked rather desolate.
Wait, did the bank just say they didn’t have any money? Aren’t banks where they keep the money? It seems the festival had depleted cash supplies to the point where even banks were short of notes.
I smiled, but I was a bit irritated. This is an annual event. The cash drawdown was likely not unique to this year. So why did the banks not plan ahead?
When I got outside, I started to get a bit more irritated. Then I realized something embarrassing. It is an annual event. It is foreseeable that the banks won’t have money the day after. Why didn’t I plan to get money before the festival?
My frustration was misdirected. I cannot control what the banks do, but I can control what I do. I should have planned better.
Many organizations make the same mistake with their crisis planning. They anticipate that things will occur as they normally do when things go awry.
Just sticking with the example I’ve chosen …In a crisis, they expect the banks will be open. Money can be moved as normal. People will be available to help if needed. But what if one or more of those isn’t the case?
When crisis strikes, you can get irritated with the bank. In the end, though, that won’t accomplish anything that supports your crisis response. Only you having a plan that offers alternatives for the banks not being available will keep your response on track.
When I used to work for the airlines, we had to be able to provide financial support to passengers hurt in an accident in short order. Having a lot of cash on hand at our airport stations for something that was unlikely to occur didn’t seem the best solution. Cash advances off credit cards were restricted by withdrawal limits and the amount of cash in any one machine. Cash cards could be given out, but they came with transaction fees that reduced the amount given. Agreements with onsite currency exchanges might work when they were open and had enough cash. Someone could always drive to a bank to make a withdrawal unless it was after hours or a bank holiday.
Rarely are back-up solutions easy. Most even have to be customized to the location where an event could occur. But each is worth the advance preparation to minimize scrambling for a solution at the time of a crisis.
A lot of what trips up organizations during a crisis is fully foreseeable before the crisis strikes. Rarely, in a post-crisis debrief does the statement “we never saw it coming” hold any water. In reality, organizations either didn’t look for potential problems or, more likely, saw the challenge and deemed it too difficult or expensive to solve in advance.
Many organizations learn the hard way which course of action is truly more expensive.
You cannot control what others do. You can control what you do. The latter includes planning for others not doing, or not being able to do, what you expect.
The organizations who handle crisis best ensure they spend considerable time on finding workable alternatives to critical people, processes, and infrastructure long before they discover they are unavailable.
Rest assured, I’ll be getting my money ahead of next year’s festival.
Be different. Be ready.