It’s Friday, and I think I’m going to make Fridays a day for blog reviews and other “lighter” and “casual” subjects. Today’s blog is Ken Simpson’s Contemplating… blog, a rather recent addition to the business continuity blogging world – the first post is dated November 20th this year. Actually it’s not so much about just business continuity, but about resilience, a topic I have a strong inclination towards, next to supply chain risk. Ken’s blog is a must read for the business continuity professional seeking a wider perspective on what resilience actually means.
Ken Simpson
Ken is a freelance management consultant living in Australia. He specializes in the field of Resilience/Continuity Management and has delivered numerous engagements on this subject all over the world. He started this blog primarily as a way to refine his own thinking in this field and to enrich this thinking by interaction with other interested professionals. And interact he does.
The first impression
I don’t remember exactly how Ken and I got to know each other; we exchanged comments on a couple of posts, and I’m not sure who commented on whose blog first, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Ken never has a non-engaging post. Kevin’s particular interest is resilience and business continuity practice, and what I like about Ken’s blog is the really wide perspective he has, drawing on research and articles from a wide range of resources, adding his own thoughts, focusing a message and asking a question for his readers at the end. Truly engaging.
The highlights
Let’s look at some of Ken’s post that made an impression with me.
In … heritage or legacy BC Ken asks whether traditional BC is stuck in silo thinking, only seeing the company it concerns, and not thinking on a grander scale, while resilience thinking by its very nature demands a wider horizon.
Ken brilliantly manages to bring seemingly unrelated topics into the realm of his blog. In … that final scene with HAL and Dave, reflecting on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey, Ken cites from Is Google Making Us Stupid?, where Nicholas Carr contends that the way we interact with information shapes our thinking, and that Dave’s interaction with computers has made him robotic and mechanic (i.e. less human), while HAL still has his emotions (i.e. human). The essence, I guess, is that continuity and resilience thinking needs to become less plan-focused and procedure-oriented, but should become softer to be more effective?
That notion is also present in … how often we mistake the tool for the process, where making a crisis management plan based on a template downloaded from the Internet actually dumbs down the process and has no effect whatsoever on raising crisis management awareness within a company. This reminds of my job in the late 80s, when I was working with several regional government agencies in Norway, and where my job was to audit the risk assessment and disaster management plans of the local government authorities. Often these authorities would have hired some consultant to make the plan, and the plan itself was brilliant, except for that they (the local government, let alone the consultants) felt no ownership towards their own vulnerabilities, because they had not sat down themselves and thought things through.
Ken is always on the lookout for anything related to resilience and in …agility he brings in agility as a foundation for continuity since agility means the capability of rapidly and cost efficiently adapting to changes. And adapting to change is at the core of continuity and resilience, because not adapting (or not being able to adapt) could mean dis-continuity.
These are just some of the highlights on Ken’s blog. I am sure there will be many more to come…
Conclusion
The title of the blog is “Contemplating…” (note the three dots), and every post title starts with”…”. I find that a rather neat trademark. Ken’s posts are thoughtful, contemplated and well-worth pondering. This is a management consultant not using his blog for soliciting potential customers, but for truly sharing his knowledge and for engaging his readers, for adding to his own and wider understanding. I do believe that his thoughts will (and should) have an impact in the resilience/continuity community. Kudos to Ken for deciding to take up blogging!
The blog
- www.blog.vrg.net.au: Contemplating…
The author
- linkedin.com: Ken Simpson
- twitter.com: simpsonkd
Related
- husdal.com: Business Continuity blogs of note
(If you would like to have your blog/website reviewed, please contact me)
