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A Plan Is Just Paper: Wargaming Business Continuity with Continuity Through Planning · The Innovation Philosophie Podcast

• speaker-0: Hello and welcome to the Innovation Philosophy Podcast, the show where we look at the economics of innovation and the conditions that produce genuinely new ideas. I'm your host, Nathan Reardon, and today we're tackling a topic every executive claims to have covered, but very few have truly mastered: business continuity and crisis leadership. Now we've all seen the traditional corporate playbook, a thick 200-page continuity plan tucked away in a folder, ticking compliance boxes to create an illusion of safety. But when a real disaster hits, that plan rarely survives the first hour. So joining me today from continuity through planning are Paul Mitchell, founder and principal consultant, and Carl Cruikshank, head of game design, who are flipping the script on traditional risk management, trading dry compliance exercises for war gaming and safe to fail simulations, including a fire marshal game that's just won a manual game award at the Sirius Games Showcase and Challenge Europe. Thank you for joining me today. So to jump right in, most organisations assume that if they've written the plan they're prepared. Is that the assumption you most want to tear up or is there something deeper within business continuity that you want to change? speaker-2: I think the the main thing is that people have the plan and the plan's great. but until you've actually exercised it and you've built some muscle memory and the team that are gonna have to invoke the plan know how to use it, it's just a piece of paper and it's of no use to anyone if you don't know what you're doing. speaker-0: Gotcha. So it's one thing to have the plan, but if you've never actually practised using the plan Is it almost no point in having the plan in that situation, do you think? speaker-2: I think so we talk to our customers when they say, Can you come in and write us plan? The first thing we ask them is, Are they gonna be prepared to exercise it? Are they gonna do the work, do the training and actually do some practising? Because if you were gonna run a football team or a sports team and you just make people read books on the sport that they're playing and never let them touch the equipment until game day, they're not gonna play well. And I think everyone get you can get behind that analogy, right? So Why would you think that people can read a plan on how to protect their business during a major incident and it'll be okay, we'll we'll know how to use this on the day without actually doing any practice. once we get that commitment from them that it's not just gonna be a paper document, it's not gonna be something to sit on their bookshelf and collect dust, it's gonna be a living, breathing document that they practice regularly on so that everyone in the company knows their role within it and How to respond to a major incident? speaker-0: So how then did because I guess you you've you've come in with some quite radical ideas of, you know, really putting things into practice, how did these ideas for approaching crisis management clash with what you saw when you first walked in to speak with executives and how did you get over that sort of scepticism that people might have had? speaker-2: I I think a lot of a lot of it comes down to the fact that there have been a lot of there's there's not a defined way to do business continuity yet. It's still quite a new industry. It's been around twenty years as a concept, but there's still, you know, several thousand consultants, contracting companies, places to get this that get your business continuity plan written, and everyone's got a slightly different approach. there's Some people that want a document for every single scenario. There's some people like myself that are much more consequential based in muscle memory than trying to trying to get people to understand what to do if the consequence of an incident is XYZ and how we would respond to that. and then there's some people that want a really just high like audit ready plan with no idea whether or not it's gonna work. Whereas we've come in and said you need to ch practice it in fact a worse business continuity plan will work in practice if it's practiced. Well work in real if it's practiced regularly. and then by exercising the plan you realise your plan doesn't work against us a given scenario. So you adjust your plan and you make your plan better and you make your people better. so that's the approach that we're taking and I think What we were seeing or what I was seeing is a lot of very big plans, heavy documents that were all out of date by the time that I came to look at them, and it might have only been six months since they were they were written, or it might have been two years since they were speaker-0: All right, right. speaker-2: written. parts of the business that didn't exist any longer. They were named people in the plans that no longer work for the company. And when you talk to anyone in the company, they had no idea the plan even existed, and if they did, they certainly hadn't practiced it. speaker-0: So was it was it easy to get buy in then from from the people who were making the decisions when you point out things like that? speaker-2: I think one thing I'd we've not had a problem with, both with the current con or the traditional consultancy side of the business on with the the games design which we'll talk about later, is when we can get in front of people and we can talk to them and we can show them our products and we can show them what we what we mean when we talk about planning. We've never had a problem with convincing them that our way is a good way to do it. I'm not saying it's the best way, I'm definitely not saying it's the worst way. But it is a really good way to do it and it is a good way to make sure that your team is ready to be able to respond to to instincts that are coming. speaker-0: So then w when you when you first decided did you put it up, when you first decided that using that sort of gamification was the answer well not the answer, but was an answer to this sort of situation. Was that was that a sudden insight or was that something that built up over time? speaker-2: so as a combination of things. One is so back in twenty ten I was working McVodafone and we started to use a very small amount of gamification in a very what I would call really rudimentary way now. and certainly wouldn't be embarrassed to share my customers like the the first prototypes that we had, but we found by turning training into a game or exercising into a game, we got that a massive amount of engagement from the teams. and they were suddenly more invested in putting the time aside. They wanted to watch when other people were playing, other like the team sat around and watched what was going on, where like traditionally that they had whenever they'd seen me and one of my colleagues come up, they knew there was a test and they all tried to hide so we speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-2: couldn't and like suddenly they were getting involved. And then the stuff that I was doing kind of t s lent to that sort of way and sort of more matrix style going kind of choose your own adventure stuff that I was doing. it wasn't however until I I saw an advert for a master's degree and more game in in resilience planning that I was like, maybe there's a more professional way to do this and so I went off for a year and did a master's degree which is where I met Kyle. and it kind of took you back to the the fundamentals of game design and what makes a good game and what you need to do to build a good game and how you can build research out the back of the game and how you can use it to really embed learning and development of teams. speaker-0: Okay, so you Kyle, when you are designing a game, where does the thinking start? Is it with the client's problem, is it the player's experience or is it the outcome that you want people to learn from? speaker-1: It's it's definitely a combination of the problem and the output. So the problem kind of defines what we should be what should we sh we should be trying to train, but the output is ultimately the goal. So I mean we want people to be able to walk out of this exercise having hit the the the the learning expectation that the client's looking for. So in in some cases it may be that they want to check their capability to understand if they actually know what to do in a in a crisis. it might just be to have a better understanding of the policy as a whole. but that that has to be the the starting point for us because from there we can work backwards and s and figure out, okay, is this going to be a matrix game? Is this going to be a card game? are we going to have more of more interactive type environment? Or is it just going to kind of be a, you know, tabletop, let's flip some stuff over and answer some questions. it it it really does define what that out or what that process is gonna be for us in the design f in the design phase. and sometimes it's even very difficult for them to understand what is the output they're actually looking for because they've been going through and and treading water on this process for so long that we just have to essentially go to and go, give us your documentation, give us time with an SME on your site And we will figure out what your output that you're looking for is and then we'll discuss it back to you and go, is this really what you're looking for? Or and then we'll have a discussion of like, well maybe you might be really wanting more of this, in which case this is the direction we'll take. speaker-0: So how do you introduce your ideas without making a leadership team defensive? 'Cause I assume people probably the people who are actually putting these things into place probably are being told by someone higher up that a new group are coming in to essentially tell them what to do. speaker-1: Yeah, I think I mean Paul and I've we've we've kind of got a really good what we call an icebreaker game now. is it's our business continuity game and it's a very simple game. It shows scenarios and it shows a time or date, essentially. And we just basically ask them, how would your organization deal with this issue at this time? Run us through what your policy is. Do you do you know what your policy is? Do you know what your escalation policy is? Do you know who can contact to resolve this issue? what risk tolerance do you have for this issue? And then after they answer it, then we go, okay. Then we pull a different date and say, does that plan still work now? So it might work during working hours on a Tuesday at noon, but what about on a bank Friday? What about on a weekend? What about at midnight? Does your plan still hold true at that time? And that's where they that the shoe kind of drops that point of them going, Yeah, I didn't think of outside hours or this issue that I really have nothing to do with, but there is still a process by which I can go about to escalate it if I were the first one to to to notice it. speaker-0: So it really is that situation of there is no one plan that fits all, no one size fits all situation. speaker-1: And also the fact that, you know, discontinuity or major incidents or resilience isn't always a fire, flood, or a cyber incident. It could be something as simple as a train strike, so half your staff don't show up, or they show up late, or you're snowed in the building. or another pandemic happens. You know, any of these could happen, as we're seeing now. How does your business deal with it? speaker-0: So speaking of the pandemic then, Paul, you led the AA's crisis management team through COVID. Was there a moment when you realised that the plan on paper and what people were actually doing under pressure were two very different things? speaker-2: yeah, I think I mean Tavy was a great example of where regardless of what you've written in your plan the the sort of world changed a little bit, you know. I think there was no one, or certainly no one that I've spoken to that like didn't honestly put their hand at their heart and say they had a pandemic plan and it kind of all eventualities and every decision the government made. you know, that they thought about homeworking, home schooling, have they had they allocated the fact that all the shops are gonna be shut and you couldn't be two meters or within two meters of the person next to you and you know, so at the A there was there was lots of problems that we we then had to encounter it, you know, from like o operational stuff like how do you recover a car without putting the people in the cab of the the vehicle that's recovering them which was on the pre COVID that if the you know the person they're picking up had COVID, then you're gonna make our driver potentially have COVID and then we'd lose another driver. And you know, what do you I mean the amount of medical ail moves that I found out about that you know seemed to be quite prevalent across all industries. that I didn't realise, you that were then gonna mean that those people needed to be isolated earlier rather than later, kind of thing. and you know moving everyone in a contact centre to working at home means used to share a computer across three shifts and suddenly you have to buy an extra two computers so that everyone's got a computer at home. You know, so there was a whole bunch of stuff and you know there's some really good lessons learned that that were captured during COVID. I think speaking to some clients that we've worked with as well post COVID. there was a lot of good learning that just got lost because of how long the incident went on for it. It was kind of almost two years worth of expert on behalf of you know, working in the extraordinary ways, that people didn't get that recovery period. So like normally when you run an exercise, you kind of everything's summed up in a sort of three or four or five hour window when you're doing the exercise and it's all backed up in a nice meat pair and everyone gets back to to normal, or we never get to that recovery phase and how do we make sure everything's working as as well as it was beforehand. So Yeah, with COVID it was it was an extraordinary place and time to be, but you you had the backdrop of it was impacting everyone in the world at roughly at the same time. So if you told your customer that it's gonna take you know as the AA wrote to pick people up within an hour or two hours when they they need recovery, it's gonna take twelve hours. Otherwise, it's COVID, you know, in the same way that every time you phone someone it's like, it's gonna take ages to get through on the phone because of COVID. and Well, say everyone was in the same boat and when people or customers say to us, we go through COVID, do we we don't need business continuity now to just make it up? It's like, well, if the incident only was a business, your customers aren't going to tolerate it in the same way that they did with COVID. So your recovery needs to be smoother, your communication needs to be better. You can't just say, we'll come back whenever we want anything. so There's a lot of good lessons from COVID. There's some complacency that came in quite soon after COVID that we've got through this, we can get through everything. and then there's a lot of well we can just work from home. So well that's great as a concept, but you know, where's your VPN based? Does your VPN still have capacity? You know, what happens if there's a power outage in the homes, you know, in a in a like where if all your contact centre staff like live and work around the office. what if there's power cut that doesn't just impact the office, it impacts everyone's phones. Like what do you do then kind of thing? So you've yes, you've reduced one possible part of one part of your risk profile, but you've kind of spread your risk. So the risk of individuals getting impactful is higher. I mean the the the lock of a broadband in the domestic setting and like power in domestic setting is a lot less resilient than the power in broadband resilience you can build into a into an office environment because projects and stuff. speaker-0: So obviously COVID was a very extreme situation. And stress does strange things to people in a crisis. How do you create an environment for the teams that you're working with where they are allowed to fail safely in a situation? in a sin in a simulation. So they don't fail in real life. speaker-2: I think the key bit, and Carl's probably got his own thoughts on this as well, but the key bit for me is the making sure it's that safe to fail environment where you you're reiterating to everyone that you're not trying to test the individual's capability, you're trying to test the plans and the processes behind them. So that gives them the opportunity to be a bit more flexible and a little bit easier on themselves and and not risk necessarily saying the stupid thing that that people might not like to hear. But the other thing is just being in that environment once you build that trust with the team is giving them the opportunity to tell them that they're practicing. So if they make mistakes, it's great. Would you rather make a mistake when you're practicing or like on match day so to speak, or you know, when when there's a world incident, that's that's why we're practicing. So we can make mistakes and then we can address them. And it might be a mistake in the plan, it might be a mistake in not having the right people in the room. in the Map instance exercises we've run where people have gone, this would be much better if we could call this person and this person and this person into It's like, Okay, well, are they available? Can we get them in? or if they're not, well, even on on a blame day, if they're on holiday or they're in hospital or they're impacted by the event, what how are you gonna cope without them? So, you know, have are the deputies available, etcetera. So it's just building that trust. speaker-1: Yeah, absol absolutely with regards to that. And it's it's building those guide rails as we call it, essentially in the game, so they kind of understand like this is the scenario boundaries by which we're looking at. But we're also not going into there trying to force our opinion or our way of thinking onto them. We're trying to just help them be in an environment that, as Paul said, they can safely fail if need be, but it's based upon the process that they themselves have. And as much as we're not to to the end user testing them, we are to the business testing their capability. So when that kind of topic comes up, or when those side challenges or side issues do appear, is the team ready and capable of of handling it in an appropriate manner? And in in theory, is the common sense that's being used in the room the common sense the business wants them to be using? speaker-0: Right. So almost like removing the pressure from the individual and putting it on the company and being like, Maybe you've not got the right individual in the right place. There should be someone else doing it or more than one person doing it. speaker-1: Essentially. I mean we we will identify gaps potentially in the process just by walking through the process with them. Everyone may be doing the the right thing for their role, but we may find that there's an actual role missing in that process to keep it all together. Or it may just be that the training they have already in place for a role isn't sufficient enough for that person to actually be capable to do that role. In which case then instead of us, you know, penalizing or saying that the person has failed, we we look at it more as an educational opportunity and go, Okay, well, so there's there's a learning area here. There's an area that we can now dig into and instead of going, Okay, well, that's the wrong answer, we kinda open it up in the in the group and go, Okay, that's one way in which we can do it. Does anyone else have any other ideas? or any other feedback they can provide at this point. And then it becomes a discussion. And instead of again us lecturing them on this is how you should do it, it's actually their peers in the business that are coming out going, well actually I faced that issue. This is how I handled it last time and this is the reaction I received. And then a whole discussion on is that a better way of doing it than this and so on and so forth. And that becomes a learning out point for the debrief at the end of the of the exercise. speaker-0: Okay. And why do you think then that something that sounds as simple as actually just running through the plan with the leaders points out these issues that they've missed in the first place. speaker-1: I think in in in in some ways it's the old mentality of we have a two hundred page document, someone has written this up, the checklist activity has been done, we are now compliant. so they put comfort in the fact that it's been documented somewhere. but as you know, Paul was saying with sports teams, if all we saw was reading and then actually got to game day, would they actually be able to do with it? The moment we we've do an icebreaker or we start building out a scenario with a client, the senior leadership team immediately starts to see where things are falling apart, that you know, a checklist type training isn't the best in every situation. It does satisfy the compliance aspect of things, but in reality, it it might not actually mean that they're a hundred percent ready for it. I mean, going back to the COVID scenario, nobody thought that was gonna happen. it was never on anyone's bingo card for that year. all of a sudden it did. Now when we come into to conversations and we bring out some what could have been ten years ago a very unlikely scenario, people take it lot more seriously now on the fact of well, maybe that could happen. You know, we were we were talking with one client on the fact that they were like, Well, these are the kind of fires that we could have. And we suggested, well, what if something like a meteor hit in your area? Translate however you want, but how would how would your team you know deal with that and that cost a fire or a panic or a major incident in your borough? And they went, And I said, Really think outside the box with regards to some of these scenarios to see If something very drastically were to happen in your organization, could your people adapt enough based on the scenarios and the process that you have in place to deal with it? speaker-0: So for example with cyber threats, supply chain failures or AI moving fast, the way to prepare a company for a crisis that might not even have been invented yet is to have them ready for something that might be a bit similar that they could then go, Okay, we can work off of what we've already got. speaker-2: No, so you're I mean, really simply put, you're if you train people to plan for the consequence of things happening, and there's only so many things in your business that you've got, so you've got your people, you've got your your workspaces, you've got your IT systems, you've got your suppliers, right? if one of them is not available or is impacted in some way, how's your business going to continue running, right? So that's the business continuity side of it. And then all you're doing with crisis scenarios is you're picking one of those things and you might be a supplier, it might be like a set of data, and you're saying we've had this impact, this impact in this bit of your data. Now, whether that's a cyber attack, whether that's AI going A well on your data, or whether it's like a fire in your building, the actual scenario doesn't matter. What matters is that as a leadership team, you're able to go, right, this is what's happened. This is the impact it's having on us. These are the decisions we need to make. This is the s strategic objectives we're trying to achieve. This is as in this is what a successful recovery from this incident looks like. And it might be that a successful recovery for them is to give all their shareholders back their money, pay the staff out of their contracts and close the business. I mean, I haven't run a scenario that's that being the solution, but that is a viable way to to like to to problem solve, right? However normally what you're trying to achieve is you're you're trying to look at what their customer database is or what their customer customers are expecting, what their service demands are, and then making sure they can continue to deliver some level of service to their customers that will have the least worst option for all their customers so that they can continue to provide revenue to the business. speaker-0: Right. Okay. And Kyle, how when you're when you're coming up with with your ideas, how do you tell the difference between an idea that's genuinely new and one that's just a new coat of paint on something old? speaker-1: Usually if if it's a it's a truly new idea, someone will scoff at the idea. You know, they they they exactly that. They they will kind of go, yeah, okay, whatever, you know, and and they'll kinda dismiss it right out of hand. if it's just a repainting of something, they'll probably have heard it at some point or heard something like it. and it might have a little bit of legitimacy behind it. But to really look at a a new idea. And and and this is where we we do get quite a bit of skeptics when we walk into some of the more senior teams when doing some of these kind of trainings. you know, they look at it like, why am I here? We're just playing a game, what am I gonna learn from this? And these are the meetings that I love the most because the not twenty minutes into our exercise, that skeptic who walked in is gonna become our best champion. Because they're gonna realize really quickly they really underestimated what we were talking about. This can be used in in a a variety of different ways. and it's kind of opened their eyes with the fact that, yeah, maybe the way that we do things all the time isn't the best way to do it all the time. and I and it I mean, we've done this now with our emergency response game now in London for local councils. You know, there's a lot of quite entrenched employees that have been in in council for a very long time. you know, they know pretty much everything back to Fords and back again. and we love running them through the exercise because someone in the room is going to challenge them going, well, actually, we do have a process on that. Or, well, we just did a a subtraining on this exact topic, on this exact scenario that came up. and this is what we actually do now. And so immediately they're like, Well, I wouldn't have known that had we not done this exercise and had this open conversation essentially walking through. Where again, they may have said something like, we don't do that and we just open it up as facilitators going, Are you sure are are we are we sure that's not a at all being done within this organization or this council? And someone else will then have the confidence or or you know, the freedom to speak up going, Well it's just a game. So yeah, actually There is something we do on that. this is how we experienced it. And actually I did exactly this two, three, four months ago. And then the whole conversation kicks off as a side tangent on that aspect. And that's the learning aspect that we were really trying to drive these exercises. I mean, anytime we've done an exercise on discontinuity or resilience or crisis, we're actually hoping it's not gonna go well. That the whole purpose of the exercise is not to be like, we've gone through this. We're gonna get through this in a speed run. Everything's gonna be great. Everything's perfect. Everybody knows everything. Reality is somebody somewhere is gonna be like, well, I didn't know that. Or they're gonna say something that is factually or process procedurally wrong. And that's gonna open up a whole conversation with somebody else in the room going, Well, actually. And that's where the learning's gonna gonna happen. And it's that open discourse at that point that people are gonna be like, I didn't I didn't think of that, or you know, this is the way we should be looking at it. And if nobody does have an answer as well, then we also take it as a capability gap, either process or employees or or business wise. And that itself will drive its own conversation of well, what is your risk tolerance if this were to happen? What do you think would happen if this were to stay for two hours, half a day, a week, what impact is that gonna have on your business, on your suppliers, on your customers, on your employees? And again, that just drives the conversation of them thinking, yeah, we have to think about this, we have to consider this as an issue. speaker-0: So even even knowing all of the processes, being able to come in with that different perspective of well, that's all well and good for the day, what does that look like if it's a month or like some period of time that no one's ever considered before can have a pretty big impact on what's going on with the team? speaker-1: Absolutely. And I and I think one of the biggest things we're finding with the exercise is just opening people's minds on there's another way of doing things within that process that they may not have considered only because everyone's been sitting in their own box doing their own job for so long that they haven't considered that, well maybe finance does this part a little bit different, or marketing goes a little bit different, or customer service is, you know, a little bit, you know. innovative in their area on this process. speaker-0: So is it speaker-2: Right. So sometimes it is literally just having all the teams in the same room talking about the same problem that you get those different perspectives coming up. And you're like, like, you know, a problem that had been a customer service. they wouldn't have thought, like Carl says, to to talk to any of the other teams about it, but because it's in that open forum and there's someone else that's got a different idea of and like fresh eyes on a problem always seem to find the solution that that people have been looking at for ages won't notice. So But it's great to have people in the room looking at the same problem and talking about it and just having those discussions. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, definitely. 'Cause I've I've done online trainings where it's that box ticking exercise, we need it, you know, there's the reminder email, have you done this video training? And I blitzed through it. Obviously I learn and understand everything that's being taught to me. but you never you never talk to anyone else about what's happened in that video training. You Yeah, there isn't that interactive element which I guess is probably like the biggest offering that you guys have of being there in person. speaker-2: a power of having a group of people around the table talking about something. so much so much learning comes from just actually sitting around a table having a conversation. It's kinda you know, if you like talk about it home life, you know, if you sit sit around a table and have your meal, right? You have a great meal, you have a great conversation. or you can take lunch and sit in front of the TV and you're you're just consuming, you know, you're not you're not learning anything about the people that are with you. you're probably not even remembering what you watch for that half hour and you probably don't remember what you've eaten. If you put speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-2: it on the table you're gonna you're gonna remember that conversation, you'll you'll eat more consciously. You know, so it's it's the same thing when you're when you're exercising or training. You train together and you'll have that shared experience. But nothing else it then stimulates the conversation further. So, you know, people go to the coffee bar and they're like, we did this training exercise, you're stimulated and then they start it. You can feel that kind of proliferation around the the business sometimes. certainly one of the London boroughs that's using our thing to to train their volunteers, they've had more people wanting to volunteer and like trying to say, I need to do my fresh training just now, they know they've got to play a game. And and while it's a very serious kind of training package that we've built then, it looks and feels like a game to them. And you know, if you if you said to your friends to come out to my house on Friday night and we'll watch some PowerPoint slides. Like you could probably not have a lot of people turn up. Whereas if you say it's games night and mine, like you're gonna have more people coming over and it's gonna be a bit more interactive, like speaker-0: So what advice would you give to another founder who wants to disrupt a legacy industry built on bureaucratic compliance box ticking exercises? speaker-2: But other than the obvious answer of come and give us a shout and we can help them. speaker-1: Could probably make a game for it as well. speaker-2: Yeah. I I think it it's that kind of thinking outside the box, isn't it? And I and I said like a real cliche thing, but if you're a founder and you're starting a new business, if you just repeat once and repeat what everyone else is doing, like where's the differentiation and what what are people getting from coming to you and buying your product? If it looks exactly like everything else they can get or, you know, something they can buy online or or whatever. So we really have to think about what your offering is and what it's different. And then if you can't explain to your mum why your business is different to the other four thousand people doing the same thing, then maybe you need to start have a have a have a look at what you're doing and how you can deliver it differently so that you can you've got something different that people are gonna go, that's that's interesting. I'm gonna get in get a little bit more information about. speaker-0: Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, that being able to explain it to mum is very good a very good point. I need to make sure I can explain to my mum what I'm actually doing. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: And what are you building at CTP today that you hope will still matter a decade from now? speaker-2: City opposite. speaker-1: Very good question. I mean, I think for us it's if we start seeing more and more adoption of exercising in this manner for for teaching, not just in corporate, but you know, if we can get into schools and and showing that there's an an another way to learn, that it doesn't always have to be somebody telling you every answer and then you have to regurgitate it back in in a multiple choice test or something. But you can actually have a full conversation to show that you've you know, you've truly understood it and also can apply what you've just learned. I think that will that that'll be a massive change. And I think that'd be really nice to be part of that change at some point, hopefully now. But speaker-0: Is that the same answer for you, Paul? speaker-2: yeah, I mean the s the stuff we're looking at doing with schools is is definitely really interesting because I mean I'd struggle to read textbooks and regurgitate information when I we s was learning and but the the way you consume data is completely different. I mean when I was at school they told me I'd never have a calculator with me all the time and I've got one on my phone and I can just like ask Google to to tell me what the answer to a question is. like a mass question, I don't really need to type it in anymore. So, you know, the world's changed and I think what we need to do is to equip people to be able to to handle that change. and in the same way, when it comes to trying to get organizations to be more resilient, I think there's there's several things that we're trying to build at the moment, including teaching people how to do business continuity in a sort of in a quicker, easier way, so that it doesn't consume a whole bunch of time and effort on their part, but still gives them the same outcome. and then teach them how to exercise and how to really get some benefit from any time they spend talking about business continuity. So it's not sort of confiance thing, it's something that's intrinsic and sort of built into the DNA of their business that even when they're starting to build new things, they're building them in a more resilient way because they realise that things can go wrong and things do change. speaker-0: Right, so even yeah, so even when they're trialling something new, coming at it with that obviously we've got to do the normal business stuff, but that what if something goes wrong mindset from the off. speaker-2: Yeah, it's much easier whether regardless of what you're building, it's much easier if you're thinking about the worst case scenario while you're building the you know, the the prototypes and stuff. Because e either having that resilience, adding that resilience at the end might blow your business cost 'cause it costs too much. it might also be that actually by making it more resilient and thinking about how you can make it more resilient, you you you end up making a better product as well because you know, when you're trying to sell it to someone, if you you know, if you sell someone you know a a tire made of chews, like, you know, it's not gonna be great, right? So, you know, if you then tell them about like how how it's gonna work and how it won't get a puncher and all that sort of stuff because you've thought about how the customer's gonna use the product and how you may fail as a as a supplier and then you work in all your resilience internet and you've got a product for a customer that A works and B then is more resilient, you know, that that gives you some sort of some ability to sell it to that customer and sort of effectively maybe charge a premium because you've got a better quality product that's not gonna fail at the first sign of any sort of issue. speaker-0: Brilliant. I think Tyre Made of Cheese is probably the perfect place to end it today. That is all we have time for today. massive thank you to both of you for joining me. if there's one takeaway from today's episode, it's that box checking only really offers the illusion of safety and true preparation comes from creating safe spaces to fail so you don't fail when the stakes are real. if you've liked this episode, and if you have any questions, leave us a comment on the Innovation Philosophy Instagram. See you next time, Impact Maker.