Digitisation has transformed our lives by providing boundless economic and social benefits through improved efficiency and productivity. Yet within critical infrastructure organisations, technological innovation has accelerated faster than our ability to secure it.
A holistic view of risk management in the context of ‘better practice’ is now viewed as ‘organisational resilience’ and is built around a framework that incorporates financial, operational and strategic risk.
Janellis has completed a series of Critical Thinking Labs with executives from a broad range of industries. In these interactive and experiential workshops, we found there is consensus across all sectors for improved decision-making at all levels within the organisation. The reason is some individuals and teams are:
Many organisations want to become more adaptive and to embed an ‘agile’ culture. This relies on effective decision-making at all layers within the organisation.
A broad spectrum of skills underpin good decision-making including the ability to ‘cut through’ by: analysing, verifying and clarifying. Imagining, perceiving and collaborating are core skills. While synthesising, prioritising, planning and communicating are the essential elements of good decision making.
Many of these skills are considered ‘Critical Thinking’ skills. Not surprisingly, it is usually the executive leaders within the organisation who have honed these skills through intuition and experience.
There is a need to build these skills across the organisation more broadly. After all, “a company’s strategy is the sum of decisions it effectively makes and executes over time”. This needs to happen at all layers on a day-to-day basis, not just for the executive-led decisions.
Recently we have been asked the following questions:
How can we simplify the decision-making process? How can we speed it up? How can we provide more rigor? How can we improve decision-making at all levels within the organisation?
Janellis has developed a Decision Support Tool. For more than ten years, senior leaders have used the tool to navigate through some of their most complex challenges. Most teams like the simplicity and structure but others don’t like the words ‘tool’, process or framework as they feel they already have enough of these within their organisation.
For those who don’t want another framework or ‘tool’ we have summarised the ten key questions that drive better decision-making. These questions assume that an individual is making a decision or leading the discussion with the right people present.
These steps may seem obvious and simplistic but debating the facts and assumptions is essential to cutting through to the main issue, particularly where there is incomplete or conflicting information. Data is an important part of getting to the facts and should be used to inform and support decision-making but not dictate it. Challenging assumptions can highlight conscious and unconscious bias at the same time as drawing upon intuition and experience. The importance of this step cannot be overstated as the rest of the decision-making is often underpinned by how well this is done.
We consider all steps in our process as Critical Thinking, but in their purest form some of the key steps include Creative Thinking. In his book Think Better Tim, Hurson says:
“The overarching principle of productive thinking is that creative thinking and critical thinking have to separate. The productive thinking dynamic is the ongoing alternation between critical thinking and creative thinking. Imagine a kayak paddle. One side stands for creative thinking and the other critical. If you always use the creative thinking paddle you will go around in circles. If you use the critical paddle you go in circles the other way.
The key is to alternate between the two. That way you develop enormous forward momentum.”
When following the steps in a group situation, it becomes clear who is more inclined towards Creative Thinking or Critical Thinking. Bringing a team together who have diversity of thought and experience, allows them to ‘toggle’ between Critical and Creative Thinking in a way that creates momentum and produces more robust decision-making.
The benefit of using the framework is it provides rigor for the individual or teams to ‘stay within the process’. This is particularly valuable where there are personal preferences and inclinations to stay too long in either the Creative or Critical Thinking phase, running the risk of ‘going around in circles‘.
If you would like to learn more about Critical Thinking, sign up to our upcoming Virtual Lab to see how it’s used.
In my last article on Using Scenario Planning to Build an Adaptive Capacity, I mentioned the research we undertook with executives about Building Resilience within Critical Infrastructure and The Value of Change Management in Executing Strategy.
Our research found that, for some organisations, there has been a convergence of issues such as:
One of the main approaches Janellis takes in helping organisations build their resilience and adaptive capacity is to enhance and develop Critical Thinking Skills. The tool we use to embed and enable team-based critical thinking is our Executive Decision Support Tool.
The tool has been designed to enable critical thinking during times of high pressure and scrutiny to:
The tool allows teams to be agile and adaptive and to demonstrate resilience in the face of rapid and disruptive change.
Teams who have been using the tool for many years have intuitively used this capability in other areas such as running major transformation projects, steering committee meetings and responding to significant regulatory changes.
Most successful leaders already follow this critical thinking process in an intuitive way, on a personal level. Using the tool enables critical thinking capability to be developed more broadly in a collective way, that draws upon the diverse views and experiences within the team or organisation.
The tool can be used at any level within the organisation to uplift critical thinking capability and to accelerate the development of emerging leaders.
Critical thinking enables leaders to understand the impact of their decisions and helps create alignment and accountability for results.
For more information on the tool, the research or our Critical Thinking Hub please email info@janellis.com.au.
Previously, we wrote an article on The role of the Board in a crisis and the need to clarify expectations between the Board and the Executive, prior to a crisis occurring.
During a crisis, the role of the Board remains one of assurance and governance. In situations where the Executive is directly impacted or implicated, the Board will need to take an active leadership role. Beyond these two scenarios, it is the responsibility of the Crisis Management Team to lead the crisis response.
During a crisis, the Crisis Management Team (CMT), comprised of members of the Executive leadership team, will quickly form to become the strategic thinking and decision-making team for the organisation. As soon as a crisis is declared, key actions for the Crisis Management Team include:
The team will often be mobilised with very little notice. The incident may be uncontained or uncontrolled, putting the team in a high-stakes and high-pressure situation, with significant community and media interest.
The crisis team members need to have strong critical and creative thinking skills and; be able to made key decisions with conflicting or incomplete information, under time pressure and with intense scrutiny.
Key decisions made by the team may be reviewed at a later date and it is essential there is evidence of clear decision-making.
To support these teams for this significant role within their organisation, an on-going capability development and maintenance program needs to be in place.
Scenario-based training and the use of tools to support the crisis management team will provide assurance that the team has the capability to respond to a range of strategic, political, operational, financial and environmental threats.
Developing this capability at the most senior levels within the organisation has significant benefits outside of responding effectively to a crisis including:
Janellis has been working with Executive Leadership Teams for over ten years in the specialist area of crisis management. Many leaders have strong intuitive capabilities to respond to a crisis but the complexity of a crisis will, by its very nature, be immensely challenging.
Individual and collective thinking capabilities are put to the test and tools and training will help the teams challenge assumptions, ask the right questions and make decisions that draw upon their combined experiences.
Key steps to building and maintaining this capability include:
Janellis is an enterprise consulting firm working with leading organisations across many industry sectors. Janellis helps organisations execute their strategy and are specialists in organisational resilience; risk, compliance and assurance; and crisis and emergency management.
Our crisis management tools have been embedded in organisations across a number of industries in countries including Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and the USA.
Janellis has recently become a partner of 100 Resilient Cities, an organisation pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation. This partnership provides our crisis management tools to member cities around the world. The tools are particularly valuable for cities with significant risks and vulnerable communities within those cities.
Following the recent Government announcement, there is a renewed focus on the ownership and resilience of Australia’s national critical infrastructure. A joint media release with Senator The Hon George Brandis QC stated:
“With increased privatisation, supply chain arrangements being outsourced and offshored, and the shift in our international investment profile, Australia’s national critical infrastructure is more exposed than ever to sabotage, espionage and coercion.
We need to manage these risks by adopting a coordinated and strategic framework. This challenge is not something the Commonwealth can address alone”.
The diverse number of threats and the need for an ‘all hazards’ approach presents significant challenges to owners and operators of critical infrastructure. In 2006 Janellis pioneered an integrated organisational resilience framework with critical infrastructure providers and key elements of the framework continue to be embedded in industries including: aviation; banking and finance; energy; transport; water and government agencies.
Areas of focus:
The ‘all hazards’ approach to building resilience is growing in awareness and acceptance due to increasingly complex and unpredictable impacts. Developing and maintaining capability is a key requirement for critical infrastructure owners and operators and; non-critical infrastructure organisations who are operating in higher risk industries.
Greater levels of assurance are being sought by key stakeholders that teams and organisations have the capability to respond and resilience reporting is being used to assess the capacity and capability for specific assets and across the enterprise.
For more information on the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Assessment and Assurance Tools or the Organisational Resilience Framework, please email info@janellis.com.au
