Who could have predicted COVID19?
The emergence of COVID-19 caught the world off guard, leaving many to question if anyone could have predicted such a devastating pandemic.
However, reflecting on the hypothetical scenario of having a five-month advance warning of COVID-19, it is worth considering how this knowledge would have influenced your business. The impact of such early awareness would have likely prompted significant changes in business strategies, operations, and risk management approaches to mitigate the effects of the impending crisis.
While pandemics can emerge unexpectedly from nowhere, it is essential to evaluate whether the impact on businesses could have been reduced with advanced knowledge. Implementing an integrated Risk Management Framework, such as our own Risk Management Framework (Insert link to this page), allows organisations to identify and address potential risks proactively. As part of our framework, we implement an effective HILP (High Impact, Low Probability) process.
By integrating this HILP process within the framework and utilising key risk indicators (KRIs) along with horizon scanning processes, businesses can be better equipped to anticipate and prepare for low-probability, high-impact events like pandemics.
Under our HILP process, our clients were able to identify activities that could limit the impact of a pandemic should one occur, we did this by:
- Identifying key staff and single points of failure
- Providing them with laptops
- Ensuring network bandwidth was adequate to facilitate homeworking
- Ensuring that they worked from home on a regular basis as well as during Crisis Management tests
These activities added only minimal overhead to the business but ensured that essential operations could continue remotely during a crisis.
When the pandemic hit and while others were side-lined by COVID19 our;
- monitoring of KRI’s (in this case number of staff of ill and length of time off) allowed us to identify that something was not right back in October 2019, nearly 5 months before COVID19 hit mainstream news.
- monitoring of government web sites identified that the pandemic risk report which is produced every 2 years was not produced for 2019, the report documents the output of pandemic testing, lack of this report indicated that the government was not ready for a pandemic.
- monitoring of global news feeds was identifying issues in China, and awareness of the Chinese New Year and how Chinese citizens travel around the world at this time of year.
Of themselves these seem un-related but by actively monitoring key risk indicators, government reports, and global news feeds, we were able to give an early warning of the potential for a pandemic to our clients and encourage them to test their processes in preparation for such an event, even though we were not aware of the specifics of the COVID-19 pandemic at that time.
