{"id":1609,"date":"2010-09-01T01:00:16","date_gmt":"2010-09-01T09:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1609"},"modified":"2010-06-21T10:56:50","modified_gmt":"2010-06-21T18:56:50","slug":"when-things-go-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1609","title":{"rendered":"When Things Go Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Over the last few months, we’ve been watching tremendously troubling images come out of BP’s Gulf oil spill. We often think that when things go wrong, they can usually be corrected, but sometimes something goes wrong and it’s just catastrophic.\u00a0 At the time of writing, the oil spill had recently overtaken the amount of oil released into the environment, overpassing any prior oil spill.\u00a0 It’s not that these oil spills are even infrequent.\u00a0 We hear about the Exxon Valdeze, and of course this BP spill will be remembered for decades at least.\u00a0 But smaller spills happen many times a year and other than local economies, most of the U.S. population doesn’t hear about it.\u00a0 The fact is that oil spills are not rare events as the oil companies would like us to believe.<\/p>\n

The sad thing, is this was probably predictable.\u00a0 On an event by event basis, the probability of this type of outcome is very small indeed.\u00a0 But as you look across time and volume, if there are 25 events that can be categrized as oil spills in the U.S. every year, every few years or decades, one of them is going to be huge.\u00a0 Exxon and this BP one fall into those categories.<\/p>\n

Perhaps when small things go wrong, we are correct in thinking that we can fix things.\u00a0 Indeed, small mistakes are easy to either fix or cover up.\u00a0 Impacts are limited and uually don’t spread to large populations.\u00a0 But when something big happens, not only is it explosive, but it’s hard to contain.\u00a0 In the example of the oil spill, sometimes events are predictable, and you can’t really stop the event from happening no matter what you do – at some point, there wil lbe another disaster of an oil spill in the future.\u00a0 But you can evaluate what the cleanup process is going to be and what disaster recovery looks like.\u00a0 In the case of the oil companies, it seems that hey have assumed that small events would happen periodically, but it was not worth the investment for the rare major events.\u00a0 In the case of BP (at the time of writing) having committed $20B\u00a0to fund cleanup and other payouts, research and development of better cleanup contingencies may have been worth it.\u00a0 (IMO, $20B is not going to come close to what the final cost will be).\u00a0 I suppose when you are not only killing off wildlife, but extincting species and altering the ecosystem for decades to come, that puts things in a hole new perspective.<\/p>\n

I remember back in Hurricane Andrew when Florida was evacuated (no, not the whole state), and ADP was literally paying people when payolls had not been submitted.\u00a0 Often the business was not even there anymore, but they got paid.\u00a0 Same thing for 9\/11.\u00a0 Businesses were literally destroyed, never to come back and sadly many people were gone as well.\u00a0 Payrolls were not submitted, but people got paid.<\/p>\n

There are similar types of employee engagement issues.\u00a0 Sometimes major events happen that adversely effect everyone else in the organziation – such as large layoffs or spinoffs in business.\u00a0 These are quite predictable as the planning probably happened in advance, but we don’t often think about the effect on other parts of the organziation and other employees.\u00a0<\/p>\n

HR is often a detailed, transactional business.\u00a0 We don’t often think about changes and problems on a large scale – instead relying on our ability to deal with small scale problems, we have to expect and be ready for the large scale problems that happen.\u00a0 I once worked with a large, global organiation that had a major project around the flu pandemic (that never happened).\u00a0 They were prepared not only regarding how to get people vaccinated, but also had a map of every country and how to get in touch with people, how to replace people and over the orgnaizational requirements on a short term basis.\u00a0 All this preparation was just for the contingency of half their population coming down with the flu.\u00a0 Hopefully things don’t go wrong, but when major events happen in the workforce, it brings our businesses down with it.\u00a0 A bit of preparation is warranted, and that does not usually mean scalability in how we treat smaller events, but a completely different approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last few months, we’ve been watching tremendously troubling images come out of BP’s Gulf oil spill. We often think that when things go wrong, they can usually be corrected, but sometimes something goes wrong and it’s just catastrophic.\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,10,8],"tags":[434,215,214,213,58],"class_list":["post-1609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-change-management","category-engagement","category-strategies","tag-adp","tag-bp-oil-spill","tag-cleanup","tag-disaster-recovery","tag-employee-engagement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1609"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1615,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions\/1615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}