Helping Businesses Survive Catastrophes

Short Program Teaches Crisis Management and Business Continuity Skills

Steve Goldman SM ’78 got an early taste of disaster mis-management just after he had earned his master’s degree in nuclear engineering at MIT. The 1979 Three-Mile Island accident, a partial core meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, was surrounded by confused communications and alarm gripped America and the world. The company and the nation were unprepared for this crisis. Unprepared is the key word, Goldman says.

“A lot of corporations are in denial—they think disaster can’t happen here,” says Goldman. “In nuclear engineering, we saw it happen to someone who was not prepared and we learned from it.”

Goldman has put that learning to work as a consultant in business continuity, crisis management, disaster recovery, and crisis communications. The idea for the 2010 Professional Education Short Program, Crisis Management and Business Continuity, ignited when a staff member from the MIT Environment, Health, and Safety office (EHS) attended one of Goldman’s workshops. The idea for the summer course quickly won approval from EHS head Bill VanSchalkwyk and Professor Richard Larson ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’69, who both taught sessions in the course. Enrollment for the three and one-half day course filled quickly and a four and one-half day course, expanded to give speakers more time, will be offered this summer.

New Situations Require New Structures

“Whatever a company does, generate electricity or develop new bioproducts, their organizational structure is set up to do that. They are not set up to deal with a crisis,” says Goldman. “When you have a crisis, you need specific processes and procedures to bring the organization back to where you want it to be—or perhaps to even better shape.”

The summer course prepared participants to create their own emergency plans so they can act quickly and effectively. Speakers came from the Federal CALL TO ACTION Crisis Management and Business Continuity, July 11-15, 2011 Learn more and register at: shortprograms.mit.edu/pi.90 Emergency Management Agency, the FBI, Intel, Oracle, the Cambridge Fire Department, and ABC News. Sessions dealt with how to keep businesses functioning, set up emergency command centers, train staff, communicate, and lead during disruptive events such as workplace violence, cyber terrorism, pandemics, and natural disasters.

The final exercise was a simulation of a multi-incident crisis. As the recent incidents in Japan illustrate, natural disasters such as an earthquake and a tsunami can spawn extreme situations such as the partial meltdown of nuclear reactors. In the simulation, students took on the roles of federal, local, and corporate responders as well as the news media so they experienced the needs of each group. For example, the best way to avoid panic is to get accurate information to the media quickly. In today’s 24-hour news cycle, a clear statement of the facts and next steps should be in the media’s hands in about 30 minutes. Without a clear response plan and delineated lines of responsibility, most companies would need hours, if not days, to prepare such a statement.

Improving Disaster Response

The title of Larson’s 2005 book, How Can We Improve Disaster Response?, captures one goal of the course. Larson, the Mitsui Professor in the Engineering Systems, admits he is sometimes called Dr. Disaster. “Over my entire career, I have had an interest in planning for and responding to disasters and low-probability, high-consequence events,” says Larson.

His work with pandemics was widely quoted in the press during the flu outbreaks in the past decade. Through a dynamic mathematical model, he and his colleagues demonstrated that the influenza death toll could be slashed by actions individuals could take themselves—avoiding social contacts and improving hygiene practices such as frequent hand washing. “We can show that hygiene and social changes have as much impart as vaccination,” he says.

Case studies, operations research tools, and expert advisors helped participants complete the course with a fresh approach to crisis planning. “The biggest contribution we make to people who come to campus for a short period of time is to get them to think about problems differently—from different angles and altitudes,“ Larson says.