Roads to Resilience

to respond. Then, when an incident occurs, we can control the crisis rather than the crisis taking control of us ” (VP Global Security Risk Management, IHG). Similarly at Drax, risk scenarios are identified and responses are routinely rehearsed. If an incident happens, procedures define who has the role of ‘Incident Manager’ and Drax selects “ people who can recognise risk and apportion the correct risk to an incident, they can look beyond the obvious, they can see it may be minor but this could escalate, they’re good at risk assessment ” (Generation Manager, Drax). A feature of Virgin Atlantic’s flat structure is that Operations and Crisis Management roles are separated to respond faster and more effectively to major unexpected events. In this structure, emergency response or duty commanders are not executives or even necessarily operational people: “The Head of Legal has been a duty commander for a good number of years. We look for the kind of person who has a passion and would like to get involved. It is open to people across the company: generally, if you want to do something, you will do a good job. Also, they have to be able to hold meetings, co-ordinate responses across all aspects of the company, structure communications and think on their feet” (Director of Operations, Safety and Security). The logic behind this separation of roles is that when an emergency happens, it does not mean that senior leaders are overwhelmed by having to manage every aspect at once. They can step back, keep an eye on the bigger picture, act as a sounding board for the duty commander and manage key external stakeholders on their behalf if needed. Further, it means that when the airline operations department declares an emergency, an experienced and well-prepared response team can take the incident away from them and manage it separately in the Crisis Centre. The event’s influence on normal operations is thereby minimised. Airlines encounter many unexpected events during operations, yet Virgin’s emergency response team is engaged infrequently. The reason is that many unexpected events, such as flight diversions for weather or medical reasons, occur so often that they are considered business as usual and are dealt with through standard operating procedures. Even when an aircraft declares an emergency, for example, due to problems with an aircraft’s undercarriage, most times

The boxed extract below from the Virgin Atlantic case study illustrates the importance of developing appropriate, rapid and decisive responses to adverse developments. Scenario planning and, in particular, the arrangements for identified teams to take control in the event of a crisis are well illustrated. This extract demonstrates that when rapid response plans and teams are established in advance, the organisation is much better placed to respond appropriately and prevent the incident becoming a crisis.

Case study: Virgin Atlantic – rapid response teams

the operations department can deal with it. In those instances, the duty commander will be alerted and will be on standby, but generally response teams will only step in when an event:

• can attract significant media attention • can lead to a large number of enquiries by passengers and staff • impacts multiple routes

• has direct safety and security implications. Even when events meet these criteria, many will be business as usual and can be dealt with through standard contingency plans. In the past, airlines have had to deal with a range of security, terrorist, and weather-related incidents and are therefore prepared to deal with the consequences. For instance, although Virgin Atlantic does not have specific plans for tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic ash, industrial action or terrorist events such as 9/11, “ … what we do have a contingency plan for airspace closure, for whatever reason. Further, we have a two-tier approach. We have an Amber Team that deals with very specific events and a Red Crisis Team that deals with major aircraft accidents. We have never had to activate our Red Team as such, but we do activate the Amber Team for a lot of events. When they are activated, we will go through a set of procedures in terms of accounting for staff, finding out where our aircraft are, making sure people are safe and secure, determining what we are going to say to passengers and the media, and what we need to do to get operations back to normal ” (Manager Resilience and Business Continuity). For more insights into resilience at Virgin Atlantic, refer to the full case study in Appendix A

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Roads to Resilience: Building dynamic approaches to risk to achieve future success