Lecture 5 - Business Continuity & Incident Stress Debriefing

Operational resilience

Broad & proactive. Focuses on adapting to systemic risks and keeping critical services running for stakeholders. It’s about flexibility and innovation to survive long-term.

Business continuity management

Narrow & reactive. Focuses on recovering and restoring internal operations after a disruption. It relies on predefined plans to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.

Burnout

A state of physical and emotional exhaustion due to excessive and prolonged interpersonal work-related stressors.

Common signs of a burnout

• Emotional changes: anger, frustration, etc.

• Cognitive changes: lack of concentration, procrastination, etc.

• Physical changes: insomnia, headaches, etc.

• Social changes: a sense of isolation, feeling alienated from other people, etc.

• Behavioural changes: loss of sense of humour, lack of empathy, etc.

Errors of omission

Occur when people fail to carry out a required task.

Errors of commission

Occur when people carry out a task incorrectly or do something that is not required.

Types of human error

• Slips and lapses

• Mistakes

• Violations

Slips and lapses

However conscientious and expert we are, we will never execute something perfectly every time.

Mistakes

When presented with incomplete information, insufficient experience or knowledge, we may make a decision that turns out to have been incorrect.

Violations

Actions or decisions that conflict with the way we should do things, unintentionally, or intentionally with positive intent.

Critical incident stress debriefing (CISD)

A supportive, crisis-focused discussion of a traumatic event. It developed exclusively for small, homogeneous groups who have encountered a powerful traumatic event