| Boring, boring business continuity… Business continuity only hits the headlines when there is ‘a spectacular’ – an event of huge proportions, such as the various wide-area power outages of 2003; the hurricanes of 2004 or, of course, September 11th 2001. While any mainstream media attention given to business continuity is to be welcomed, there is a danger that a false impression is created. Business continuity is not about predicting and preventing one-off, esoteric, unusual, incidents. For most organisations, it is about providing proactive protection against every day threats. In 1906, Pareto’s Principle was born. An Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, observed that 20 percent of his country’s people owned eighty percent of the wealth. This principle was broadened in the mid-20th century by Dr. Joseph Juran, who penned a universal rule called the ‘vital few and trivial many’ – the principle that 20 percent of input is always responsible for 80 percent of the output. Juran’s work, although expanding widely on Pareto’s, remained known as Pareto’s Principle, or the 80/20 rule. Pareto’s Principle applies to business continuity management. 20 percent of the threats to an organisation will result in 80 percent of invocations. The business continuity manager’s main task is to identify the ‘Pareto Principle risks’ and mitigate these. These risks will not be the headline grabbers, they will be the mundane threats of fire, and flood; of natural disaster; of loss of critical IT and telecoms systems; and of loss of human resources. Business continuity managers have been heaped with criticism over recent years for failing to include the threat of terrorism in their business continuity plans. Survey after survey has led with headlines in the vein of ‘Businesses fail to address terrorism threat’. But maybe this criticism is unjustified. Perhaps it just goes to show that many business continuity managers understand and operate to Pareto’s Principle. READERS' COMMENTS: I agree with the theory that 20 percent of the threats to our organizations will represent 80 percent of the invocations. In preparation for those, we almost certainly cover the few as well. The 20 percent mitigates loss of premises, staff, equipment and infrastructure. Major occurrences almost always hit one of these mitigations. Terrorism, although a potential risk, does not fall in our 20 percent and hopefully never will. Vickie L. Due, Business Continuity Coordinator, Mackenzie Financial Corporation, Toronto, Canada Yes, 100 percent - well said. Terrorism is a complex, variable risk source - it is a function of factors beyond reasonable foreseeability and resistibility (both in occurrence and effects) of individual entities and managers. Unless the context is a condition or location where the imposed risk is to quote Monty Python, the "bleeding obvious” (such as war zones and iconic targets), it (terrorism) lives in a domain outside of our control. John Salter, Director, Emergency Preparedness Capacity Builders, Blackwood, South Australia Is the Pareto Principle something new in the last 125 years or so? Consider Plato's 'theory of forms', the central feature of his 'organon', or philosophical system. The social order reflected his view of the human mind and, therefore, intellect. There was a broad appetitive and commercial mass with a materialistic view of the world. This is the 80 percent (or so, who's counting?). Then there is a small cadre of police who take orders from the 'command and control' group, the Philosopher Kings. Together the top two social categories are about 20 percent of the populace (who's counting, anyway?). The Philosopher Kings, Plato indicates, are the top dogs who set philosophy, policy, programs and principles for administration. They direct the little group of police (read: military and police, indistinguishable in his thesis) to do this and do that according to the circumstances in society, which means how people are behaving. The goal: what Canadians call 'peace, order and good government'. Come forward in time and consider that we operate on a model of the mind that derives from the first and only systematic attempt to scientifically explain this thing called a 'mind'. Freud's model of the mind. It has a libido which correlates to the 80 percent appetitive, commercial, materialistic majority. It has a 'superego' which correlates to the police-military forces. And it has an 'ego' which stands for the superogatory power of the Philosopher Kings. Most people who model corporations and industries and views of the centrality of 'the economy' and 'free markets' love the idea that the 80/20 principle puts them into the highly rewarded 20 percent, which accords them status and a fellow feeling of superiority, and which, definitively, gives them a significant share of wealth created and status assigned. If the world view outlined is correct Pareto merely reflected the larger organon Plato said came from Socrates, but clearly was only vaguely Socratic.... it was to the extent that the 'system' included a dialectical battle implied, or drama, between the 80 percent and the 20 percent. To receive and keep the 80 percent when you are 20 percent is a real triumph. All kinds of LEADERS in our social and political systems, or polities, in history have tried and, eventually, failed. Pareto's view is dynamic, conflict-based and an honest attempt to explain phenomena. It is better than no theory at all, but should be the starting point for going from 'what is' to 'what should be'. The greatest common era of lovers of wisdom (literally: philosophers) is to jump from descriptions to prescriptions without considering how these moves may be validated at the highest possible level. The broad issues of business continuity directly relate to the broad issues of the continuity of any social institution. As such, the question of legitimacy and metaphysical claims must be closely examined. The Philosopher Kings, apparently, rose out of the ranks of the broad 80 percent masses. This means they carry a sense of justice, fairness, equity and fair play with them into that rarefied world. Will they act against their extended family that appears to be 'below' them? Will they defend the rights of the 80 percent to a fair share of the wealth? Or will they turn their backs on 'the many' to add to the wealth of 'the few'? All the effort you put into examining 'business continuity' issues begs the close examination of both words. Socrates reportedly {we only have Plato's reportage, no direct documents} said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." This is an extraordinarily valuable insight into the addition of values and ethics to the organon. That organon moves from being an abstract machine view to an assessment of other values associated with the human family. As an extension of that: we examine business continuity in order to 'do better'. We deal with conflicts in points of view, overviews or world views {philosophies, programs, policies and policing of systems} by seeing it all steady, and whole. The smug assumption of special rights for one 'class' in this model is not helpful, not progressive, not liberal and is not acceptable. A recent review of Chinese history with a constant reference to modern western industrialized attitudes published in an Asian publication by Henry C.K. Liu, of Liu Investment Group in New York, suggests that the Chinese tradition, the Islamist tradition and the Christian tradition all must be examined steadily and with equal openmindedness. But we see established interests doing what they do best as politicians, hypemasters of the special interest view (the 20 percent view in any culture), and ego warriors systematically using gullibility with clear purpose, to defraud the 80 percent. And they have, since the early Eighties, reasserted the traditional view that vested interests must defend themselves against the claims of the 20 percent. Corporations display similar issues. The view of contemporary management is that the current office holders have special rights. They do not have to achieve high levels of competence, creating wealth for broadly based redistribution downward to all stakeholders. Their compensation is built into a model of failure, based on greed and supported by lawyers and politicians who are part of their 20 percent club. The deep irony is that, in the long philosophical run, it is only the streaming of wealth downward that creates the consumers with adequate personal income to fuel the acquisition process that supports the contemporary corporate world. The advent of the industrial age about 300 years ago spelled doom to an old set of structures, but not their elimination, and new classes of people found ways to milk the cows. We are still, even in an electronic wonderland or Information Age, living out the consequences of the apparent breakdown of the 80/20 model suggested by Pareto. What remains profoundly ironic is that many of the 80 percent believe their interests are being pursued by those who are like bloodhounds and are now effectively milking the system to further enrich the 20 percent, and flood their ranks with vast accumulations of wealth. The system is a wonderful grid for action, and they are using it. The system is legal, and they know how to drive issues of the law to favor 'their own kind'. A truly dialectical system, any playwright will tell you, rests on irony. So the system always works, no matter how slow and tedious it may be. Or fast and so-called revolutionary it may appear to be. I once spent three months slowly traversing European countries in an old English automobile with my wife. One morning she was slow-washing her hair and preparing before we left the Swiss city in that country's gorgeous lake district. I went for a long walk along the lakeshore, so groomed and lovely. I came into a little pocket park and turned a bunch of corners. In the morning mist and direct sunlight ahead of me as I turned a corner I saw a figure in robes, with a bald head that now resembles my own {but didn't then}. Instinctively I knew who it must be since a goblet was about to fall from his dropped arm. This was Socrates in death throes. In the society of his time he had made a choice, this man who had generated the potent, deathless ideas that we must examine our lives from the point of view of someone considering the hard choices of values. My heart almost stopped with the sense of wonder at the man choosing to die when he could have easily, and without much threat to any part of his reputation that the public understood, escaped death. He had accepted the judgement of his peers. I still shake a little as I re-imagine that moment. There were no pupils in the stone eyes that the sculptor had left drawn back, open, staring wide-eyed at his world. Socrates according to historians had a scold, a shrew for a wife. The only real documents we have extant about his life are HOUSEHOLD BUDGETS. They examine what came into the house and what went out. Income and expenditures. And balances. I haven't examined them closely myself (but should have, and may now that I've reminded myself of them). The metaphor of a budget is a profoundly important one, even considering how Socrates, an ethical and logical fountainhead in human history. As you consider the forms of continuity in human life, the part that is economic and commercial continuity should drive us to reflect on the fact that businesses are human constructs. They are fallible. They reflect the values of those who build the constructs. They are statements of a world view. Continuity.... for what?! I returned to the hotel room and shortly afterward my wife and I drove out of that city. But it is now forever registered in my mind. I remember the breathtaking beauty. I remember an employee of the hotel who spoke Romansch, a nearly extinct language said to be very close to the original Latin, but still alive unlike the latter. I remember the moment when I turned that corner and saw that statue. I walked around it a number of times. Its size was almost perfectly a natural human dimension. It was not hyperbolic, oversized like the crappy statues of ancient warriors. It was humanistic in its native innocence, honoring the power of human reflection and care and imagination. It showed in the artist's honest review of the dying Socrates that it was a confession that human beings will only have continuity as one of the animal species on earth if they deserve it, fight for it and win it. Exclusiveness in abstract models of 80/20 won't get the job done, even if they tend to accurately portray how we've done it to date. Remember: 'What is' is not necessarily 'what should be'. (c) Eric R. Green, President Power Communications Inc., North Vancouver, Canada
•Date: 17th June 2005 •Region: World •Type:
Article •Topic: BC general UPDATED 20TH JUNE |
