Crisis Management, Organizational Continuity, and Resilience: Perspectives from the Public and Private Sectors

This course teaches students key principles of Crisis Management, Organizational Continuity, and Resilience and how to develop strategies for each using battle-tested frameworks and data-driven methodologies. In addition, the course helps students understand commonalities and contrasts of the private sector and public sector in aspects of crisis and risk management - this perspective prepares students to transition from one sector to another. The course will review noteworthy events of the past that created significant challenges for key industry verticals, participants, and service providers. The instructor will bring use-cases from both the public and private sector and will create discussion forums about what happened, what worked, what did not work according to plan, lessons learned and expectations for preparedness (operational, tactical, and strategic).

Naturally, there are many factors that every organization must consider in planning for localized and systemic crises and threats, this course will consider both general and specialized issues associated with various verticals of critical infrastructure and assets, such as: organizations, people, operations, systems, and delivery of services and products. In particular, reviewing systemic implications of highly complex interconnected and interdependent systems under crisis.

The goal is to use the historical experiences as well as forward looking analysis and assumptions as a backdrop for identifying the key factors of a Continuity, Contingency, Resilience and Sustainability (CCRS) enabled enterprise. The course will enable the students to lead an organization in the strategy through execution phases of a CCRS plan and develop corresponding tools for industry-wide and firm-specific adoption. A deep dive of operational, infrastructure and enterprise risks and contingency plans for each risk type will be emphasized.