"There's nothing as useless as altitude above you!"

I was at the world’s biggest airshow at Fairford recently watching the tremendous displays of fast jets, helicopters and transport aircraft. The skill and precision of the pilots - including the famous Red Arrows - was incredible. 

It got me thinking about an expression I was taught when I learnt to fly a (much slower) aircraft - “There’s nothing as useless as altitude above you”. The phrase is often used when you are performing a maneuver and realise that you are too low - it loosely translates as “You shouldn’t have put yourself in this situation!”

Having been involved with organisations who have made the headlines for all the wrong reasons in the past I can see how that expression might apply. We say in our training sessions that a crisis is unexpected - but that usually applies to the scale of a crisis, rather than the fact that it couldn’t be foreseen. So that makes it even more surprising that so many organisations seem unprepared or underprepared for a crisis. 

Most BC managers and senior executive teams could easily name their top four or five threats, and those threats will probably include cyber attack, data loss, supplier failure etc. etc. Rehearsing a response to those threats is a reasonably simple matter of running through the likely scenario and practicing the response. Which means there is really no excuse to  pitch up in a crisis unprepared. So practise your crisis response now - don’t be caught out thinking “How did we get in this situation?”