Understanding Critical Event Management: From Basics to Best Practices

As far as business jargon goes, “critical event management” is actually a pretty decent definition. It is fairly self-explanatory, and over the past few years, professionals in the fields of safety, risk management, and business continuity have come to recognize and use it fairly consistently. 

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With that said, I feel like there is quite a bit of room for improvement in both understanding the basics, but in how the discipline has changed and what it requires today. 

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What is critical event management—and why you should care about it

Critical event management (or CEM) is your company’s approach to handling major disruptions (aka critical events) before, during, and after they occur. In other words, critical event management is not just about responding when things go wrong—it's about having the right information, processes, and tools to identify potential threats early, notify the right people quickly, manage your response effectively, and then recover efficiently.

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This is not a particularly novel nor unusual definition, and, as I mentioned earlier, it is fairly intuitive. What’s more, most businesses have some version of critical event management set up already. 

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Why, then, should you care? 

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In the last few years, the business world’s approach to disruptions has changed rapidly:

• Weather disruptions have become more extreme and less predictable
• Political events are causing seismic shifts in the known world
• Financial markets and events are unpredictable 
• Supply chain issues are calling for tighter management of disruptions 
• The rise of open source intelligence
• Social media has changed the world, making legislation risks and public image risks exponentially higher: 
  
  • Employees are legislating for their rights more publicly and visibly
  • Safety incidents are exposed faster than ever

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For all these reasons, disruptions have to be calculated much, much more rapidly, and companies need to respond with increased vigilance and savvy. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves—let’s start with the basics. 

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When CEM Becomes Essential: Key Triggers

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Several types of events typically trigger your critical event management processes:

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Environmental disasters: Heat and cold stress, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, can all present a threat to your people, assets, and operations. 

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Human-caused events: Active shooter situations, protests, civil unrest, and other security threats that could impact your people or locations.

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Public health emergencies: Pandemics, disease outbreaks, or other health crises that affect your workforce or community.

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Supply chain disruptions: Major transportation issues, supplier failures, or global shortages that impact your ability to operate.

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But here's the thing: a truly effective CEM program isn't limited to specific event types. The best applications are flexible enough to handle any significant disruption, regardless of its source. The key to controlling risk is building capability around situational awareness, communication, and coordinated action—skills that translate across virtually any crisis scenario.

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Basics of Critical Event Management

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Critical event management consists of these main components:

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Preparation: Contingency planning, training and drills, communication templates and playbooks. 

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Monitoring: Continuously scanning for potential threats or disruptions. This means tracking everything from weather patterns to social media trends to security alerts. 

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Classification: deciding what threat is relevant for the business.

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Alerting: Quickly notifying the right people — typically employees, but also potentially contractors, customers, and the public — when a threat is identified. 

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Response: Coordinating your organization's actions during the event. This includes activating response teams, implementing emergency procedures.

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Recovery: Getting back to normal operations as efficiently as possible. This includes assessing damage, reallocating resources, and basically returning to the pre-event state as soon as possible. 

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While all these components are indeed important, defining CEM this way almost inevitably leads to two pitfalls: 

1. Pitfall 1: Thinking of critical event management as a linear process consisting of more or less isolated steps. Instead, critical event management needs to be thought of as a virtuous cycle in which every event generates knowledge and information, and knowledge and information lead to better prediction, management, and recovery.
   
   
2. Pitfall 2: Thinking of critical events as unpleasant surprises each and every time. A myriad of conversations with organizations and practitioners reveal that budgets for critical event management go up almost exclusively after something really bad happens.
   
   

Instead, modern critical event management should be thought of as a virtuous cycle, with an organizationally integrated sense of ongoing preparedness and ability to handle any disruption and learn from it. 

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Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

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Here, the temptation is to list the issues that plague any industry and company: organizational silos, expensive and inefficient technologies, and the rising costs of…well, everything. However, I think of these issues as symptoms of a wrong approach to critical event management, rather than causes. 

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Here is how this plays out:

1. Organizational silos: when CEM is thought of as a linear system of isolated event management techniques the natural consequence is to treat safety, business continuity, and risk management as siloed disciplines, each with its own tools, teams, strategies, and KPIs. This fragmented approach worked when threats were predictable and change was slow. In today’s world, we need to have an integrated team approach where people easily share information, have easy visibility into each other’s tactics and measures, all rolling up into one easy central view where any risk is managed timely, efficiently, and holistically.
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2. ‍Expensive and inefficient technology: when we apply technologies that only benefit one department, one site, or one team, we tend to look for technology that solves one problem only: for example, only alerting, or only weather, or only road safety. Instead, managing risk from a central, integrated point of view creates a need for technologies that can securely connect to any device, process the information and enable a centralized view, and also share to any device needed.

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3. Rising costs: put simply, safety and resilience saves money, but we all know that this is hard to trust - especially for executives - when we think of avoiding the very thought of events until they happen, and when the full range of risks is never quite in sight.
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Instead:

- Executives should have a clear, holistic approach to all types of risks, and how they are managed

- The organizations should approach events as learning opportunities with forensic analysis that translates into team commitment and sharing of information

- Teams like operations and safety should work together to identify how one and same resilience measure can save both lives and money

Then we can have clear insight into excellence and productivity gains, as teams coalesce and gain solidarity. It also helps organizations escape from a drift cycle where what is learned from one negative impact is codified into abstract rules and procedures which then are subject to institutional drift.

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Technology in Critical Event Management 

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How we build technology directly stems from how we understand the discipline. When critical systems operate in isolation—when safety protocols don’t communicate with business continuity platforms, or environmental monitoring is cut off from operational risk management—organizations create dangerous blind spots.

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Rather than building to fit antiquated, siloed models, new technology works from a point of view that’s both flexible enough to fit a single team on the ground with its individual needs, and expansive and agile enough to easily spread to the organization, and provide visibility—to both management and people on the ground—into all risks, employees, assets, and processes.

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The world is increasingly interconnected not only by the traditional web but now by the internet of things. IoT devices are omnipresent and provide the sixth sense for identifying hazards. Technology thus needs to and can take into account today’s fast-moving, complex, and deeply interconnected risks, and provide organizations with the ability to not only mitigate, respond, and recover, but learn, share, and minimize future risk. 

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Here are just some of the technology capabilities that support modern Critical Event Management: 
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Core communication capabilities

• Multi-channel notification (SMS, email, voice calls, mobile app push notification, screen take overs, API callbacks…) 
• Multiple alert modalities: notifications, confirmations or surveys/polls, with docs, pics, maps, streaming video
• Customizable communication cascades and escalation paths
• Pre-configured message templates for two-click deployment
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Workforce safety, tracking and training

• Employee location and status tracking
• Incident management, like centralized incident response with dashboards, logging, reporting, live streaming video, photos, chats
• Workflow management for emergency protocols
• Comprehensive incident logging and reporting
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Threat intelligence

• Multi-source intelligence gathering (open-source intelligence collection, social media monitoring, dark web scanning, government and law enforcement feed, commercial threat intelligence platform, Geopolitical risk databases
• Real-Time Data Ingestion
• Threat/Hazard identification, analysis and classification
• Custom Risk Mapping

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Future trends in Critical Event Management

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Modern Critical Event Management lies in both organizational and technical tendencies. On the one hand, more empowered, connected individuals and teams, on the other, technical solutions that promote system integration and flexibility. Here are some examples of what’s out there and what’s coming: 

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Seamless Enterprise Integration:

• API connectivity with HR systems
• Machine to machine integration for hazards and classifications

Advanced Technical Infrastructure, with Customization and Scalability

• Sensors and IOT
• Distributed computing architecture
• High-availability cloud infrastructure
• Flexible deployment (cloud, on-premise, hybrid)
• Zero-trust security model
• Scalable architecture supporting organizations of various sizes
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Comprehensive Analytics

• Machine learning model refinement
• Forensic analysis capabilities
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Security and Compliance Features

• Human-in-the-loop, four-eyes, verification processes

Data Processing

• Natural language processing
• Sentiment analysis
• Multi-language threat detection and messaging
• Automated translation integration
• Semantic threat context understanding

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Where does this leave the solo practitioner reading this? 

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In short, modern CEM lies at the intersection of organizational philosophy and technology — and while this may seem grandiose and unachievable, the truth is that kernels of good CEM can be planted at any level and on any team, no matter how small. It can be as simple as automating a few manual processes, making sure that information is disseminated and that learnings are shared locally and across the organization. The technology is there to support sharing the successes across the board.

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