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A WORD IN YOUR EAR

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 1 - February 2007

Ear Productions is something of a 'cause celebre' in the world of business continuity training - a company where the directors are as likely to be found commissioning a new film, forum theatre or radio play for their clients as setting up a series of workshops or conference

You won't find Ear Productions in plush offices in a big city high street, but rather in a small town in Rutland. "A place so small," as Ear's creative director Laura Brattan puts it, that "a night on the town takes five minutes and all social events are cancelled when the school hall floor is being varnished".

Ear believes training should be entertaining, fun and informative, as well as fact-filled - and that has made the people behind Ear responsible for some of the most innovative and creative work in business continuity (BC) training and awareness. Ear's aim is simple: to create engaging, effective, inclusive training and education around business continuity by using a wide range of targeted, inventive methods, all of which has put the company right at the cutting edge in its field.

For example, for the past few years Ear and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have been working closely together on a number of pioneering campaigns focused on BC training and awareness.

Indeed Brattan, along with Ear's managing director Eric Thompson and their team, firmly believes that if you truly engage by not only taking all styles of learning into account, but also by entertaining as well as informing - using these tools to break down the barriers between the message and the audience - then you can deliver results at a very high level.

A few years ago, Brattan had been working on a variety of projects with senior managers and directors of the Inland Revenue, as it was then known, when she got a call from HMRC's Peter Bryson. He led a small team that had responsibility for business continuity planning for about 100,000 staff across 800 sites in some 300 towns and cities across the UK.

Bryson's call was the catalyst that set Brattan, and Ear Productions, on the business continuity trail. He asked her to help him develop and launch a BC training and education programme.

Of course, the board led by example - developing their own business continuity plans. But the people he really needed to communicate with, to get buy in from, were the business managers - the people in the middle; the people who are challenged each year to do more with less. It was critical to get them to own business continuity.

"Ear worked in partnership with us to find out exactly what we need," says Bryson. "This consultation process is very important. We take care to ensure that we know who needs to be targeted and why. Having said that, we like to get things done."

One group of campaigns started with refreshing knowledge for Business Continuity champions, who had already done basic training, but which would also give some basics to those new to their posts. Using HMRC's annual Business Continuity conference, Ear and the in-house BC team set out to challenge, engage and entertain.

Says Brattan: "We began with a bogus conventional opening address, which was interrupted by an actress playing an air hostess shouting for everyone to put on lifejackets. The delegates were so shocked and convinced, that they genuinely started reaching under their seats for the paper lifejackets our team had placed there.

An actor, planted in the audience, screamed that he didn't want to die. More sound and drama bombarded the delegates until suddenly the audience's 'guardian angel' - another actor - introduced them to the island on which they had 'crashed'. The delegates then spent two days working on BC basics on their desert island."

Feedback was very positive. A real buzz was created amongst BC practitioners. Again, working in collaboration with the HMRC in-house team, they embarked on their next project, a 'getting ready' support pack for exercise managers and planners. This comprised a manual and a 'radio play' on CD.

In order to launch this to HMRC's BC community, they took a series of roadshows around the country, staged at unusual venues such as an arts centre, a museum and a lecture theatre, and again there was a surprise element, with delegates eager to find out what format they would use. Comedy played a huge part, something Brattan often looks for in a script.

"As humans, we tend to remember what is funny," she says. "Be it jokes, something our children said, a witty email from a colleague or lines from Monty Python, Catherine Tate or Blackadder, we often remember them far more readily than we remember the directions we were just given to the M42. I want our audience to go home with these kinds of lines buzzing around their heads. Humour carries the message to the brain like an express train. Make 'em laugh, cry or sing and they will usually remember it: and the proof is there in our feedback."

According to Peter Bryson, "the roadshows were delivered to support a very large exercise programme and, interestingly, it was the lessons we learned from that programme … that informed the content of our next level of training. It was clear that using a business continuity plan - actually dealing with an incident - called for a different set of skills and knowledge. So we used the next annual conference to focus on crisis management - again working with Ear to present a mixture of acted scenes, discussion and exercises to educate the eighty or so delegates, and using feedback sessions to help them pin down who needed what, in terms of crisis management education."

Ear worked in collaboration with HMRC to develop this comprehensive education programme, aimed at members of crisis management teams. With the teams taken care of, it turned its attention to the leaders themselves. HMRC have designated command and control team leaders in an incident. Ear and the in-house team recognised that that these people didn't have time to take part in a lengthy facilitated course. So they decided to create a film and a booklet instead. The film was a drama-documentary that interspersed dramatic action with footage of the London bombings, the events of September 11th 2001 and interviews with leading advisers in crisis command. The film has now been distributed to more than 700 command and control team leaders across the department.

Ear's work continues apace with HMRC on many levels. HMRC and Ear knew they needed to engage everyone in the message that HMRC is getting ready and challenge them to get ready as well. And this they have done with much success. This unusual company’s motto, and oft-used strapline, is: 'The difference is Ear'. In an ever more demanding and complex environment, that's a difference that seems worth exploring. ST