176: Beyond Resilience, with Keith Erwood

Most organizations don’t fail because they don't have a plan. They fail because they can’t imagine they would ever need a plan.

We sit down with Keith Erwood to talk about what real risk looks like and why business continuity and crisis management have to be more than checklists and compliance.

Keith shares how his experience in EMS during 9/11 shaped the way he thinks about leadership, reflection, and recovery, including the quieter aftermath that hits months later. 

We also talk about the ripple effects on small and mid-sized businesses, and why community resilience collapses when the local places people depend on can’t reopen. From there, we dig into what helps individuals recover from trauma, why mental health support is still hard to access, and how workplaces often respond only after something big happens.

Then we challenge a common assumption about organizational resilience: bouncing back isn’t the only goal. Keith introduces the idea of endurance, using Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition to explore perseverance, survival psychology, and the will to live. We connect those lessons to preparedness planning, overlapping disasters, and the biases that make teams dismiss realistic scenarios. Finally, Keith offers a practical tool leaders can use right now: financial impact analysis that focuses on what it costs when a critical process goes down, no matter the cause, from cyber events to key-person risk.

If you care about disaster preparedness, IT disaster recovery, or building a people-first resilience strategy, you’ll take away concrete ways to think clearer and plan smarter. Subscribe, share this with a leader who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest preparedness blind spot.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Overview

Keith Erwood 0:01

So sometimes it's about pointing out or reevaluating the risks that we face and having a second set of sometimes outside eyes.

Manya Chylinski 0:15

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski. My guest today is Keith Erwood. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Erwood Group, and he's a leading authority on risk, business continuity, crisis management, disaster recovery, preparedness planning. And that is what we talked about. And we talked about also the importance of resilience and paying attention to your people. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Keith, I'm so glad you could join me today. Thank you so much for being here.

Persistence And Jumping In

Keith Erwood 0:54

Thank you, Manya, for having me. And it's my pleasure to be here.

Manya Chylinski 0:57

To get us started, what would the title of a book about you be if your worst enemy wrote it?

Keith Erwood 1:07

I know that you asked me that question, but I haven't taken a deep dive into it. But if my worst enemy wrote it, it'd probably be, oh, here it comes again.

Manya Chylinski 1:18

Oh, I love that.

Keith Erwood 1:20

Oh, thanks.

Manya Chylinski 1:22

Um why? Why would it be? Are you just persistent or what's the what's the story behind that?

Keith Erwood 1:31

Um a lot of persistence. Uh, I don't believe in quitting or giving up. Um and just life has a way of throwing things at you and just the need to bounce back. Um, ironically, someone else uh had asked me recently what what would be my intro song, and I also said that it would be back in black. So it kind of all fits together.

Manya Chylinski 1:59

Well, and and before we hit record, you mentioned that you are used to just kind of jumping in with both feet and uh getting started, whether you sort of know what's going on or you need to figure it out on the fly.

Keith Erwood 2:15

Yeah. Um, and I've had uh my my whole life has pretty much been and revolved around that, um, being thrown into the fire and even having uh bosses or higher ups, just being like uh, we'll just throw Keith at him, he'll just figure it out. So it kind of happens.

Manya Chylinski 2:34

You've got that reputation as the person who comes in and and knows how to fix things. Well, which makes sense. You work in in business continuity, crisis management, risk, all of those areas. It seems you are well qualified to be thinking about those kind of topics.

Keith Erwood 2:52

It's kind of ironically, like my life has come full circle as a kid. My uh favorite thing in the world to do is when I lived in New York and we went, we would go upstate New York every summer and go to the fair. My first thing I would want to do is go to the Red Cross and civil defense tent and learn about disasters and how to protect against that. And I've my life has taken a huge amount of twists and turns, but now I kind of do that for a living. So it's interesting.

Manya Chylinski 3:23

I love that that the Red Cross wanted was what you wanted to visit first. I thought you were gonna say, like, go to the top of the Ferris wheel or something.

Keith Erwood 3:32

I've never I've never been into the Ferris wheels or a lot of rides. Um, as a teenager, I spent a lot of time on it, but now I'm again a little more risk-averse and yes.

Manya Chylinski 3:44

I'm glad I tried a couple of the really serious roller coasters when I was younger so that I don't ever have to do it again.

Keith Erwood 3:53

Yeah, I'm right there with you. I just uh would rather not anymore.

Manya Chylinski 3:58

So, Keith, everyone has had a moment in their lives that changes how they think about taking care of others or how they think about being a leader. What was one of those moments for you?

Keith Erwood 4:12

I've had many. Honestly, when I look back at it, and it wasn't during the actual time frame that it occurred. I kind of feel like it while it was occurring, I never really had a chance to kind of just sit there and think about it. But for me, I think uh 9-11 and I was a really big one, and I know it's a big one for a lot of people, but because I worked for EMS at the time, I like especially for the first, I would even say a couple of months, I never really got to kind of step back and think about it. Like I was kind of just living in the moment, and I worked so much during that time frame, even like over time, that when I did have time off, all I really did was sleep. So I never really got to kind of think about everything until several months in, really. But that had like obviously for a lot of people, it had a major impact on their life, but it also kind of refined where I wanted to focus.

Manya Chylinski 5:13

Right. And you have that experience that I think is so important as you work in things like crisis management and preparedness, that understanding of in the moment, you can't be thinking about the meta-level. You're just thinking about doing what needs to be done to protect people, to recover, etc.

Keith Erwood 5:34

Yeah, and that's exactly right. I I I remember even still that I was working and there was a lot of uh funerals going on, and I didn't really focus on that. And it wasn't until like months later, I had looked at there's a kind of now a famous fire department poster of like the people who were killed on that day. And I didn't even realize it until I actually looked at the poster of who I knew was on it that had passed away, and it was like months later. So that had like a major impact on me, and then I kind of really turned around and focused on there were other things that happened that at the time I didn't focus on either, such as some of the small businesses that were impacted and actually went out of business. And there was uh one, there was a restaurant that actually took care of a lot of the first responders and fed them, but afterwards had to go out of business because they didn't have the funding to continue, or they didn't have the actual establishment to actually continue operating their business. So that made me kind of want to focus on small and mid-sized businesses and and recovery for that. There's a huge long story there, but basically that's the gist of it. And that that changed my focus on helping businesses after that.

Manya Chylinski 6:58

Wow. That's you're right. Sometimes those are often those smaller businesses don't have the same, they don't have the same kind of infrastructure as the larger businesses, and they probably don't get as much attention. Um, but it's just as vital to the community that they're taking care of as well.

Keith Erwood 7:16

Yeah, absolutely.

Manya Chylinski 7:18

So you've seen a lot of hard things happen in in your own life, um, in your work and business continuity. You know, some people seem to find their footing faster than others. What is it that you think really helps people recover after something difficult?

Keith Erwood 7:38

Well, that's a great question. And different people handle it differently. Um, some people are really good, they have coping mechanisms in place, some of them without even realizing it, and then others, others go through things and it could be a major event, right? Like a 9-11 or with what you went through, right? And then other times it could just be a personal trauma or maybe even an uncomfortable situation or event happens to them, and they don't necessarily have the coping mechanisms and they don't deal with it as well. And that kind of has to be a learned process to kind of go through for some people.

Manya Chylinski 8:19

Right. What role do you think the community or our organizations play in supporting people as they recover?

Keith Erwood 8:29

Well, there are things that people can do, and there's things in the community that offer help to people, most of those within the healthcare or mental health areas. But I think that we could do a better job because I don't think the average person, the individual, you know, again, whether they're going through something that's a personal trauma or a major event that impacts a lot of people, that they don't really understand how to go about getting help that they need in many cases. The irony is it's better today than it was even 10 years ago, right? Now, like you'll have commercials on TV, uh, promoting mental health. Um, more celebrities or influencers talk about it. But I still think that there's far more that could be done, especially at a community level to help people. And at an organizational level, I do think that businesses in it, and again, they've gotten better at it, but unfortunately, many times it's not usually until a major event happens that you get the organizational or community support because that's when people think, hey, we really need to support these people. But when it's an individual struggling and having issues, that's a whole nother ballgame that's usually not really looked at as well. Right, right.

Manya Chylinski 9:56

Okay. From your perspective, working with organizations and businesses and helping them plan for or in the aftermath of crises, is there a question about resilience or healing that you think we're still not asking?

Keith Erwood 10:46

I don't know if it's that we're not really asking um the questions, but I think that we're not really talking about it in some of the right ways. So like when it comes to resilience, right, resilience is often looked at as something happens, right? And then usually there's like a pause, right? Whether it's whether it's a personal resilience or organizational resilience, it's something happens to disrupt our normal daily flow. Whether that's an individual again or an organization, that disruption creates a pause and then usually a reflection and then a continuation of moving forward. But I think that we as people and organizations, we don't really, a lot of free thought isn't really given to that, and there's not really much conversation around it. So actually, some people again, like I mentioned earlier, like are really good at resilience, right? Something something can happen and they just seem to bounce back. But that happens like on the surface. So there are people who are good at it and can move on or move forward. I like to think most of the time I'm pretty good at that myself, but that's also sometimes it can appear that way, and internally sometimes someone else needs more help than what it appears just on the surface. So I think that we need to do a much better job talking about both mental health and resilience for persons and again resilience as an organizational. One of the things I actually like to think about is kind of moving beyond resilience. And I know I don't think I've spoken to you about this, but I look at stuff as uh like beyond resilience, and the best way that I have found to talk about that is endurance, and I've actually been talking about that a lot from an organizational preparedness perspective. And I'm a huge fan of Ernest Shackleton. I don't know if you know the story or anything. Um but prior to all the events that happened, um, his personal family motto was fortudine vinkimus. I'm not sure if I'm saying the second part right, but basically it's by endurance we conquer or through endurance we conquer. And endurance is slightly different, like it's similar to resilience, but when things confront us, it's about like kind of pushing forward and pushing through the issue. And that's not gonna be that's not gonna be right. I'm talking about mental health like for everybody, but I'm really fascinated by his story. And the story of Ernest Shackleton and Endurance, uh especially if you're familiar with it, basically they went to the Antarctic, the ship's name was Endurance through Ernest Shackleton's motto, but the ship got caught in pack ice, was crushed. I forget the exact number, I think it's including Ernest Shackleton, I think it's 27, but 27 men were trapped in the Antarctic for 633 days. And basically it was bitter cold, they faced hurricane force winds, starvation, dehydration, and on top of that, they were chased by leopard seals. So they were stuck for for almost two years.

Manya Chylinski 14:32

Yes, that's crazy.

Keith Erwood 14:34

Yeah, and every single one of them survived. Yeah, so that to me is an incredible story involving perseverance, trauma, an incredible survival story. And basically when everything was going against them, they just pushed forward and survived. Now, there's a lot to say about that too, right? Is one of the interesting things to me and getting into a survival thing is how much of it is actually uh mental. And if you study uh people just lost in the woods, right? There's been people like hunters who are well prepared, having a weapon, a backpack, survival items, well dressed, and they're lost for a couple days, and unfortunately, they succumb to the environment around them. But there's also stories of children lost with nothing, surviving one or two weeks, and it all comes back to the mental preparedness and what they call it is the will to live or the will to survive. And I do think that us as human beings in general have a strong will to live and survive and to overcome. So I think that's actually one step in getting to resilience.

Manya Chylinski 16:03

You know, when you talk about that getting lost in the woods, it makes me think of the concept of survivor bias, which is we only have the stories of the people who survive. We necessarily have lost the stories of the people who didn't survive. And so we don't really know what the difference is. We can surmise, and based on circumstances, I just I find that concept so interesting that we can only ever know the story from one side.

Why Organizations Avoid Planning

Keith Erwood 16:37

Yeah, that that is actually very true. And you're right that survivor bias is basically implicated there because we don't really know, right? Like what caused the people to succumb that did. So we don't really know.

Manya Chylinski 16:51

So I want to get back to something you said earlier. You mentioned that organizations and and we who are part of organizations don't often give a lot of pre-thought. And I know when we think about preparedness and disaster preparedness, there are barriers. People don't necessarily want to think about something bad happening. And why do you think it's such a struggle to get people to plan ahead to be ready when something I and here I'm thinking organizationally, I'm sure that we all personally are or aren't prepared for disasters, but I'm curious on the organizational level and some of the companies that you've worked with, like what are some of those barriers?

Cost Objections And Real Impacts

Keith Erwood 17:36

Yeah, it's interesting. So even so I've worked with some companies too across various industries and then multiple companies within an industry. And you're right, there's the the biggest obstacle is the thinking of that's never going to happen to us without mentioning the name of a company. Um like one of the good examples I come up with is just prior to the latest most recent pandemic, right? The with the coronavirus, uh COVID-19, I was doing an exercise with a company out in Utah. And that was in the summer of 2019. During that exercise, we had multiple scenarios. So the first scenario, basically, there was like an earthquake type event and a massive damage, and the company responded very well to that. But in the midst of that, we kind of threw in some of the company people took a trip out to Disneyland and there was uh an outbreak, and some of the members had gotten sick. So we got a lot of pushback on that one. And even though that has happened many times, we got pushback on that saying those two events would never happen together at the same time. So the irony of that is when the pandemic kicked off, that's when people started seeing these other events happen, right? So while that pandemic was happening, there were other events like earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, and all these other events. So a lot of times people just can't see things happening to them. There's obvious biases there, and that creates a lot of pushback and issues. There's also things like uh just human human hubris alone accounts for a lot of dismissal of many different events, and that's even um with earthquakes. Like as a for instance, I had another client organization, um big set of hospitals. And even though earthquakes are frequent, the major earthquakes aren't as frequent. And this is in California, so they looked at it um from a risk standpoint that they didn't need to really worry about earthquakes too much because it's just the big ones, it's just not it's not gonna happen. Well, kind of had to sit down with them and reevaluate that assessment because even though earthquakes over there happen more frequently, it's not those earthquakes that are gonna cause the major impact. It's it's the big one, right? Like that really large scale 7, 7.1, like 8.0 earthquake happening that's gonna cause the major damage. And when that happens, things are gonna be cut off, which which would have been the case to this one client where they have a hospital on a peninsula and it would have had a major impact for them. So sometimes it's about pointing out or re-evaluat, reevaluating the risks that we face and having a second set of sometimes outside eyes. And that's also where I typically come in is well, there's a lot of bias in there. So we kind of run through an exercise or a risk assessment or an impact assessment on how it's actually going to impact the client as an organization.

Manya Chylinski 21:10

I would imagine, in addition to the general not wanting to think that something bad can happen because it's not a pleasant thing to think about. I would imagine that cost comes into this too, in terms of, well, if we have to design something for the worst possible case and that's not going to happen, or we want we don't want that to happen, we don't want to spend the money.

Keith Erwood 21:35

That's true, but it's also something that I I again I look at and we look at it in some unique ways. So what one of the things that I do this differently is we'll do what we call financial impact analysis. And what we do is we look at it not from the perspective of um, and it we'll use that as a as a scenario, right? Like the big earthquake that might happen. But we don't look at just that as an impact scenario. We look at what's the financial impact if this service or this business process is unavailable? And that that puts it in a different perspective where it's not just the earthquake that might cause it, it could be any number of things that might cause the same impact where a business process or a business application becomes unavailable. And that could be, you know, something from a cyber event to A key person that has institutional knowledge that wasn't passed on being unavailable.

People-Centered Recovery And Closing

Manya Chylinski 22:41

Right. Okay. Okay. So you, yeah, you need to look at that full picture. Oh, interesting. So we're getting close to the end of our time. And when you think about the future and you think about disaster preparedness and business continuity, what is giving you hope?

Keith Erwood 23:00

This is interesting because, as from an organizational perspective, one of the things that's most often overlooked is the people. But from a recovery standpoint, from what usually makes a difference to organizations with their recovery, is again their people. So when an organization prepares appropriately and includes their people and has plans specific to people and people recovery, including access to mental health. And one of the things like I recommend to them, especially if there's a big event, regardless of the type, is to have like mental health counselors available. And it's always the people who make the recovery possible.

Manya Chylinski 23:47

Right. Absolutely. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Now, Keith, before we log off, can you please share with our listeners a little bit more about yourself and what you do and how they can reach you?

Keith Erwood 24:00

Sure. And thank you for that. I'm Keith Erwood and the co-founder, along with my wife, of the Erwood Group, where we help organizations of all sizes prepare through business continuity, crisis management, and IT disaster recovery.

Manya Chylinski 24:16

Excellent. Thank you so much. I appreciate you sharing that. And thank you very much for joining me. I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Keith Erwood 24:25

Me too. Thank you for having me.

Manya Chylinski 24:26

And thank you to our listeners for listening to this episode of Notes on Resilience. We will catch you next time.