For crisis preparation, it is important to plan so that everyone understands their role when a crisis occurs.

Understanding the alert and enacting a plan quickly is crucial, as it is impossible to plan for everything.

For any crisis response, psychological safety is essential to ensure the security team can protect against any potential breaches effectively. 

Despite disruptions, resilience is the key to maintaining a stable business environment. Trust and executive understanding lead to shared accountability. 

In this community interview, Rowan Dollar – Chief Information Officer at Catholic Education Office Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, explains that executives in the C-suite must be transparent in their decisions.

In this way, anyone can understand the decision-making process, from an executive to a school administrator. The result is better buy-in. 

The principal is the ultimate decision maker in a school, so it is crucial to influence their indirect stakeholders, such as CFOs, CEOs, and parents. Building trust with all stakeholders requires stable and sustainable principles. 

Build relationships with people in your environment and learn about their problems. Do not use acronyms or technical solutions to solve problems that do not exist, as this can lead to distrust.  

Key Takeaways: 

• Working with teachers and administrators, respect their intelligence and their domains to build engagement and trust. There are challenges such as technical and business readiness. To overcome these challenges, be prepared to answer questions and adapt to changes.  
• My mandate is to improve outcomes for students and teachers in classrooms. If we are working on something that is not doing that, then we should not be working on it. 
• We need to understand what the crisis alert means, which requires us to implement the plan we have devised. In many cases, you will need to be agile and adapt since you cannot plan for every outcome.