Pandemic-Induced Work Changes

🚨 Closing the Gap: Strengthening ICT Resilience 💪🏽 When ISO/IEC 27031:2025 was published, it caught my attention immediately. While ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO 22301 provide strong foundations in information security and business continuity, they treat ICT as a supporting player, not the lead. Yes, I know ISO/IEC 27031 isn’t a certifiable standard. My posts are about creating robust resilience frameworks that extend beyond achieving certification as a company. This is where ISO/IEC 27031 can be used as a supplemental guideline to create additional company controls to mature/improve resiliency. In today’s reality, ICT is the backbone. If it fails, everything else follows. That’s why I’ve moved quickly to integrate new ICT-specific controls into the framework my team has developed. Why? 1️⃣ Bridge the gap between security, continuity, and ICT readiness. 2️⃣ Reduce recovery times and data loss after incidents. 3️⃣ Align with global best practices and demonstrate resilience maturity. How? Here’s what you should consider implementing: ✅ Set precision recovery targets: Establish ICT-specific Minimum Business Continuity Objectives (MBCO), Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for every critical service. ✅ Map the entire digital backbone: Document end-to-end system dependencies, data flows, and architecture to prioritize recovery where it matters most. ✅ Plan for the unthinkable: Build ICT-specific disruption scenarios into our enterprise risk models, from ransomware to cross-region outages. ✅ Know exactly when to act: Define explicit triggers for activating ICT continuity plans and integrating them into enterprise incident response. ✅ Engineer resilience into the core: Require tested redundancy strategies for infrastructure, applications, and data layers. ✅ Prove it in the field: Expand exercise programs to validate full ICT restoration capabilities under realistic, high-pressure scenarios. ✅ Put vendors on the hook: Hold critical third parties to contractual recovery SLAs, with testing and performance reporting. ✅ Track readiness like a KPI: Measure ICT resilience through dedicated metrics, scorecards, and internal audits to ensure continual improvement. 🤌🏽 The result: The framework my team has developed now forms a three-standard powerhouse, ISO/IEC 27001 + ISO 22301 + ISO/IEC 27031, that strengthens our ability to operate through anything, from cyberattacks to data center failures. 🤪 (Don’t worry, we’ve included NIST to develop our framework as well) 📘 Next step: I’ll continue to share lessons learned with the broader resilience community and encourage adoption across industries as we continue to implement any changes. #ISO27031 #ResilienceByDesign #ICTResilience #BusinessContinuity #CyberResilience #ComplianceCulture #RiskManagement #ISO27001 #ISO22301 #Resilience #ProgramArchitecture #BCDR

The remote work era demands a new approach to team leadership. With distributed work and hybrid setups becoming the norm, it’s time to re-evaluate traditional frameworks. Inspired by Patrick Lencioni’s "Five Dysfunctions of a Team," I adapted it for remote teams—because the rules have changed. 👀 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝟱 𝗗𝘆𝘀𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗥𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀: 1️⃣ 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗚𝗮𝗽 Trust is essential in remote setups but harder to build without regular face-to-face time. Consistency, transparency, and empathy are critical to bridge the trust gap. 2️⃣ 𝗩𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗹𝗶𝗰𝘁 𝗔𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗱𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 In virtual settings, it’s easy to skip tough conversations. Healthy conflict is essential for innovation—encourage open channels for feedback and constructive debate. 3️⃣ 𝗟𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗼𝗳 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 & 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 Misalignments are common without a shared space. Set clear goals, built upon narratives and outcomes — to ensure everyone is moving in the same direction. 4️⃣ 𝗘𝘃𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 Remote work can blur accountability lines. Establish clear roles, responsibilities, and track progress consistently to build ownership. 5️⃣ 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀 Digital tools create constant distractions, making it easy to lose sight of team goals. Regularly reinforce your team’s mission, celebrate progress, and debrief setbacks. --- Ready to tackle remote dysfunctions head-on? Here are also 10 practical tips for remote leaders: 1️⃣ Visualize team goals in one shared place 2️⃣ Write weekly async updates instead of a meeting 3️⃣ Set clear ownership of outcomes upfront 4️⃣ Build a “virtual watercooler” for informal chats 5️⃣ Plan quarterly offsites (in-person or digital) 6️⃣ Share small wins weekly to boost morale 7️⃣ Run frequent feedback sessions of different scopes 8️⃣ Set clear deep work timeslots for the team 9️⃣ Create a digital playbook for team processes 🔟 Document, document, document --- What's your view on this? Does it resonate? What other tips would you suggest for remote leaders? #RemoteWork #TeamDynamics #Leadership #HighPerformance --- I'm Hugo Pereira. Co-founder of Ritmoo and fractional growth operator, I've led businesses from $1m to $100m+ while building purpose-driven, resilient teams. Follow me to master growth, leadership, and teamwork. My book, 𝘛𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘥, arrives early 2025.

Some of the best conversations in our team don’t happen in a boardroom; they happen in airports, coffee shops, or right after a client meeting. At Youniq Minds, we don’t sit under one roof. Our team lives in different cities, coming together in person only when a client assignment calls us. And yet, every time we meet, it feels like picking up from where we left off, as though distance never stood in the way. That’s the gift and the challenge of leading virtual teams. Flexibility and diversity of thought come naturally. But so do hurdles: miscommunication, different working styles, the absence of casual watercooler moments, and the silent risk of burnout. Over time, we’ve learned that the glue isn’t just processes or tools. It’s intentional leadership. The Center for Creative Leadership offers some powerful best practices that we often apply with our clients: - Define the team’s purpose and align on vision. - Clarify roles and expectations. - Establish clear procedures and working norms. - Invest in trust, celebrate small wins, encourage input, and stay connected. - Recognize differences: cultural, generational, and experiential. For us, one of the most powerful practices has been bringing in a coach to facilitate conversations. Those moments surface the unspoken, strengthen alignment, and turn distance into connection. Because leading virtually isn’t just about managing tasks, it’s about managing distance, diversity, and differences. Done with care, virtual teams don’t just work, they thrive. They become engines of trust and innovation. This picture is a reminder that distance doesn’t limit collaboration, but it does require leaders to be intentional. What about you? What’s one practice that has helped you thrive in a virtual team? #YouniqMinds #VirtualTeam #VirtualLeadership #TeamCulture #LeadershipDevelopment #RemoteTeams #CoachingForLeaders #TrustInTeams #Coaching #LDPerspectives

❓ What are some best practices for leading a virtual project team? Virtual teams can present unique challenges. How do we keep everyone aligned and engaged when our only connections are remote? Here are some practical tips for leading a virtual project team: 📢 Set Communication Ground Rules: Don't leave communication to chance! Is it Teams or Slack for quick questions, email for formal updates, or a project management platform for task assignments? Specify which tools to use for what types of communications. You should also encourage team members to share their working hours and availability to help manage expectations. 🎯 Optimize Virtual Meetings: Long, rambling virtual meetings can kill engagement, so ditch the round-robin status updates. Instead, use your meeting time for brainstorming, problem-solving, and decision-making. To create space for open discussion and feedback, share agendas ahead of time and incorporate interactive elements like breakout rooms and shared whiteboards. 🧩 Encourage Team Member Collaboration: Suggest that small groups of team members meet outside of regular team meetings to tackle specific tasks or problems together. These working sessions can help build trust and individual bonds. 👋 Schedule Individual Check-Ins: Schedule short, regular meetings with each team member to check in on progress, address challenges, and offer support. These meetings help to cultivate connections but also allow us to catch obstacles and potential delays early. Leading a virtual team requires intentional effort and clear communication. By implementing these best practices, you can foster a more collaborative environment, no matter the distance. #projects #projectmanagement ________________ 👋Hi, I'm Jami, a project management and planning consultant for mission-driven organizations. I write about my work and share strategies and advice for leading more impactful projects, teams, and planning. Follow me 🔔, comment 💬, and reach out ✉️ to keep the conversation going.

Can Leadership Development Thrive Without an Office? For a long time, we have assumed that leadership development requires physical presence—learning by osmosis, catching organic wisdom from senior leaders. These things do matter, but what if they were never the real driver of growth? And if not that, what are the ingredients that really matter? 🔹 Nick Bloom’s research shows remote work doesn’t kill productivity—it can actually improve it. 🔹 Brian Elliott argues that the best companies succeed not because of where people work, but how they work together. 🔹 Laszlo Bock has long said great leadership isn’t a product of proximity—it’s a result of intentional design. So why do so many organizations still fear that remote work will destroy their leadership pipeline? In my latest Forbes article, I explore how Hudson Institute of Coaching helped a global firm with hundreds of thousands of employees crack the code on virtual leadership development: ✅ Structured Peer Learning: tech-powered matching built diverse learning groups across business units. ✅ Embedded Micro-Development: Weekly 15-minute practices turned daily work into a training ground. ✅ Expert-Facilitated Coaching: Monthly deep dives replaced the informal mentorship that offices once provided. ✅ Measurable Business Impact: Leadership skills improved, engagement soared, and turnover dropped. The real challenge isn’t remote work—it’s whether we’re designing leadership development for the way work actually happens today. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gwwpMzTb

🚀 Drone Meets the Cloud ☁️ "In cybersecurity, assumptions are vulnerabilities." For years, one of our quiet assumptions has been this: the #cloud is someone else’s problem. But the cloud isn’t a cloud. It is steel, concrete, diesel, fibre—and increasingly, a target. Recent drone-enabled attacks on hyperscale data centres in West Asia have broken another assumption: that failures will be accidental. Hardware fails. Software breaks. Storms come and go. We built redundancy for that world. We did not build for a world where infrastructure is deliberately attacked. “Only the paranoid survive.” — Andy Grove Multi-availability-zone architectures were meant to provide comfort, but if multiple facilities in the same geography can be disrupted together, then redundancy becomes correlation - exploitable by capable attackers. Dependencies are now #geopolitical. Power grids. Undersea cables. Rare gases. Firmware supply chains. Contract manufacturers. “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower Most enterprise Business Continuity Plans have not been tested under #adversarial conditions. Here are five ways to test whether your #resilience is real. 1. Kill a region. No warning, no graceful degradation. - Can you fail over across countries, not just zones? - How long before your most critical service is back online? - Who makes the call when automation fails? 2. Corrupt your backups. Missing/encrypted/poisoned. - Do you have immutable, offline, or cross-provider backups? - How far back can you go without breaking the business? - Have you ever actually restored from them? 3. Break your dependencies. Simulate failure of an identity, DNS, telecom vendor. - Does your architecture have hidden single points of failure? - Can your teams even identify them quickly? 4. Run a no-notice recovery drill. No scheduling, no announcement. - Wake up your incident response team at 2 a.m. - Remove key personnel from the exercise. - Measure not just recovery time—but decision quality under stress. 5. Extend your BCP to the supply chain. Probe your weakest upstream dependency. - Do your critical vendors have geographically independent operations? - Do their recovery objectives dovetail into yours—or are merely aspirational? For boards and CXOs, the questions are no longer technical. They are existential: - Are we resilient to failure, or to attack? - Is our cloud strategy optimised for cost—or for survival? - Do we know where our data—and our risks—actually live? For years, we have engineered systems to abstract away the physical realities of infrastructure. That premise may no longer hold. We must now design with a renewed recognition that the underlying fabric matters—profoundly. Resilience, therefore, can no longer be defined merely in terms of uptime. It must be measured by an organisation’s ability to continue functioning amidst adversarial operating environment.

Two years ago, I'm invited to observe a large healthcare organization's disaster recovery tabletop. Walk in expecting the usual PowerPoint parade. What I witnessed changed how I think about business continuity forever. COO kicks off the meeting. CISO runs the show. Every functional group in the hospital is there. Not just IT. Nursing. Surgery. Pharmacy. Billing. Everyone. Then they start the simulation. "Ransomware hits at 2 AM. Systems are down. What do you do?" Here's the brutal truth: Most disaster recovery plans are IT fantasy documents. They assume perfect communication. They assume backup systems work. They assume people remember their training under pressure. This hospital? They tested every assumption. And reality hit hard. First Reality Check: Communication Breaks Down Fast IT ops team identifies the threat. Starts recovery procedures. They're about to bring systems back online when someone asks, "Did security confirm the attackers are actually out?" Silence. IT was moving at recovery speed. Security was moving at investigation speed. Nobody was talking. In a real attack, they would have restored infected systems and made everything worse. Second Reality Check: Your Backup Communication Plan Is Broken Physical phones down. No problem, everyone has cell phones, right? Wrong. They actually tested cell coverage throughout the hospital. Dead zones everywhere. Including the incident command center. Imagine coordinating disaster response via text messages that won't send. That's what they were planning for. Third Reality Check: Testing Reveals What Planning Misses A tabletop exercise on paper would have checked all the boxes. "Communications plan? Check. Recovery procedures? Check. Command structure? Check." But when humans actually walked through it, the gaps became canyons. Here's what this taught me about real business continuity: First: Cross-Functional Drills Beat IT-Only Exercises Your entire operation needs to practice together. IT might restore systems perfectly while operations makes decisions that amplify the damage. Everyone needs to know their role and how it connects. Second: Test Your Assumptions Physically Don't just say "we'll use cell phones." Walk the building. Make the calls. Test the coverage. Don't just say "we'll restore from backup." Time it. Watch it fail. Fix it before it matters. Third: Communication Protocols Save Companies Who talks to whom? Who has decision authority? Who can pull the "stop everything" cord? Write it down. Practice it. Make it instinct. Fourth: Speed Without Coordination Is Dangerous Fast recovery means nothing if you're restoring compromised systems. Quick decisions mean nothing if departments aren't aligned. Build in checkpoints. Force communication. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Your disaster recovery plan looks great on paper. But when's the last time you actually walked through it with everyone who'd be involved in a real crisis? What would break if you tested it tomorrow?

In Uncertain Times, Visibility Is the New Power In virtual or hybrid teams, you can’t lead from behind closed doors. You have to be seen—on purpose. Because visibility isn’t ego. It’s how people know you’re with them, watching, listening, and investing. Great leaders don’t wait to be “in the room.” They create rooms of connection—even across time zones. That means: 👀 Showing up in moments that matter 💬  Making your thinking visible 🧩 Inviting others into shared ownership 📣 Sharing quick updates and signals from the field—stories that connect people to purpose, progress, and each other Try this shift: ❌ “They know where to find me.” ✅ “It’s my job to show up—before I’m needed.” → Proactive presence builds trust. ❌ “I don’t want to micromanage.” ✅ “I want to be seen as engaged—not just accountable.” → Visibility ≠ control. So ask yourself: 📍 Where am I present—and where have I gone quiet? #VisibleLeadership #DistributedTeams #LeadershipPresence #HybridWork #xLEAD #TrustInAction

Instead of starting with threats or systems, I start with the value stream. Why? Because business continuity isn’t really about hurricanes, power outages, or servers going down. It’s about something much simpler: preserving the flow of value through the business. Executives don’t care which database is offline. They care that customers can’t buy, contracts can’t close, or invoices can’t be sent. That’s the flow you’re protecting. Here’s how I break it down: 1️⃣ Identify the process that directly supports revenue or mission-critical outcomes. - What activity actually creates value? - For a SaaS platform, it might be the software deployment pipeline. - For a manufacturer, it might be raw materials through production to distribution. - For a hospital, it might be patient intake → treatment → billing. 2️⃣ Map each step in that process — people, systems, vendors, tools. - Who touches this? - What tech or suppliers does it rely on? - Where are the single points of failure? 3️⃣ Estimate what percentage of the company’s total revenue depends on this process. - If it fails, how much of your annual revenue would actually pause or disappear? - Is it a core process that drives 80% of revenue or a supporting function tied to 10%? 4️⃣ Estimate how much of that revenue is at risk in a realistic disruption. - Will you lose all revenue immediately? - Or just delay it? - Be conservative and credible — executives hate inflated numbers. 5️⃣ Spread that loss over operating hours to create an hourly cost of disruption. - Take the annual revenue at risk, divide it by 8,760 hours (for 24/7 ops) or by working hours for narrower processes. - Then add recovery costs (staff overtime, consultants) and reputational or compliance penalties. What you end up with isn’t perfect — but it’s credible. It turns abstract “criticality” into a number: This process costs $X per hour when it’s disrupted. Why this works: ✅ It sidesteps technical jargon — you’re talking value, not servers. ✅ It reframes continuity as a business problem, not an IT problem. ✅ It gives executives a simple, repeatable model to prioritize investments. ✅ And yes, it’s executive-friendly — because it speaks in dollars, not downtime. I’ll walk through a concrete example in my next post. But first, let me ask you — what would you add or improve in this approach? Have you seen a better way to make the financial case for continuity?

Waiting until you have an incident to understand which of your systems are critical can have serious consequences, sometimes even life or death consequences. Here is an unusual example: It was recently reported that hackers launched a ransomware attack on a Swiss farmer's computer system, disrupting the flow of vital data from a milking robot. See https://lnkd.in/eVhzu429. The farmer apparently did not want to pay a $10K ransom, and thought he didn't really need data on the amount of milk produced in the short term. In addition, the milking robot also worked without a computer or network connection. The cows could therefore continue to be milked. The farmer, however, apparently didn't account for the fact that the data at issue was particularly important for pregnant animals. As a result of the attack, the farmer was unable to recognize that one calf was dying in the womb, and in the end, this lack of data may have prevented the famer from saving the calf. While most of us will hopefully not find themselves in this exact situation, the takeaways are the same for all of us: 1. CONDUCT A BIA: Consider conducting a business impact assessment (BIA) to understand the criticality and maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) of all your systems, processes, and activities, from a business or commercial standpoint. Of course, such analysis should include the health and safety impact of downtime. 2. VENDORS: As part of the BIA, consider assessing the MTD for each vendor as well. This will help you decide which primary vendors require a secondary, as well as define the terms of your contract with the secondary vendors. More details on backup vendors can be found here: https://lnkd.in/e-eVNvQz. 3. UPDATE YOUR BC/DR PLAN: Once you have conducted a BIA, update your business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan to ensure that that your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are consistent with the MTD determined through your BIA. 4. PRACTICE: Conduct regular incident response (IR) and BC/DR tabletop exercises, as well as full failover exercises, to test and improve your ability to respond to a real event. Advice on conducting successful tabletop exercises can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eKrgV9Cg. Stay safe out there!