Operations planning

Become a results-oriented, time-efficient organization through the use of battle-proven formats to guide both your crisis action and long-term deliberate planning under conditions of limited time, a lack of subject-matter expertise amongst your team, fatigue, and high stress.

Why? – There is never enough time nor enough resources (i.e. human, financial, materiel) to complete a given task to 100 percent perfection.  Information is seldom stable, planning variables (e.g. time, schedule, scope, resources, and partners) may evolve through external and internal pressures, the variables may decay or grow in importance over time, and the variables may change properties simply through being observed.

Value added – Errors and omissions in the planning process are readily detected through the examination of all possible factors, deficiencies are remedied, the mission is executed, and your organization is postured to switch their effort to contingency tasks and to subsequent deliberate tasks.

institutional & individual resilience

Organizational restructuring, natural disasters, terrorist attacks are as inevitable as death and taxes.  Stress is inevitable – but the degree of suffering is optional – at both the individual and organizational level. 

One of the best-known axioms in leadership development is that “leaders are made, not born.”  Leaders come in all shapes and sizes!  Our coaches will provide exposure to the transactional and transformational styles of leadership, and coach participants in understanding when to apply each style, and how to make these styles “stick” in a life-long approach which uses the individual leader’s personality and experience as a starting point.

I-MUSICS Consulting, Inc. provides instruction at the:
·         coaching individual mental resilience at familiarization level (one-day);
·         in-depth level (2-4 days) in coaching organizational resilience;
·         in-depth level leadership coaching (negotiated); and,
·         advice (negotiated) to governments and large organizations on large-scale societal trends and how to best posture the organizations for survival and rebound.

Public relations

Maintaining the integrity of your public image is an inseparable part of your business, whether you’re a creative individual or a small company. Protecting your privacy and your public image from slander and libel is only one side of the coin; negotiating sponsorships, public appearances, and endorsements is the other. Our firm advises on both, offering image protection mechanisms—all so you can amplify and control the way you want the world to see you.

exercise design

Exercises test concepts, validate plans, contribute to the development of Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP), and facilitate the evaluation of individual and organizational readiness against individual and organizational task performance standards.  Exercises provide an opportunity to practice and develop new skills in a controlled, learning environment.  All but the simplest exercises require:
(a)  extensive pre-planning and resource coordination;
(b)  tight design parameters to test specific capabilities;
(c)  closely supervised execution of exercise events;
(d)  measures to identify best practices and areas for change;
(e)  measures to retain such lessons learned (LL) in institutional memory.

Value Added?  The Lessons Learned Process (LLP) facilitates the Collection (Observations), Analysis (examine and understanding of all parts of an Observation to gain Insight), Decision (to endorse remedial action), Implementation (remedial action), Validation (monitor the implemented change to confirm that it has been successful).   Following the LLP will assist your becoming a Learning Organization: An organization that recognizes the need for continuous growth and improvement and thus strives to embed mechanisms for its employees and structures to learn and to adapt to change.

protection

Necessity for Pre-Planning:

Develop a safe workplace Policy, aspirational Vision Statement, and purposeful Mission Statement tied to the role of the organization.
Develop a Response Plan
Develop a Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
Validate your plans through exercises
The Necessity of Post Activity Reports and Investigations

Ideas, tangible or not, are the most important things to protect in today’s competitive creative market.  Our techniques will assist you in identifying disaffected employees.

threat, RISK, vulnerability analysis

Threat Risk Vulnerability Assessments (TRVA)
CARVER - Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect, Recognizability
Physical protection measures at the home and office.
Hardening the target (their families and colleagues)
Advance work:
- Pre-plan time away from initial meeting or movement requirement to return to home location.
- Isolated Personnel Reports (ISOPREPS)
Open Source intelligence (OSINT) to build situational awareness
- Logistic planning
- Reconnaissance checklists for routes, meeting venues, and alternates
- Liaison checklists
- Key Leadership Engagements (KLE)
- Itineraries and route planning
- Counter-measures
- Anticipation and Rehearsal of Concept « ROC drills »
- Close Personal Protection (CPP) drills
- Post activity reviews

intelligence

Improve your critical reasoning - and Gain insight into hidden consequences of your decisions.
Know where to look for information - and how to turn it into intelligence.
Fuse intelligence sources, methods, collection techniques, and analytical processes.
Avoid cognitive traps (i.e. blind spots and prejudices)
Achieve media literacy by developing a series of competencies which facilitate analysis, evaluation, and creation of messages in a variety of media modes, genres, and formats. Learn knowledge, skills, and habits of mind.
Learn from others successes and failures through intelligence history case studies – from antiquity to the present day.
Engage I-MUSICS specialties: Africa, Eastern Europe; weapons; vulnerable populations and cultural property protection (CPP) intelligence; Private Security Company survey (Canada), Global Private Security Company regulation and oversight; and youth-at-risk as child soldiers or gangs. Receive I-MUSICS reports: Basic, Current, Estimative intelligence tailored by region, nation, or resource and verified by Structured Analytic Techniques.
Become competent in the application of basic-level Structured Analytic Techniques.
Forecast the evolution of mass (social and political) movements through understanding historic patterns, trend analysis, and link analysis.
Improve your report writing through understanding etymology (word origin and meaning).

business continuity planning (BCP)

BCP ensures that core corporate functions are identified and replicated in satellite offices in the event of an adverse weather event, a terrorist attack, or an active shooter incident which forces the closure of the primary office and/or the loss of key staff.

BCP Exercises confirm the validity and currency of plans and provide training opportunities to practice the plan, and to update it as required.  Exercises also facilitate the assessment of team functions and key leaders while providing an opportunity for individual employees to practice their roles in each response plan.

The internet, software, and technology are so pervasive that we can’t remember having ever lived without them. They make our lives simpler, but behind the digital curtain are fluctuating challenges in protection and monetization; challenges that our firm stays two steps ahead of. 

emergency management

Advice in emergency planning in the Mitigate, Prepare, Respond, and Recover phases of a disaster by staff qualified in the internationally recognized standard Incident Command System (ICS) and experienced in disaster zones.  We emphasize the most challenging phase - Recover.