ERMS Group

19/08/2026

The ERMS Group are proud to be the principal provider of public safety, risk and emergency management advisory services for History Alive: A Journey Through Time. Now being hosted at Ipswich and supported by the Ipswich City Council this timeline event is a great opportunity to see reenactments from various periods. Tickets are on sale now!

History alive is just over 3 months away. Ticket sales will go live soon. We can't wait to welcome you all to the event. Watch this space.

17/07/2026

The winner of 4 x Day Passes (Saturday OR Sunday) along with joust tickets and a parking pass to the 2027 Abbey Medieval Festival is Meg McDermott. Meg congratulations on your win, please send our team a DM so we can arrange your tickets.

Stand by there we will have another chance later this year to win more tickets.

16/07/2026

Stayed tuned we will announce the winner of the 2027 tickets for Abbey Medieval Festival later this morning.

The team at the ERMS Group know that a lot of people missed out on tickets for this year so couldn’t enter this competition.

As we move to celebrate our 20 years as sponsors for the festival we will have other competitions that will allow you a chance to get tickets to 2027, and other unique prizes.

15/07/2026

69% of reputational damage in a crisis occurs within the first 24 hours (PwC, 2023). Most organisations that go silent aren't choosing silence. They're waiting for an answer that was never agreed in advance.

Three figures tell the quieter story:
PwC 2023: 69% of damage lands in the first 24 hours.
Deloitte 2022: 49% of executives have no pre-agreed internal escalation protocols.
CMI 2023: recovery takes up to 3x longer when external communications are delayed beyond the first hour.

The gap is rarely about media handling or spokesperson training. It's about decisions that should have been settled long before the incident. Who approves the first statement. Who briefs the board. Who speaks to regulators.

For Australian organisations operating across multiple states, time zones, and regulators, an unrehearsed escalation chain is measured in trust that does not return. The ERMS Group works with executive teams to pre-agree those decisions, so the first hour begins with clarity rather than questions.

Sources: PwC Global Crisis Survey 2023; Deloitte Executive Preparedness Benchmark 2022; Chartered Management Institute 2023.

07/07/2026

19/06/2026

Most disaster recovery plans get written before the planner has spoken to a single resident in the affected area.

That's the wrong order.

Our team spent months embedded inside a regional Australian community 3.5 times the size of Tasmania before drafting a single page of policy. No assumptions. No desktop reviews. Just walking the ground, meeting people, and mapping the informal networks no satellite image will ever show you.

Here's what surfaces when you embed first:

>> Resource gaps that don't appear on any register
>> Cultural considerations that shape whether a response is accepted or rejected
>> Informal networks that activate faster than any official channel

Plans built this way treat preparedness, response, and recovery as one connected sequence. Not three separate documents handed to three different teams once the pressure is already on.

Resilience is built before the disaster, not during it. 💡

Swipe through for the three shifts we think every community-facing plan needs.

17/06/2026

Your team has read the risk register. They've sat through the briefings. They still won't act until something breaks.

That isn't negligence. It's Normalcy Bias, the mind's quiet habit of underestimating disruption because the past felt normal.

It's why the flood report gets filed away because the site hasn't flooded in 30 years. Why the Q1 ransomware patch slips to Q4. Why the business continuity plan sits in a shared drive, last opened two years ago.

Risk managers aren't fighting a lack of information. They're fighting a brain wired to treat unlikely threats as impossible ones, right up until they arrive.

We've broken down how Normalcy Bias shows up inside well-informed organisations, and the language you can use to name it before your next planning session. Take a look through and tell us where you've seen it play out 💡

15/06/2026

Most organisations write their crisis plan after the crisis.

The first draft gets sketched at 2am, mid-incident, by whoever happens to be awake. It's understandable. It's also the most expensive version of that document you'll ever produce.

A crisis plan isn't paperwork. It's the cornerstone you press into the ground before the clouds gather. Every member of your team needs to clearly understand their role before an incident, not during it.

Three things worth settling while the sky is still calm:

✅ Who makes the call when leadership is unreachable
✅ Who speaks to staff, media, regulators and families, and in what order
✅ Who keeps the business running while the response team responds

When those answers live on paper and in muscle memory, your people don't scramble. They execute.

The organisations that recover well aren't the ones with the thickest binder. They're the ones whose people knew their part before the storm arrived.

If your plan hasn't been tested, walked through, or updated in the last 12 months, it isn't a foundation yet. It's a draft.

12/06/2026

Ever wonder why most Threat and Vulnerability Assessments end up gathering dust on a shared drive?

It's because organisations treat them as a report. A document to file. Something the security team owns and compliance signs off on. That framing is the blind spot.

A properly scoped TVA is a decision framework, not a deliverable. It looks at four threat categories across the whole organisation:

🛡 Natural: flood, fire, storm, seismic exposure
🛡 Criminal: theft, fraud, insider activity, targeted attack
🛡 Terrorist: ideologically motivated harm to people or assets
🛡 Accidental: human error, system failure, supply chain disruption

Each one cuts across functions you may not link to security: HR, operations, IT, facilities, executive travel, supplier networks. When a TVA becomes a discipline rather than a deliverable, it shapes how leaders make decisions about capital projects, hiring, vendors, and continuity planning.

The organisations getting this right are not the ones with the thickest report. They are the ones whose executives can name their top three vulnerabilities without opening a file.

When did your leadership team last sit down and review yours together?