Mr Hancock comes from a security background, having worked for eight years with the Royal Hong Kong Police, much of it in counter-terrorism.
Leaving the police in 1997 he joined security and intelligence company Hill & Associates, supporting mostly US nationals wanting to reduce their risk as they moved into China.
When Hill was bought by G4S – now notorious for its inability to meet its contract for security for the London Olympics – he decided it was time to move on. He is now Country Manager for Singapore with Special Projects & Services Asia Ltd (SPS).
He’s been around. He was heavily involved in Aceh, Sri Lanka and Thailand after the 2004 tsunami, and in Japan after last year’s quake and tsunami, doing everything from organising searches for missing staff of clients to helping multinationals get their operations up and running again.
In 1998 he was helping multinationals weather the upheavals following the fall of President Suharto in Indonesia. He was involved in supporting investment banks involved in Iraq after the US-British invasion, and the UK’s Department of International Development in Afghanistan.
His specialty is crisis management – an art somewhat underrated in Thailand, and most parts of East Asia, except with the benefit of hindsight.
As a result, most of his clients are US multinationals, international schools and hotel chains, almost all Western-owned or managed, and many Fortune 500-listed.
But that’s changing, he told The Phuket News. For example, he says, “South Korean companies are now looking at their risk exposure as they set up operations in Africa and South America.”
Chinese corporations, in contrast, are not concerned – yet. “They will accept higher risk. But this will change as lawyers and litigiousness grow, and as health and safety become factors.”
Mr Hancock splits risks into two main groups – natural (earthquakes, tsunamis and the like) and man-made (terrorism, civil unrest) – and each of these into gradual or sudden crises. “The Arab Spring, for example, is gradual,” he explains. The Kuta bombing in Bali in 2002 would, of course, count as “sudden”.
So how does one go about planning for disasters that may never happen, or for disasters that cannot be foreseen?
There are several strands to crisis planning, he explains. These include creating a crisis management team; identifying key personnel in the company, without whom it might not be possible to go on; identifying and prioritising risk (by no means an exact science – tsunamis would not have appeared in most people’s crisis plans in Thailand before 2004); and organising communications networks.
In addition, assets must be listed, along with people, property, proprietary information and reputation.
An example of the last was after the tsunami, he points out. Hotels whose staff stayed on to help saw an enhancement in their reputation; hotels whose staff did not saw the opposite effect.
On a wider scale, the organisation’s resistance to disaster must be assessed, emergency services identified, along with essential infrastructure, and key people in embassies and local government.
Getting reliable multi-source information is a must, he says, pointing out that international media cannot be relied upon, often giving distorted and exaggerated pictures of a crisis.
Does SPS work for Asian governments? That’s a little tricky, he says. Often there is too much face to be lost in bringing in a private company to advise on handling crises.
However, the company does like to test its clients’ crisis plans, and at that point it always invites the local police and local government bodies to be involved.
For more on SPS visit sps-global.com