Fractional Head of Operational Resilience · Crisis exercise designer and facilitator
Fractional and interim operational resilience leadership for regulated firms, from banks, insurers and fintechs to healthcare and medical technology. Twenty years inside the machine, latterly running it at UBS and Barclays, and ten more doing it independently since.
I am a professional screenwriter and novelist, and I make podcasts too. That craft is what turns a compliance exercise into a day your board actually feels, and remembers when the real one comes.
I design and run crisis exercises for regulated firms, and I write them with the craft I use across film, TV, theatre and radio, which is why they land and stick when it is real.
Boards remember stories, not spreadsheets. So I give them the story of their worst day to rehearse, and then I run the room while they live through it.
I work on a fractional basis, so a firm can buy exactly the seniority it needs. Some firms want a Head of Operational Resilience for a few days a month, and others want an interim lead to build or rescue a programme. Plenty simply want their worst day written and rehearsed, or a single session that makes the board feel a risk before it arrives.
I own the resilience and crisis programme against SYSC 15A, DORA, PS7/26 or CPS 230, from important business services and impact tolerances to end-to-end mapping and the self-assessment the board signs off.
You get a former UBS Managing Director and Barclays Global Head of BCM for the days you need one, without the cost of a full-time hire.
Three to six months, hands on, to build or rescue a programme ahead of a regulatory deadline or after a failure. Independent challenge that tests whether a framework would survive contact with a real event, and a proper handover to the in-house team at the end.
Crisis exercises at every scale, from executive tabletops to market-wide simulations with regulators in the room. I write the scenario with a dramatist's instincts and a practitioner's scars, and then I facilitate it, reading the players and turning up the pressure as the day unfolds.
The scenarios unfold in real time and through the channels a real crisis actually uses: breaking news, a regulator's letter, a supplier's carefully worded reassurance, the social media pile-on. Synthetic media means the bulletins and the journalists arrive looking like the real thing. I write and run cyber incidents, ransomware, third-party and supplier failures, technology outages and market-wide disruption.
A keynote or workshop that uses the films a board already knows as the way into the risks it would rather not look at. It draws on my forthcoming book, Screen Test, and on my Severe But Plausible and Leading Questions series.
The book about the heroes and villains no policy ever catches, drawn from the Severe But Plausible series and written in public as it runs. The first two chapters will be posted here to read before long.
Email me and you will get the opening chapters the moment they land, plus a note when the book itself is out.
Email me for early accessCrisis is a story told badly, under pressure, with everyone watching. Fiction is a crisis run beautifully, on purpose. I am the only person in the UK market visibly selling the second craft to fix the first.
Business storytelling workshops that teach executives what novelists know about tension. Creative projects delivered with the discipline of a bank's change programme. The same instinct that scripts a drama is the one that makes an exercise land in the room.
And it is not only on the page. Two decades of hosting live rooms, from literary residencies to prestigious members' clubs, sit alongside as many years briefing boards at the most senior level, up to and including the UK Joint Intelligence Training Group. A room in crisis does not rattle me, which is rather the point when it is yours.
Narrative structure as a leadership tool: the briefings and exercises people actually feel.
Crisis simulations scripted like drama and run like operations. The format banks ask for twice.
Production discipline and finishing power for writers and creative teams who start more than they ship.
The craft in the exercises is not borrowed, it is made here. Under inkjockey I write for film, TV, theatre and radio, and make the podcasts that keep the instinct sharp. The full creative stable, from Behind the Spine to The Writing Salon, lives on at inkjockey.co.uk.
Essays on story and craft land monthly in the inkjockey Substack. See the full stable at inkjockey.co.uk.
"Our board needs to rehearse its worst day" and "I have a story that will not leave me alone." Both are welcome. Sometimes they are the same email. If you need a senior resilience lead for a few days a month, book a conversation and we can talk it through.