A Truly Disruption-Minded Culture Requires Awareness, Trust, and Technology

Preparing for a future of severe, destructive weather goes hand-in-hand with preparing for a future of power grid disruptions. A resilient grid is something that most consumers think little about – until they experience one. Then it’s on you, the utility senior manager, to rally the troops and get power restored as quickly as possible.

Metrics like SAIDI and SAIFI prove that your customers’ satisfaction is directly tied to how often they don’t have power. And with increasing occurrences of severe weather that cause more disruptions, modern utilities should be thinking about how to handle disruptions when they happen. In fact, every utility’s organizational culture should be molded around disruption awareness and best practices for disruption preparation, management, and recovery. Only then will your organization be best-poised to handle disruptions swiftly, safely, and reliably, every time.

But how do you ingrain this way of thinking into your utility’s business culture? Let’s start from the ground up.

In order for your utility business to foster a culture focused on disruption management, you need to first make your people aware of how disruptions affect them, as representatives of your organization. That starts with helping them realize that disruptions will always happen, no matter what. You can’t prevent them altogether – but you can minimize their impact by being prepared and understanding your role in preventing them. Lunch-and-learns, organized trainings, and performing key restoration and storm system rehearsals throughout the year, are all great ways to keep your people on their toes about the ever-present potential of power grid disruptions.

It's important to note that everyone – from the operator to the CEO – plays a role in keeping grid disruption awareness active. That is why it is imperative to make sure your communication and training efforts include everyone – not just those who are most directly associated with disruption management (think control room staff, line workers, tree crews, etc.).

A truly disruption-aware culture requires trust. Specifically, your workforce needs to trust the training they receive will help prepare for, manage, and recover from power grid disruptions.

After all, when grid disruptions occur, everyone needs to be given strict marching orders. Power grid disruptions are no time for your employees to be running around trying to figure out what to do next. Instead, there needs to be a carefully structured plan in place for before, during, and after disruptive events. Everyone must know exactly what’s required of them, when they must do it, and why it is important. Most importantly, they must trust you, the senior manager, to make effective, appropriate decisions in the moment. Faith in leadership is incredibly paramount to ensure you have a disruption-aware culture.

A truly disruption-aware culture cannot exist without grid technology to guide and facilitate its preparation, management, and recovery strategies. Introducing grid technology into the equation offers a slew of benefits for utility organizations, including:

Better decision making.
The best power grid disruption software solutions for utilities leverage AI and machine learning to help senior managers make better, more informed decisions. Whether using forecast data and historical outage reports to predict damages, pinpointing specific vegetation that could threaten grid infrastructure, or identifying how to best regulate power flow to affected areas, intelligent software solutions unlock the most informed decisions possible. Better decisions result in more effective directives for your workforce, which goes a long way to establish trust in your leadership.

Easier task delegation.
You’re only one person. You can’t delegate tasks to every single one of the countless people that make up a disruption management workforce. Instead, you can offload some of the task assignment to software solutions that show you in real time what assets are damaged, where your available crews are, and other key information to help you and your control room staff know who should do what and when.

Increased safety.
Knowing how to keep your employees safe is a key trait of a disruption-aware culture. You can ensure this with grid disruption management software that predicts the trajectory of incoming storms and other disruptive events. This information can give you the insights to stage your recovery crews in safe locations, far from any danger zones. Your employees will have peace of mind knowing that you will stage them in safe places to wait out the storm – which only adds to their faith in your leadership and your power grid disruption-centric culture.

Faster response times.
Some grid disruption management software can pinpoint specific assets that are likely to be damaged by a storm. You can use that information to stage specific resources in areas that are safe, but also close to where their help will be needed most. For example, imagine GE Vernova’s Disruption Readiness solution tells you that an approaching storm will damage a certain cluster of utility poles. That insight may prompt you to stage your pole-repair specialists (along with replacement poles and power lines) as close to that area as possible while still being out of harm’s way. When you have the insights and visibility to determine the most practical and efficient staging locations, grid disruption recovery happens much faster.

And from a high-level standpoint, simply equipping your utility workforce with this grid technology speaks volumes about your commitment to a disruption-centric culture. Implementing the right software technology shows your employees that you are willing to make investments that improve your utility organization’s power grid disruption preparation, management, and recovery efforts. In turn, this all translates into a culture that is truly disruption-aware.

Many utilities leverage GridOS® Orchestration Software to guide their workforces before, during, and after disruptive events. To learn more about how our grid software could transform your culture to be more disruption-aware, contact our solution experts anytime.