Alison Crockford is the founder of cybersecurity consultancy Build Secure Thinking. She is a board advisor, program leader, educator, and speaker with a career background in tech, science, and communications. Her day-to-day work focuses on building a security-conscious culture in organizations, which in turn can then best support strong business resilience. 

Alison’s career path in the Information Security industry has encompassed roles ranging from highly regulated financial institutions to leading-edge engineering start-ups. She is fascinated by the relationship between technical, organizational, and human factors, in what NCSC has referred to as ‘sociotechnical’ security. As a consultant, her goal is to demystify security for those for whom it is not part of their day-to-day, building capability and confidence for clients.

 Joanna Grove-Lafarge has over 30 years’ experience in organisational resilience, risk management, and disaster recovery. With a background in both industry and consulting, she specialises in helping organisations prevent, detect, withstand, and recover from disruption.

Jo has led senior leadership teams through real incidents, including major storm events that led to lasting changes in incident management. A qualified lead auditor, she works with boards to strengthen resilience frameworks and test contingency plans. 

Jo has contributed to industry standards, including BS25999, ISO22301, and FCA regulations, and authored BCI exam content. 

Beyond resilience, she designs gardens, focusing on sloping sites, cottage styles, and water features. 

Nick Simms has nearly 40 years’ experience in Business Continuity, Operational Resilience and related fields, working as a Sales Manager, Marketing Director, Global Head and consultant. He has supported organisations across sectors, from global banks, asset managers and the Bank of England to internet startups, the NHS and the London Ambulance Service. Nick has led pandemic flu programmes, redeveloped control room processes, and designed and facilitated over 100 scenario exercises. He has managed major events including hurricanes, earthquakes, data centre failures, power outages, supplier bankruptcies, 9/11 and bomb scares. His proudest achievement is developing the next generation of resilience practitioners—many of his mentees have become Fellows of the BCI, including Helen Lipscombe. A Fellow himself since 1994, he continues to mentor globally and serves on the Fellowship interview panel. His wife, Jillian, also achieved Fellowship in 1999.

Steve started out as a jelly bean machine salesman and was running radio stations by the time he was 21. He branched out with a music festival, a production company, internet radio station and helped set up charity for homeless people as well as a number of digital businesses that went nowhere. He founded Then Somehow in 2014 to create tools to help organisations with the messy stuff. He works with universities, local government and technology businesses codesigning programmes to change behaviours and building apps to support teams to have better conversations. On Fridays he makes cider with Bignose & Beardy. 

Tom helps companies prepare for the unexpected. He is an Operational Resilience expert with over fifteen years’ consultancy experience. Throughout this time, he led many national and international projects across the public and private sectors.

Tom’s main interest lies in scenario testing; putting leadership teams through their paces in front of realistic and engaging scenarios that cause them to think, collaborate, and more often than not, swear at the thought of these things really happening to them. He has run over 150 scenario tests across most industries and brings his thoughts to this podcast to help organisations engage with the topic. In a world where crises continue to hit the headlines, Tom has built the Scenario Testing Academy to help more people build the skills to run scenario tests, to help prepare teams and individuals for the unexpected. Tom is also a qualified Transformative Coach and works with leaders to prepare them for times of stress.