Leading Resilience at Scale: Inside Netflix’s Crisis Approach - A conversation with Gayle Anders

0:00So that's what really separates us from traditional programs is we can tell you exactly right now today, how prepared are you? What are your gaps and where do you need further investment? Hello, everybody. This is Belen Santaolalla from Conductor Crisis Exercise Platform.

0:31You're listening to the Crisis Designer Podcast, where we share tips, thoughts and concepts to help you create impactful crisis management exercises. So if you're involved in crisis management, reputational risk, business continuity training, information warfare or immersive simulations, this show is for you. In each episode, we talk to resilience experts and crisis designers about their experiences, challenges and the practices that help make organizations stronger and more adaptable.

1:09Today, we're joined by Gail Anders, Global Business Continuity Program Manager at Netflix and head of the BCI USA chapter. With over 20 years of experience in the U.S. Marine Corps and the private sector, Gail brings a deep and disciplined approach to resilience. At Netflix, he leads business continuity efforts across all global operations, supporting every part of the company's value chain and revenue streams. His focus is on turning complex continuity processes into actionable, organization-wide capabilities, bringing agility, clarity and strong return on investment to the resilience conversation.

1:53Gail, welcome to the Crisis Designer Podcast. How are you today? I'm doing good. Thank you so much for having me, Belen, and thank you so much for that introduction. It's a pleasure to have you here. So, well, let's get started. How exactly do you help your organization today?

2:11So, that comes in a number of different variations. So, sometimes it's as easy as just having a quick conversation in the hallway, right? Hey, you know, we're expanding an office in a certain location, and it's more or less like, hey, it'd be a good idea to identify what teams can't work from home. Like, who has absolute dependencies on an office location? And then that gives them something to think about, right? Sometimes it's a little bit more structured in how we forecast that, hey, this effort needs to happen.

2:43We need to do a continuity assessment, which is our form of a business impact analysis, or we need to create a recovery strategy. So, it's more or less like showing up, letting people know that we exist and what we offer as a team and as the products and services across the business. And then sometimes we just stumble upon open documents of people who are creating their own continuity plans. And we're like, hey, that's all extra work for you. We actually have a formal program here. We can support you so that that burden doesn't rely on you independently.

3:13So, a number of different versions because Netflix is just one of these companies that one size does not fit all at Netflix, right? So, when I first started, it was just DVDs and streaming video. Now, we're in games, ads, live, a number of different other product offerings and things of that nature. So, we spend a lot of time right-sizing it, which then in turn creates an overall resilience workforce and products. Okay, fantastic. And let's go to the why.

3:45Why is your work in continuity and resilience so important, especially in a company like Netflix? Yeah, disruptions cost money. Disruptions can impact your brand. It can impact the trust with your customers. And now we're in ads. Ads have to show in certain geographic regions with, you know, like we made a promise that your ad would hit a target audience, right? So, that's why continuity and resilience matters to Netflix. We want people to be able to access the content they want when they want it from wherever they want it.

4:18Whether you're in a different country or you're using your iPad or an Android device or a TV versus, you know, a tablet or whatever the case is. We want to have the greatest level of availability so that people can enjoy the content from around the world wherever they choose to. It's one of our core, you know, our core thing or one of our core statements is we want to entertain the world. In order to do that, we have to be able to tell people stories and we have to be able to get, you know, reach them where they are or whatever device they're using. Fantastic. And how did your time in the Marine Corps influence your approach to crisis and continuity planning?

4:56Yeah, so the Marine Corps is the smallest branch of all the military's services that we have here in the United States. With that being said, we have the smallest budget. We have little to no resources outside of like what we're given as our initial setup or whatever. But when we when we face wicked problems, hey, it would take it's going to take 500 people to do this job, but we only got 300. OK, we got to figure it out. So how can we be effective? How can we be efficient?

5:26How can we still maintain a high quality of mission success or completing the objective? So through all of that, basically just being being in the trenches, so to speak, and figuring out and understanding like, hey, how do I how do I accomplish, you know, big, big objectives with little to no resources? Like those are the things that set me up for success. I spent a little bit of time as a as an operations planner. So basically, you know, sitting in APAC, we have, you know, APAC region is one of the most they have a high frequency of like natural disasters.

6:02You know, everything from even this year so far, we've seen tsunamis, we've seen earthquakes, we see volcanic eruptions, we see earthquakes and, you know, Bangkok and I'm sorry, Thailand and Cambodia on the border there. So even all of those things, like from a military perspective, we have forces all over the world. And so we have to address like, OK, if we can't access the beaches, you know, where are the landing zones we're going to use to get the resources in there? So even supply chain from military perspective is everything these we have to account for and we have to plan for.

6:33And then I find myself in a corporate entity and we have a lot of resources. And so it's like it's a little bit of it, but we don't want to waste those resources. Then we don't want to be we want to make sure that everything we're doing. So I still come at it from that mindset of that. I don't have these resources. So I'm never asking for a lot of money to problem solving. You know, let's say you find a person else seeing a point of failure. Most people would default to like, hey, we need to hire more people. I am always of the opinion, like, who else can do this work?

7:05Right. If I create a checklist or I just document my processes, can somebody else come in and just keep the lights on until I'm back or, you know, whatever the primary people are back in their capacity? So even those types of things, I believe that as a Marine has really set me up for success within corporate America. Oh, fantastic. We've we've seen many people from the military transition to to the corporate sector, especially crisis management. So I think there's a lot of very interesting synergies happening there.

7:40So now you're leading Netflix global business continuity program. And what sets your model apart from more traditional approaches? Ah, that's a really good question.

7:52We came in here and the only directive we were given was make Netflix more resilient. And that's that's very challenging because, you know, where do you start? Like, how do you like what what do you do? And so the first thing we want to do is like, hey, whatever solution we create, it's got to be the right size for the business. It has to appreciate the culture of Netflix, of freedom and responsibility, you know, guardrails, not gateways, context, not control. So we spent a lot of time making sure that, you know, it's going to, number one, be the right solution for the business and that it was going to be adaptable and agile, depending on if we're on the corporate side or the studio side.

8:33But, you know, even if we just talk about metrics, right? Traditionally, traditional programs would say, hey, Belinda, I did business impact analysis this month and I helped the team create a business continuity plan. All that tells you is that Gail's been busy. It doesn't tell you, like, how prepared you are for those bad days or those potential disruptions. So quantification was huge, right? We had to be able to tell a story with the data because it's a very data driven business.

9:04People want to know, like, very quickly, they need the 30 second snapshot of, like, how bad is it? What do I need to do now? And what what do I need to do within the next six months? And how do we track this? And so every so our surveys are really, really light. Our BIAs take 30 minutes. So why? Because we if I were to come to a team and say, hey, I need three weeks of your time, that kind of that kind of engagement kills innovation. It's like you are here to do marketing. You are here to do studio stuff or finance or whatever your primary purpose here.

9:35So I can't come in and be that I can't be the disruption as a business continuity person. So to that point, how do we how do we get the right level, right level of context without creating the disruption and still maintaining integrity of our program? So it's been a lot of time making sure that the questions we ask in our surveys are appropriate questions. We would absolutely take points away from you. These are not nice to know questions like these are things that we need to know, right? And we're going to hold you accountable if you answer these questions in the negative.

10:08So all that being said, we spend a lot of time figuring out who else is doing surveys and who is the risk teams at? What questions are they asking? Who's physical security? Because we don't want to ask all their questions, but we want to share our information and have access to their information. So now I still provide you that comprehensive report. But for you as the customer, so to speak, it's soft touch. All you do is answer a 30 minute survey and you get right back to work. And then your leadership is the one that we engage with to provide that that detailed analysis and summary of anything we find.

10:40That's what helps us separate apart is because with that, we call it a resilience score. So every team has a resilience score. So if you're responsible for 10 things and let's say your worst asset is a vendor and they have a negative four. So now your team scores a negative four. So everybody in the ecosystem at Netflix can see that, hey, this team is a negative four. It doesn't mean they're doing anything bad because resilience is a journey. It's not pass or fail, right? And this is where that messaging comes into play because because we do quantify it like negative scores have have emotional responses from individuals.

11:18So we have to help them understand, like, it's OK to be read. Like, what's your plan? And that's really the story that we want to tell to those those teams leadership chains is that, hey, it's bad right now. But they've already had they have a corrective and corrective action plan or an improvement plan to address these gaps and close them and become more resilient. So that's what really separates us from traditional programs is we can tell you exactly right now today. How prepared are you? Where what are your gaps and where do you need further investment?

11:48Fantastic. It feels like it removes the like the burden of lots of compliant processes and makes it very easy to read and to act upon. Right. Yes, absolutely. Prioritization is key, especially when you have teams that are supporting major product improvements. You know, we're doing live events. OK, that's cool. We did one last year. Now we're doing over 100 this year. And so that's scaling. We don't want to disrupt the business from making money. And so that's why we had to make sure that our work is deliberate. It's it's intentional.

12:23Like we're not just here because we're curious. We're here because we know that you could potentially cost us 250 million dollars in losses. If if a disruption comes from your specific part of the business. From a crisis management perspective, what do you feel are the biggest risks you're keeping an eye on?

12:50I'm so because I'm from a military background, geopolitical events are always near and dear to my heart. It's something that I track. Now, it's also it's also not in my my domain. So I'm not responsible for incident management or physical security. That's an entirely different team. And they handle that. But from a continuity perspective, what we are doing is like, hey, when we find out that there's a typhoon somewhere in the Pacific and it's going to affect one of our Netflix offices, we reach out to those teams that we've worked with and we say, hey, just letting you know, like, are you guys tracking this?

13:25Is there any indications that you may have to activate your plan? And then that's how we support that that relationship or that leading into potential disruptions. So national hazards, geopolitical events, the the the tariff situation, to my knowledge, I don't know that that's really affecting us as a business, but obviously that's changing relationships between countries and different parts of the world. So, yeah. Wow. OK. And what would you say are the essential elements a strong business continuity program needs to include?

13:58Uh, I think you absolutely need to start with leadership, but. There's there's many facets to that, so. We believe in freedom of responsibility, so I don't need the CEO to tell me what to do like that would that would be a waste of their time. I don't need the board of directors to tell me what they what what they want me to do. Like, no, we work directly with those those senior leaders across the business to say, hey, this is what we need to do.

14:29And like, when does it work for you? So leadership engagement, because if you start with the leadership, you get the consensus and everybody understands why the work is happening. And more importantly, like we have that leadership support and leadership understands what we are providing them as an outcome from from the effort there. So that's absolutely number one leadership. And that's also but leadership within the continuity team, too. Right. I don't have the authority to tell people to stop what they're doing. So I have to be that extrovert.

14:59I have to be the friendly guy. I have to be the person to just like I have to be sociable. Right. I can't just like send somebody an email and say, hey, fill out my survey. No, I want you to know like why we are here's what I'll share with you. It's not that I want you to know. I want to make sure that you have the opportunity that if you're curious and you want to have that deeper conversation of like, where does the score come from and why am I a part of this effort? Like I can provide you that context or you can complete the survey. You've got to be able to metrics is number two.

15:30Right. Reporting, dashboarding. Are you reporting on the right things? Like, so it's cool. You have the scorecard. But what does that really tell tell somebody who's just passing by and just seeing this this the score on their dashboard? What so like what other information can I add to that dashboard to to support that number? Hey, this number is coming from these other gaps or these these gaps. OK, great. And so now I see the gaps. What does that tell me about what the team is doing about those gaps? Well, here's another box on that dashboard that says this gap is going to be closed in six months.

16:03This gap is going to be closed in 12 months, whatever the context is. So now everybody doesn't have to call everybody to ask a question. So reporting and dashboarding is number two. I think the third thing is connecting the business to technology. I think for a long time, people have in many of the conferences that I go to, you know, disaster recovery and business continuity are like these two separate entities. At Netflix, they're one in the same. You can't have a service that supports 150 business activities like that engineer needs to understand what happens when this thing breaks.

16:38And look, man, it's not just like five people touch this thing every day. Like it's over 1500. This application is accessed 1500 times a day or, you know, whatever the context may be. But connecting the business to the technology so that everybody understands not just RTO relationships, but like, why is this critical to this team? Right. You may not be on call for this service, but if it breaks and it's unavailable for two hours, it stops this part of the business. And providing that overview is essential to people understanding, like, why do we care about continuity and resilience?

17:10And that's a really interesting thing. Why do we care about it? Because we've encountered many times that people in this sector have difficulty getting leadership on board, as you mentioned, or engagement from people that need to be trained or prepared. Do you have any way? You've mentioned that you're social, sociable. But how do you get everyone on board? Do you have any tips or any proven practices that you've encountered?

17:43Yeah. So sometimes people are, some people are resistant, right? They don't want extra work. And because to them, sometimes, you know, it's human nature. We all have bias at some level. And if you've been scarred with business continuity in your previous life and you worked at a bank or, you know, you worked at a different company. And then here comes Gail Anders talking about continuity like it's an immediate stop. Sometimes you have to be patient, right? So I always ask them, hey, listen, obviously right now you have a lot going on. I see your three, six, 12-month plan.

18:14And obviously I see your calendar. It's completely booked. I had to fight for the 15 minutes that I have with you today. When does it make sense for this work to happen? Hey, Gail, you know what? Right now is not a good time. But if you guys came back in Q3 in 2026, that would be a perfect time. We'd have the space and the capacity. More things will be established. And we can actually do some meaningful work with it. Hey, cool. I will put you on the calendar. I'll send you an invite as a reminder, you know, that, hey, this is going to end. We can adjust. It's okay. Right?

18:44Because it's when you need us. Or, hey, here's everything that we offer. If testing, if exercises is not appropriate this year, if creating the actual continuity plan is not appropriate, how about we just do the assessment, which takes 30 minutes for individual assets. And you can at least understand how prepared you are. And that's minimal. So they understand, like, okay, then that's another flavor. I don't have to have the full package. I can just take a piece of the pie. For the more difficult ones, eventually there will be a disruption.

19:16You know, we had the LA fires here earlier this year in Los Angeles. And that woke up a lot of people who generally had taken the opinion that we're just going to figure it out. It's cool to just figure it out when the electricity is working and the water is flowing and you're sitting in your air conditioning office and that's fine. But when you're driving through two hours of traffic to go find your kids, to go find your spouse, or go get your pets, or your house is burning down and you're trying to manage your team, that's what I mean by being patient.

19:48Sometimes it hits home personally to those individuals across the business. Hey, look, I understand you went through a bit of a rough spot there. And here's how it could have been better. And not being the dude that's like, hey, I told you this was going to happen. Never coming, like that's just not appropriate or necessary, but using it as a lesson. Like, hey, with that friction, while it's still fresh in your mind, here's how this could have been resolved a lot easier, right? Do you understand who knows who's for a vendor, whatever.

20:20So like, that's like the approach that I take because Netflix is small, but it's also massive. So there's plenty. If somebody says no, there's three people saying yes. And so that's how I'm able to like, cycle through the business to stay engaged. Wow, very interesting. And you've mentioned exercising. Do you run simulations or exercises regularly? Or what does that look like at Netflix? So from the technical side, I'm not the guy who's doing this, but it's all open source.

20:55And you can Google search chaos engineering. So from a technical perspective, the engineers will literally break things in production without telling people. And then like when the alerts and the alarms are going off, that team has to literally go through their response procedures, triage and isolate and go through that workflow to restore that service to its functionality. And then they're evaluated on, you know, within their engineering teams, they're evaluated on, you know, how well they responded. They call the right teams, the incident management teams, et cetera. So that's one aspect of it.

21:26But then we have like the business side, or even sometimes within engineering, we do tabletop exercises. And again, this is like, hey, what version of this experience do you want? Because if you come at them and say, hey, I need some subject matter experts to help me build this scenario and create the NJX, and it's going to take 12 weeks, and we're going to meet for two hours, like that's going to overwhelm a lot of people. Or you can say, hey, check it out.

21:57Let's just pull out our books, our run books, playbooks, whatever, and let's walk through some scenarios. Let's workshop, workshop, whatever the case may be. So it's one time we review it, we go over the, hey, risk identify these risk events. You know, this is, you know, the MITRE ATT&CK things that we're tracking and that we're most concerned about, how to like walk us through this piece, right? So that's a version of it as well. And I guess what I'm trying to say is like exercises don't always have to be the full blown tabletop exercise experience where you're bringing in vendors and you're bringing

22:28external entities in to do this work. It's really about like what works best for that specific team. And then what are the objectives, right? If we're just trying to validate this one little team, then maybe we don't give them the full experience. I want to create a regional exercise that involves multiple countries and multiple leaders, then yeah, we're going to have to be a little bit more deliberate and plan accordingly for that level of investment. Do you have any best practices for preparing teams for exercises or assessments?

23:04How do you get them ready? Do you tell them in advance something's happening with the chaos engineering thing too? Like, do they know it's part of the chaos engineering or they actually feel that it's like the real thing? How do you prepare them? Or if you do? Yeah, so for the chaos engineering, like they don't find out until afterwards. Oh, God. Yeah. So it's shock and awe. But they're all tight. They're all really proficient and they're really good at what they do from incident management, incident response and figuring all that stuff out.

23:35For the tabletop exercise, I am always in favor of shock and awe. So I don't tell anybody anything except for that it's happening on this day. And all I need you to do is be you. If you are an engineer, if you're on a procurement team and you do this specific thing, I'm not asking you to be a fire chief. No, I'm asking you just to play you, right? Just play you. And it's also like the no fault environment. I am not. This is not pass or fail. We're going to go through some scenarios. We're going to stress, you know, most people don't like me at the end of a tabletop, but

24:09they're grateful that they have gone through that because it prepares them for like, you know, how do I use comms? How do I use my internal comms team or my external comms team? If CNN is calling for a quote or seeing like whatever the scenario is driving and whatever injects we're creating, oh, I didn't know that this is my comms representative. So just even that helps, right? So, yeah, I'm not a proponent of sharing information. And then obviously we just ask that anybody who's serving as a subject matter expert, they

24:41don't participate in the actual exercise, that they just maintain the code of silence, right? Which to date has worked very well. Okay, fantastic. And do you facilitate the exercises? Yes. And do you like that? I love it. I love it. So good because listen, you know, Marine Corps resource restrictions, I'm not going to get bullets every time I need to go to practice clearing a house or to taking an objective or whatever the case would be.

25:12So we're going to walk through this or maybe I'm on a ship and I don't have the space. So yeah, we're going to build some type of a terrain model or we're going to have a map or something and we're going to basically rehearse this or walk through this or speak through each of our actions that we are doing so everybody understands what's happening, right? So what I'm trying to say is that I have a world of experience when it comes to being creative with how we deliver exercises, but also ensuring that the outcomes of those exercises are still driving the improvements or the behaviors that we want as we make our team stronger and

25:47better. Fantastic. And do you conduct after action reviews or how do you ensure that those insights are acted on? I try to wrap it up within the same session. So there'll be, okay, exercise is over. Hey, for the next 15, 20 minutes, I want you to throw it at me. Like, what did you hate? What did not work? Like, but we also had the recorder, right? And so the observers slash recorders, so for example, let's say we're in the middle of an event and the inject, you know, requires you to engage with external comms and you don't

26:19know who you're supposed to call external comms or how you've reached them. Okay. That's now an improvement plan. Hey, Belen did not know who the external comms point of contact was. I mean, that's an easy fix, obviously. Hey, do you know who they are now? Do you know how to reach them now? Okay, great. So we'll catch that. We documented and that's done, right? Some things it's like, hey, man, like you were shooting from the hip the entire time. You didn't reference any of your playbooks or your documents that you said you were, you deviated so far from your response plan that we need to, you need to add a, I don't

26:53know, an appendix or a clause or an extra paragraph or update because the names of the players have changed, whatever the case may be. And we need you to do this within six months. So as far as getting the feedback for like actions and a task, we try to wrap that up within the last 15 to 20 minutes of the session. And then, you know, we follow up with you in 12 months and say, hey, we identified these gaps. Like, did you close them? You know, what was, and if you didn't, why did, why did you not? And just, it's all about capturing context. And maybe they didn't know how to do it. Hey, that's what we're here for.

27:24We, you know, because we, documentation is always like, everybody's calling this, nobody wants to do it. But then look, a checklist, a one page checklist or workflow, workflow diagram or something. If it meets, if it serves the intended purpose, then that's sufficient enough. You don't need 40 page procedural document. Like that's, nobody's going to use that. Definitely. Yeah. Okay. So can you tell us about the most challenging or high pressure or complex situation you've

28:01had to manage?

28:03For me, it's understanding the business. I was an infantryman by trade in the Marine Corps. So we used radios. We used some software applications for like tracking and things like that. But I never had to really consider about like the availability of those services and applications that I was using. I just turned it on and either it worked and I used it or it didn't work and I put it back in the footlocker, right? Like I just, whatever. But now I'm sitting at a business where everything is a service, like our entire product line is

28:36all digital. It's virtual. It's all services and applications and AWS and, oh my God, like you mean to tell me the cloud's not in a cloud. It's like these huge, massive warehouses on earth. And it's just like, it's like, so for me as a professional, like that was a steep learning curve. And, you know, during my first three to six months, I spent a lot of time, you know, attending AWS training events and understanding cloud deployment. And like, how do these things, like, what is a recovery region? What is the, what is, what is, what do we mean by availability?

29:08Like, what does that actually really mean? And then understanding like, you know, AWS has shared responsibility, right? So they provide you all the infrastructure, but you're responsible for what you do inside that infrastructure. And so understanding that so that I can sit down and look, I'm not a coder. I'm not going to sit down and talk to you about like how you wrote your query and how you ran that, that, that report or whatever, but I know enough to say like, Hey, if we're talking about a library, like what is this, should this be included in our assessment?

29:42Right. I can have those types of conversations. I understand like what a run book is or playbook. And it helps me understand like, Hey, is this active in all three regions or is this active only in one region? So I can have those level of conversations, which helps me maintaining the relationships with these people because I'm, and it's not just an engineering thing. Like, I don't know anything about marketing, right? Uh, so like I'm working with a marketing team or somebody on that side of the house. I want to be prepared to show up and have an informed conversation. So I'm just not completely ignorant of like what you do or how critical some of the things

30:16are. Uh, so for me, it's always, that is always number one. And that's because it's, I don't want to say it's a weakness. Uh, it's just a lot of information. So I'm very deliberate on reading anything that you've published, any memos, anything you've written that relates to why I'm speaking to you today or, you know, whatever the case may be. I do a lot of due diligence to understand you're part of the business. Um, so that's always, that's always where I think it's one of the biggest challenges here. Wow. Fantastic learning too.

30:46If you want to, to make sure that you understand, uh, a crisis, you need to understand the business, uh, nature and how it works and, and all infrastructure and all the pieces that put, uh, put it together. So that's really interesting. Final question, uh, to wrap up, uh, what advice would you give your younger self just starting out in this field? Oh my gosh. Uh, um, I think very early on, I, because I didn't know what I know now, I was a bit scatterbrained.

31:23And my approach for like rolling out the program across all of the business. And so had I been more methodical and deliberate about, Hey, we're going to start with this one part of the business, or maybe, Hey, this is priority number one, priority two, priority three. I don't know, like whatever works. Right. I think that would have made my first 18 months here a lot easier because I was so all over the place with, Hey, there's something going on over here in Turkey. There's something going on over here in Singapore.

31:54There's something going on over here in finance or studio. And like, I think I should have been a little bit more methodical in, in, in how I was engaging with different parts of the business and say, showing up and just asking, or just being curious and look, you have to be curious. You have to be curious. Like I never want the first time that we talked to be the time that we asked, like there's a crisis going on. Right. I want to make sure that we have all these relationships. So it wasn't a complete waste of time. Uh, it had to, it had to happen. I just wish that I would have been a little bit more deliberate about where we were rolling

32:26out the program across the business. Because I, at the time it was only two of us on the team. So I do business continuity and my counterpart does technology continuity. Uh, and so it became overwhelming very quickly, but I'm trying to make a good impression. So I had to meet my timelines and my, my project due dates and things like that. So that, that would be the only thing I would tell my younger self is like, try to understand the business and just, just start somewhere. Right. Where, where do you think is worth your time and your investment? Draw a box, start there, and then, then you can expand as people start to become more

33:00familiar with your program and advocate for you, which has also been a force multiplier for me. What a great way to wrap up, uh, and take away. I think that for, for everyone too, right. That they want to, uh, leave a mark on, they want to really, um, being impactful with their, with their, uh, work. So I think that being methodical, it's a really good, uh, approach to making sure that if you cannot tackle everything in one go, you roll out something that can be rolled out in a,

33:32in a timely fashion. Well, Gail, thank you very much for coming to the podcast. It's been a pleasure. We've learned a lot. Uh, it feels like your job at Netflix. It's very exciting. Um, thank you for sharing your knowledge and take care. Thank you so much, building. It's been great being here. Thank you.