Small incidents can and should be handled by compliance officer and some partners in affected areas of the ground level. While small, they should be tracked to enable analysis of trends and also to keep a historical record. Because sometimes, even the small incidents rear their heads later with repeat bad behavior by employees or concerned and impacted customers and other stakeholders. What is a small incident? Of course, there's no agreed upon definition as this is a subjective notion. But I tend to think of small as incidents that don't result in significant harm to individuals or to our organization. Sizeable incidents are different. These are incidents that require extra attention, understanding, analysis and communication. Sizable incidents, maybe those that would matter to the public at large, to stockholders, to regulatory agencies or to the bottom line. Sizable incidents have concerning consequences even under the best case scenario. To try to be at that best case scenario, incidence response must be organized, well led, well communicated. And here is the topic at hand guided by a Senior Response Team. Compliance professional should never do their work in a vacuum. And for these sizeable incidents, a cross-functional, authoritative leadership group should be assembled to receive reports of the incident and any investigation, and to help guide the "on the ground" response team. In most successful companies, leadership connotes significant expertise and guidance to high profile problems. And they provide additional information in the inside that on the ground response team can benefit from. Even without any change in direction from such a team, a compliance professional will want to sample this team as a matter of good corporate citizenship. Remember, noone likes surprises. Well, that's certainly true of executive leadership. The task at hand then is to identify who should be on the regularly constituted senior response team. Ensure that they understand that they may be convened on short notice for sizeable incidents, and modify the team as needed depending on the incident. Usually a senior response team will include counsel, public relations, communications, government affairs, a CIO, and/or a COO, and/or a CFO. A good incident response on a consequential incident has to leverage for their sake and for yours the leadership expertise of the organization.