Why most business continuity plans fail under pressure
The plan is rarely the problem. The problem is the gap between the document and the organisation's ability to operate it.
We've reviewed hundreds of business continuity plans over the past decade, and they fail in remarkably consistent ways. The plans themselves are usually fine — well structured, professionally written, signed off. What fails is the assumption that having a plan equates to being able to execute one.
The first failure mode is currency. A plan reflecting a 2022 operating model is a fiction document in 2026 — different suppliers, different systems, different people in the seats. If your plan hasn't been refreshed against real organisational change in the last twelve months, it is already wrong.
The second is accessibility. Plans stored on the system that has just gone down are not plans. Plans that require a senior leader to open them on a laptop they don't have with them at 2am are not plans either.
The third — and most expensive — is rehearsal. The plan is the script; the team is the cast. A script no one has read aloud is not a performance. The organisations whose plans hold up are not the ones with the best documents. They are the ones whose teams have walked through the document together, more than once, before they needed it.
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