Let’s Endeavor to Stop Writing Plans and Focus on Capabilities Instead

Many organizations have successfully recovered or navigated disruptive events without ever having written a business continuity plan. Thorough, well written plans exist for organizations that end up being poorly prepared when disasters occur. If both of these statements are true, then what good are written plans?

Plan [plan] a scheme or method of acting, doing, proceeding, making, etc., developed in advance: i.e. battle plans

Every minute we spend on writing plans is a minute we are not spending developing our people. When we train people on how to use their plans, we take away their agency to operate as they see best, based on their level of competence. Every time we tell people they must follow their plans by testing and exercising them or by informing them of where their plans are and how to access them, we demonstrate our lack of trust in their own capability. When we spend time developing written plans, we also ignore what we already know and for which ample evidence exists:

People are going to do what is natural for them. Following documented instructions is instinctive when assembling a child’s bicycle Christmas Eve or when arriving home with that brand new Leorfne desk from Ikea. It is far less intuitive during a disaster. People in stressful situations will act on instinct. Good preparedness should start with what people will do naturally, not with what we’d like them to do in an ideal world.

Plans and procedures are poor tools for dealing with complex and chaotic situations. If you subscribe to the Cynefin[1] sense-making framework (and I do), then you know that plans and procedures are great tools for dealing with predictable environments. Disruptions and disasters, however, are unpredictable and the plans written during very predictable times will not work effectively when things become more challenging.

Preparedness efforts should be focused on improvement of capabilities, not plan maintenance. The work we do to prepare organizations should be actionable. The procurement and staging of resources, the building of competencies or the formal delegation of authority, for example. Getting the budget to make equipment available is difficult. Ensuring that spending and decision-making authority is delegated to ground-level managers and supervisors is challenging. Building collaborative teams from disparate members of different departments can be uncomfortable. But these actions yield results. By contrast, updating plans is easy but accomplishes little.

People cannot build competence relying on plans. Successful militaries are not born from battle plans. Great sports teams do not emerge from their playbooks. Talented musicians are not the product of their sheet music. Our goal should be the development of people with the skills to react and the delivery of the resources they need to be most effective. This is not accomplished through written procedures.

Plan documents are a poor measure of the quality of our programs. Auditors and regulators rely on plan documents to determine the effectiveness of preparedness programs. Yet, no evidence exists to show that the best outcomes are the result of the best written plans. But quality documentation is what we strive to deliver. This is because we are increasingly more focused on demonstrating compliance than delivering value. By doing so, we re-enforce the notion that exists among auditors that plan content is the primary means of evaluating capability.

These problems can be fixed. But it requires a seismic shift in thinking and radical changes in how we practice. I wouldn’t be writing this if I did not think our profession was up to the challenge. If we were to all agree that our discipline can do better by focusing more on capabilities then, collectively, we can move things in a better direction. Some steps we can take toward that end include:

Watch your language. Remove the word plan from your vocabulary and replace it with capability. If you must, use plan in its verb form: to plan. Experienced professionals know that plans are an assemblage of frameworks and strategies which are executed using available resources and competent team members. People outside the discipline and new entrants to the field do not have this understanding. When we talk or write of the need to have plans in place, the uninitiated think “document”. If we stop referring to plans altogether, we eliminate such confusion.

Focus on capability improvements, not plan updates. If you are serious about applying lessons learned, then determine what must be done to improve capability. Getting there will require action, not modification of procedures. If it really is as simple as executing something differently then…

Practice and exercise. Exercises should not be tests of the plan or of people’s ability to follow the plan. Instead, exercise activities should be used to see how people naturally and intuitively react. If changes can be made to make people more effective, make them but then practice, not test. People need to know that they are how recovery happens – not the plan.

Find opportunities to execute. We know that even minor disruptions or threats have the potential to escalate or cause serious impact if prolonged. Why wait? Use those as opportunities to activate, assemble and execute. Even if the instances of real issues are few, practicing and exercising should not be optional. It is the only way for people in our profession to understand what response and recovery look like. Use the time you would otherwise spend on plan reviews and updates.

Make it known that plans will not be referenced. People should know plans are rarely ever referenced in response to an event and that plans frequently fall short of expectations when they are used. When people understand this, they are more likely to engage and take responsibility. At the end of the day, this will serve the organization far better than even the best plan.

Educate your Auditors. Documentation of capability improvements will exist in the form of budget approvals, product invoices, meeting minutes, formal authority delegation and the like. This is what we should be providing auditors and regulators. Changing the mindset starts with us. Our function should be viewed as driving improved preparedness, not as compliance with someone else’s expectations.

Let’s endeavor to do work that is more meaningful and focus on actions that more directly improve outcomes. The purpose of this piece is not to convince all practitioners to adopt my perspective and all my guidance – as nice as that would be for me. Instead, I only want to nudge us in a different direction. And, I believe, that direction is the right one for each of us and the profession as a whole.

[1] For a great, four minute introduction to the Cynefin framework, go here: https://youtu.be/epXqgrm2hs4?si=Ok0BJJSNm_z2vaQR