Arthur builds sets for a regional theater company in Ohio. He builds doors that do not lead anywhere and windows that look out onto painted plywood. The doors have heavy handles and brass hinges. They look substantial to the audience in the third row.
A person cannot actually walk through these doors. They are made of thin balsam wood and stage paint. The set designer creates an environment of belief. He does not create an environment of function. The actor knows the door is a prop. The audience assumes the door is a functional part of a house.
Corporate continuity plans often resemble the work of Arthur. They are designed for the viewers who sit in the boardroom.
The Reality of 6:15 AM
Priya stands in the lobby of the operations center at . The building is cold because the climate control system has stopped. She tries to access the digital recovery manual on her tablet. The network is unresponsive. The connection to the cloud has been severed.
She walks to the physical cabinet in the corner of the room. She pulls out a blue binder with a plastic spine. This binder contains the business continuity plan. It has not been opened in . The cover is coated in a thin layer of grey dust.
She turns to the section marked for IT emergencies. She finds a list of emergency contacts. The first name on the list is a man who retired in . The second name belongs to a woman who moved to a different state.
Priya dials the third number. A recorded voice tells her the line is no longer in service. The phone tree is a map of a ghost town. It is a directory for a company that existed . The plan is technically complete according to the audit. It is useless during the current crisis.
Connections Dissolved by Time
The binder says to contact the primary data vendor. The company name is printed in bold letters. Priya searches for this company on her personal phone. The vendor was acquired by a global conglomerate .
The old account numbers are no longer valid in the new system. The support portal requires a password that is not in the binder. The vendor relationship exists only on paper. The actual connection has been dissolved by time and neglect.
We build these documents to feel prepared. We do not build them to be prepared. The feeling of safety is available for the price of a few meetings. Real preparedness is expensive and requires constant effort.
A manager writes a plan and feels a sense of relief. This relief is a form of self-deception. It is a quiet lie told to the organization. The lie is repeated until everyone believes the fiction.
A Graveyard for Office Supplies
The storage site is the next step in the manual. The manual says the secondary site is ready for immediate occupancy. Priya drives to the industrial park across the city. She finds the building behind a chain-link fence.
She uses the key from the emergency kit. The key turns in the lock after several attempts. She opens the door and turns on the light. The room is not an office. It is a storage space for old furniture.
The desks are stacked against the far wall. The chairs are covered in plastic sheets. There are no servers in the racks. The cables have been removed and coiled in a box. Someone used this space to solve a different problem.
They needed a place for broken equipment. They chose the backup site because it was empty. The backup site was empty because it was never used. The room is a graveyard for office supplies. It is not a functional recovery center.
The Gap of Resilience
This is the gap between the words and the thing itself. The words say the company is resilient. The thing itself is a collection of broken links and empty rooms. Most organizations treat continuity as a task to be finished.
They want to check a box and move to a different project. They treat the plan like a static object. A plan is not an object. It is a living system that requires maintenance.
"Silence is a diagnostic tool for a bad plan. If the plan does not account for the silence, the plan is a failure."
- Sam W.J., Podcast Transcript Editor
Sam W.J. is a podcast transcript editor who spends his days removing the errors from human speech. He once told me that the most dangerous part of a recording is the silence that no one noticed.
"Silence is a diagnostic tool for a bad plan," Sam said. If the plan does not account for the silence, the plan is a failure. He removes the "ums" and "ahs" to make people sound certain. Corporate planners do the same thing with their documents. They remove the messy details to create a sense of certainty.
Masking the Flaws
The certainty is an illusion. It is a mask worn by the organization to satisfy a regulator. The regulator wants to see a document. They do not want to see a drill. A drill is inconvenient.
It interrupts the daily flow of work. It reveals the flaws in the system. It shows that the phone tree is broken. Most leaders prefer the document because the document does not talk back. The document never fails until the power goes out.
The Document
Quiet, Obedient, Untested.
The Drill
Loud, Revealing, Authentic.
Expired Condiments of Strategy
I recently looked through my kitchen pantry. I found a jar of mustard that expired in the previous decade. The jar looked full and the label was bright. It occupied a space on the shelf and looked like food.
It was not food. It was a chemical hazard disguised as a condiment. I had kept it because I liked the idea of having mustard. I did not actually have mustard. I had a glass jar of disappointment.
People change jobs every few years. Software is updated every few months. Vendors are bought and sold every week. A plan that is one year old is a historical document. It is a record of how the company used to work.
It is not a guide for how the company works now. Using an old plan is like using a map of a forest to navigate a city. The landmarks have changed. The roads are in different places.
The Myth of Resilience
The director of operations starts to improvise. She calls people she knows on their personal phones. She asks for favors from former colleagues. She bypasses the plan because the plan is an obstacle.
This improvisation is what actually saves the company. The leaders congratulate themselves on their resilience. They do not realize that the plan failed. They think the success proves the plan worked.
They are mistaken. The success proves that humans are good at solving problems in a panic. A high-performance organization does not rely on panic. It relies on rehearsal.
It treats the continuity plan as a script for a play. The actors must learn the lines. They must know where to stand on the stage. They must practice the movements until the movements are natural. A script that is never rehearsed is just a stack of paper. It is a story that has never been told.
Testing the Steel
A bridge is resilient because the steel can handle the weight. It is not resilient because a lawyer wrote a letter about the steel. To build a resilient organization, one must test the steel. One must put weight on the beams and watch for cracks.
This is the core philosophy of Kestralis Group. They understand that a program must perform when the organization needs it most. They do not value paperwork that only exists to satisfy an audit.
Testing a plan is uncomfortable. It forces people to admit they were wrong. It shows that the backup site is full of old chairs. It proves that the IT director's phone number is wrong.
Most people avoid discomfort. They choose the comfort of the binder. They choose the safety of the shelf. This choice is a deferred cost. The cost is paid with interest when the systems fail.
The interest is paid in lost revenue. It is paid in lost reputation. It is paid in the stress of the employees who must work through the night. Priya is tired by noon. She has solved three problems that the plan should have solved for her.
She has spent five hours doing the work of a binder. Her energy is a finite resource. She is using that resource to fix the past. She should be using it to manage the future.
Building Capability
We should stop writing plans and start building capabilities. A capability is the ability to do a thing. It is not the description of the thing. If you cannot call your vendor in five minutes, you do not have a recovery capability. You have a paragraph in a document.
If you cannot sit at a desk in your backup site, you do not have a site. You have a lease for a storage unit.
The day the systems go down is a day of revelation. It is the day the paint is stripped away from the balsam wood. It is the day the fake door is pulled by a real hand. The handle will either turn or it will break.
The door will either open or it will stay shut. The audience will see the truth. The boardroom will see the truth. The truth is always waiting in the blue binder. It is waiting for the first person to dial a disconnected number at .
The binder remains a heavy object because the servers have become light as air.