2025 and beyond: When Failing to Plan is Indeed Planning to Fail!

Service Category: Systems & Strategy

Client Type: A National Public Benefit Entity

Service: Our client safeguards public trust in democratic institutions and fosters social cohesion and peace. With a breakdown of global order, continuity planning moved from an afterthought to a priority resilience investment! It ordered a business continuity plan (BCP) to bullet-proof its operations during significant disruptive incidents (DIs).

What we did: We focused on reinforcing resilience by: ·

• Benchmarking to International Standard ISO 22301 “Security & Resilience – Business Continuity Management Systems (BCMS)” ·
  Assessing critical services. ·
• Evaluating service exposure to strategic, operational, technological, and environmental disruptions. ·
• Developing governance principles and a client-specific continuity taxonomy, ·
• Facilitating the agreement of BCMS processes for planning, testing, response, recovery, responsibilities, accountabilities and a virtuous learning and improvement loop. ·
• Identifying potential DIs and a detailed BCP to (a) reduce risks and (b) secure necessary insurances before they occur; (c) efficiently manage response and learning when they happen. ·
• Training key staff to implement and refine BCMS processes.

Foresight Created: We demonstrated that: ·

• Embedding continuity within governance processes enhances resilience and accountability. ·
• Risk management cannot be static, it must respond to the ever-changing business environment. ·
• The BCP is meaningless without the BCMS. ·
• There are limits of BCMS. After all, the Japanese Fukushima nuclear plant prepared for a tsunami. It also prepared for an earthquake. But it did not expect the combination of the two which overwhelmed its defences. Yet, its resilient mindset made it better off than if it had not had a BCMS!