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Contingency Planning Patterns

Keep running when a person, site or system fails.

Methods for keeping a business running when a person, site, system, supplier or channel suddenly fails. For managers and operations leads, the cards help you map what cannot stop, find single points of failure and key-person risk, plan for outside failures, write fallbacks people can follow under stress, rehearse them in drills and recover in the right order afterwards.

49 cards · 7 suits · 5 recipes · 2 missions

What's inside

• Map7Is it clear what must never stop?
• Weak Points7Have you found every single point of failure?
• Key People7Could you cope if anyone vanished tomorrow?
• Suppliers And Sites7Are you ready for a supplier or site to fail?
• Plan7Can people follow the plan under stress?
• Drill7Has the plan been tested against reality?
• Recover7Is it agreed who declares and what returns first?

A few cards

Map

Critical Activities List

Name the handful of things that must keep happening, and let everything else wait.

Weak Points

Single Point Hunt

Find every link that has nothing behind it.

Suppliers And Sites

Supplier Criticality Tiers

Sort suppliers by how fast and how hard their failure would hit you.

One card in full

Drill

Plan Read-Through

Read the plan aloud with its owners and fix every point where someone stumbles.

The cheapest exercise of all is reading the plan out loud with the people who would have to carry it out. Plans written at a desk are full of assumptions that sound fine in silence and fall apart when spoken: a phone number nobody has, a step that needs a missing key, a decision nobody is allowed to make.

How to use it

1. Book an hour with the owners of one critical activity and their deputies.
2. Read the plan section by section, out loud, with each step read by the person who would do it.
3. After each step, ask: could you do this now, today, with what you have?
4. Record every stumble on a flip chart: missing access, unclear wording, wrong contact, impossible timing.
5. Assign each stumble an owner and a date, and repeat the read-through when they're fixed.

Example

A school's read-through of its building-loss plan stalls on step three: the assembly point is the car park now used for a temporary classroom. They pick a new point that afternoon.

Watch out

• Reading silently in advance and discussing in general. Aloud, step by step, is the point.
• Letting the plan author read every step. Owners must speak for their own parts.

It is the warm-up for a Continuity Tabletop, works especially well on First-Hour Card drafts, and ends with a short Hot Wash.

Recipes

• Continuity Plan In A Week: Name the few activities that must keep going, size the harm of stopping them, set recovery targets, trace what each one needs, give it four fallbacks and a one-page start, then read it aloud with its owners.
• Exercise The Plan: Pick a bad day that could really happen, talk the decision-makers through it, add surprises that test the plan's assumptions, debrief at once and fold every fix back into the plan.
• Hunt The Weak Links: Draw what each critical activity depends on, mark every link with nothing behind it, catch backups that fail for the same reason, spot over-reliance, rank the failure modes and stack defences that fail differently.
• Key Person Leaves Tomorrow: Find the people whose sudden absence would stall something critical, get their knowledge onto paper, spread the skills, give each role a practised deputy, and prove it with a planned absence.
• Supplier Goes Dark: Sort suppliers by how hard their failure would hit, look one level down their chain, test their continuity claims, line up a working alternative and write how you would leave within the notice you would get.

Missions

• Recover from a disruption: from "the site, supplier or person is gone today" to a declared event, recovery in priority order, reconciled records and a plan gap review with owners for each fix.
• Write a continuity plan: from "we've never thought about what happens if" to a plan with critical activities, recovery targets, a PACE plan per capability, a call tree and first-hour cards, read through by their owners.

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