Simplifying Business Continuity – A Path to Resilience

Key takeaways 1. Alignment with Business Goals: Simplicity makes it easier to integrate business continuity into your organisation’s strategic planning process. Ensure that your continuity efforts align with your overall business goals or achievement of your strategic objectives. 2. Accountability and Reputation Protection: Clear and simplified plans ensure that everyone knows their role during a crisis. This increases accountability and preparedness for disruptions, which is crucial for maintaining trust and protecting your organization’s reputation during crises. 3. Resource Efficiency: Simplified plans lead to more efficient resource allocation. Focus on critical functions and resources, reducing the overall cost of business continuity efforts. 4. Accessibility and Compliance: Simplified plans are more accessible to employees and facilitate compliance with regulatory requirements. Complexity does not equate to effectiveness; simplicity makes your plans actionable. 5. Ease of Testing: Simplified plans are easier to test and validate, helping you identify and address vulnerabilities effectively. 6. Faster Response and Reduced Errors: Simplicity leads to faster responses during disruptions and reduces the risk of critical mistakes. It enhances overall resilience.

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, the need for effective but practical business continuity planning is more critical than ever. Organisations face a multitude of potential disruptions, from cyberattacks and natural disasters to supply chain interruptions and global crises.

Ensuring continuity of operations in the face of these challenges is essential for survival and long-term success. However, complexity often hinders the very process that should provide clarity and protection.

To navigate this complexity, businesses must turn to the principles of simplicity and efficiency to simplify and make their business continuity strategies practical and strategic.

The Challenge of Complexity

Traditional button-up approaches to business continuity planning have often been characterised by extensive documentation; template-filling exercises; complex and incomprehensible procedures and details; and siloed responses for multiple teams.

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) has also stated that “the ‘bottom-up’ approach being considered good practice in resilience”.

While these bottom-up good practice approaches referred to by BCI may have been well-intentioned, they have created their own set of challenges, which include:

1. Lacking skills, money, and people for complex business continuity – Making business continuity unnecessarily complex and over-engineered will force organisations to either avoid doing business continuity because it is too hard or forced to hire experienced but expensive professionals who have a good track record for implementing business continuity. Unfortunately, smaller organisations do not have money for such hires and will not have vital business continuity plans in place.
2. Limited understanding – Overly complex plans can be challenging for employees to understand and implement. When people do not understand a topic, they will not engage and perform well.
3. Unnecessary resource overload – Complex plans and unnecessary template-filling exercises can consume significant resources in terms of time, effort, and money, diverting attention from core business activities. Organisations today have limited budgets and resources, and business continuity will not be at the top of their priority to-do list.
4. Slow response times in times of trouble – Elaborate procedures and many disparate detailed plans that lack completeness, coordination, and interoperability can lead to delayed or counter-productive responses, hindering the organisation’s ability to respond to a disruptive event effectively and positively.
5. Making erroneous assumptions – Complexity itself can be a breeding ground for misunderstandings and complacency, prompting individuals to make erroneous assumptions to bridge knowledge and understanding gaps. Cognitive biases, like overconfidence and confirmation bias, can lead people to make assumptions without subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny.
6. People become overwhelmed – The overwhelming nature of complexity may likely prompt individuals to negatively ‘oversimplify’ business continuity planning, inadvertently glossing over critical details, and making unhelpful assumptions.
7. Siloed-based disparate plans lack interoperability – Different departments or units within the same organisation have their own isolated, disparate, or compartmentalised plans for various aspects of their operations. These plans do not seamlessly work together or communicate (interoperate) with one another. This lack of interoperability can lead to inefficiencies, coordination challenges, and difficulties in responding effectively to complex situations or emergencies, especially in larger organisations.
8. Resistance to change – People are usually resistant especially when there are overly complicated plans or when there is complexity involved. This can lead to inconsistent or ineffective implementation. They may even refuse to follow the steps documented in the plans when they are required to in a major disruption.
9. Difficulty in testing and improving plans – Over-engineered plans are difficult to test and improve. There are so many moving parts and too many dependencies and interdependencies that people cannot comprehend. They cannot understand their relationships and potential impact on each other. It becomes just too hard to test. It is not surprising that one common audit finding for business continuity is the lack of plan testing.
10. Unprepared for future shocks – With all these challenges, it is not surprising that many CEOs are very concerned about their organisation’s unpreparedness for future shocks or their ability to effectively respond to major disruptions like another pandemic, despite having gone through one.

The Power of Simplicity

Simplifying business continuity planning involves distilling the process down to its essential elements.

Here are key steps to consider when embracing simplicity using a top-down strategic approach:

1. Identify your time-sensitive critical business functions.

a) Identify and classify external-facing, time-sensitive, mission-critical business functions.

b) Gain executive consensus on enterprise-wide critical business functions.

2. Strengthen the resilience of your critical resources.

a) Identify enterprise-wide critical resources that are time-sensitive.

b) Develop resilience strategies for these critical resources.

3. Co-develop your business continuity strategies.

a) Co-develop practical, intuitive, cost-effective, complete, and clear business continuity strategies for your critical business functions.

b) Identify alternative workarounds and manual processes.

4. Document, test, and improve your ‘lite’ enterprise-wide business continuity plan.

a) Document resilience strategies for critical resources and business continuity strategies for critical functions.

b) Train employees to implement these strategies and your simplified enterprise-wide business continuity plan.

c) Continuously test and enhance your resilience and business continuity strategies, as well as your ‘lite’ business continuity plan.

The Benefits of Simplification

Simplifying business continuity planning offers several advantages, which include:

1. Executive buy-in – Simplicity in business continuity planning and easy-to-understand plans can help gain executive confidence and buy-in. Executives are more likely to support plans that they can easily comprehend and see as practical and actionable.
2. Effective resource allocation – By focusing on a handful of critical functions and resources, simplified plans help organisations allocate resources more efficiently and strategically. This ensures that essential areas receive the necessary attention and investment, thus avoiding waste.
3. Cost-effectiveness – Simplicity often translates to cost-effectiveness. Streamlined and simplified plans require fewer resources to develop, maintain, execute, and test, freeing up valuable time and limited funds and resources to other priority areas. It reduces the overall cost of business continuity efforts.
4. Being prepared and accountable – Simplified plans with clear accountabilities will ensure that everyone knows their role in executing the strategies. This ensures a swift response to any crisis or disruptive events. You will have confidence that your organisation can respond to a major disruption.
5. Taking small steps – Many organisations try to bite off the whole elephant in their first attempt at business continuity. Instead, develop a ‘lite’ good enough version of the plan first, gain feedback from users once people understand its application to the organisation, and further improve and mature over time.
6. Start from the top and pivot as you go – Your strategic ‘lite’ enterprise-wide business continuity plan will cover most areas from a business continuity perspective. Once you have developed and implemented this enterprise-wide plan, take stock of what additional business continuity plans you need to fill the gaps.
7. Complexity of the organisation – Large and complex organisations often have multiple business units, processes, and locations. Coordinating business continuity across these diverse areas can be challenging, leading to fragmented and siloed approaches and difficulties in standardising practices. The larger and more complicated the organisation gets, the more simplified your business continuity framework and program should be. This is an inverse relationship.
8. Alignment with business goals – If your business continuity is complex, it is difficult to integrate it into the organisation’s strategic planning process and the overall strategy. Simplicity makes it easier for integration without complicating your strategic planning. Aligning business continuity with business goals is crucial for ensuring its relevance and support.
9. Everyone can do business continuity – Whilst complicated business continuity requires specialised (and costly) knowledge and skills, a simplified approach to business continuity means that anyone in your organisation can develop an enterprise-wide business continuity plan with ease.
10. Compliance – Having a ‘lite’ enterprise-wide plan is better than having no plans at all. Many regulatory requirements demand business continuity planning. Simplified plans make it easier to demonstrate compliance with these regulations. And it is not about the ‘volumes test’ – just because a document has a lot of pages, it will have no value if it cannot be used. Simplicity takes more conscious effort to be actionable.
11. Ease of testing – Simplified plans are easier to test, validate, and improve. Conducting regular exercises becomes less cumbersome, allowing organisations to identify and address vulnerabilities effectively.
12. Accessibility – Clear and concise plans are more accessible to employees, enabling faster and more effective responses during disruptions.
13. Employee confidence – When employees can understand and follow business continuity plans, they gain confidence in the organisation’s ability to handle disruptions. This can boost morale and reduce anxiety during crises.
14. Faster response – Simplified plans lead to faster responses in the event of a disruption. When the steps are straightforward and well-communicated, there is less room for confusion or hesitation.
15. Reduced errors – Complexity can lead to errors and oversights. Simplified plans reduce the risk of critical mistakes during a crisis, enhancing overall resilience.
16. Flexibility – Simple plans are often more flexible, scalable, and adaptable. They can be easily adjusted or adapted to accommodate changing circumstances or new threats, ensuring ongoing relevance, without significant overhaul.
17. Cross-training – Simplified plans facilitate cross-training among employees. When processes are straightforward and complete, it becomes easier for individuals to understand and perform tasks outside their usual roles during a crisis.
18. Clear communication – Simplified plans enable clear and concise communication. This is crucial for maintaining trust and transparency during disruptions.
19. Protect reputation – Simplified plans reduce the likelihood of public relations mishaps during crises. Effective business continuity planning and execution can protect the organisation’s reputation.

In an era of increasing complexity and uncertainty, simplifying business continuity planning is not about cutting corners but about focusing on what truly matters strategically. Over-engineering processes and things make it very difficult to execute or implement.

By embracing simplicity, service organisations can enhance their resilience and better protect their operations in the face of adversity at little or no cost.

It’s time to simplify business continuity, making it an essential part of every organisation’s path to a more resilient future.