Business continuity and disaster recoveryΒΆ

A printed business continuity binder open on a desk, surrounded by sticky notes asking "who owns this?", "have we tested it?", and "still valid?". The binder is clearly the kind that gets photocopied at audit time and forgotten until the photocopier itself is the failure.

Continuity is one of those subjects every organisation claims to have until the building floods and SharePoint becomes theology. The plan exists. The plan is current. The plan has been signed off. And it could be that none of these statements survive contact with a fire, a ransomware event, a depot strike, or the quiet news that the third party that owns half your dependency graph has filed for administration.

Exploring the possible gap between a plan and an organisation that enacts it. Such a gap is fundamentally adversarial systems thinking applied inwards: what breaks first, what cannot fail, what humans will improvise around, how technical failure walks slowly toward governance failure if nobody is watching the corridor, and what happens on the Monday morning after the event when the technology is back and the organisation is not.

Continuity as an honest account of how an organisation can break and return:

Test the plan before it tests you