Business continuity works only when your organisation can decide fast, communicate clearly, and act without waiting for approvals that never come. Most failures come from authority gaps, not missing templates.

What breaks first in a disruption

• People wait for the “right person” to approve actions.
• Escalation paths bounce between managers.
• Two reporting lines become two delays.
• Teams argue about responsibility while impact grows.

Why plans fail in the moment

1) You designed for comfort, not command

Many plans assume cooperation and time. A disruption removes both. Without a command structure, meetings replace action.

2) You treat incident leadership as a role, not a capability

If leaders have never practised taking decisions with partial information, they will freeze. The plan will not save them.

3) You never defined authority boundaries

Who can:

• Shut down a system
• Switch to a manual process
• Notify stakeholders externally
• Approve emergency procurement
• Activate remote work or alternate sites

If the answer is “we will decide then”, you already lost time.

What a workable model looks like

Name an incident commander and deputies

Not a committee. A person. Add backups. Document it.

Pre-approve actions by scenario

For the top disruption scenarios, define:

• What triggers activation
• First hour actions
• Who approves what
• Communication channels and templates

Run exercises that test leadership decisions

• Remove key people on purpose
• Inject conflicting information
• Force trade-offs between availability and integrity
• Time-box decisions to 10 minutes

The hard truth

Business continuity fails when you avoid answering one question: who decides during chaos? If you cannot answer that now, the disruption will answer it for you.