Sometimes Business Continuity goes off track before it even starts.  By the time most organizations realize their program isn’t fit for purpose, the damage has already been done.

Not in a crisis.  Much earlier.

Business Continuity rarely fails because plans are missing or standards are weak. It fails because the real work — the thinking, the trade-offs, the ongoing design — sits in parts of the organization that are structurally undervalued, under-resourced, and routinely overruled.

Nowhere is this more visible than in how scope is treated.

Scope is meant to move. It rarely does.

ISO 22301 assumes a living organization. Strategy evolves. Operating models change. Supply chains reconfigure. Digital and people dependencies shift.

Business Continuity scope is supposed to move with the organization. It should be reviewed, challenged, and reshaped as strategy changes.

What actually happens is very different.  Scope freezes. “This is what we’ve always covered” becomes the default. Or worse, an external consultant defines it once, at Board direction, and it becomes sacred.

The organization moves on. The BC program does not. That gap is where resilience quietly erodes.

The real-world failure pattern.

Across organizations, the same pattern repeats.

Someone has a fixed idea of what “the BC program” is. That idea becomes self-reinforcing. New strategy is bolted on rather than integrated. Leaders assume coverage where none exists.

There is no malice in this. Just inertia. And inertia is lethal in a disruption.

Resilience does not fail loudly. It degrades quietly, until the moment it is needed most.

So what can we actually do differently?

This is the part that matters.

If Business Continuity is going to improve, it will not be because we add more templates or demand more time. It will change because we reposition the work in a way that makes sense to the people doing it.

1. Make the WIIFM for middle management explicit.

Middle managers already have skin in the game. It just isn’t named.

Disruptions rarely show up to them as “BC failures”. They show up as missed delivery targets, exhausted teams, escalations they didn’t see coming, decisions made with incomplete information, and personal credibility under pressure.

Strong Business Continuity reduces chaos long before a crisis. It protects delivery confidence, team capacity, decision quality, and reputation with senior leaders.

That is the What’s in it for Me (WIIFM) and it needs to be said out loud.

2. Speak BC in operational language, not framework language.

Most middle managers do not reject Business Continuity. They reject how it is talked about.
Demystifying BC means translating it into the language of operations and delivery. It means asking what breaks first if a system goes down, where the organization is relying on one person or one supplier, which work stops if key people are unavailable, and which assumptions would fail you. By the time most organizations realize their Business Continuity program isn’t fit for purpose, the damage has already been done.

Not in a crisis.  Much earlier.

Business Continuity rarely fails because plans are missing or standards are weak. It fails because the real work — the thinking, the trade-offs, the ongoing design — sits in parts of the organization that are structurally undervalued, under-resourced, and routinely overruled.

The real work is interpretive, not administrative.

This is the part that is consistently misunderstood.  The hardest work in Business Continuity is not writing plans. It is interpreting strategy into disruption reality.

It is asking what a strategic shift does to critical dependencies, which assumptions no longer hold, and where new single points of failure have been quietly introduced.

That work requires judgment, organizational context, and permission to challenge.

Instead, the work is often reduced to maintenance. BIAs are updated. Plans are refreshed. Exercises are repeated. Metrics are reported.

Activity continues. Design stops.

Align BC to the KPIs people are already measured on.

If Business Continuity does not support the KPIs that matter, it will always lose the prioritization battle.

BC creates value when it is explicitly linked to delivery reliability, change success, customer outcomes, staff wellbeing, and the ability to recover quickly from routine disruption.

If the program only demonstrates value during extreme events, it will never compete with today’s pressures.

Resilience has to show up in day-to-day performance, not just worst-day scenarios.

Design for “doing more with less” — don’t fight it.

Resource constraints are not a temporary condition. Cognitive load will continue to increase. Expectations will keep rising.

A credible Business Continuity program accepts this reality and designs accordingly.  That means fewer, clearer priorities. Explicit trade-offs. Less reliance on heroics. Reduced documentation and greater decision clarity.

The goal is not perfection. It is useful resilience.

Reframe BC as a performance enabler, not a compliance task.

When Business Continuity is framed as another requirement, another report, or another audit cycle, it will be treated as such.

When it is framed as a way to protect delivery under pressure, improve decision-making, and reduce surprise, it earns attention.

The work does not increase. The relevance does.

Change is possible — and it’s already happening.

Positive change does occur.

It happens when leaders allow scope to move as strategy moves. When middle managers are given permission to challenge assumptions. When BC professionals act as translators rather than enforcers. When value is demonstrated in normal disruption, not just extreme events.

This is how Business Continuity stops being theatre.   Not by fixing the standards, but by changing how the work is framed, valued, and supported.

In the next article, I’ll tackle why Business Continuity is measured so poorly, how current metrics reward activity over risk reduction, and what better signals of resilience actually look like.

Because if we keep measuring the wrong things, we’ll keep getting the same results — just with better documentation.il on the organization’s worst week, not its best.

This is not a separate discipline. It is good operational design under stress.

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Come to the HUB on February 2 to read articles 2-6 in the in the series.

• Top Management “Buy-In” Isn’t the Problem. Ownership Is. 
• What’s really holding us back and How Change Actually Takes Root?
• When Plans Are Cheap, Proof Becomes Everything.
• If We Can’t Articulate our Value, We Won’t Be Valued.
• Resilience Is a Behavior — Not a Framework.

This introduction was originally published on LinkedIn and has been republished with permission. Link to the article and join in on the discussion.

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