The primary key to planning is preparing an enterprise to respond and adapt to the unexpected. (Photo: Shutterstock)
When something goes wrong, there is one thing we know for certain: the situation will be different from what we anticipated. That is the whole point of planning: to prepare an enterprise to respond and adapt to the unexpected.
One key challenge in enterprise disaster planning is accounting for individual behavior. The post-disaster choices made by individuals (employees and customers) are largely outside of enterprise control, yet those decisions are critical to continued operations. Workforce and customer availability become a key issue. A chain is only as strong is its weakest link, and in disaster planning that weak link is the unpredictability of human behavior.
Related: Changing times ahead for insurance claims industry
From snowball to avalanche
In a major natural disaster, like Superstorm Sandy, the 2011 tsunami in Japan, or the next big one in California, the worst losses are those least expected: short-term aggravations that snowball into long-term losses, and defy quantification.
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