It's Post-9/11: Where's Your Business Continuity Plan?

Disaster management and crisis recovery are ugly topics, but in the post-9/11 world, not-dealing with them is not an option. 

[Full disclosure, as they say in journalism circles, before they typically disclose something utterly trivial and profoundly beside the point:  I was a securities lawyer with a large investment bank/broker-dealer for nearly 10 years whose offices were primarily in the South Tower of the WTC; although I had left the firm before 9/11, on that day I lost one abnormally courageous and far-sighted friend, who had predicted another attack (I was there for the first one in 1993), the firm's head of security, an Aussie and a Vietnam Vet, and a "bloody-hell" down to earth fellow.  His fatal mistake?  He stayed behind to make sure everyone was getting out.  For the record, the firm lost only two other people.]

On to the topic at hand, then:  We have moved from the era of "disaster recovery" to the era of "business continuity."  In other words, it's not whether your critical files are backed up, it's whether your firm can continue to function and serve its clients.  This is a more complex endeavor.  Why is this important?  The obvious reasons are:

• Moral:  You have a duty to your partners, employees, and clients;
• Physical:  Your firm is entrusted not just with data but with confidences, with plans, with, if you're good, dreams--safeguard these; and
• Conceptual:  Senior management has, as part of their mandate, an obligation to undertake a serious examination of "risk management," and today that includes, alas, terrorism.

Perhaps the most astute insight from this article about these issues is this question:  How will senior management think on their feet in the face of a huge, and by hypothesis unforeseen, disruption to the business?  If the instinct is to adopt "business as usual" mind-sets, patterns of behavior, and methods of communication, the disaster will be amplified.  The more unfamiliar and threatening the reality, the more our instincts drive us to take comfort in the familiar.

Resist the impulse.