The ideas that generally drive Emergency Management and Business Continuity efforts are connected to events that can or have previously caused harm to our constituents or our business. The severity of an event and the perception of its severity both have an influence on planning associated with the event. As preparedness and continuity professionals we all work in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment that presents unlimited challenges and limited resources. That arrangement forces us to prioritize.
To be most effective, perhaps we need to more actively consider that our constituents (customers, patients, staff, business partners, and community partners) face the same environment but look at it through a very different lens. In the past, it has been our practice to build our response and continuity plans around scenarios. Scenarios of fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, and earthquake live clearly in the thoughts of our constituents and customers but tend to concentrate on the tactical aspects of response. Should we expand our approach to how we build and test plans? Can our planning processes and plans benefit from separating how we consider the strategic and tactical domains?