Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2025

goal of this component is to identify the mission critical initiatives that must be accomplished this quarter or this year. If these are not accomplished, your organi zation’s big goals will be in jeopardy and at risk of failure. Perhaps there is a big product launch planned, or large acquisition, or joint ven ture to announce, or even retiring a key supplier. Your leaders know the many, perhaps hundreds of initiatives to accom plish. They are likely prioritized, with owners assigned, and status reports filed regularly. This is normal work, right? Here’s a challenge that impacts almost all organizations: how to focus resources on the right activities. Many organiza tions excel at this, announcing the Top-5 priorities at kick-off meetings each year. That’s fine. We’re not here to critique … yet. However, we have seen how many of these initiatives are disparate and conflict ing. That is a separate problem, beyond the scope here. For now, our goal is to simply identify the most important initia tives. To accomplish this, we engage leaders from across the business to identify their priority initiatives, using a standardized approach for all departments and teams. This sounds like our traditional opera tions-focused business impact analysis. Indeed, but with different questions, and different measures to prioritize and filter. In some cases, organizations have done this work already, so we use what they have in place. No need to reinvent.

Step Two: Outlining Components of a Strategic Resilience Program The components of a strategic resil ience program include the: strategic response team, strategic impact analysis, strategic continuity plans, and validation. Sounds familiar, right? That’s because it is, and it works. We are adapting proven tools for a different challenge, for differ ent risks. Strategic Response Team Think about the strategic response team. Who must be involved when a stra tegic crisis occurs? Now think about your existing executive crisis management team. Do you see a Venn diagram form ing? Not all roles are required on both teams, and it is possible you have never spoken with some of the people who will need to be on the strategic response team. Here’s a diagram describing which roles may belong on each team.

Strategic Continuity Plans Strategic continuity plans provide teams with a mechanism to identify the risks to their mission critical initiatives. Like with the operations side of the house, we approach the owners of these initiatives, who are clearly busy, and who know the entire organization is counting on them to succeed. Yes, we are here to help. Smile. The strategic continuity plan identifies what must happen, by when, and what resources are needed. It identi fies and prioritizes the risks, along with the steps and resources needed to mitigate these risks. The most sophisticated teams can pinpoint which leading indicators must be monitored, and have pre-cleared with management, the latitude to execute the plan when needed. All of this saves time. It increases the likelihood of success when strategic initiatives are threatened. If it weren’t important, we wouldn’t be concerned. However, these activities are mission critical, so we do something about it. Just like on the operations side, resilience professionals help organizations plan for the uncertain future. So far, so good, but there’s a catch when it comes to strategic continuity plans. Unlike operations-focused BC/ DR plans, these strategic continuity plans don’t require investments in backup generators, cyber defenses, or system work-around procedures. These plans may require reallocating significant resources from one project to another in mid-stream. Or they may require engag ing a new partner at significant cost, to pull the team over the finish line. Or they may require doubling down on a contro versial and unproven innovation, when it becomes clear the industry is shifting in that direction. These are decisions at the top executive level, not to be taken lightly. The good news is that some of your leaders are keenly aware of these strategic risks. This strategic resilience program provides them the opportunity to explore and prepare for these risks in a healthy way, without diminishing their vigor and commitment to the chosen path.

There is flexibility here, just like with your crisis management teams, with teams designed to suit your unique organization and structure. And this is also where your knowledge of the people, the organization and your credibility as a non-partisan participant helps build the team. This is also a great team to bring together, for a new type of crisis exercise: using a strategic threat scenario instead of a traditional operations-focused threat. More on that later. Strategic Impact Analysis The strategic impact analysis compo nent is also familiar, but different. The

10 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SUMMER 2025