Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2024

crisis scenario. My review of this litera ture for my master’s thesis indicates there is significant consensus that the way a person responds in the very first moments after a disruptive change can impact the entire recovery process. Think of it like the age-old kitchen fire. If your first action is to throw water onto burning oil, your recovery plan may need to include replacing the entire kitchen rather than just your pan. People (generally) know not to throw water on an oil fire, but in that moment of panic, the immediate mental framing is “fire!” and the knee-jerk reaction is “water!” After this immediate, irreversible misstep, the recovery process takes on a much broader scope. In his seminal book, “Sensemaking in Organizations,” Weick’s research is clear that organizations must ready them selves to respond well as much in that first moment as in all those remaining. This requires training and “high-reliability” readiness above and beyond instinct. That first decision may very well define the context, considerations, and parameters for all the subsequent choices. That first decision rests on the person who discovers the problem or experiences the change. For widespread incidents like the July 2024 Crowdstrike outage, this

could be the director of a particular depart ment whose job it is to give the first orders. For localized incidents, it may be the indi vidual engineer who finds a crashed server or receives a notice of a supplier’s sudden insolvency. The context will change but the point remains–there are consequences to the first response as much as there are to subsequent recovery decisions. What does all this mean for the BIA? Simply put, our immediate response deci sion will draw in part from what we know to be most critical or the most immediate potential solution. The experience of par ticipating in a BIA can help us get that first decision right. The embedded criticality and priority decisions in the BIA process may later serve as sensemaking guides in that first moment. The value of the BIA as a process is the training that comes from critically engaging one’s own work activities so, at the onset of a crisis, we are confident to know what action we should take first. That strategy is ultimately captured in the plan but, as Eisenhower ostensibly said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” An immeasurable outcome of the BIA process is the promotion of deep under standing of business processes, dependen

cies, and interconnectivities (the causes and effects) that informs the mental models which later become a tool for ini tial decision making. To revive the previ ous analogy, it’s like understanding cook processes, including their chemical depen dencies and interactions that the initial instinct at the onset of an oil fire is to use a blanket, not water. This “action-centric argument” is about how the process of the BIA informs our first response decision. The BIA is more than an output for the BCP, it is itself a valuable intellectual exercise that can refine the choice of action a leader makes at a very consequential moment. The Check-and-Balance Argument (or Best Practices Argument) The BIA can also provide BC practi tioners with assurance we are “getting BC right” for our organizations. If a great BCP is rooted in an accurate BIA (that’s the consensus) then it is not the existence of plans that should assure us we are getting this right, but the quality of their founda tion. Let’s pause on this point. BIAs tell us about the various dependencies that underpin our organization’s work pro cesses. They help us connect one process to another, upstream or downstream, and

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30 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | WINTER 2024