Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2025

E DITOR’S NOTE: This article discusses key plot points from Netflix’s “House of Dynamite” and includes spoilers. ttt “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” — John Lennon, “Beautiful Boy” Most people – especially continuity professionals – know the truth of that lyric because they have lived it. Who hasn’t buried themselves in a project, only to be redirected elsewhere to put out a fire! Often that other fire occurred under circumstances no one thought possible. People call that a black swan event. The impossible somehow took life and became possible. That term came out in a book called “The Black Swan,” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2010. He is a mathematical statistician. His book pointed out the unthinkable or unlikely often happens to everyone’s surprise. Murphy’s Law tells us the unthinkable will often occur at the worst time for our calendars too. Netflix recently released a movie about that concept called, “House of Dynamite.” The movie is about the US decision-making process around a single missile strike. The film gives us some great lessons about the nuclear war fighting process. It also offers up some great crisis planning vignettes everyone could use. Kathryn Bigelow directed the Netflix film. She also directed “Zero Dark Thirty” and “The Hurt Locker.” Noah Oppenheim, a former producer on the Today Show and president of NBC News, wrote the screenplay. The movie follows the US response to a one-missile-strike scenario. Through the film, you follow the response from the interceptor base in Alaska, to the White House, through StratCom (United States Strategic Command). You even see the government starting to implement their continuity of government and

continuity of operations plans (COOP) too! The movie has won numerous film festival awards. It had a limited run in theaters before debuting on Netflix, Oct. 24, 2025. Reception of the film has been positive, with 78% positive reviews from critics (and 77% from fans) on Rotten Tomatoes. It also gives the public a few visual vignettes about commonly overlooked continuity planning factors. I thought the film was excellent. It is intensely realistic. It shows the decision process throughout the 18-minute attack timeline. It covers the incident through multiple viewpoints. The movie portrays government officials as very professional as they go through the process while also showing the chaos and difficulty in such a scenario. We see how intangible stresses interfere with plan execution. I know every serious organization has an extensive continuity plan – a plan they probably paid some consultant a lot of money to create. They poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into plan amendments through many months or years. I would bet those plans still miss some of the intangible pitfalls exhibited in this film. Right at the start, we see a common problem on display – information management, or some would say information overload. Today, technology allows anyone to collect a ton of information very quickly. This abundance of information functions as a blessing and a curse. We see in the movie how the president and other key staff faced that curse. We see how the White House operations center and StratCom staff can collect information about various disasters and military movements of our enemies across the world in mere minutes. Every staff member had an opinion on what was occurring and what the government should do. However, no one knew who fired missile. The technology missed that single piece of information at the wrong time.

I think this highlights a problem many organizations face in crisis. Staff can produce volumes of material, but can they produce the information decision makers need? Does your plan or your staff know how to collect the right information at the right time? The Army has this thing called a Commander’s Critical Information Requirements (CCIR). Every organization has a list of specific needs for a commander’s decision-making activities. Once you find that information, can the staff manage and properly distribute what they find to the right office? Often in exercises, people drill like they live in a perfect world. They have the information they need as they will it. We see throughout the film, leaders never get the complete picture. Can your organization deal with incomplete information? In the movie, we see people scrambling to find the staff subject matter expert on North Korea. No one knew where she was. Everyone hoped she might have the magic key to what was occurring. When they finally found her, she was off on a vacation day at Gettysburg National Park. After wasting precious time, the expert did not have the magic answer. Does the lack of information for your organization stop operations as people search for perfect answers? Do you have a procedure to manage this collection over time? The military calls this a battle rhythm. It is a deliberate, scheduled cycle of activities that synchronizes all actions of an organization, to achieve unity of effort and clarity. This is commonly a regular set of meetings, briefings, or processes that help an organization stay focused and make consistent decisions. The movie shows us the dangers of exclusively relying on top-level people and not the supporting characters. When the right people aren’t there when the crisis hits, things fall apart, and the whole organization suffers. Reality and experience teach us that problems will occur as much as the

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