business continuity

A bound stack of aged manila case files tied with string, beside a pair of reading glasses, on a wooden desk

A 74-Year-Old Wreck Just Explained Why Your Safety Briefing Exists

A 74-Year-Old Wreck Just Explained Why Your Safety Briefing Exists Last month a sonar drone found the wreckage of a Pan American Airways aircraft two thousand feet down off Puerto Rico. The Clipper Endeavor had been missing since 11 April 1952, when it lost several engines shortly after take-off and went into the Atlantic with […]

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Mont Blanc and the French Alps, the destination behind a lesson in contingency planning

None of It Was Mine to Fix: What a Trip to the Alps Taught Me About Contingency Planning

None of It Was Mine to Fix: What a Trip to the Alps Taught Me About Contingency Planning I’ve just got back from a few days in the Alps, and the getting there and back was, in its own small way, a masterclass in exactly the thing I spend my working life advising other people

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Venn diagram showing three overlapping types of risk — financial risk (ACA/ACCA), project risk (PMI/APM) and operational risk (ISO 22301) — with their small area of overlap labelled 'Risk: one word, several meanings

Risk means different things to Different People. That’s the whole problem.

I spent a chunk of last weekend scrolling through risk management job vacancies, out of nothing more than professional nosiness (and a need to avoid 24/7 football). It’s not as if the confusion over what “risk” actually means was news to me — I’ve spent the best part of two decades watching it play out

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Relay baton dropped mid-handover, illustrating a failed third-party contract handover

What the Sats Marking Crisis Tells Us About Third-Party Contract Handovers

What the Sats Marking Crisis Tells Us About Third-Party Contract Handovers Every July, Year 6 pupils across England find out how they did in their Sats. This year, a lot of schools found out how their exam board did instead, and the answer wasn’t good. Pearson took over the £180 million Sats marking contract from

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Fire extinguisher behind break glass panel in an office corridor — the emergency plan nobody reaches for

Your Business Continuity Plan Exists. So Why Did Nobody Use It?

In my experience, organisations that come to me for consultancy often share a similar story. They had a business continuity plan in place, sometimes one they had developed internally, sometimes one built by a previous consultant. Something went wrong, and nobody invoked it. Not because the disruption was trivial, but because nobody felt confident enough

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Aerial view of a stone architectural maze with a clear navy blue path marked through it, representing navigation through complex ISO standards

ISO Spaghetti: Why the Standards Landscape Is Confusing (and What to Do About It)

The five standards worth knowing about ISO Spaghetti: Why the Standards Landscape Is Confusing (and What to Do About It) I have lost count of the number of tender documents I have reviewed that specify ISO 22301 and ISO 27001 and ISO 31000, sometimes with ISO 22361 thrown in for good measure. Occasionally all four

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Aerial view of a large data centre on a flat Dutch landscape, a faint wisp of smoke rising from the building, a ferry visible on the water in the distance

A fire in the Netherlands, a ferry company in chaos, and a BIA that probably didn’t ask the right questions

A fire in the Netherlands, a ferry company in chaos, and a BIA that probably didn’t ask the right questions. The Brittany Ferries booking outage is a textbook case study in third-party dependency risk, inadequate RTOs, and what happens when your recovery plan assumes someone else has already thought about it. On the morning of

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