Anticipating Disruption

Disruption is a loss of continuity caused when a condition an organisation depends on changes, fails, or disappears.

Why separate continuity plans fail

Conventional Business Continuity Management is misnamed. It addresses response protocols, not actual organisational continuation. It introduces its own jargon and its own disconnect from how the organisation actually operates. In Deciding, Roger Estall and I argued that this separation is the core defect: BCM treats disruption as a category of event, something outside normal operations that requires a parallel structure.

But disruption is not a category. It is what happens when something you were resting on breaks. A supply chain interruption means supplier reliability no longer holds. A pandemic means workforce availability no longer holds. A technology shift means the relevance of your product no longer holds. Once you see it that way, the response is clear: the watch-and-respond mechanism you built into the decision is already your disruption plan.

I have spent nearly fifty years helping organisations make decisions across mining, finance, aviation, and public health. The ones that survived disruption were never the ones with the thickest continuity binders. They were the ones whose Deciders had named what they were resting on and were watching whether it still held. Preparing for disruption is not a separate activity from deciding well. It is the same activity. The leader who decides well is already prepared, because the decision itself contains the early warning system.

The evidence from COVID-19

When the pandemic arrived, organisations did not open their BCM binders. They did not consult their risk registers. They made decisions. They reduced vulnerability. They identified new opportunities. The entire apparatus of continuity planning sat on a shelf while executives worked through what competent leaders always do: clarify the purpose, weigh the options, stress-test what they were resting on, and act.

The organisations that moved fastest were those that already knew what their operations depended on. A manufacturer who had named “single-source supplier in Wuhan” as a Critical assumption and specified an alternative trigger was weeks ahead of a competitor who had never articulated that dependency at all. The first organisation was not prescient. It had simply done the work of deciding properly in the first place.

Fairfax Media offers the slower version of the same lesson. For decades, the company rested on the belief that classified advertising revenue, the “rivers of gold,” would remain stable. That belief was never written down. It was never stress-tested. When online advertising invalidated it entirely, institutional memory of the original reasoning had already faded with departing executives. A decision autopsy conducted even five years before the collapse would have surfaced one Critical assumption with zero supporting evidence, because no one had ever articulated what the business model actually depended on. The disruption did not arrive suddenly. It arrived over a decade. The organisation simply was not watching.

Critical assumptions as early warning

The Universal Decision-Making Method classifies each element of a decision by its influence on the outcome and the Decider's confidence that it will hold. Those rated Critical, high influence and low confidence, are the ones you watch most closely and review first.

Consider a manufacturer whose decision to build a new facility rests partly on the expectation that raw material prices will remain within a certain band. If that is rated Critical and actively watched, the manufacturer has advance warning when prices move. The review plan specifies what to track, who tracks it, and what triggers a revision. The disruption does not arrive unannounced. It arrives as a monitored condition crossing a threshold that was named before the decision was finalised.

When something breaks that was never named, the organisation has no pre-planned response. It scrambles. A BCM binder full of generic recovery scenarios is not a response plan. A named premise with a specified trigger and a pre-agreed action is.

This is the practical difference between leaders who anticipate disruption and those who merely react to it. The first group has a short list of Critical assumptions with defined triggers. The second has a long document full of generic scenarios that no one has read since the last audit. When the disruption arrives, the first group already knows what broke and what to do. The second group convenes a crisis committee to work out what happened.

Why “resilience” programs miss the point

The past decade has produced a new industry in organisational resilience. Consulting firms sell resilience assessments, resilience frameworks, resilience maturity models. The language has changed. The structural defect has not. These programs still treat disruption as something that happens to an organisation from outside, requiring a separate apparatus to address. They catalogue threats. They score preparedness on a scale. They produce a register of vulnerabilities that sits alongside the risk register, adding to decision fatigue while remaining equally disconnected from any actual decision.

The Universal Decision-Making Method does not use the word “resilience.” It does not need to. An organisation whose leaders have surfaced what they are resting on, rated its significance, and built ongoing review into every consequential decision is already resilient. Not because it has a framework labelled “resilience,” but because its decisions contain the mechanism for detecting when the world has changed. Roger Estall and I argued in Deciding that this is not an additional discipline. It is what competent decision-making already produces.

Disruption also creates opportunity

The organisation that has named what it is resting on and is watching actively is the first to see when conditions shift in its favour. A competitor's supply chain failure, a regulatory change that opens a new market, a shift in technology that makes your offering more relevant rather than less. The leader who has done this work is not merely prepared for bad news. That leader is positioned to move first on good news.

The question BCM never asks is the one the method always does: which of the things we are resting on are most likely to change, and what will we do when they do? That question covers downside and upside alike. No separate framework required. The decision already contains the disruption plan, because the decision already names what it is resting on.

A difficult business decision does not become easier by adding a continuity plan on top. It becomes easier by being made properly in the first place: purpose stated, what was taken as given named, significance rated, review triggers specified. The disruption plan is not a separate document. It is the monitoring column of the Decision Record. When leaders understand this, the entire apparatus of BCM and resilience frameworks collapses into a well-made decision with a clear view of what it is resting on.

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Grant Purdy is the co-author, with Roger Estall, of Deciding (2020), and the architect of the Universal Decision-Making Method.