Article Excerpt:
Many companies take the time to create a business plan and then follow it. This is touted as a way to achieve your goals successfully. However, unexpected incidents can derail the plan’s progress. This is why a contingency plan is so important. Learn what a contingency plan is and how to go about creating one for your company.
What Is a Contingency Plan?
A contingency plan is a “plan B” that helps a business address specific situations or incidents that may or may not be out of its control. A contingency plan is the way that your team should react if there is something that interrupts the normal course of business. Contingency plans are often found as part of emergency planning, disaster recovery and risk management. It’s important to know how you want to proceed when the situation prevents you from running things as business as usual.
You can’t control many disastrous situations that can occur, but you can plan for them. Remember to think about your resources and how you can overcome obstacles to keep your business operations running smoothly after a disaster happens.
Analysis:
Business planning and its techniques can be directly applied to first response or crisis response. We can draw off of certain planning techniques such as contingency planning, crisis management, or risk management to develop techniques that are able to be applied to mass crisis situations. While certain protocol is defined for specific situations such as natural disasters or mass shootings, it is important that we think about the “what if” scenarios that our future may hold; situations where there is a lack of protocol altogether. When it comes to casualties on a large scale, adequate planning can mean the difference between success and disaster.
