Mega Events / Planning

Contingency plans that can be executed by somebody else

The person who wrote it will not be the one reading it.

Contingency planning frequently produces a document describing scenarios and general responses. In the moment, what is needed is different: who decides, what the trigger is, what the first three actions are, and who is told.

Written that way it can be executed by whoever has it, which is the point, since the incident may occur while the person who planned for it is elsewhere or unreachable. A plan that requires its author to interpret it is not a plan.

The triggers matter as much as the actions. Deciding in advance that a specific wind speed, a specific queue length or a specific temperature initiates a response removes the hardest part, which is somebody making an unpopular judgement under pressure with everybody watching.

Plans should be walked through with the people who would use them, briefly, rather than distributed. Ten minutes in a briefing establishes whether the plan makes sense to somebody who did not write it, which is the only test that matters.

It is worth adding that a plan should state what will not be done as well as what will. Deciding in advance that a particular response is not available, because the resource does not exist, prevents somebody assuming it during an incident and building a response around something that was never there.