Contingency Planning - for when Plans go Awry!

What do you DO when your car runs out of gas? What do you DO when you have bought out the store and suddenly realise you left your wallet at home? What do you do before you cross the street? What do you do before leaving home when the weather forecast is heavy showers?

On automatic pilot you have solutions to these situations, because you encounter them every day. However if you analyse what you really do it becomes interesting as you are actually using "contingency planning".

This is where you take as many of the possible things that go wrong or have a negative impact on you and then assess the risk of those things happening. Risk being the likelihood of the event happening and the level of the likely impact from none to major damage being caused.

Since almost everyone can handle contingency planning almost like breathing in their everyday life it comes as a rude shock to find how few people transplant this everyday management technique into their working lives. It is almost as if the moment they step through the front door of their work places all of the common sense things that they do outside the work place are carefully left outside the door only to be picked up again when they step out of the work place.

Contingency planning is part of the part of the formal planning process and it is as applicable to tactical as to strategic planning.

Since crises are bound to occur in any organisation whether it is well run or not it is just as well to be prepared for the worst and then breathe a sigh of relief if the worst does not happen!

Developing a plan for dealing with something that can go wrong BEFORE it happens is thus an excellent idea. The very worst things you can do in a crisis is have a panic attack because you have NO idea what to do when the dreaded thing happens.

Training people in procedures to be followed and then actually pretending that a crisis is happening and then putting the plan into operation to see how people would cope with it as a practice run is also a sound idea - after all practice does tend to make you perfect.

With frequent repetition you tend to get a better outcome if and when the feared event happens.

Do not expect your plan to match the crisis exactly. It never will. Allow yourself to be flexible in your responses but within some known parameters. The KISS (KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID!) principle usually applies here. The more complex and detailed you make some contingency plans the greater the risk that your people will follow it to the letter and so miss some opportunities to be creative and flexible.

Above all else involve people in commenting on the dry runs by asking them what they thought of the experience and whether they could see something they would do differently to get a better or more useful outcome. Their creativity in response to situations can be the most successful way of improving your planning and future responses to any crisis.