If you have played chess, then you know that to be a good chess player, planning three or four moves ahead gives you head space to think and also hopefully, set you up to win the game.
So it is with incident or crisis management the more moves you can plan ahead, the more successful the response or recovery is likely to be – the reality is though at the initial stages of an incident you will be dealing with a developing situation and all you can do is react to what you know in that instance, it could be hours or even days before you are able to find that space to plan ahead.
If you are reading this, then you know that good preparedness is a must in resilience planning – that’s not what this article is about though. Think back to early days of the Covid pandemic the gradual unfolding story and migration of Covid from China to the rest of the World, how many Governments and organizations watched and left it until very late to react and respond to Covid arriving at their doorstep – many did.
There is a universal law in responding to incidents though and that is; suitable options are limited to the time they take to implement if that is more than the time they are required to be implemented. In other words the more time you have, the more bigger and better options you can make available to respond to an incident or event – the less time you have they are likely to be quick fixes, fired from the hip.
If you spend the time looking for an all singing all dancing option to implement as a response when time is fast running out, the opportunity to use it will have passed and the incident or event will have moved on already and probably escalated.
Having a ‘no regrets’ policy in place is one way to help early intervention in an incident or crisis, and when time is limited should be number one option. A no regrets policy is when a response is required, assume that it is worst case scenario and all available resources are directed at the response. If it turns out its not as bad as we thought it could be – happy days – lets start standing resources down, and we have no regrets on throwing resources at it. Far better to start ahead of the curve then to stay behind the curve by continually adding additional resources in to the response.
So in summary; what is the ‘Best possible plan’? It’s the best we can do in the time that we have given the circumstances of what we are dealing with. Hopefully though you saw it coming, and like a good chess player you were already three moves ahead ready with some good options.
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