Introduction
Most organisations have a crisis plan. Far fewer have tested whether it holds up when key people are unreachable, systems are down, and the picture on the ground is changing faster than anyone can brief it. That gap between documented procedure and lived response is the subject of this interview with a director at Nuum Group, a UK-based resilience, preparedness and crisis management consultancy.
The conversation covers three areas: what happens when a plan meets an actual incident, what general crisis guidance tends to leave out, and the decision-making traps that open up in the first hours of a disruption.
When the plan doesn't hold
Asked about a time a client's usual crisis plan failed once something actually happened, the director was careful not to name any organisation but direct about the pattern. Preparation quality, he said, has a significant influence on how effectively an organisation responds.
A good plan, in his view, is more than a documented procedure. It "establishes responsibilities, decision-making structures, communication arrangements and priorities, giving people a framework to work within when normal operations are disrupted."
But no plan anticipates everything. Key people may be unavailable. Communications or technology may fail. The incident may differ in nature or scale from what was anticipated. In those moments, he said, the challenge is to adapt the arrangements "without losing the structure and control that good planning provides."
In practice, that has meant adapting command arrangements, finding alternative communications, and making decisions with incomplete information. His conclusion is not that planning is overrated, but that planning without exercising is. It is through exercising that organisations discover whether their assumptions, arrangements and capabilities actually work. Understanding critical functions, their dependencies and the consequences of disruption matters just as much.
The objective, he said, is not a plan for every conceivable scenario, but arrangements "robust enough to provide direction and flexible enough to adapt when circumstances change."
What live incidents expose
The second question concerned what keeps coming up in a live incident that general guidance leaves out. His answer centred on coordination.
Guidance, he noted, rightly focuses on structures, roles, responsibilities and procedures. What it can underestimate is the difficulty of maintaining a shared understanding of what is happening when information is incomplete, teams are working to different priorities, and senior decision-makers are under pressure.
He listed the questions that become surprisingly hard to answer in the moment: "Who knows what? Which information can be relied upon? What services and dependencies are affected? Have decisions been recorded? Are actions actually being completed? Has the situation changed since the last briefing?"
These problems compound when several teams, external partners or suppliers are involved, or when key people are working remotely. Without effective coordination and a reliable picture, organisations can end up working from fragmented information and conflicting priorities.
He also flagged the human element. Stress, fatigue and cognitive overload affect people's ability to process information, communicate and keep perspective. Effective crisis management, he argued, needs more than the right plan and command structure. It needs the practical arrangements, tools and discipline to maintain situational awareness, coordinate activity and track decisions and actions as the incident develops.
The first hours: deciding too fast, in the wrong order
The third question asked what people decide too quickly, or in the wrong order, in the first hours of a disruption. His answer was that organisations can be too quick to focus on recovery before they properly understand the incident and its consequences.
The instinct to restore services, reassure stakeholders or communicate a definitive position is understandable. But decisions made without a sufficiently clear understanding of the situation can create further problems.
There is also a psychological dimension. Under pressure, he said, decision-makers are susceptible to cognitive biases. The availability heuristic can lead people to focus disproportionately on the most immediate or memorable threat rather than the wider range of consequences. Anchoring can keep them attached to an initial assessment even as new information emerges. Action bias creates pressure to decide simply to show something is being done.
Recognising these tendencies matters. Effective crisis leadership, he said, requires people to challenge assumptions, consider alternative explanations and stay prepared to change direction.
His summary of the principle is worth keeping: "the quality of the initial response is not measured by how quickly an organisation makes decisions, but by whether it makes the right decisions, in the right order, with the information available at the time." That starts with understanding what matters most to the organisation, the consequences of losing it, and where limited resources and attention need to go.
Resilience as a capability, not a document
Underpinning all three answers is a consistent position: resilience should be an organisational capability rather than a collection of policies and documents. In practice, that means helping organisations understand what is critical to their operations, identify vulnerabilities and dependencies, develop practical continuity arrangements, and regularly exercise and assure their effectiveness.
Technology has a role here. Nuum Group's client portal and Virtual Command Centre are designed to bring these arrangements together, providing a way to maintain visibility, coordinate activity and manage decisions and actions during an incident, including when key people are working remotely.
But the director was clear about where the emphasis belongs. "Technology supports the response, but it is people, leadership, preparation and the quality of their decisions that determine its effectiveness."
Practical takeaways
- Treat the plan as a framework for decisions, not a script. Build in the flexibility to adapt command arrangements and communications when assumptions fail.
- Exercise regularly. Testing is how you find out whether roles, dependencies and capabilities actually work under pressure.
- Answer the coordination questions early. Who knows what, what can be relied on, what is affected, what has been decided, what has been done.
- Watch the first hours. Resist the pull toward recovery and reassurance before the situation is understood.
- Name the biases. Availability, anchoring and action bias all shape decisions under pressure, and naming them helps counter them.
- Invest in people and preparation first. Tools support the response; they do not replace judgement.