Contingency Planning
Contingency planning is deciding in advance what you'll do if a specific bad thing happens, so the decision isn't made from panic when it actually does.
Picture a line of boxes moving left to right, ending with the plan tested before you need it.
Reach for this when…
- Your operations depend on something you don't control: weather, a single supplier, a single system.
- A near-miss just happened and you got lucky rather than prepared.
- You're about to commit to a plan with a single point of failure.
How to run it
- List the specific events that would derail the plan, not 'everything might go wrong.'
- Rank them by how likely and how damaging each one is.
- For the top few, write what you'll actually do, who decides, and who acts.
- Set the trigger: the exact signal that switches you into that plan.
- Test the plan against a real scenario before you need it for real.
A worked example
Situation. Nikos Papadimitriou managed operations for Aegean Swift Cargo, an inter-island shipping company based in Thessaloniki, Greece, where winter storm season routinely shut down routes with only a day's warning.
Applied. Instead of a general 'storm policy,' he wrote three specific plans for the routes carrying the most perishable cargo, each with a named decision-maker, a re-routing option, and the wind-speed reading that triggered it.
Result. When a storm closed the main channel that October, the duty manager didn't wait for Nikos's approval - the trigger had already fired and the reroute was already agreed. Cargo that would have sat for four days moved within twelve hours.
The catch
A plan only covers the scenarios you thought to write down, and writing them all is neither possible nor useful - rank hard, then stop. Plans also age; a contingency plan nobody has looked at in two years is a comfort, not a capability.
If nobody knows the trigger without asking you, you haven't delegated the decision, you've just written it down.