Finnish households have been given clear advice: be prepared to cope on your own for 72 hours. Water, food, medicines, cash, a battery radio — the list is familiar to many. The brilliance of the recommendation is not the list but the mindset: disruption is not an exception but an assumption, and the first three days are survived on what was thought through in advance.

Turn the same question to a company: if your critical system, supplier or premises drops out of play on a Friday evening, does your operation cope until Monday? What is your company’s emergency supply?

A company’s emergency supply is not a warehouse but the ability to operate without its systems.

The company’s 72-hour list

Think of it as four questions. Information: if the main systems are down, where are the customer contacts, the order book and the critical documents — and has the backup restore actually been tested, or is it a matter of faith? Communication: how do you reach your staff and customers if email doesn’t work — is there a list that does not live inside that same system? Work: which processes can be run by hand or on paper for three days, and do the people doing them know it? People: who decides, and who has the authority, if the responsible person cannot be reached?

Answering these four does not require a consulting project. It requires one workshop and honesty. And exactly as with home preparedness, the point is not perfection but that the first chaotic hours have been thought through in advance — so they don’t have to be thought through when thinking is at its most expensive.

Test — don’t believe

The weakness of a home emergency supply is that it packs itself into a cupboard and gets forgotten — batteries age, medicines expire. A company’s continuity plan has the same disease: it gets written, approved and archived. The cure is the same in both: rotation and rehearsal. Once a year, one afternoon of actually trying it — restore a backup, make a call on the fallback system, run one order through by hand. Every rehearsal finds something, and every find is cheaper now than in the middle of a disruption.

Next Wednesday, in September’s first article, I continue where this one ends: an unrehearsed plan is a hypothesis.

As a service: business continuity and preparedness.