Why doing the right thing isn't always enough

Leadership and operational teams working through competing priorities during a response discussion

Many organizations expect alignment to improve once everyone understands what's happening. 

  • The situation is understood.
  • Initial decisions have been made.
  • Everyone begins doing what they believe is right. 

In reality, this is often when an organizational response begins drifting.

Different definitions of success

The drift begins because different parts of the organization naturally begin optimizing for different definitions of success.

IT - Restore critical systems as quickly as possible.

Operations - Maintain essential services.

Communications - Provide timely and accurate information.

Legal - Reduce organizational exposure.

  • Each perspective is reasonable.

  • Each represents responsible leadership within that team's area of responsibility.

Every team may be doing the right thing.

The challenge is ensuring they are working toward the same definition of organizational success.

Good decisions can still create organizational drift

The challenge is that these definitions of success are not automatically aligned.

As the response progresses, each part of the organization naturally begins optimizing for what it believes is most important. Without realizing it, capable teams begin pulling the organization's response in different directions.

This is one reason organizations can appear coordinated during the early stages of an incident yet become increasingly difficult to synchronize as events unfold.

The issue usually isn't commitment or competence.

It's that different parts of the organization are working toward different operational definitions of success.

Alignment must be intentional

Exercises provide a unique opportunity to make those differences visible before they affect a real incident.

They allow leaders to identify where competing priorities are likely to emerge and establish a shared understanding of what organizational success should look like before the next response begins.

Because organizational alignment isn't created by good intentions alone.

It comes from intentionally defining success the same way before pressure forces everyone to define it for themselves.

 

For more on how exercises support business continuity management, see Tabletop Exercises as a Business Continuity Management tool.