The plan on the shelf
Northgate Bank has 4,500 staff. Its continuity plan is rewritten each year by a three-person head-office team and published as a 90-page PDF. Everyone completes a 20-minute e-learning module at induction; nothing follows it. Exercise attendance across branches averages 12%, and the most common reason given is 'no cover to release staff'. The intranet continuity page receives about 200 hits a year. No continuity objective appears in any scorecard or appraisal. Contact-centre turnover is 34%. Two recent disruptions - a payment switch outage and a burst pipe in a call centre - were handled well, but both were managed by the same long-serving operations manager, and neither was debriefed. Internal audit has concluded that continuity is 'not embedded in the culture'.
1. Diagnose why the e-learning and annual plan are not producing capability.
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Separate compliance from competence. The e-learning measures that someone clicked through a module, not that they can act. Completion at induction, with no reinforcement, means the only people who remember anything are those who joined recently - and 34% turnover means a third of contact-centre staff have never seen it.
The real evidence is in the two incidents. Both were managed well and both depended on one individual. That is not embedding; that is a single point of failure that happened to be in the building. The fact that neither was debriefed is the most damaging finding: the organisation had two free lessons and discarded both.
Structural gaps:
- No line-manager ownership. Continuity lives with a central team, so branch managers correctly infer it is not their job.
- No consequence or reinforcement. Nothing in a scorecard, appraisal or team meeting references continuity, so it competes with everything that does.
- Nothing is role-specific. A 90-page document and a generic module tell a branch cashier nothing about what they personally do in hour one.
- No feedback loop. Without debriefs, plans never incorporate what actually worked, so they drift away from reality and are then ignored with good reason.
- Friction is being ignored. 'No cover to release staff' is a resourcing decision, not an attitude problem; treating it as attitude will fail.
2. Design a 12-month embedding plan with measurable indicators. Justify the layers you choose.
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Layer 1 - Leadership visible in the system. Executive sponsor opens each exercise cycle; continuity appears in the quarterly business review pack. Measure: number of business reviews where continuity was tabled; sponsor attendance at exercises.
Layer 2 - Role-based competence, not generic awareness. Replace the single module with short, role-specific briefings: what you do in the first hour, who you call, what you stop doing. Target the 20 roles that matter most in the first 90 days. Measure: percentage of in-scope staff who can state their first-hour actions when sampled (not completion rates).
Layer 3 - Reinforcement through existing channels. A 15-minute item in monthly team meetings; a one-page incident-relevant 'what would we do' scenario each quarter; continuity tasks in job descriptions for managers. Measure: percentage of teams with a recorded monthly discussion.
Layer 4 - Realism. Debrief every incident within ten working days, however small, and feed actions into the plan. Run exercises in the branches that struggle, at shift-friendly times. Measure: percentage of incidents debriefed within ten days; exercise participation by function (target above 60%, tracked, not assumed).
Layer 5 - Assurance. Annual sample of plans tested without warning; internal audit reviews the corrective-action closure rate. Measure: percentage of open exercise actions closed by due date.
Why this order: awareness campaigns without role clarity produce polite ignorance. Fix what people must do first, then reinforce, then assure. Twelve months is enough to shift two or three of these measurably - claiming all five at once would be the same over-promising that produced the 90-page PDF.
3. You have no additional headcount. How do you get branch managers to engage?
Read the worked answer
Stop asking them to add something, and start removing friction. Every request to a branch manager competes with sales targets and staffing. The design principle is: continuity must fit inside a meeting they already hold and solve a problem they already feel.
Practical moves:
- Shrink the ask. Not the 90-page PDF - a one-page branch card with five actions, the call tree for their building, and where to go. That is a two-minute read.
- Use a peer. Identify the two or three branch managers who handled the switch outage well and have them present at the regional managers' meeting. A message from a peer with the same targets carries weight a central team's does not.
- Make it locally useful. Frame the first exercise around their most plausible disruption (a burst pipe, a lost system, a closed high street) rather than a corporate scenario. Managers engage with their own risk.
- Give them a slot, not an extra meeting. Fifteen minutes in the monthly team meeting, scripted for them, so preparation cost is near zero.
- Trade visibility for effort. When a branch completes an exercise, the regional director hears about it. Recognition is the currency you actually have.
What not to do: escalate non-participation as a disciplinary matter before you have removed the friction. It converts a solvable capacity problem into a compliance one, and you will get attendance and no capability.