What could happen? Looking at scenarios
Impact scenarios vs. disaster scenarios
A fire in the building is an obvious emergency but an emergency in the building isn’t necessarily a fire. There are thousands of events that can result in a business invoking its emergency plans. Is it possible then to develop responses when you don’t know that to which you will respond?
Yes it is. The secret is to look at abstract events rather than specific one. If you think of concrete examples of disasters, you’ll imagine fires, floods, power failures, or even bomb alerts. These are immediately understandable emergencies and they urgently motivate people to counter them.
On the other hand, taken individually, these events have common characteristics that can be abstracted out. Whether the reason is a fire or a flood the end result is the same: you cannot use your office space. Instead of having one plan for floods and one plan for fires, you have one plan for fires and floods and that plan can also cover bomb alerts and power failures.
When looking at causes, you should create plans to respond to losses. You should look at the impact of a disaster and plan for that rather than plan for the disaster.
So impact scenarios describe abilities and functions lost by the business without referring to causes. On the other hand, disaster scenarios describe events causing adverse impact on the business. Impact scenarios are abstract, disaster scenarios are concrete.
This is not to say disaster scenarios aren’t useful. They are very useful but not in planning. Disaster scenarios are used to test your plans, a topic for another discussion.
Copyright 2008 Vincent Poirier
