American View: Why Is Business Continuity So Often Put Off Until It’s Too Late?

Risk Management

I’ve been thinking a lot about Business Continuity this month. I swear this isn’t a weird and contrived excuse to talk about some “exciting new” product or service. It’s a real thing (albeit a very strange one). See, my father died a little over a year ago. This year, at nearly the same time, my only aunt died after a long illness. In parallel, my partner at work had to grapple with a parent’s unexpected cancer diagnosis. The last two years have been just as hectic, stressful, and exhausting for us as you might expect.

One of the least surprising side effects of this inescapable drama has been a sharp decline in my motivation to write. Honestly, getting a column assembled that wasn’t just two pages of copy-pasted rows of “AAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!” has been extraordinarily challenging. I was staring out my office window this morning when it “clicked” for me that this was probably like what my father was going through in the years leading up to his end.

My father had always been a writer. He’d studied literature in university and won a trip to Spain for a novel he wrote for … some academic competition? … the summer before I was born. He wrote several fiction novels when I was young, ^[1] but none of them were ever published. Much later in life, he wrote and published his best-selling non-fiction books about his physical therapy research. He also wrote over three hundred country-western songs while I was still living at home … and almost got a dozen of them sold and recorded. ^[2] Writing was as natural to him as breathing.

At the same time, my father was a very private man. He didn’t talk about some aspects of his past. Not that he was ever a secret criminal mastermind (as far as I know). He just chose to keep some things to himself. Never explained why, either (to me, anyway). Hell, I didn’t learn that my mother was my father’s second wife until I was in my forties … and I learned that from my sister, not from the man himself. Why wasn’t I allowed to know this? Beats the hell out of me.

I spent a long time searching the stock photo library, and none of the humans adequately captured my feeling of exasperated confusion. This fits.

There were also stories that he’d share and then steadfastly refused to elaborate on them. I knew that he’d served in the U.S. Army during the early 1960s; we talked several times about how he’d voluntarily enlisted to avoid getting drafted and sent to god-knows-where. I knew he’d been a corpsman attached to a combat arms unit in West Germany and later transferred to a dispensary in Berlin. When I found an old Soviet flag in his office and asked about its provenance, he explained that he’d been taken behind East German lines with some gunfighters from his battalion’s reconnaissance platoon during some sort of high-speed, darned stupid operation and that they’d “stolen” that specific flag. The strange thing was this old 1950s vintage flag was made of cotton and looked like it had been handmade. I pestered my father for details about the “flag raid” and he adamantly refused to ever say another word about it.

There were a ton of similar personal anecdotes that gave me a small glimpse into my father’s life before all discussion was inexplicably cutoff. Then he died. Now I’ll never know. I did ask him about the flag incident when he was on his deathbed, but by then he couldn’t remember ever having served in the Army at all, let alone any details about his military adventures.

To be fair, my father had attempted to write his autobiography. I suspect this was prompted when he first learned that he was facing a rapid decline … but I can’t prove that because he hid both his condition and the severity of it from me until the last six months of his life when it couldn’t be disguised or ignored anymore. Why hide it? I have no idea.

I’m grateful that I have about a hundred pages of personal anecdotes from my father’s childhood that help me understand his childhood. I have a much better idea of what growing up in nowhere, Kansas was like in the fifties. That’s good. The trouble was my father started — and effectively finished — his writing about four years before he died. I read his first draft shortly after he finished it; the final copy that my sister recovered from his laptop after his passing was an exact copy or the draft I’d received down to the last punctuation mark. My father clearly put a lot of work into describing his childhood and then … nothing. Not so much as a word about dropping out of college (three times!), joining the Army, grad school, working at a university, married life, or anything else. Then he died. Now I’ll never know.

I must be grieving wrong. Instead of crying like a normal person, I’m fighting to keep a deep well of anger and frustration from slipping out.

Those last seven words have been gnawing at me. Not only for the frustration I feel over losing all those cryptic stories, but because I’ve heard many variations on that exact sentiment within the business community. It seems like everywhere I’ve worked, there has always been a succession crisis. Someone important left and walked out with all the crucial “tribal knowledge” needed to understand their critical process(es). There had been documentation (sometimes), but only content that a seasoned practitioner could understand. The departed’s replacement couldn’t glean enough from what little notes there were (when there were any at all) to continue the process. Everything had to be relearned from the beginning, often by trail and humiliating error.

This was a scenario we’d been warned about as subalterns. It was standard operating procedure in the Army for brand new lieutenants to be assigned as platoon leaders for one — and only one — year. We’d get experience leading soldiers, then get transferred to a staff or support role to learn new skills. This helped create well-rounded officers and ensured that darned near every new lieutenant got to experience leading a platoon.

Our military science instructors had warned us that our first responsibility upon taking over a platoon was to read our predecessor’s “continuity book.” This was supposed to be a guide to all of the platoon leader’s responsibilities, processes, and critical knowledge. Things like when and where the meetings too place, what reports were due and to whom, and terrible mistakes that others had made that a smart officer would want to avoid at all costs. We were also warned that if such a book didn’t exist, it was our responsibility to create one for the lieutenant replacing us.

I fell into that second category, as I’d signed in to my battalion the day it activated. There hadn’t ever been a previous platoon leader because there hadn’t been a 1st Platoon, A Company, 61st Medical Battalion since the Vietnam War era … and those predecessors’ lessons learned might be a tad out of date. So, I resolved to create my platoon’s first continuity book once I received my orders to report to my next assignment.

Let’s go over this from the top, sir. You’re claiming ‘the future’ jumped out from behind a tree and derailed all your plans and intentions before you could react?

Except … I screwed up. I had my notes, but I was so busy leading my platoon and putting out (metaphorical) fires that I never got the damned thing written. Then, one Monday morning, out of the blue, I was ordered to report to Battalion HQ immediately to take over as the Assistant S-2 … and (oh by the way) here’s the guy taking over for you. Clear out so he can put his stuff in what’s no longer your desk. Too little, too late.

It’s not exactly what happened to my father’s autobiography plan, but I suspect it was similar to what happened to me as a green platoon leader. Plans were “overtaken by events.” Once my father realized that he was on his was going to lose his facilities, he started hammering away on his long-postponed memoirs. He gave it his all … but by the time he got the first third of it down, he’d run out of capacity He wrote as much as he could … then couldn’t finish. He ran out of time. Literally.

That’s what I’ve seen over and over in the corporate world: people know that it’s essential to fully document their essential business processes and insider knowledge. They – no, we – always fully intend to do right by our replacement. We don’t want the great programs we’ve built to fall apart after we leave. But … the end comes for us all, often sooner than expected. Not through death, hopefully, but through a more humane “termination of employment.” Nonetheless, gone is gone … and far too often, every story and explanation that was essential for a process leader to know “dies” with them once they’re off the stage.

I guess what I’m saying is that you – yes, YOU! – need to draft your own continuity book for your current job today (yesterday would be better). No excuses; no leader knows the day or the hour when their departure shall be thrust upon them. Sure, it might not seem like a priority right now compared to … everything else … but there might not be a “tomorrow” to sort it in.

^[1]I have the only typed copy of one of his books here on my desk. I’ve been thinking of retyping it and publishing it posthumously.
^[2]The artist who bought and recorded them went bankrupt before they could get their album produced. So it goes.