failure to plan is planning to fail
DESCRIPTION
In business continuity terms if we have good planning for an incident and the plan is executed well from the beginning we can promote the Olympic virtuous circle of success leading to further success. If the start of the event goes badly, we don\'t recognise the incident early enough, the press will begin to criticize us and our reputation will begin to suffer then it will be difficult to raise the moral of our staff and our stakeholders and the incident response is likely to be deemed a failure.TRANSCRIPT
Failure To Plan Is Planning To Fail
Those of you who have been watching the Olympics for last couple of weeks cannot fail to have noticed the immense amount of planning that must have gone on to make the games such a success. The doom-mongers prophesised terrorist attacks, transport chaos and a heroic British muddle through. Instead there was very little transport failure, no terrorist attacks and the game worldwide has been heralded a great success.
The success of the games, I believe, has been down to detailed planning and good organisation. Where there contingency plans needed to be implemented, such as the failure of G4S to provide enough security the army were on standby and got called in. Other events such as the flooding (by sewage) of one of the main CCTV monitoring stations was not well reported as they invoked their business continuity plan this worked from a fallback location and once the clean up was done they quickly moved back.
The planning of the event created the right atmosphere; as people had confidence in the event. I believe that the crowd threw themselves enthusiastically into supporting the athletes who then went on to give their best performance and win medals. This provided a virtuous circle, the more support the crowd gave to the athletes, the more they won. I feel that good organisation by the organisers allowed this to happen.
Coming back to the initial quote which according to Wiki answers was by Winston Churchill who said "He who fails to plan is planning to fail" during World War II. In business continuity terms if we have good planning for an incident and the plan is executed well from the beginning we can promote the Olympic virtuous circle of success leading to further success. If the start of the event goes badly, we don't recognise the incident early enough, the press will begin to criticize us and our reputation will begin to suffer then it will be difficult to raise the moral of our staff and our stakeholders and the incident response is likely to be deemed a failure.
Charlie Maclean-Bristol
