Continuity planning is presented as an exercise for organizations with a risk function, and small organizations reasonably conclude it is not for them.
The conclusion is wrong for a specific reason. A large organization has redundancy by accident: three people can process payroll, four know the funder, several understand the building. An organization of thirty has one of each, and that concentration is the actual exposure.
The realistic threat
Not a fire or a flood, though both happen. The overwhelmingly likely disruption is that one particular person becomes unavailable for two or three weeks.
An illness, a family situation, a resignation with no notice, an accident. None of these is unusual, all of them are certain to occur eventually, and for most small organizations any one of them produces a genuine operational crisis within days.
This is worth stating plainly because it changes what preparation means. The exercise is not scenario planning. It is finding the concentrations and reducing them, which is cheap and takes an afternoon.
Find what only one person can do
The question to ask, of each person including yourself: what happens on Monday if you are not here for three weeks?
The answers cluster in predictable places. Payroll and the accounting system. Access to bank accounts and the ability to authorise a payment. The relationships that are personal rather than institutional, particularly with funders, major customers, and regulators. Passwords and administrative access. And the undocumented knowledge: why the invoicing runs on a fourteen-day cycle, which supplier will move on price, what the arrangement with the neighbouring property actually is.
Ask the question directly rather than inferring the answers. People know precisely what would break if they vanished, and they are frequently uneasy about it and have never been asked.
The six items worth fixing
Two people can access anything that must be accessed. Financial systems, the email account that receives regulatory notices, the building. Not shared passwords, which are a different problem, but a documented and lawful path by which a second person can obtain access.
Payment authority has an alternate. Frequently a bank matter requiring a resolution, so it takes a few weeks to arrange and cannot be done in the moment.
Key external relationships know a second name. The funder, the auditor, the attorney, the largest customer. One introduction each, in ordinary conditions, so the second person is not a stranger arriving in a difficult week.
The recurring obligations are written down. Filing dates, reporting deadlines, renewal dates, board requirements. Held in one person’s head, these are what get missed, and a missed filing produces a problem out of all proportion to the effort of recording it.
Somebody else can run payroll. Either internally or by a standing arrangement with the provider. People will tolerate a great deal during a disruption and not this.
The reasoning behind the odd arrangements exists on paper. A page per item, written by the person who knows. This is the one that never happens because it is not urgent until it is impossible.
Test it by taking time off
The exercise that reveals everything costs nothing and is genuinely pleasant.
Have each person who holds a concentration take a real week away, unreachable, on a normal week rather than a quiet one. Whatever breaks is the finding, and it is a considerably more honest finding than any planning session produces.
This also addresses a related problem. In many small organizations the founder or director has not taken an uninterrupted week in years, and the reason is precisely the concentration described here. Fixing the continuity exposure and making the leader’s absence survivable are the same piece of work.
The nonprofit and district version
Small nonprofits and special districts carry an additional exposure worth naming, because it sits with volunteers.
Where a treasurer holds the books, a secretary holds the records, and a chair holds the institutional history, the organization depends on three unpaid people who did not sign up to be single points of failure and may not realise they are. Board turnover then produces gaps that nobody notices until an audit or a filing deadline.
The addressable part is documentation and a real handover: what the role actually involves, where the records are, what the recurring dates are. Written once, updated at each transition, and held somewhere the organization controls rather than in a departing volunteer’s home office.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD