Understanding Adaptive Business Continuity: Principles over Methods

EDITOR’S NOTE: This six-part series explores Adaptive Business Continuity, a framework that deliberately challenges traditional business continuity assumptions and restructures how preparedness and resilience are achieved.

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Adaptive Business Continuity is challenging. I know this from personal experience. I’ve had to break old habits and adopt a drastically different perspective. However, by fully embracing Adaptive and working through the struggles of abandoning all my old notions, I’ve come to a place where I can confidently say it has the power to revolutionize the work of organizational preparedness.

Join me … but be prepared.

Method (n): a way of doing anything, esp. according to a defined and regular plan; a mode of procedure in any activity, business, etc.

For most of the past 30 years, the work of business continuity and organizational preparedness has been defined by methodology. Methods define what needs to be done. How it is done is left up to the practitioner. Because of the fact that professionals are given a wide degree of latitude in how they execute there is a common belief this makes the traditional methodology quite flexible and not dissimilar to Adaptive. This is wildly inaccurate.

Adaptive Business Continuity does not define any methods. Full stop. There are no actions or deliverables defined within the Adaptive canon. There are tools, such as the aperture and the RPC Model. The work is based on theories developed by my fellow Adaptive conspirator, Dr. David Lindstedt. One may execute Adaptive using the tools and theories we promote, but these are not requirements of the framework. They are simply offered to better equip and enable the practitioner in the execution of their work.

Principle (n): A fundamental truth or proposition on which others depend; a general statement or tenet forming the (or a) basis of a system of belief, etc.

Adaptive is based on principles. Methods define the “what” of execution. Principles define the “how.” In the development of Adaptive Business Continuity, David and I deliberately defined the “how” while leaving out the “what.” This leaves practitioners free to execute according to what works best for them within the context of their individual organizations. In other words, there is not a single deliverable required by traditional methods that is necessary to success within Adaptive Business Continuity. Alternatively, one could complete all the deliverables of traditional methodology and still be considered Adaptive. This is what real flexibility looks like.

Challenges Abound

Given the language of the principles themselves, it may seem disingenuous to say Adaptive does not prescribe any methods at all. Additionally, performing work based on principles, without methods, presents challenges. Let’s look at both of these critiques:

Don’t the Principles Define a Method?

An argument could be made that many of the Adaptive Principles are a “what” (i.e. method) in and of themselves. Examples include “measure and benchmark,” “learn the business,” and “obtain incremental direction from leadership.”

Yes, these may be taken as actions, but that is not the intention. Practitioners can – and should – take steps to encompass many principles simultaneously. Obtaining incremental direction from leadership should serve as a form of “learn the business” as well as “engaging at many levels within the organization.” It may even be used as a form of “measurement and benchmarking” by understanding leadership’s competence and understanding of resources or strategies.

This means that, yes, principles may be executed as actions. However, no principle should ever be interpreted as requiring a dedicated deliverable or output. Any work done to achieve the mission of improving recovery capabilities, within the parameters of the principles, satisfies the Adaptive Business Continuity framework.

Does Adaptive Invite Chaos?

Adaptive does not come with a roadmap. There are no milestones, no deliverables and no actions to be checked off a list. This is an uncomfortable truth about the framework itself: Adaptive practitioners must develop the skills needed to determine for themselves they are operating correctly.

There is a presentation from 2019 which provides a perfect illustration of this. It was delivered by Sarah Powell, director of emergency management at Temple University, and Emma Stocker, director of emergency management at Oregon State, at the time.

In the presentation, Sarah mentions Adaptive does not define how it should be implemented. This is expressed as a shortcoming. However, the lack of definition is a deliberate feature of Adaptive. It was considered and built in from the start. I don’t have any misgivings about this, but I can empathize with Sarah and Emma’s struggles.

In the end, both took different approaches to solve their respective challenges. This is the essence of Adaptive. We’ve deliberately avoided explaining how implementation should look in order to free up practitioners to implement their vision based on their own individual knowledge and skillset – as well as the culture, values, and priorities of the organizations they serve.

Without a clear outline of how work should be done, Adaptive can seem like a free-for-all. But the principles act as guardrails, preventing preparedness work from devolving into chaos while providing enough latitude for the work be performed in a very wide variety of meaningful ways. The purpose is to free up the unique problem-solving skills of the professional while encouraging experimentation and risk-taking. As confident as I am in my own approach, I genuinely believe it can be improved upon. Additional solutions certainly exist outside my experience. This lies at the heart of Adaptive. It demands a lot from the practitioner, but the rewards are significantly greater. We should embrace both the inherent difficulty of Adaptive and the value it enables as a result.

How To Think About This Differently

There is one more, bigger hurdle to implementing an Adaptive Business Continuity Program: perception. Experienced business continuity practitioners have a firmly held view of how preparedness is achieved. With that view comes a whole host of beliefs and assumptions. All of these must be abandoned in order to properly understand Adaptive.

This is a problem. It greatly limits how successful the Adaptive business continuity practitioner can be.

I know this first-hand, during the first several years attempting to implement Adaptive. It can be done, but it is difficult. At least it was for me.

If I had the equivalent of Morpheus’s red pills, I would hand them out like jelly beans. Unfortunately, I do not. To be successful in the Adaptive world, you simply have to put in the time and the work. On the other hand, the results are more than worth the effort.  

If you find yourself among those struggling with this concept, I invite you to reach out to me directly. I always do my best to share every upcoming presentation and podcast while varying my approach with each delivery. I’m confident one of them will resonate with you, if you are willing to give it time. If, like so many others, you struggle to deliver value following common practices, I am offering another path. A difficult one, to be sure, but one that ends at a far brighter destination.

Stay curious, friends!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Armour

Mark Armour is a resilience industry leader with more than 20 years of experience in the field. He has been instrumental in the implementation and leadership of several global business continuity and crisis management programs. More importantly, Armour has been directly involved in corporate response and recovery for hundreds of events, from IT outages and natural disasters to pandemics. Armour is the co-author, along with David Lindstedt, Ph.D., of the “Adaptive Business Continuity Manifesto” and the book, “Adaptive Business Continuity: A New Approach.” He is currently the senior director of global resilience at Brink’s Inc., the worldwide leader in secure logistics and cash management solutions.