If there is a question whether a business should plan for the unexpected, the answer will be always in the affirmative. An emergency can occur on account of human failure or natural causes, both of which are inevitable at some stage.

Instead of resorting to fixed and predetermined scenarios we should apply ‘logical what and how’ thinking. As a first step we should identify the key resources, processes and procedures which keep the business going.

Once this is done we can easily find solutions to the failures of these factors if and when it happens. In this way we will be able to pin point the cause of the problem and tackle the same effectively.

For example we should consider what will be the repercussions if the payroll data is lost, what are the ways that the data can be accessed, from what source, what is the time taken for retrieval. In this case ‘ the what’ is that the data is unavailable. ‘The how’ is not important. We need to focus on how to retrieve the lost data.