You may have reduced your concentration and backed up your data and still have no answer to the plainest question a shock asks: when this hits, how do we keep serving the people who count on us?
Which services absolutely must continue, which can pause, how do we run in a stripped-down mode, and who does what? This guide answers it. It decides in advance what must keep running no matter what, how you would run lean to protect it, and it gets the plan adopted by your board so it carries real weight. It is not more preparation; it assumes the reduction and protection work is done or underway, and pulls it into one plan. It is not a document to write and forget; a continuity plan nobody adopted or updated is a comfort, not a protection. Use it once you know your exposures and have started reducing and protecting.
In a shock you cannot protect everything, and trying to protect everything means protecting nothing well. List what you do, and mark the services that must continue through almost anything because people would be genuinely harmed if they stopped, separating them from the ones that could pause for weeks without real harm. Then, for each essential service, name the few things it cannot run without: the people, the space or a substitute, the systems, the money.
Open the Mission-Essential Service Map →Knowing what must survive is not the same as knowing how. Write how the organization would run stripped down: which essential services continue and how, what pauses, the reduced budget it would run on, and how long you could hold that mode, pulling in the reductions, buffers, and disaster protections you have already built. Then name who does what when a shock hits, who leads the response, who handles money, who communicates, and pull it into one plan.
Open the Continuity-of-Service Plan →A continuity plan becomes real when the board owns it and the people who would run it know it exists. Until then it is a draft on a shelf. Adopt the continuity plan by formal board action and record it, then make sure the staff who would carry it out know it exists and know their part.
It has no authority in a real shock, and that plan will be second-guessed exactly when there is no time to argue. Route the board question to board governance and development, resolve it, and return to adopt. This is a route with a clear way back, not a dead end.
If deciding what to protect in a shock forces a genuine question about whether the organization can sustain all of what it does, or whether some services should be handed to a partner better able to carry them, that reaches past resilience into a real strategic and structural question, and it deserves an honest conversation with your board and, where a partnership or transfer is on the table, a look with counsel. Naming that is the guide being honest about its edge.
You can name the services that must survive a shock and what each needs to run. You have a written plan for running lean that your board has adopted. And the people who would have to run it know it exists and know their part.
With the plan adopted, the last guide is See It Coming and Stay Ready, which builds the warning signs and the practice that keep the plan alive. The loss of a key person is the sibling emergency succession work. If you came in through a crisis and have steadied, the whole-organization check-up is the honest next look once your resilience plan is complete.