You carry a low worry about the thing that could knock your organization over, but you have never laid out exactly what those things are or which would hurt worst.
This guide finds the shocks you genuinely could not survive right now, sorts them into the kind of danger they are, whether that is leaning too hard on one source, a disaster or systems failure you could not recover from, or simply having no plan to keep serving through any of it, and hands you an ordered plan so you shore up the most dangerous exposure first. It is a sorting instrument, not the plan itself, and it is not a fear exercise. It takes about ninety minutes and asks you to name, specifically, the one or two things that would actually knock you over. Start here if your worry is about surviving a shock: a lost funder or contract, a disaster, a systems or data failure, or having no plan to serve through a crisis. If your real worry is the loss of a specific person the organization runs on, that is emergency succession, a different door. If your trouble is that your everyday systems are a mess but no single shock threatens you, that is the broader operations work.
If you have just lost the funder, or the building is already gone, that is an active emergency, not a planning exercise, and it comes first. Steady the immediate thing, then come back to build the resilience that keeps the next one from doing the same. You can start from the welcome page.
You cannot plan for shocks you have not named. List the shocks that would actually threaten the mission: losing your largest funder or contract, a fire or flood or lost building, a systems or data failure, the loss of a critical supplier or partner. Leave off the everyday headaches that would not stop the work. Then, for each, ask honestly: if this happened next month, could we keep serving, or would we stop, and mark the ones you could not survive as they stand today.
Open the Exposure Picture →Place your worst exposure in the kind of danger it is, because the kind decides the guide. Answer each statement the way it really is. The statements are worded as strengths, so an honest not true is where your fragility lives. Most organizations are weak in more than one, and that is normal.
A rating on paper is worth little until you run it against a real scenario. Take your single most dangerous exposure and walk it forward as if it happened next month. If it is your largest funder, trace the budget hole, the layoffs, the services cut. If it is a fire, trace the lost records, the closed doors, the scattered staff. Where the honest answer is worse than your rating, trust the honest answer.
Open the Shock Reality Check →Turn the finding into an ordered plan that names your first guide, the guides that follow, and the pieces you can skip because they are already covered. Sequence by danger, worst first, and where a piece is already solid, mark it done and skip it. Write the Plan to Keep Serving Through a Shock and See It Coming and Stay Ready close the sequence for nearly everyone, because reductions and protections are not resilience until they are pulled into a plan and kept ready. Give the very first guide a real start date.
Open the Resilience Priority Plan →Your answers stay in your browser on this page and are never sent anywhere. Use Save or print to keep your copy.
Two moments here call for someone outside these pages. If working through your exposures makes plain that a shock has effectively already happened, you are already past planning and into managing a crisis, and that calls for immediate stabilization at the Front Desk before any of this. And if the exposures you surface are heavily legal or contractual, a lease you cannot escape, a grant clawback you are exposed to, get a nonprofit attorney's read, because those are decided in the fine print, not on a worksheet. Naming these is the guide being honest about where its edge is.
Once the acute work is done and you are on your feet, it is worth stepping back to look at the whole organization, not just the piece that was on fire. There is a short whole-organization check-up waiting for you when you are ready. That is not a sales pitch. It is the next honest thing to look at. The whole-organization check-up →