Young humans tend to learn by experience. Those lessons tend to stick but it’s a method that can prove extremely costly when the stakes are high. A business that survives a disaster will doubtless learn a good few lessons, but the fact is that most businesses don’t survive disasters without advance planning.

“Often a child won’t accept being told that a candle flame burns, and needs to test it out—but the experience is bought cheaply, at the expense of a brief pain,” explains Steven King, a Business Development Manager at ContinuitySA. “But in later life, it pays to profit from others’ experience and your own analysis to plan ahead for events that could put you out of business. That’s why business continuity planning is so important—it requires a company to assess all its risks and plan for even the unlikely eventualities.”

For example, it probably goes without saying that all Japanese businesses have put plans in place against a tsunami, and the same goes for those companies that rely on Japanese suppliers. However, many companies whose businesses were ruined by the tsunami in 2011 would have been able to recover much more quickly if they had the right business continuity measures in place.

“Business continuity is all about applying your mind to assess what risks your business faces, and then putting in place what you need to recover the business,” King observes. “It’s all about building business resilience.”

He points to the 2009 fire that ravaged the head office of a leading South African emergency-response company—an unexpected but foreseeable event for which the company had planned. It was able to move to a recovery site and assure clients it could continue to service them, a display of far-sightedness and “grace under fire” that resonated strongly with its brand persona.

Even if a specific event was not foreseen, a company with a comprehensive business continuity plan is nevertheless in a good position to adapt existing plans. King argues that the recent earthquake on 5 August 2014 at Orkney is a case in point of an event that would previously have been rated a low probability, but which nonetheless occurred.

“Mines and other businesses in the area may have discounted the probability of such a large seismic event, but those with contingency plans in place for disasters of similar magnitude were more likely to have recovered quickly,” King says. “While it’s certain that many more businesses in that area have included a repeat earthquake in their scenario planning, let’s also hope that they have looked at their entire risk profiles with greater care as well. Businesses need to be prepared for disasters if they are to survive: learning by experience is very much second prize—if the company is around to get any prizes at all, that is!”