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Practical Business Continuity Exercises

How to Test Your Organization’s Resilience

Prepare your organization for disruption with this guide to conducting business continuity exercises that increase your preparedness and resilience.

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EAN: 9781398628236

Edition: 1

Published: 03 Aug 2026

Format: 234 x 156

304 pages

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About the book

How can leaders ensure business continuity plans deliver proven results under real-world pressures?

Practical Business Continuity Exercises is a strategic guide for business continuity leaders and managers who need tools to test their organization's resilience to disruption. From cyberattacks and IT failures to supply chain breakdowns and geopolitical crises, this book shows how to design exercises that protect operations, safeguard reputation and secure long-term stability.

Written by Charlie Maclean-Bristol, it provides a guidance for developing exercises that align with global standards including ISO 22301:2019 and ISO 22398:2013. Through expert insight, it equips leaders to stress-test their organization's business continuity plans, measure performance and ensure ROI on resilience investments.

You'll learn how to:
- Select the most effective exercise to match organizational priorities
- Strengthen leadership decision making in simulated high-pressure scenarios
- Embed risk governance and compliance into continuity strategies
- Measure outcomes and sustain resilience with clear, data-led metrics

Featuring real-world examples and practical tools, Practical Business Continuity Exercises enables leaders to anticipate disruption, maintain stakeholder confidence and deliver lasting organizational resilience.

Themes include: business continuity exercises, resilience strategy, risk management, ROI in continuity planning

About the authors

Charlie Maclean-Bristol is a business continuity and emergency planning expert with decades of experience delivering business continuity exercises. He is a member of the British Standards Institute's CAR/1 Committee and contributed to development of ISO 22361. He is a former board member of the Business Continuity Institute and a contributor to the BCI's Good Practice Guidelines. He is the Founder and Director of PlanB Consulting and based in Glasgow, UK.

Charlie Maclean-Bristol

- Chapter - 00: Introduction;
- Chapter - 01: Why business continuity exercises matter and what you get from conducting them;
- Chapter - 02: Choosing the right type of business continuity exercises;
- Chapter - 03: Developing a multiyear exercise program;
- Chapter - 04: Learning by doing – embedding education into every exercise;
- Chapter - 05: Assessing and building knowledge, skills and competency;
- Chapter - 06: The end to end process – the 4Ds;
- Chapter - 07: Phase 1 – Design;
- Chapter - 08: Phase 2 – Development;
- Chapter - 09: Phase 3 – Delivery;
- Chapter - 10: Phase 4 – Debrief;
- Chapter - 11: Safety and risk management during exercises;
- Chapter - 12: Documenting each phase;
- Chapter - 13: Roles and responsibility with exercises;
- Chapter - 14: Verisimilitude – making your exercises come to life;
- Chapter - 15: Detailed guidance for running different types of exercises;
- Chapter - 16: Conclusion and next steps;
- Chapter - 17: Appendix A – exercise assessment sheets;
- Chapter - 18: Appendix B – incident management teaching syllabus;
- Chapter - 19: Appendix C – capability maturity model;