OVIEDO, FL – Sept. 17, 2026 – Recovery strategy should be built before a crisis, not invented during one, according to business continuity expert Keith Erwood. The most common and costly assumption in business — “we’ll figure it out when it happens” — is not a strategy but, in Erwood’s words, “uncertainty disguised as confidence.” When disruption hits, an organization does not suddenly become clearer or more coordinated; pressure rises, time compresses and the cost of confusion climbs fast. That is the central argument Erwood made in Episode 9 of his daily broadcast, “The Morning Endurance Call.”
A recovery strategy is not just a document or a set of hopeful ideas about getting back to normal, Erwood said. It is a deliberately considered approach to restoring critical capability after a disruption — answering what comes back first, what dependencies matter, what workarounds exist, what trade-offs are acceptable and who has authority to decide. Those are not questions to answer for the first time in the middle of an incident.
“Recovery is not strongest when it is invented under pressure. It is strongest when it has been considered, shaped and challenged before pressure arrives,” Erwood said in the episode.
Without a recovery strategy, businesses tend to fall into one of two traps, Erwood said: improvisation without priorities, where effort rises but alignment does not, and false confidence based on unvalidated assumptions — that systems will restore quickly, access will be available and vendors will respond. Both make recovery slower, more chaotic and more expensive than expected.
A useful strategy, according to Erwood, helps an organization answer five questions in advance: what to recover first and why, what dependencies must be in place, what recovery options genuinely exist, who decides when trade-offs are required and what must already be true — current runbooks, validated contacts, access readiness and working communication paths — for the strategy to hold. As he put it, recovery strategy “sits at the intersection of leadership, operations and reality.”
Strategy should not be confused with complexity, Erwood added. “A recovery strategy does not need to be a 100-page document to be useful,” he said; it needs to be usable, tied to business priorities and tested. A strategy that has never been challenged may still be mostly theoretical, and confidence becomes earned rather than assumed only after a plan is discussed, exercised and refined.
“The Morning Endurance Call” is a free, weekday broadcast of 15 minutes or less, created for business owners, executives and preparedness professionals who want to start the day thinking more clearly about leadership, risk, continuity, recovery and building enduring businesses. The show airs live each weekday at 8:45 a.m. Eastern. Erwood describes the format as leadership-based preparedness rather than fear-based content.
Episode 9, “Why Recovery Strategy Should Be Built Before the Crisis,” is available on the Erwood Group YouTube channel.
Viewers can join the free Endurance Community for additional tools, resources and ongoing discussion at https://members.erwoodgroup.com/communities/groups/endurance-community/home.
About Erwood Group
Erwood Group is a crisis management, business continuity and disaster recovery consultancy that helps businesses protect their operations, reputation and legacy against disruption. Drawing on more than two decades of hands-on crisis experience, the firm provides preparedness planning, executive advisory services and practical tools across risk management, business continuity, IT disaster recovery and cybersecurity. The firm is led by Keith Erwood, a recognized authority on business preparedness and the originator of the Endurance™ leadership approach. Learn more at erwoodgroup.com.