Why Your Business Continuity Plan Will Fail: Lessons from the Nuclear Navy

By Tony Grayson Tech Executive (ex-SVP Oracle, AWS, Meta) & Former Nuclear Submarine Commander

We thought we were ready.

Six months of nuclear power school taught us the fundamentals: thermodynamics, reactor physics, and electrical systems. Then we went to the prototype, where we stood watch on an actual operating naval reactor. We walked through the casualty procedures dozens of times. Loss of coolant. Steam line rupture. Electrical failures. We knew every step, every valve lineup, every communication protocol.

My watch section had it down cold. Or so we believed.

Then the simulator threw our first casualty at us without warning.

The alarm sounded. And we fell apart.

The guy who calmly explained procedures in the walkthrough. Froze at his panel. Our most confident operator started calling out the wrong valve numbers. I watched communication, the thing we'd practiced most, completely disintegrate. People talked over each other. Critical information got lost. Someone made a decision we'd specifically drilled NOT to make.

This was a training simulator. The reactor wasn't real. The consequences weren't real. But the stress response was absolutely real.

Here's what we learned that day: knowing what to do and executing under pressure are entirely different skills.

When your body floods with cortisol, your brain changes. Vision narrows. Fine motor control degrades. Memory recall fails. The methodical thinker becomes scattered. The confident leader needs direction. Personalities don't just shift, they transform. The person you think you have isn't the person who shows up when it matters.

The nuclear Navy figured this out decades ago: you don't drill to memorize procedures. You drill until the stress response becomes the trained response. You practice until muscle memory overrides panic. You run scenarios again and again, under pressure, with chaos and incomplete information, because when the real casualty hits, you won't rise to the occasion—you'll default to your training.

Most organizations never test their crisis management strategy until it's too late.

They run tabletop exercises in conference rooms. They announce drills in advance so people can prepare. They review their Business Continuity Planning (BCP) checklists during business hours when everyone's fresh and focused. They stop the exercise when it gets uncomfortable. Then they check the box and assume they're ready.

They're not.

The gap between "we have an incident response plan" and "we've actually executed a failover at 3 AM with missing people and conflicting information" is where companies discover their plans don't survive contact with reality. The person you're counting on to lead the crisis response might be the one who falls apart. The quiet engineer you overlooked might be the one who takes charge.

You won't know until you test it under actual stress.

Here is how to build operational resilience through realistic stress testing:

Run drills without warning; this is what red teaming actually looks like. Introduce chaos. Remove key people mid-scenario. Degrade the information available. Make people execute, not just talk through it. Push until something breaks, because it's better to break in practice than in production.

Then debrief ruthlessly. Not "what should have happened" but "what actually happened." Who performed? Who didn't? Where did communication fail? What assumptions were wrong?

This is how high-reliability organizations like the Submarine Force operate. We drill until failure isn't an option, because in our world, the first time you discover your procedures don't work is the last time you get to learn that lesson.

Your organization won't sink if your crisis plan fails. But without leadership under pressure, your reputation will suffer. Your customers will leave. Your leaders will be exposed. And you'll join the long list of companies that had a plan right up until the moment they needed it.

The question isn't whether you have procedures. It's whether you've developed the operational resilience to execute them when it's hard, when people are tired, when nothing goes according to plan.

Because that's when you'll discover who you really are.

____________________________________

Tony Grayson is a recognized Top 10 Data Center Influencer, a successful entrepreneur, and the President & General Manager of Northstar Enterprise + Defense.

A former U.S. Navy Submarine Commander and recipient of the prestigious VADM Stockdale Award, Tony is a leading authority on the convergence of nuclear energy, AI infrastructure, and national defense. His career is defined by building at scale: he led global infrastructure strategy as a Senior Vice President for AWS, Meta, and Oracle before founding and selling a top-10 modular data center company.

Today, he leads strategy and execution for critical defense programs and AI infrastructure, building AI factories and cloud regions that survive contact with reality.

Read more at: tonygraysonvet.com