The filing cabinet fallacy.
Thinking formed in practice, published as part of the Bearing & Course Points of View library.
Every organisation has one. A bottom drawer, a shared drive, a folder that nobody opens unless something has already gone wrong. Business continuity plans. Disaster recovery procedures. Risk registers. Crisis playbooks. They exist in every sector, at every scale. They are often carefully written. They are rarely tested.
Until something breaks. Then suddenly those documents matter. Or at least, we hope they do.
When a major cloud outage rippled across global systems recently, it took services, customers and operations with it across multiple industries simultaneously. What it exposed, again, is how much confidence organisations place in what is written down versus what has actually been practised. Continuity plans get pointed to. Recovery checklists get retrieved. But comfort on paper rarely translates into control when the pressure is real and the clock is running.
That is the filing cabinet fallacy: the habit of mistaking documentation for capability.
When systems fail, communications fragment and time pressure builds, people do not reach for the file. They act on whatever has been rehearsed, or on instinct built from experience. If neither exists, they improvise. Sometimes that works. Often it does not, and the gap between what the plan assumed and what actually happens becomes visible in the most costly possible way.
We understand this principle clearly in physical safety contexts. An evacuation map on the wall does not get anyone out of a building. We run drills because instinct is built through repetition, not through reading. The same logic applies to operational resilience, but organisations that run regular fire drills often treat their technology and operational continuity plans as documents rather than disciplines.
Every year, someone updates the plan. A new date goes on the cover. The assumptions inside remain unchanged. The exercise looks like progress. It rarely is. The organisations that hold up under pressure are not the ones with the best-written plans. They are the ones whose teams have practised. Where responses are recalled from experience rather than retrieved from a document.
If resilience still lives primarily in documentation, the work is not finished. Test it properly. Keep plans short enough to be used under pressure. Assign owners with real accountability, not committees. Learn from what fails in rehearsal. Do it more than once a year.
Real resilience comes from practice, not paperwork. Confidence comes from testing, not templates.
Stop admiring your plans. Run some drills.