The appropriation by crisis managers of the “Business Continuity Plan” during the pandemic crisis
Résumé
A crisis is a disruption in a balance leading to the risk of losing control. The challenges that await managers are
relatively identical regardless of the organization. In particular, they have to deal with surprise in a complex
environment (an event with little or poorly known effects, exceeding benchmarks, a break in capability) and make
strategic decisions even though the information available is fragmentary, sometimes erroneous or contradictory,
often evolving, and various pressures (major consequences induced by the decisions to be made, time pressure,
media pressure, and hierarchical pressure) can lead to multiple cognitive biases. The SARS-Cov-2 crisis illustrates
the evolution of threats and the need to prepare to serious disruptions. This crisis emphasized the importance of
ensuring the continuity of a company's activities in order to guarantee its sustainability by adopting continuity
strategies. The purpose of this study is to detect the role of the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) in the decision-
making process of crisis managers. We seek to understand how they handled with covid-19 crisis, what the skills,
strategies and tools were used to detect and respond to this extraordinary situation. All these reflections will allow
us to project the axes of improvement that can be envisaged, a renewed strategic approach that must be imposed to
crisis managers. To achieve this goal, we used a grounded theory approach as one of our qualitative research designs
and analysed data collected from crisis managers (17) through directional centered interviews. We combined the
results of our analysis to what the literature has to provide (e.g. Norms) in a bottom/up approach to enrich the
manager's toolbox by proposing a model of anticipation and business continuity that will help him to have a more
holistic understanding of crisis issues that are increasingly complex.