Why Is Business Continuity's 'Back to Basics' Movement Creating a Crisis Communication Blind Spot?

The crisis communication gap is widening. Here's what you need to know:

Business continuity teams are becoming more operationally focused while simultaneously moving away from strategic engagement. This shift creates a critical blind spot for crisis communication.

The BCI Continuity and Resilience Report 2025 delivered troubling news for communication professionals. We can no longer assume our business continuity colleagues are covering the crisis communication angle. The data suggests they may be actively moving away from it.

According to the Business Continuity Institute's 2025 research, 45.5% of organizations now formally distinguish between "resilience" (strategic) and "business continuity" (operational), representing a significant increase from 39.4% in 2023 (BCI Continuity and Resilience Report, 2025, https://www.thebci.org). Resilience occupies the strategic high ground, focusing on adaptation and long-term organizational viability. Business continuity has become its operational counterpart, responsible for plan creation, system testing, and recovery procedures.

This division makes intuitive sense on an organizational chart. It creates an artificial separation that crisis communication simply cannot afford.

Effective reputation management during a disruption demands both intimate knowledge of what's actually happening and the strategic authority to shape the narrative. When the function closest to operational reality becomes less strategic, a critical gap opens up. These gaps only become visible when it's too late to close them.

One survey respondent captured the emerging mindset perfectly: some view "resilience as the bigger picture" while BC processes "step in" when that layer fails (BCI Continuity and Resilience Report, 2025, https://www.thebci.org). But crisis communication doesn't step in. It must be embedded from the beginning, with clear ownership and decision-making authority. Otherwise, you're building plans that work beautifully on paper and collapse the moment someone needs to explain them to a journalist or a worried customer.

When crisis accountability scatters across multiple executives, organizations lose the unified voice stakeholders demand during disruptions. The numbers reveal a leadership vacuum.

The BCI research shows that 42.3% of business continuity professionals want a board-level appointment responsible for resilience but lack the internal support to make it happen (BCI Continuity and Resilience Report, 2025, https://www.thebci.org). Accountability remains scattered: 31.4% say it sits with the CEO, 14% with the COO, and 8.3% with the Chief Risk Officer (BCI Continuity and Resilience Report, 2025, https://www.thebci.org).

Fragmented accountability produces predictable failures.

Consider Boeing's response to the Alaska Airlines incident. The company showed improvement over previous crises—the CEO held employee town halls and appeared in media interviews. Yet critics noted the initial response lacked technical detail and the personal accountability that stakeholders expect in the critical first hours (Dittoe Public Relations, 2025, https://dittoepr.com/pr-lessons-from-the-biggest-crisis-communication-blunders-of-2024). Even improved communication efforts struggle to overcome the reputational damage of those first critical moments when authority is unclear or delayed.

Stakeholders expect a single, authoritative voice during a crisis. Every hour of delay compounds the impact when that voice is either absent or unclear.

The problem becomes more acute when you consider the knowledge gap. The people who understand what's breaking—the BC professionals—often sit in middle management without strategic authority. The senior leaders with authority frequently lack deep situational awareness. This disconnect between knowledge and influence creates exactly the conditions that produce weak, delayed, or contradictory messaging.

The perceived importance of communication skills for BC managers jumped from 57.4% to 82.4% in a single year, yet this recognition arrives precisely as the BC role becomes more operational. This creates a fundamental paradox.

Organizations clearly recognize that technical expertise alone is insufficient. The BCI data shows a 25-percentage-point increase in how organizations value communication capabilities for business continuity managers (BCI Continuity and Resilience Report, 2025, https://www.thebci.org). Yet this recognition arrives at the exact moment when the BC role is becoming less strategic and more operational.

Organizations seem to want better internal communicators. People who can brief executives and translate technical details upward. What they may not have considered: internal reporting requires fundamentally different skills than external crisis communication.

Briefing a CEO is not the same as managing a press conference. It's not the same as responding to social media criticism or maintaining stakeholder trust when information is incomplete and evolving. The distinction matters. You can have excellent internal communication capabilities and still be unprepared for the external demands of a major crisis.

Organizations report exercising and testing more than ever, yet human coordination failures remain the primary cause of emergency communication breakdowns. They're testing the wrong things.

An impressive 83.7% of organizations cite exercising and testing as a top outcome of their BC programs (BCI Continuity and Resilience Report, 2025, https://www.thebci.org). The BCI Emergency & Crisis Communications Report 2025 reveals a significant flaw in what's being tested: despite increased training and exercising, "human factors" such as lack of staff response and poor internal coordination remain the primary causes of emergency communication failures (F24, 2025, https://f24.com/en/bci-pr-ecc-report-2025).

Most testing focuses on technical systems. IT failover. Backup procedures. Operational recovery. Far less attention goes to whether the organization can actually craft and deliver appropriate messaging under pressure.

A robust notification system means nothing if no one has determined what message to send, who has authority to approve it, or how to adjust it as circumstances evolve. Plans are not capabilities. Having a crisis communication framework doesn't mean your spokespeople can handle hostile questions at 3 AM after eighteen hours of incident response.

Start conversations with your BC and resilience counterparts now, before the next crisis forces the issue. This isn't territory to claim—it's a partnership to build.

Business continuity professionals bring operational depth and technical expertise. Communication professionals bring stakeholder intelligence and narrative management. Neither function can deliver true organizational resilience alone.

Here are the essential questions to address with your BC colleagues:

Does your organization have clear ownership of crisis communication? In a real incident, who has the authority to approve external messaging within the first hour? If responsibility blurs across multiple functions, you've identified your first vulnerability.

When you test continuity plans, does that testing include realistic communication scenarios? Are spokespeople challenged with incomplete information, contradictory reports, and the kind of pressure that accompanies an actual crisis? If your testing stops at technical recovery, you're only preparing for half the challenge.

Who translates technical recovery details into stakeholder-appropriate messaging? Is that process defined and practiced? The middle of a crisis is the worst time to discover that no one owns this critical bridge between operational reality and public communication.

Have your plans adapted to distributed work environments? Do they still assume everyone's in the office and accessible through traditional channels? Remote work fundamentally changed crisis coordination. Your plans should reflect that reality.

Is there a board-level executive with clear accountability for crisis preparedness? This accountability must explicitly include the communication dimension, not just operational recovery.

The path forward requires genuine integration. BC and communication professionals need shared planning sessions, joint testing exercises, and collaborative frameworks that respect each discipline's expertise while creating unified response capabilities. We need to advocate together for board-level ownership that bridges both operational recovery and reputational protection.

True organizational resilience emerges when technical recovery and stakeholder trust advance in lockstep. When BC professionals and communicators work as partners rather than parallel functions, organizations don't just survive disruptions—they maintain the confidence of everyone who matters.

The alternative? Discovering during the next significant disruption that technical recovery and reputational recovery are equally critical, and you've only prepared for one.

The BCI report provides the evidence. What we do with it determines whether we're ready for what comes next.

The BCI Continuity and Resilience Report 2025 shows that 45.5% of organizations now formally separate "resilience" (strategic) from "business continuity" (operational), up from 39.4% in 2023. This creates an artificial divide that leaves crisis communication in dangerous middle ground without clear ownership.

When responsibility scatters across multiple executives—31.4% to CEO, 14% to COO, 8.3% to CRO—organizations lack the unified voice stakeholders demand during disruptions. The disconnect between operational knowledge and strategic authority produces weak, delayed, or contradictory messaging precisely when clarity matters most.

Organizations increased their valuation of communication skills for BC managers from 57.4% to 82.4% in one year, yet simultaneously made BC roles more operational and less strategic. They want better internal communicators to brief executives, but internal reporting requires fundamentally different skills than managing external crisis communication.

No. While 83.7% cite testing as a top program outcome, human coordination failures and poor internal coordination remain the primary causes of communication breakdowns. Most testing focuses on technical systems—IT failover, backups, operational recovery—rather than whether teams can craft and deliver appropriate messaging under pressure.

Start conversations now about clear crisis communication ownership, realistic communication scenario testing, defined processes for translating technical details into stakeholder messaging, adaptation to distributed work environments, and board-level accountability that explicitly includes communication dimensions alongside operational recovery.

Having a crisis communication framework doesn't mean your spokespeople can handle hostile questions at 3 AM after eighteen hours of incident response. A robust notification system means nothing if no one has determined what message to send, who has authority to approve it, or how to adjust it as circumstances evolve.

Remote work fundamentally changed crisis coordination. If your plans still assume everyone's in the office and accessible through traditional channels, you're preparing for a workplace configuration that no longer exists. Crisis protocols must reflect current distributed work realities.

The function closest to operational reality (business continuity) is becoming less strategic precisely when organizations need integrated crisis response most. This creates a critical blind spot where reputation management lacks both intimate knowledge of what's actually happening and the strategic authority to shape the narrative.

Boeing showed improvement over previous crises with CEO town halls and media appearances, yet critics noted the initial response lacked technical detail and personal accountability in the critical first hours. Even improved efforts struggled to overcome reputational damage from unclear authority and delayed response.

Board-level ownership must bridge both operational recovery and reputational protection. It requires explicit responsibility for crisis preparedness that includes communication dimensions, not just technical recovery plans. Without unified leadership, accountability fragments and response coordination suffers.

[1] Business Continuity Institute. (2025). BCI Continuity and Resilience Report 2025. Retrieved from https://www.thebci.org/

[2] Dittoe Public Relations. (2025, January 29). PR Lessons From the Biggest Crisis Communication Blunders of 2024. Retrieved from https://dittoepr.com/pr-lessons-from-the-biggest-crisis-communication-blunders-of-2024/

[3] F24. (2025, March 5). BCI Emergency & Crisis Communications Report 2025. Retrieved from https://f24.com/en/bci-pr-ecc-report-2025/

About the Author: Philippe Borremans is a crisis, risk and emergency communication consultant and organizational resilience expert. He provides training and consultation on crisis and emergency preparedness, helping organizations bridge the gap between operational continuity and reputational protection through his work at RiskComms.

Related Training: Crisis Communication Planning for 2026 – Next training webinar available.