With the UK having just experienced an extreme heatwave, July is a timely opportunity to remind ourselves that disruption doesn’t always hit with one big bang. Instead, it can creep up on organisations day by day, unfolding through a series of escalating yet familiar stressors: heat, absence, transport disruption, supplier pressures, technology dependency, customer demand and infrastructure capacity.

For businesses and organisations, seasonal disruption can raise issues that go beyond hot weather. It can be a test of business continuity, crisis management and operational resilience planning.

Because summer pressures aren’t simply about whether an organisation has a plan. They are about whether people, processes, suppliers and decision-making structures can deliver when multiple issues hit at the same time.

The Risks Are Familiar, But Impacts Are Evolving

One reason seasonal disruption can be overlooked is that it doesn’t feel like a crisis. Summer means hot weather, summer absence, holidaymakers on the move, public events and celebrations, lower water pressure and higher energy demand –plus a healthy dose of climate chaos!

Many of these challenges are familiar. But as the Met Office 20 June to 20 August Red Extreme Heat Warning showed, familiar risks can cause unfamiliar impacts. The Warning identified public health risks, infrastructure failures, transport delays, power and water shortages. For organisations, these issues translate into timely business continuity questions, such as:

  • If the premises become difficult to access or work in, can critical activities continue?
  • Are plans in place to consider vulnerable employees, lone workers, field-based staff and customer-facing teams?
  • Are any suppliers, transportation routes or third-party facilities likely to be most impacted?
  • Do we rely on technology or data centres that could be affected by the heat, power demand or cooling restrictions?
  • Who decides when to change opening hours, suspend activities or enact contingency plans?

The reason these questions matter is that disruption doesn’t usually fit neatly into categories. Extreme heat can become a people, facilities, supply chain, communications and customer service issue all at once.

Back to Basics Doesn’t Mean Standing Still

When it comes to risk, there has been a lot of recent discussion around artificial intelligence, cyberattacks, data centres, climate volatility, war and insurance gaps. All are important topics, but they don’t detract from resilience basics.

They heighten the importance of them.

If an organisation has well-established business continuity management arrangements, it should be able to identify critical activities, dependencies, recovery time objectives, single points of failure and response structures. It should also be able to demonstrate governance, accountability and commitments to exercising, validation, maintenance and continual improvement.

Put simply, if we can ask (and answer) the following questions about our organisation, we are starting from a position of strength:

  • What activities must continue at all costs?
  • What activities could be paused or suspended?
  • Are there alternative ways of working if we can’t access usual premises or systems?
  • Who has the authority to make decisions when pressures rise?

Tools and plans are helpful, but resilience is built when those plans are understood by people, exercised, challenged and improved.

Seasonal Disruption Can Be a Realistic Planning Exercise

Seasonal risks can help organisations test themselves before they face the next major disruptive event. There are plenty of potential stress points for July and August, giving organisations a useful opportunity to reflect on their resilience posture now.

A review doesn’t need to be overly complex. It should be considered, proportionate and focused on practical operational impacts.

Helpful areas to consider include:

  • People – welfare checks, summer absences, role coverage, escalation routes and vulnerable workers
  • Premises – cooling, ventilation, access, fire risks, security presence, maintenance schedules and site-specific contingencies
  • Technology – dependency on systems that high temperatures could impact, reliance on data centres, remote working capability, cyber mitigations and assumptions for tech recovery
  • Suppliers – critical third parties, logistics routes, supplier lead times, alternative providers and visibility of supplier continuity plans
  • Communications – internal messaging, customer communications, stakeholder updates and decision logs
  • Leadership – trigger points, delegated authorities, meeting cadence and acting on incomplete information

Business continuity and crisis management are two sides of the same coin. Continuity exercises help us understand what matters and how to keep it running. Crisis management gives us the structures we need to lead, coordinate and communicate if conditions change rapidly.

Like cyber security and climate change, these issues are connected.

The UK Government Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024/25 found that 43% of businesses had experienced a cyber breach or attack in the last year. Cyber incidents are here and present. There is a risk they could be amplified when organisations are already facing seasonal pressures.

For example, during a hot spell, teams may be more reliant on remote work, temporary work processes, supplier workarounds and urgent communications. This creates an opportunity for cybercriminals to target employees through phishing, impersonation scams, misuse of confidential data or pressure into making decisions.

The simple mitigation is that cyber resilience, business continuity and crisis communications planning should not happen in isolation from one another. A real incident will likely require elements of all three to be present.

What Questions Should Organisations Be Asking?

To help, we’ve shared some practical questions organisations can use to review their readiness during periods of seasonal disruption. Ideally, these conversations should take place across leadership teams, not just within risk or resilience functions.

Key questions include:

  • Which activities are critical for us during summer disruption?
  • Have we mapped dependencies including people, premises, tech, suppliers and information?
  • Are our people aware of the plan and how they would be involved?
  • Have we exercised our plans through a realistic scenario?
  • Do our comms plans work when put under pressure?
  • Have we learned from previous incidents, exercises or near misses?
  • Do we have evidence of resilience to demonstrate to insurers, regulators, clients or other stakeholders?

Hopefully these are actionable questions that prompt practical discussions. Because they’re not designed to be theoretical, they are governance questions that help organisations bridge the gap between having a plan and actually feeling confident they can handle pressure when it arrives.

Testing Builds Confidence

If there is one thing that leading organisations do to build resilience confidence, it is practising through exercises.

The best exercises don’t aim to catch people out. Instead, they help teams understand their roles, test assumptions, assess dependencies, practise decision-making and improve communication before a real incident happens.

Exercises that replicate potential summer disruption may include elements of the pressures listed above. Extreme heat, site closures, supplier delays, reliance on technology that might not be fully functioning and greater customer demand. The value lies not in predicting exactly what will happen, but how the organisation thinks, communicates and adapts when pressure is applied.

The best organisations use exercises as part of a virtuous cycle of continual improvement. They capture lessons, assign actions to individuals, review and update plans as a result and build resilience capability year on year. The risk landscape can feel complex, but building resilience doesn’t have to start with complexity. It can start with clarity.

Clear governance. Clear priorities. Clear dependencies. Clear response processes. Clear communication. Clear ownership of continuous improvement.

Seasonal disruption is something that every organisation will face. Use it as an opportunity to test whether your resilience posture is helping you protect people, sustain critical operations and feel confident about making decisions when those pressures hit.

Thanks for reading,

The Horizonscan Team