Normal Business Continuity (BS) in itself need to have been in place in the organization for you to have a real value for continuity after disaster. The questions are: what are your disaster recovery programs (DRP) in place, who is responsible and what level of knowledge does the person or group possesses to ensures continuity BS. You need to go back to the BS documents and DRP management documents or charter. When was the last time an Audit of BS or DRP was done, etc.?. If there exist some level of positiveness in a good number of the questions then there is high rate of success for quick recovery and BS. Summarily, do have a BS and DRP management plans and do take time to audit them accordingly.

You could check CISCO and IEEE pages for a broad answer to your question.

The higher authority persons in the management has to be serious in those issues then only the decision making will be done properly of course. when  mistakes are happening the decision makers has to be prompt in their decisions if one receives positively or negatively,....

Normally, in a well managed organization, events and responses are established. The risks and actions are well assessed previously. Such risks depend on business operations. For a manufacturing plant and for an IT organization, these risks are different. 

But I assume that the "unexpected event" you are referring is not thought of previously and no specified action plans are available.

In such kind of cases, unexpected event is classified in different dimensions like time (what is the response time that is needed), Cost (what are the financial impacts), and Strategic impact that can be foreseen for the events.

Depending on these dimension, the nature of action and involvement of personnel as team gets decided. 

The fact that an organisation faces an "unexpected event" is a failure in itself. But if such a situation should nevertheless occur, then we must assume that the organisation neither had thought of the possibility of the event occurring nor does it have any immediate solution/plan of action for it. Hence, the best practices would include a thorough investigation of the likely consequences of the event on the organisation's future, followed by a brain-storming session in order to identify potential ways to deal with the situation (this may be to prevent harmful future consequences but might also mean to turn them into potential future opportunities, after all, every previously unknown and unexpected event can represent a future opportunity just as much as a future threat).

The key factor to handle surprises is preparedness. Yes, 'unexpected events' are by definition a surprise, but there are means to build up adaptive capacities that are beneficial in many different suprising situations. 

You may check out the work by Sheffi and others on resilient enterprises, or the recently founded X-Center Network (http://xcenternetwork.com/) - a community of researchers who deal with the question how to manage surprises.

Hi there Alix, to rephrase your question - what you're asking is, 'how an organization react to unplanned risks (=unplanned events) and how they need to be handled.

From project management perspective, the best practice is to add these two type of reserves to the cost of your project. One is 'Contingency reserve' (for known unknown aka. known uncertainties) and the other one is, 'Management reserve' (for unknown unknown). By adding a management reserve, you take care of unknown uncertainties. If you ask how much would you add, it is totally based on, 'expert judgement'.

I have explained this in terms of Project Management Institute (PMI) terms. The decision to add the reserves to the total cost during the initial period of project planning is the best practice.

The manager faces conditions of certainty, risk, and uncertainty, where the level of ambiguity is low, moderate, and high.

Unexpected events are natural part of systems management. We mustn't take them as extraordinary incidents. We should be prepared in terms of critical organizational resources. And, usual decision making procedures should be followed. Good luck.  

Proactive mgmt use scenario planning to reduce the impact of the unexpected events. even so, some serious unexpected events have sever effects over the firms ability to survive... in this case Crisis mgmt is needed to deal with this critical situation .... for more about crisis mgmt best practices :

http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=joursp

http://www.ipsos.com/public-affairs/sites/www.ipsos.com.public-affairs/files/Best_Practices_for_Crisis_Management-INTL.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1361372306703670

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0363811111002049

I, personal, believe that when preparing organization strategic plan. The executives need to be more cautious on any unexpected circumstances and have plan B. 

Moreover, the good executives must have a control&evaluation system and monitor them all the time. Even it is an annual strategic plan but you need to revise it from time to time and take action if there is anything does not goes with the plan. 

Lastly, I still believe that there is no the best practice in making decision but use your gut and take action. Not just having tons of report on your desk and do nothing. 

In such situations it recommends to ask the executive to use his strong relationships to solve issue could threat the continuity of business.

I prefer in such situation to avoid any meetings where most of organization conduct to solve the issue, which is wasting time.

Recommend to read "Tie management"

Dear Alix,

According to empirical evidence, heuristics may be the best practice.

Upananda

@ Islam - 'avoid any meetings where most of the organization conduct to solve the issue, which is waste of time' - I disagree with your view. 'Avoidance' is a bad idea. It is almost putting the things under the carpet. If it is not cleaned today, it has to be cleaned some day. Similarly, if you're not meeting and make a decision as how or when to solve the problem; it is still left unattended. If not solved today, it has to be solved someday. The more you delay, the more severe it becomes.

@ Upananda. Which empirical evidence you're referring to? I disagree with your assertion. If 'heuristics' is the best practice as you point out, then there is no need for any strategy or planning. I am not sure that is the case.

In large businesses, there are many constraints (time, cost, and quality, plus others) can be noted. Surely, any one can make a decision based on a trial and error method. However, when so much money, quality, or time constraints, I don't think, 'heuristics' could rescue some one. I am also not sure if you have any evidence to support your claim. An unexpected event, which are inherent to any business, can be devastating consequences, hence a management reserve needs to be planned. That said, they cannot be totally predictable or avoidable. If there is no lessons learned based on the historical information of their business practices, the unexpected needs to be tackled properly. I am not sure 'heuristics' will do a good job in such scenario! 

What if the unplanned event affects the production planning done?. For instance, manufacturing companies have to have their production planning according to confirmed  sales, foresting, capacity, costs,  among others. One of the suppliers cannot provide an important raw material for the manufacturing process and the plan made cannot be accomplished. Changing the plan it is not appropriate because it is really expensive and time consuming and the decision maker has to do something to allow the business continuity in timely fashion. If this decision maker has a decision support system (DSS) that help him to take better decisions effectively. Shouldn't be this an advantage for the business ?. This is just one example, but there are different kind of events that can affect the production planning such as, canceled customer orders, quality problems, labour problems, among others. Having a suggested  solution for  each kind of unplanned event could help the decision maker to take better decisions. 

I haven't found literature of DSS in this specific context. Any advice about this topic that can help me to keep developing the idea I have in mind?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

If strategic management was carried out right then we will refer back to the other alternatives or the different scenarios that were established earlier taking into consideration the unexpected changes in environmental factors where organizational wide participation is needed when preparing the strategic plan  

Generally, any business have a certain degree of uncertainty. With reference to your question .unexpected thing may refer to this uncertainty. Uncertainty, essentially deals with not knowing the probability of outcome resulting from from the 'unexpected thing'. Then you have no alternative than heuristic.   You do not have time to employ decision theory in the context of 'unexpected' situation.

Dear Alix,

What you are talking about is, the decision making under uncertainty where the decision maker has absolutely no knowledge, not even about the likelihood of occurrence for any state of nature.

In such situations, the decision maker's behavior is purely based on his/her attitude toward the unknown (Eiser, 1988). Some of these behaviors can be optimistic, pessimistic and least regret, among others.

For more details on the subject, you may refer to the following link

https://www.soa.org..../mono-2009-m-as09-1-damghani.pdf

I would say: Gather the people who have the intellectual capacities to solve the problem and give them the power to decide things.

Easy answer, I know. :)

Decision supporting tools: Well. actually ... no. This would have to be a very complex situation under rather specific circumstances.