Many people around the world today will have woken up to the pictures of the fire at Heathrow. To say it will have caused disruption is an understatement – its not just those people going on holiday or travelling on business, but the amount of freight handled every day. And of course, the c1300 flights a day that are now disrupted.

This is the analogy that initially struck me – like payments, airports are highly orchestrated, and most depend on knowing when payments/planes will arrive to co-ordinate a range of “integration” points – baggage handlers, customs staffing, cleaners etc.

I’ve seen a number of comments on LinkedIn essentially saying that this would never happen in my industry – we have back-up generators, contingency plans etc. In fairness to Heathrow, the substation that caught fire isn’t owned or run by them, and isn’t even on the airport and Heathrow does have back-up generators and contingency plans.

Yet I’m reminded that the comments are possibly true but only because that industry has already learnt that lesson the hard way. Many, many years ago, one of my previous employers discovered that the UK phone system wasn’t as resilient or well designed as the phone operator had thought. The initial fault was such that it brought down the entire UK phone network including the back-up circuits, cutting off the UK payment systems for much of a day. It’s also that we are much more aware of the risks as well in some industries. One large payments processor used to run its back up systems in the basement of the building of their main site. It was only freak weather flooding that basement that spurred them into action to re-think.

For me there are a few take-aways for banks.

The UK banking industry carries out regular “war games” where certain scenarios are tested to see what would happen. The reason that banks were relatively unaffected during the Covid pandemic is because a number of years earlier one war game was the impact of bird flu. This included large numbers of staff becoming ill, and some areas being placed in quarantine. The industry learnt a lot, though many felt it was highly unlikely. In fact, Covid was significantly worse than the scenarios, proving that you can never anticipate everything.

No contingency plan can cater for eventuality – or should. Instead, they should understand the likelihood of something happening, what the risks are associated and the costs for managing this. Yes, we could be hit by an asteroid but….?

For example, it’s being reported that Heathrow didn’t have enough back-up generators to power the entire site. At the same time, many other things worked perfectly. Air-traffic control seamlessly switched, and (so far) not a single incidence of note has been reported. Flights were re-routed. There was disruption but there wasn’t disaster.

Instead, it’s about understanding what might happen, what you might be able to do, and rank based on current understanding. Those contingency plans need to be revisited on a regular basis. I’ve worked in a number of places where the hand-over from night shift to day shift is known as morning prayers – as everyone prays that nothing had happened overnight. I think it’s also telling that at a personal level, many IT people will say something along the lines of “there but for the grace of god go I”. There is a recognition that it could happen to me tomorrow, so I will offer to help, and I will learn from this may happen to me tomorrow.