Every DR plan I have seen boils down to two numbers, RTO and RPO. Both objectives assume the people executing the plan are calm and actually reading the runbook.

At 3am during a real incident, none of that is true. Ask me how I know!

Twenty years ago, before I stumbled into data, I worked as a paramedic with the German Red Cross, where I learned about Crisis Resource Management. Aviation built CRM after a run of crashes where the airplanes worked and the teams didn't. Medicine had similar problems and adopted the concepts wholesale.

In this session we will explore what happens to a human brain under incident pressure, and why runbooks written for calm people fail the moment panic arrives. We will also look at what teams owe each other during and after. We will tackle how to keep the person in charge and the team around them functional when everyone is scared, tired, and can barely see past the next step.

Whether you carry the pager or own the DR plan, you will leave with a different way of reading it and a handful of named techniques borrowed from a line of work where crisis is daily business. You can start using them Monday morning.