The Plan Is Not the Capability
A continuity plan is the residue of thinking, not the thinking itself. Most organisations confuse the document for the muscle.
Every organisation I've worked with that took a serious hit during a real incident had a continuity plan. Many had thick ones. Glossy, version-controlled, signed off by a steering committee, sitting in a SharePoint folder that took three clicks to find at 2am. The plan was not the problem. The plan being mistaken for the capability — that was the problem.
A plan is an artefact. It captures a moment of thinking by a small group of people, usually under fluorescent lights, usually months before the thing it's supposed to cover. The capability is something else entirely. It lives in the muscle memory of the team on shift, the clarity of the decision rights, the small habits of escalation that either exist or don't when the pager goes off.
You can audit a plan in an afternoon. You cannot audit a capability without putting it under load. This is why exercises matter more than documents, and why a half-tested plan is more useful than a perfect one nobody has read. The act of rehearsal is what converts intent into reflex.
The honest test is uncomfortable: pick a random Tuesday, take the most experienced person in the room out for the day, and watch what happens. If the response sags, you have a plan. If it holds, you have a capability. Most organisations don't want to know the answer, which is precisely why they should.