Scotrail has had a tough time of it this week. And that meant extra time commuting, sat on a rail-replacement bus, pondering how best to tweet something hilarious about how they couldn’t have foreseen rain, in Scotland, in January and prevented this disruption.

Except I know it’s not that simple.

A lot of the jokes, complaints, and frazzled replies focused on the fact that they “can’t control the weather”, but saying that the rain was the root cause is a lazy answer, there are a whole bunch of other factors that could have had a cause: the pylon installed nearby for overhead cables, or the new electric trains on the line could have influenced conditions. And that’s just two things from an outsider’s view. Other factors like changes in maintenance, use of the land nearby, trespass incidents, and many many more things could have affected things in unpredictable ways, and this is just one small stretch of the railway.

It’s not simple because all these conditions make it near impossible to prevent disruptions like this from happening.

In these situations it’s better to make sure that you have a plan to get through the disruption as quickly as possible. First of all, have a communications strategy that gives the affected folk the right information at the right time, but also to make sure the information is consistent across all streams. Next, find a way to start operating at a reasonable level, Scotrail got a deal in place to use the existing bus routes, which helped get folk moving. Unfortunately their other plan to put in replacement busses between a couple of stations didn’t work as well, the drivers didn’t know the route and ended up getting stuck on back roads. The idea was fine, but a bit of testing might have helped pick up on this .

So while I couldn’t come up with the perfect, hilarious tweet, it was kind of interesting to think through what was going on and try to learn something from it. Focusing on minimising recovery time rather than on trying to prevent disasters again comes out as a better strategy for BCP.