By Ann Marie van den Hurk, Mind The Gap Advisory
Run this thought experiment with me.
You disappear tomorrow. Completely unavailable for 24 hours. No phone, no email, no Slack. No one can reach you and you cannot reach anyone.
What breaks first?
Not as a hypothetical. As a diagnostic.
Walk through the 24 hours
Eight in the morning. Your team arrives. Someone has a question that would normally come to you. They send a message. No response. They wait. They try another channel. At some point they either make the call themselves — if they feel authorized to — or they put it aside and hope you surface before it matters.
Which one happens in your organization?
Noon. Something develops that needs a decision. Not a crisis. Just a normal operational moment that requires someone with authority to say yes. Your deputy steps in, or tries to. But there is uncertainty about scope. About whether this falls within what they are empowered to handle. The conversation takes longer than it should. People are careful in a way that costs time.
Three in the afternoon. A vendor needs a response. A partner is waiting on approval. A regulatory question comes in with a time component. The team knows roughly what you would do. But knowing what you would do and being authorized to do it are two different things.
End of day. How many decisions got made? How many got deferred? How many got made correctly but without the authority trail that documents it properly?
What breaks first is almost always where governance drift has concentrated. Follow the breakage and you find the dependency. Find the dependency and you find the gap that needs to be closed before something more serious than a thought experiment surfaces it.
What the data says about decision latency
Sygnia’s analysis of major cyber incidents from 2025 named the real problem.
What failed was not intent. It was not effort. It was not technology.
It was the way decision-making structures performed under pressure.
Incident response plans defined notification paths. They stopped short of clearly assigning decision authority. So when incidents surfaced, leadership teams waited for confirmation on scope, intent, or impact before triggering broader response actions. Legal, communications, and business stakeholders evaluated risk from different perspectives, each reasonably cautious about acting too early.
While teams worked to align, response timelines extended. Operational impact increased. External obligations accumulated.
Decision latency, not attacker sophistication, became the dominant driver of damage.
Sygnia, 2026
That is the thought experiment made real. The scenario where a key decision maker is unavailable, the team is operating without clear authority, and decisions are being deferred is not a hypothetical. It is what the first 20 minutes of a serious incident actually looks like.
A breach does not wait for you to land
A regulatory notice does not pause while your team figures out who can respond. An AI-generated deepfake of your CEO circulating on a Friday afternoon does not care that you are at a conference.
Most organizations have incident response plans. Very few have tested whether their decision authority structure holds when the pressure is on and the right person is not reachable.
For organizations working toward CMMC compliance, incident response requires designated personnel who can act — documented, trained, and authorized. If those personnel can only act with confidence when you are watching, your incident response plan has a single point of failure.
That failure will surface in an assessment or in an actual incident. One of those is recoverable.
What the thought experiment is actually telling you
Most executives already know what would break first. They just have not said it out loud.
It is the decision that only they can make. The approval that only they can give. The call that everyone waits for because no one is certain they are authorized to make it without them.
That knowledge is not a comfort. It is a data point.
The organizations that will contain incidents fastest are not the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They are the ones that enter an incident with clear authority, practiced coordination, and a realistic view of how decisions actually get made under pressure.
That clarity does not come from the plan. It comes from knowing, before the incident, who is authorized to act.
What breaks first in the thought experiment is worth more than any governance framework document you have ever produced. It tells you exactly where the framework is not actually working.
Run the thought experiment seriously. The answer is already there.
If you already know what would break first
Governance Gap Map
A 90-minute structured session that surfaces where governance drift has created decision authority gaps — and what that exposure looks like before a mandate, deadline, or incident forces it into view. Written finding delivered within 48 hours.
Ann Marie van den Hurk, MSc., APR is the founder of Mind The Gap Advisory and originator of the CrisisOS5™ Framework. She advises CISOs, General Counsel, Chief Risk Officers, and boards on decision authority and executive crisis readiness for the AI era. Based in Newport, Rhode Island — serving organizations across New England, nationally, and globally. mindthegapcyber.com