One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose.
— Randy Pausch
Unconventional Contingency Plans quotations
And even, if circumstances required, a contingency plan for his contingency plan's contingency plan.

We have contingency plans for war, but none for peace.

But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.
Presidents and Lyndon Johnson was really no exception, very rapidly learned the difference between a contingency plan and an authorized act.
In the army we are drilled into execution and then supervision, to make sure everything goes the way you planned it. But there is another thing that we do in the military, that I think perhaps isn't done enough in corporate life: As soon as you have made that decision, you start on the contingency planning. Because there is, as we like to say, a thinking, breathing enemy out there, who is not going to let you do just what you want.

There is nearly always uh, a process of wanting contingency plans made in the military.
I would tell startups to just keep your head down, keep building.
Your contingency plan, if you have one, should be because you are still spending more than you make and you still don't have a line of sight for that J curve. That is the most important contingency. Because otherwise you are betraying that equation to your cofounders, to your investors, to your employees and to your customers.
[Young people] can't do much with [student debt] other than try to figure out how to pay it down. They can't take jobs they want. They can't get the credit they would like to start a business. So we're going to refinance it, we're going move people into income-contingent repayment plans, we're going to have a date certain when their obligations end, and I'm not going to let the government harass kids.

By admitting they have no contingency plan to assist the millions that may lose subsidies, the administration confirms how the misguided law is unworkable for the American people. I’m committed to working with my Republican colleagues on how Congress can respond to help those hurt by Obamacare’s broken promises.
In all cultures, it is the task of a religion to close the field of contingency ...and to set up havens of the absolute where it is possible to be led from acting to listening, from having to being, from planning to hoping, from judging to forgiving from the finite into the infinite. A society in which such open spaces of eternity do not exist or are only insufficiently developed dies of itself due to lack of air to breathe.
There are contingency plans in the NATO doctrine to fire a nuclear weapon for demonstrative purposes, to demonstrate to the other side that they are exceeding the limits of toleration in the conventional area.

Certainly, I know what to do, and when I am Vice President -- and I will be -- there will be contingency plans under different sets of situations and I tell you what, I'm not going to go out and hold a news conference about it. I'm going to put it in a safe and keep it there! Does that answer your question?
The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.