Resilience Reimagined: A Practical Guide for Organisations

Discuss future failure

Consider connected impacts

Understand essential outcomes

Define impact thresholds

Balance strategic choices

Stress test thresholds

Enable adaptive leadership

UNDERSTAND ESSENTIAL OUTCOMES: A selection of quotes from the research

“What matters is whether a customer can make a payment. That might take 37 different applications and it might take a whole set of different people in the organisation, but it’s that, that matters, not whether a single component is resilient or not, or what the recovery time is of that component. It’s no good having a 2 hour recovery in one thing, and a 24 hour recovery in another.”

“That switch to outcome thinking is one that people really have to believe in, in order to implement operational resilience properly.”

Key considerations: • How is the EO delivered? • What might prevent the delivery or recovery of the EO? • Could the EO be delivered by alternate means? • Do we have sufficient flexibility to deliver the EO even in severe or extreme scenarios?

“I think the resilience debate has gone from traditional business continuity, thinking about systems and applications, to thinking more about outcomes. How you could provide those outcomes in alternate ways through periods of disruption? How do you test your ability to be able to do that in periods of disruption? It’s a much more customer and market centric way of thinking about what’s important, rather than an internal ‘what’s important to the firm?’ perspective.”

“You have to be comfortable making a whole series of really rapid decisions. It starts with the understanding of your organisation. The truth is that a lot of organisations don’t truly understand themselves.”

“You need to manage the risks but the cost to provide a seamless customer journey is huge, but it’s happened, even for some of the bigger organisations by outsourcing to third parties. They are essentially a three-platform business.”

“The person responsible for the P&L of that important business outcome is where the accountability for the resilience choices sit. That’s the only way you will drive a balanced conversation horizontally across the organisation.”

20 Resilience Reimagined: A practical guide for organisations