Resilience Reimagined: A Practical Guide for Organisations

Define impact thresholds

Balance strategic choices

Consider connected impacts

Understand essential outcomes

Stress test thresholds

Discuss future failure

Enable adaptive leadership

BALANCE STRATEGIC CHOICES: A selection of quotes from the research

“It’s about building resilience. What can you do ahead of time to make sure that when something happens that your people are more resilient and better able to step up and act when an extreme event takes place.”

Key considerations: • How progressive or defensive is the mindset in your organisation? • How flexible or consistent is the design in your organisation? • How do you balance tensions and leverage a ‘both/and’ mindset? • What further investment is required to maintain EOs within acceptable impact thresholds?

“In highly regulated industries they really don’t like the grey areas, but the truth is when something like this, and this is a pandemic; it could be an earthquake or it could be an act of terrorism or whatever it happens to be, there will always be grey areas.”

“Making sure that we are sustainable and as an organisation in financial services is doubly difficult because concurrently you’re having to use every available piece of capital to either shore up the balance sheet, right now, or invest in technology, because that’s going to be the only long term saviour of your organisation.”

“One thing we’re currently going through is being really honest about our risk appetite statements. Asking ‘what really is our risk appetite here?’ We say we have no tolerance for that type of risk, but our investment strategy doesn’t justify that. And by the way, it’s not affordable.”

“A lot of our business continuity plans are tailored around the supply chain that we might be managing for a customer. If you want to do something organisational you need to have some common ways of working; common standards so that results become flexible.”

“One of the benefits of the principles and outcomes-based approach Is that it allows firms to effectively innovate in a way that suits them.”

“We’ve made decisions at a far faster rate than we’ve ever made in our normal business cycle, than pre-COVID, so the risk balanced decision- making was in pieces. The need to make a decision, to actually do something is now.”

31 Resilience Reimagined: A practical guide for organisations