Resilience Reimagined: A Practical Guide for Organisations

Discuss future failure

Consider connected impacts

Understand essential outcomes

Stress test thresholds

Define impact thresholds

Balance strategic choices

Enable adaptive leadership

LEAD THROUGH DIRECTION, ALIGNMENT & COMMITMENT: A selection of quotes from the research

“Resilience is dependent on our whole organisation.”

“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, you know common standards so that results become flexible.”

Key consideration: • How do

“If you’ve got a comms function, use them to proactively help you manage communications and don’t just have the technical people trying to communicate at a technical level because we have to get this message out to everybody.”

“COVID-19 has taught us a lot about resilience, particularly resilience over time and maybe reacting in ways that we might never be expected to again as an organisation. Behaviourally it’s been quite important, but it hasn’t taught us everything about resilience. We still have to go through a pretty rigorous intellectual and operational process to make sure that we are more comfortable that we have all the systems in place that we might need.”

people in your organisation achieve direction, alignment, and commitment to resilience?

“I think that the boards of banks have a duty to make sure that everyone who works in a bank owns operational resilience.”

“Are the people who work in that organisation, who need to be there to make sure that the systems work, both willing, do they trust the organisation, do they understand the risk and the context in which they’re working, do they trust the government that they’re trying to manage that risk? Not only are they able to get on a train or to drive to work, but are they also willing to carry on doing their job.”

“It’s the difference between the formal organisation and the informal organisation – which is what actually happens. What people actually do. A lot of controls fall down because they’re designed by well meaning, but systems thinking people who have no understanding of how human beings and the human brain and risk perception actually work.”

“The fact that you’ve got built-in resilience, to fail away from problems, doesn’t always work. Initially it didn’t work for us because people were too nervous to press the button in case something went wrong.”

39 Resilience Reimagined: A practical guide for organisations