Five reasons to invest in resilience - success, culture, knowledge, efficiency and muscle

1.      Business success

Business success is my top reason for investing in organisational resilience. Creeping failure, turbulence and shocks disrupt business as usual, undermine business success and impact on business as usual – thus the key reason for investing in resilience. The rest of the reasons are also closely linked to business success but this is one that has to be called out as the priority reason to invest in resilience.

2.      Organisation culture

While it is not good to be hyper sensitive to potential failures, it is important to be change ready and adaptive. The good health of any organisation requires the team and its leaders to be moving in the same direction.  As a practical tool, emergency, crisis or disaster exercises are a great team building activity that have organisational value. Next time you are thinking about investing in a cultural change or transformation program, look at how emergency exercises may compliment the program. Alternatively, get a business and stakeholder group together and throw at them a wicked problem that is in their mutual interest to solve but outside their normal responsibilities. Resilience is a great way to build a good culture internally and across the supply chain.

3.      Knowledge advantage

Any business worth its salt recognises the value of knowledge. Risk intelligence is a critical element of business resilience and success. We live in a connected world characterised by complexity. Our scanning and sensing activities should focus on understanding this complexity. This includes the interrelationships between economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and technical forces (and many more). When we invest in resilience incorporating risk intelligence, we are placed to succeed.

4.      Business efficiency

The practical aspect of resilience involves the business functions of risk management, emergency management, security management (or security risk management), business continuity management and other aligned disciplines. While ‘other’ is listed here, don’t underestimate the importance of human resource management, business improvement and business planning sections of your business in contributing to resilience. Risk based decision making and disruption or resource based planning are not new. Having silos in the mentioned areas will potentially increase organisational costs, result in duplication, or most dangerously result in a tug of war over finite business resources that is not only unnecessary but can also lead to business failure. Avoid silos and misdirected resourcing at all costs and leverage aligned organisational functions. 

5.      Muscle

Efficient and appropriate investment in resilience will ensure the lean characteristics of the business or supply chain are not creating an unacceptable vulnerability that will lead to business failure. The resilient supply chain for example, needs to include some redundancy or contingency to allow agility and adaptive capacity to be leveraged when complexity strikes. This is not fat, it is lean muscle – Resilience ensures the bones that make up the supply chain are supported, lending strength, endurance and short bursts of speed and agility at need. While this is closely related to efficiency, it also ensures survival of the most adaptive and may include lower recovery costs and improved market position over the competition when things go wrong.