Resilience reimagined

The world is seeing increasing volatility arising from developments such as climate change, pandemics, geopolitical shifts and accelerating technological innovation. In the face of these disruptors, risk management tools and systems are falling short, and a new paradigm is emerging. Executive leaders must approach risk differently and consider its impact across the organisation. Today, they’re looking at organisational resilience as the ability to survive and prosper in the face of sudden disruptions and incremental change. Enabling this requires a suite of capabilities that should be in place before disruption strikes. These include having the capacity to diligently scan the horizon, anticipate coming shocks, and put measures in place to minimise the impact. This is essential to reorient the organisation for success in an impacted, evolving environment.

Economist Impact conducted an in-depth research programme sponsored by Iron Mountain to identify the changing organisational interpretations of resilience and provide guidance on planning, building and maintaining a global entity amid significant disruptions. The research included a bespoke survey of 611 senior executives across four major regions (North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia-Pacific) in highly regulated sectors (financial services, healthcare and life sciences, energy, and the public sector). The report’s key findings include:

• Organisations are increasingly persuaded by the importance of a system-wide approach to resilience. Experiencing the covid-19 pandemic, climate change incidents and global conflicts have accelerated this trend.
• Leaders express a high degree of optimism about their organisation’s resilience, but this may reflect some complacency. Having responded to the covid-19 pandemic, executives may now be overly confident in their ability to survive a more sudden crisis.
• Organisations that focus on resilience outperform peers on several key metrics, particularly customer satisfaction. These advantages are reflected where it matters most: the bottom line.
• The risk of cyberattacks and data breaches remains the critical driver of resilience efforts, both anchored in data and IT asset protection strategies.
• The key to successfully building organisational resilience is creating connections between functions within the enterprise, including finance, legal, HR, IT, records and facilities management, supply chain management, and risk and compliance functions. This, in turn, requires deploying the budget and personnel needed to make it effective.

Download to read the full Economist report