We hear the term resilience often. What does it mean?

It is the ability of people or things to quickly recover after something unpleasant such as shock or injury – Oxford Dictionary

So, if it is about recovering then surely prevention is better than a cure, right? To help make your organisation more resilient there are a lot of things you can do.

Horizon scanning.

This term has always been one to pop up throughout my career as a risk professional. Looking into the future, semi-predicting patterns based on information at your disposal. For example, the UK’s National Risk Register in previous years had identified a pandemic, years before COVID struck.

In the 2023 National Risk Register the statement ‘no risk assessment will ever be able to identify and assess every possible risk'. However, in this report the risks have been categorised into main headers:

• Terrorism, Cyber and State Threats
• Geographic and Diplomatic
• Accidents and System Failures
• Natural and Environmental Hazards
• Human, Animal and Plant Health
• Societal
• Conflict and Instability

‘no risk assessment will ever be able to identify and assess every possible risk
What can you do?

• Understand the risks, particularly locally and relevant to you and your business operations. Do you have a risk and opportunity register?
• Take steps to prepare for, prevent and mitigate the impact of risks. Do a risk assessment.
• Know how to respond. Who are your key people and parties to get involved when it comes to response?
• Help with recovery. Commit to taking action post event, learn lessons and apply what has been learned.

Ongoing health checks for the organisation are important. Commit to running drills or desk stop studies of scenarios and how the business could and would respond. Keep it working, keep it live, keep reviewing and revising it.
It doesn’t need to be too complex but the situation in the business does need to be challenged. So, getting someone external to help, to challenge comfort zones, to challenge the culture of ‘this is how we do it’ and to help stress test the systems will pay off.

 How resilient is your organisation?