Resilience (organizational)

British Standard, BS65000(2014) defines "organisational resilience" as "ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, and respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper."

In recent years, a new consensus of the concept of resilience emerged as a practical response to the decreasing lifespan of organisations and from the key stakeholders, including boards, governments, regulators, shareholders, staff, suppliers and customers to effectively address the issues of security, preparedness, risk, and survivability.

An organization that realizes the benefits of the above definitions of resilience will have a high likelihood of maintaining a successful and thriving enterprise.

Previously, it was considered that 'organisational resilience' could only be generated from processes and functions such as Risk Management, Business Continuity, IT Disaster Recovery, Crisis Management, Information Security, Operational continuity, Physical Security and so on. These are recognised as key contributors to operational resilience, and “the positive ability of a system or company to adapt itself to the consequences of a catastrophic failure caused by power outage, a fire, a bomb or similar” event or as "the ability of a [system] to cope with change". However, research from many academics including as Hamel & Valikangas in the Harvard Business Review, Boin, Comfort & Demchak and research facility ResOrgs has influenced understanding and lead to new viewpoints on resilience, including that from the BSI Group, being developed by ISO, the Australian government, ResOrgs,ICSA, and professional services firms such as PwC, all of which recognises that processes and functions are but one element of an organisation's resilience web.

Global turbulence is expected. Competition, instability and uncertainty are constants in a changing world. Organizations face an unprecedented and growing number of potential disruptions to the status quo and the best laid strategic plans. As history repeats itself, prominent organizations will fail unless modern risk management and governance models incorporate scalable resilience metrics.

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