Organisational resilience is often viewed as a firm’s ability to bounce-back and continue performing to meet its objectives in the face of one or multiple challenges.

However, it’s about more than just overcoming a ‘shock.’ It’s an ongoing, conscious process that represents the ability to absorb, adapt, transform and continue to thrive in the face of multiple threats.

There are two key elements to consider – ‘Planned Resilience’ and ‘Adaptive Resilience.’

Organisations exhibit planned resilience by using pre-existing policies, such as business continuity or risk management tactics to avoid or minimise the effect of a crisis. These can include preparing plans for during and after a period of natural disruption, such as a flood, pandemic, fire or even a terrorist attack.

Adaptive resilience emerges after a crisis, as organisations develop new approaches by responding to emerging situations. Although both planned and adaptive resilience is essential, the latter is more sustainable in the context of uncertainty and what the future may bring.

In effect, a resilient organisation is one that remains able to achieve its core objectives in the face of adversity by being situationally aware and adaptive.

Pandemic resilience lessons

By way of example, some of the main resilience takeaways for organisations following the pandemic include:

• The need for agility. Agile businesses emphasise quick decision-making, sound processes, investment in the right technology, and flexible structures – these are the organisations that survived and even thrived during the pandemic.
• Larger firms appear more resilient, recover faster, and adapt more quickly than smaller entities. This is due to them having higher capabilities and more resources.
• Firms that quickly switched to remote and blended working were less likely to face closures and recovered more rapidly, signalling higher resilience and adaptability.
• Businesses participating in government assistance programs showed little real improvement in firm outcomes. By contrast, firms that participated in international trade showed more resilience and adaptability in the face of the shock.
• Businesses that thought traditional 9-to-5, in-office working benefited the organisation more than remote and hybrid work are now rethinking worker demographics, job selection, and compensation packages.
• The importance of, and benefits from, technology were quickly recognised, maintaining high employee engagement, retention, and productivity, which in turn have accelerated organisations’ digital transformation.

The need for collective commitment

Resilience cannot be achieved by any one organisation acting alone. It requires sustained, collective commitment, as well as:

• Finding a balance between ‘what is possible’ and ‘what is practical.’
• Top management sharing a vision of what needs to be achieved. Once ‘what the end goal might look like’ is visualised, it’s far easier to have people buy in and commit to making it happen.
• Overcoming differences of vision and motivations. This is a crucial step towards building a shared-vision of what needs to be achieved.
• Ensuring ongoing commitment. Resilience requires an ongoing programme of work to be established and resourced.
• Maintaining a healthy organisational culture – resilient organisations are positively underpinned by less tangible aspects of a business, such as culture, leadership, and vision.
• Critical qualities that are fundamental to helping different parts of an organisation work together to achieve a common objective. These encompass: Capable leadership; sound communication; a shared vision and priorities across the organisation; rrusting relationships within the organisation and with key stakeholders.
• A sound reputation – protecting the organisation’s reputation during a disaster while being resilient and maintaining inter-organisational cooperation and privacy concerns is critical. Once reputation is lost, resilience will also suffer.
• Sound plans and documented processes.
• An organisational structure that’s agile to take quick and effective actions.
• A trained workforce that can enact strategy and processes in a coordinated manner.
• Technology that can shape the user experience to maintain productivity.
• Skilled staff to tackle immediate challenges.

Re-imagining the future

Factors that some organisations already had in place to help them weather the pandemic were that they were agile as a response, rather than as a planned mindset, which relies on moving several levers simultaneously to remain viable.

Re-imagining the future and focusing on business-critical dependencies such as processes and assets can have a material impact.

Some organisations were able to move from office-based working to entirely virtual operations within just three days. Some also introduced wellbeing programmes designed to support their people.

This shift emphasised online services and adjusted supply chains accordingly and some businesses continue to repurpose their operations to produce different products, or offer various services that are in demand as they futureproof additional revenue streams.

These organisations rethought their ways of working and created central rapid response teams to tackle strategic priorities and the entity’s critical challenges. Others developed networks that became self-sustaining and self-managing, championing radical transparency and authenticity.