Resilience has been a watchword of the pandemic from both an individual and an organizational perspective, with the huge uncertainties caused by Covid forcing many of us to dig deep into our reserves.

A new report from Cranfield Universities explores some of the organizational lessons we can learn from the past year.  The researchers interviewed 50 C-suite executives from a range of FTSE 100 companies, multinationals, and infrastructure organizations, and found that society is entering a new age of uncertainty.

Building resilience

The report includes a number of recommendations for how organizations can build resilience to help them cope with unexpected events, such as the pandemic.  They found that the most effective organizations were doing three key things:

• They understood what was most important to their customers and therefore what were the most essential things to continue to deliver as the crisis unfolded.
• If something went wrong, they knew what the thresholds of tolerable impacts to the customer/user were and had examined in advance alternative ways of delivering those outcomes that mattered the most.
• They had relentlessly stress-tested for possible disruption without worrying about what type of threat they might have to face – a cyberattack or a pandemic – learning how to cope when under pressure from challenges that might not be foreseeable or imaginable.

“We do not know what shape the next crisis will take but we can take proactive action to prepare,” the authors say.  “Businesses and organizations need to seize the learnings from this crisis and develop the agility to cope with the next. Whether it is another pandemic, another financial crisis, or threats from a cyber attack or climate change, the risks are multiple and complex but the capabilities of readiness, responsiveness, recoverability, and regeneration, the 4Rs, are ones that can be ingrained.”