In physics, resilience is the ability of an elastic material to absorb energy and release that energy as it springs back to its original shape. Organizations and individuals can be resilient as well. Actually, you will hear the word resilience more and more these days. It is mentioned as the new robust to cope with the opportunities and risks of new developments and existing interdependencies.

Complexity and interconnectedness

The world starts to be more and more complex and is rapidly changing. We, organizations, communities, people are relying on an interconnected web of technology and infrastructure. The rate of changes and its impact on human beings and the environment, are challenging and may attribute to incidents, near misses and natural disasters.

To keep pace with the changes and respond effectively to unexpected events, people and organizations need to understand which factors attribute to a sustained and continuing process. They need to be able to effectively respond to an event, absorb change and where needed adapt to the new circumstances to continue and maintain their competitive edge and profitability.

Creating agility

We can mention an infinite number of disruption scenarios here; fires, IT-hacks, disruptive new technologies, climate change, political changes to name a few. Leading organizations however do not manage specific scenarios, they create the agility and flexibility to cope with turbulent situations.

The Human Element

An organization is as good as its people supporting it. With increased artificial intelligence, virtual reality possibilities and subsequent robotization of processes, the Human Element is gaining more and more importance. Without always realizing themselves, the workforce must adapt rapidly to support the organizations resilience. This requires creative and adaptive leadership and an open culture in which people have trust to excel and contribute to the organizations’ resilience.

But that is risk management!

It sounds like old ideas parading as new ones. As humans we are fallible. We are biased and can permeate an organization’s thinking about foreseeable risk. We tend to discount scenarios that have not occurred in our experience. And those that occurred in the past are not always an adequate guide to foresee all future risks. We must live with that.

Coping with the unforeseen

Resilience is more than risk management. It requires a different approach. It means you need to acknowledge that you can run into unforeseeable circumstances. You need to understand how well the organization is prepared to cope with that. You must be able to recognize the symptoms which may attribute to a slow response or even worse, no response at all to changes. Resilience is the new robust.