Summary: Operational resilience is about a firm’s ability to adapt to shocks and maintain essential services, focusing on customer needs rather than just internal processes. It encourages organizations to plan for extreme scenarios and operate in degraded states, ensuring that critical functions can continue even under stress. This approach transforms traditional business continuity planning by emphasizing the importance of understanding and managing risks across all areas of the business.
Operational Resilience is the ability of firms and the financial system as a whole to absorb and adapt to shocks, rather than contribute to them (View Highlight)
But like the old adage of planning being more useful than plans, the very act of shifting the mindset of leadership to make the hard choices of what are the minimum viable delivery objectives and to contemplate more extreme, but still plausible, disaster scenarios to push the limits of recoverability will drive more resilient outcomes. This is different to traditional business continuity planning processes that often deliberately exclude such scenarios and focus on recoverability of all services, or worse, prioritize recovery of that which is most critical for the business vs. most critical for the customers. (View Highlight)
Much of our cyber-physical resilience focus to date is to manage lagging indicators of performance. This, so-called outcome based approach, is necessary but it’s not at all sufficient. What you really need, especially for resilience, is to focus on leading indicators. (View Highlight)