While resilience has rightly jumped up management agendas in operational risk domains such as IT and supply chain, thereby building upon the foundations laid by business continuity and disaster recovery practices, there is still a sense that resilience needs to break out from the operational level, if it is to truly deliver on its promise.

Strategic resilience is therefore about taking the step to build a sustainable organisation working from the strategic level rather than attempting to “break out” from the operational level, an approach which doesn’t have a great history of success.  According to management guru Michael Porter, strategy is about building a unique company over time.  This uniqueness is typically reflected in the brand and reputation of the company.  Developing the right approach to understand the attributes of this uniqueness is critical; even more important is the ability to interpret these attributes for operational planning and the setting of risk appetite.

The second dimension of strategic resilience is sustainability: as a term it is no longer restricted to purely environmental considerations, it can be applied equally to the way the company does business and how it treats its customers.  Consideration of sustainability brings forward the requirement to take a longer term view of the organisation and build a capability for horizon scanning.  Horizon scanning will be covered in a future posting but the scope of this activity will be framed by the sector and the structural risks to which it is exposed (i.e. STEEP framework)

So strategic resilience equips an organisation with a consistent and coherent framework rooted in the strategy of the business.  It ensures that the understanding of the business is held at the right level within the organisation and downstream operational methods and practices can draw upon this insight in day-to-day decision making.