PwC’s Global Crisis and Resilience Survey 2023, which polled nearly 2,000 business leaders worldwide about how they meet the most urgent challenges of a constantly changing business environment, singles out six key elements shared by organisations with strong operational resilience (the capacity to maintain critical business services during disruption). As the chart above shows, companies with a mature, integrated resilience programme are far more likely to have defined and optimised those elements than companies without a fully integrated plan.
What’s an integrated resilience programme? In the broadest sense, it’s the foundation of a robust corporate immune system, one that allows the business to adapt, flex and move forward in the face of disruption. More specifically, the survey highlights these key attributes:
First and foremost, an integrated approach to resilience entails centrally governing and aligning multiple resilience competencies around what matters most to the business, and embedding the programme into operations and the corporate culture.
Just as important, an integrated resilience programme breaks through traditional silos, enabling coordination across functions. That can require executive sponsorship—a visible senior leader who is responsible for the programme, and who can align it with the company’s strategy, values and investment priorities.
Finally, an integrated programme should be informed by a panoramic view of the company’s unique risk landscape. And it should leverage technology to highlight weaknesses and mine actionable intelligence from company data to help teams anticipate, prevent, prepare for, simulate and learn from risks and disruption.
Businesses are moving in the right direction—almost two thirds of survey respondents say they’re working toward a fully integrated resilience programme. But with only a fifth of them saying they’ve got one in place, there’s still a lot of progress to be made. The increasing complexity and interconnectedness of today’s crises make the need all the more urgent.
