The key words here are proactive and holistic. The reality is that, historically, risk has often been managed in silos within specific verticals and functions. What the global crisis demonstrated to many CEOs and their boards was that they needed to create a much broader and more integrated approach across corporate functions that, in the past, had not worked closely together. This forced organizations to think more holistically about resilience, and at the organizational level, interlinking some of the key pillars of resilience such as financial, operational and reputational resilience. 

These pillars are not the only aspects to consider. Executives and their boards will need to recognize their organization’s resilience is tightly interlinked to a wider hierarchy of resilience.

When disruptions are ever present, organizations need the ability to respond to and recover from unforeseen challenges to get back to thriving. This resilience has become a key organizational attribute—and a skillset. Here’s how to learn it and leverage it.

Resilience is not a destination; it is a way of being. A “resilient organization” is not one that is simply able to return to where it left off before the pandemic crisis. Rather, the truly resilient organization is one that has transformed, having built the attitudes, beliefs, agility, and structures into its DNA that enable it to not just recover to where it was, but arch forward and above the challenge —quickly and effectively.

To help our clients overcome the challenge, we advocate important mindset shifts that resilient leaders and their organizations must embrace to turn their organization’s focus to from responding and recovering, to: thriving – along 5 pivots:

• The situation pivots from a tenuous interim normal to actively pursuing a better normal. Leaders must therefore chart their organization’s strategic destination as it emerges into the outlook of thriving.
• The leadership attitude shifts from reinventing ways of doing business in the interim to a pioneering character, one in which you focus on inspiring and empowering the team to follow you.
• To steer towards thriving, organizations need to shift their focus from internal and market-facing, into: market-making. Leaders must lead a transformation of focus in their organizations to determine how they can better contribute to the evolution in existing markets and identify emerging markets to venture into.
• Planning shifts from medium-term scenarios that ensure financial and operational viability to true, longer-term strategic visioning—methodically designing and embarking on the journey to the destination of thriving.
• Management shifts from sustaining or surviving to building the resiliency and agility to return to business as unusual.