- Describe how resilient you are today. How resilient are you currently—overall and across each of the six dimensions of resilience? Do you have well-developed capabilities to anticipate and respond to disruption or crisis? What are you doing to promote resilience? In particular, to what degree and where do you rely on add-ons or trade-offs and in what ways do you bake resilience into the way you operate in normal times? Systematic diagnostic tools enable quick but comprehensive understanding of the current state.
- Determine the degree and nature of resilience you need for the future. What types of threats or potential change matter most to your institution? Where do you have gaps across each of the resilience dimensions? This analysis should consider each company-led change (for example, a digital transformation), industry-specific dynamics (for instance, rapidly changing levels of regulatory scrutiny), and global dynamics (for example, climate change) that may pose the greatest threat to the institution.
- Design your approach to building and maintaining the resilience you need. Where do you most need to shift or supplement your current approach? Ongoing resilience requires embedding related considerations into day-to-day decision making as well as into strategy setting. Institutions should link this business-focused approach toward resilience to any existing enterprise-risk-management processes and should consider investment in anticipation and response capabilities. An ideal design will maximize practices that make you stronger in normal times and better ready to withstand and adapt to threats, but it will also accommodate add-ons and trade-offs where needed.
Companies that understand the resilience they need for the future can implement sensible change. In case of vulnerabilities, this may mean transforming in ways big or small to enhance resilience directly. But, as importantly, firms should look to build resilience into any transformation they undertake, regardless of the primary goals—from digital to growth to cost. This yields more robust change and helps you bake in resilience from the outset.