Most organisations aim to achieve Operational Resilience (OR), rather than only establishing a Business Continuity Management (BCM) programme. Which raises two questions:

1. What is the key difference between OR and BCM?
2. Should resilience be a discipline or a culture?

To answer the first question:

• Business Continuity Management (BCM) follows a proactive, structured process for developing a set of plans that will be implemented to manage through disruptions.
• Operational Resilience (OR) implies the drive to prepare for disruptive events as part of day-to-day operations.

For further context on the difference between OR and BCM consider the formal definitions:

• The definition of Business Continuity Management as formulated by the Business Continuity Institute: “Business Continuity Management identifies an organization’s priorities and prepares solutions to address disruptive threats. This understanding supports the design and implementation of plans to protect and continue the value creating operations of an organizations in the event of any major disruptions.”
• British Standard (BS) 65000 defines Organisational Resilience as the ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to events – both sudden shocks and gradual change. That means being adaptable, competitive, agile and robust.

This brings me to answering the second question: Approaching resilience as a discipline is seen as “the right thing to do”. Organisations ticking the box and adhering to a BCM programme, and the requirements set out in their validation, awareness and training programme over a predefined period (i.e. annually).

Seeing “resilience as everybody’s business” is the way to go, making it part of the organisational culture. In the effort to embed OR in the culture the following fundamentals need attention:

• “Buy in” at the top should show commitment to building resilience.
• All levels of staff should participate in resilience activities (i.e. developing responses, validating the solutions).
• Resilience should be included in risk, compliance and operational agendas.
• Alignment and collaboration between risk functions and resilience activities.

#ResilienceCulture