Resiliency Planning is Strategic: Now is the time for planning
When a crisis occurs, how will your organization bounce back?
Unforeseen issues – like COVID 19 – are impacting our world, our industry and our organizations more frequently. Preparedness has become a strategic imperative. Organizations that will survive and thrive for the long term need to build resilience into their strategy and make it part of their operating reality.
Resilience is a positive word. It’s the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. Toughness. Being flexible, dynamic, and continually learning and improving. Organizational resilience is about establishing a culture of flexibility and preparedness.
Organizational resilience preparedness includes everything from: business continuity planning, disaster planning, pandemic preparedness to crisis communication planning. The process can start with a simple brainstorming session anticipating the possible crises that may impact your organization. Once you have identified these situations, you can start thinking about how to avoid them. Ask yourselves – What does prevention look like?”. What if a crisis does occur?
How you make this thinking real – more than just a plan on a shelf – is the process of embedding organizational resilience in your strategy. Yes, you’ll need to create a plan. Yes, you’ll still need to create policies, protocols, and checklists. That’s where most organizations stop – if they ever even get that far. The extra step is bringing these planning assets and infrastructure to life.
Resilience preparedness should ideally be worked in to your organization’s strategy through your multi-year strategic planning process. You can even try out the approach by building resilience preparedness through your organization’s annual operational planning process. Begin with your organization’s mission and how to ensure that it can be delivered in the face of what external pressures may come this year. Assemble your operational plan using the building blocks of your strategy. Underwrite the achievement of your strategic priorities with resilience strategies as insurance.
Consider how your organization will cope in the face of external challenges. What needs to be in place in order to rebound from a potential crisis, having learned, and even improved through it? Leverage the organization’s existing strengths. What needs to be invested in this year to make the organization more resilient in the face of adversity?
So often we do operational planning and add a contingency line item to show that we are thinking about risk and resilience. There’s never enough money, it seems, to properly address risk and build in resilience and so we don’t do it at all. We don’t need to move forward that way. We can no longer afford to.
In the words of Benjamin Franklin: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Get ready by starting your resilience journey.
