A beginner approach to business resilience

In 2022, I took an executive course on business resilience at Oxford University.

At the time, it felt obvious why. I had spent a long consulting assignment with H&M, working partly on their crisis management. Supply chains were already fragile after COVID-19, geopolitical tensions were rising, climate risks were becoming harder to ignore, and disinformation was quietly targeting corporations.

I assumed most organisations would start taking resilience seriously — not as a crisis response, but as a strategic capability.

That hasn’t really happened (yet). And as global volatility increases, I’ve been revisiting that assumption.

Last week, the British domestic and foreign security agencies, MI5 and MI6, pointed to a large-scale biological systems collapse as a material security risk in 2030. Not collapse in a dramatic, overnight sense, but cascading failures across energy, information systems, supply chains, trust, and governance.

In December, the director of MI5 also acknowledged that large technology companies now have the power traditionally associated with nation-states: economic, infrastructural, and informational power. Power without democratic accountability.

These reports are not shocking if you’ve been following global developments lately. But what surprises me is how most companies still treat resilience as something to address only after a disruption is visible. Very few treat it as a strategic issue.

I understand that it is easy to prioritise the day-to-day, but when the world is this volatile, you often benefit a lot from understanding your exposure to external risks. 

So, how could you start preparing your organisation?

It's simple: Book a conference room, invite your peers, bring snacks, and start discussing these four questions:

1. What (type of) global events could disrupt our operations and how?
2. Where do we depend on systems we don’t control?
3. Which of our strategic assumptions are most detrimental if they are wrong?
4. What decisions we make today might reduce our ability to adapt tomorrow?

These are often uncomfortable questions. But avoiding them doesn’t make the risk disappear. It just makes you unprepared.

One of the things I took away from that Oxford course, which has only become clearer since, is how much business resilience is about relationships: within your organisation and within your industry. And how building resilience will also improve your day-to-day operations.

The secret to business resilience is that it starts long before the crisis.

You can start this week. And if you do, you will be better prepared than most.

This year, I’m intentionally making space for small projects that help organisations understand their resilience - honestly and pragmatically.

So, if you’re a leader who would like to move from ”l deal with it when it happens” to a more proactive approach, I would love to explore how we can work together.

Anna

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Weekly Recommendations

Security and Climate Change – The UK report about biological systems collapse as a security risk cited above.

Big Tech and Democracy – Are you an Instagram junkie who would like an alternative platform not owned by Meta? Try Pixelfed, a federated alternative that is owned by the community rather than a single corporation. I'm there, but not too many others, so bring your friends (you will actually see what they share).

AI Agents and Math – In a new paper, AI researchers show that the math does not match up when it comes to advanced AI agents. It shows mathematically that “LLMs are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity.” And with a lot of people claiming 2025 would be the Year of the AI agent, I think we can look back and say that there was a lot of talk but not necessarily that much concrete progress.