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A Guide to Building a More Resilient Business

  • Martin Reeves
  • Kevin Whitaker

business resiliency plan

Done right, it’s a major competitive advantage.

Mainstream business education and managerial practice is largely focused on managing performance. But as the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the painful fragility of many of our systems, leaders are focusing on resilience — a concept rarely taught in today’s business schools. What is resilience? How do you manage and measure it?  And how can you build a more resilient enterprise?

In these difficult times, we’ve made a number of our coronavirus articles free for all readers. To get all of HBR’s content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter.

In the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, we have become painfully aware of the fragility of supply chains, health care, and other critical systems. Many leaders have announced the intention to build back their businesses more resiliently, but not many know how to do so. Few business schools teach resilience, and today’s managerial toolkit is dominated by financial performance management. As a result, very few companies are able to explicitly design for, measure, and manage resilience.

business resiliency plan

  • Martin Reeves is the chairman of Boston Consulting Group’s BCG Henderson Institute in San Francisco and a coauthor of The Imagination Machine (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).
  • KW Kevin Whitaker is the head of strategic analytics at BCG Henderson Institute. He can be reached at [email protected] .

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What is Business Resilience?

What is business resilience

Business resilience describes an organization's ability to respond and adapt quickly to disruptions or significant, unplanned changes that could threaten its operations, people, assets, brand, or reputation.

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Why is business resilience a priority?

The risk of business disruption is always present. But recent events—namely the global health crisis—have led to a renewed and intensified focus on business resilience for organizations across the globe. Business leaders and IT decision-makers now recognize that the unexpected can happen and should be planned for accordingly.

A prescriptive and reactive approach has long been the foundation of business continuity. But to successfully navigate future disruptions, business leaders will need to adopt a new mindset—one that emphasizes the IT agility needed to achieve business resilience.

What is business resilience vs. business continuity?

Business continuity is the capability of an organization to deliver products and services within acceptable timeframes at predefined capacity during a disruption. A business continuity plan is documented information that guides an organization to respond to a disruption.

Business resilience is an organization's ability to absorb stress, recover critical functionality, and thrive in altered circumstances. In short, it positions organizations to prepare for anything.

Traditionally, business resilience was IT-focused. It meant ensuring that applications and data would remain available and secure during a disruptive event such as a cyber attack—provided the disruption lasted only hours or days and affected facilities or workers in just one region.

Now business resiliency needs to be about more than just protecting a company's IT operations. Organizations must be able to adapt operations in response to continuous change as well as major events and continue to thrive.

Until recently, few businesses had business resilience or business continuity plans for global events that would last for months, result in extended travel shutdowns, and prompt lasting changes to how a company operates and where its employees work. 

Considerations for business resiliency planning

The ability to adapt fast is now a critical measure of success for businesses. Here are some things to consider when an organization creates a plan for developing business resilience.

Business recovery risks

What would happen if the business experienced a disruption or damage that impacted its ability to conduct day-to-day operations for an extended period? Risks can range from supply chain operations and extensive property damage to loss of critical staff.  How will the business ensure continued availability and access to applications and data? What strategies should be implemented and what resources need to be aligned?

Employee safety

Can the business track the health, safety, and availability of both remote and onsite workers in the event of a disaster or major disruption? What safety policies should be in place and how should they be communicated? What training is needed?

When people return to the workplace after a disruptive event, how will the business continue to promote their safety? For example, many organizations are investing in technology to help people maintain social distancing and to conduct contact tracing as the health crisis persists.  

Financial loss mitigation

The longer a business is unable to operate normally, the greater the risk for financial loss. To mitigate that risk, business resilience planning should consider what systems, processes, and people are most essential to mission-critical operations—and outline steps for restoring their functionality as quickly as possible. 

Other considerations

Other questions an organization may want to address:

  • What can we do to protect our brand and reputation?
  • How can we optimize business decision-making during a crisis?
  • How can we maintain our service to customers and partners not only following a disruption, but also in response to changing trends and expectations?

Strategies for building business resilience

These strategies can also help to increase IT agility and deliver an optimum application experience.

Preparing for the future of work

Business resiliency means being able to adapt to gradual but significant change as well as sudden disruptions. This can mean transforming culture, workplaces, and workflows by investing in new collaboration tools and technology.

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Increasing cyber resilience

Cyber resilience helps to build business resilience, whether it's understanding how best to secure a remote or hybrid workforce or creating simpler but more effective cybersecurity practices for the organization. 

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Accelerating a multicloud strategy

Using multiple cloud providers for can increase business resilience, allowing organizations to mitigate the risk of downtime and service outages. Moving between cloud services creates agility and makes it possible to scale services up or down depending on need. Organizations can bring new IT infrastructure online in minutes and rapidly provision computing resources to users working from anywhere.

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Planning for IT infrastructure resilience

As part of reimagining and redesigning the workforce and workplace, organizations need to make sure that their IT infrastructure is also resilient. This includes having the ability to provide highly secure virtual desktops to all workers, wherever they are located, and to optimize on-premises and cloud resources continuously to maintain performance and control costs.

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business resiliency plan

How To Build Business Resilience

Saphia Lanier

Published: May 26, 2023

Over a  half million small businesses fail every year. Of those, roughly 22% are only a year old when they close their doors for the final time. The 50% of businesses that make it past the five-year mark are considered successful. 

Business resilience

The businesses that succeed don’t just have a competitive edge, superior product, or management team with good decision-making skills. In most cases, they are the businesses that faced significant challenges that forced them to adapt, shift their strategies, and grow in new and often unexpected ways. 

In other words, they are the businesses with resilience. 

Unfortunately, 95% of business leaders admit to needing crisis-management-capabilities improvement. If you’re in a similar boat, then your business could be shuttered by the next calamity. 

Business resilience definition

Business resilience refers to a business’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond, and adapt to disruptions to maintain continuous operations.

It involves managing risk and responding effectively to unexpected events that could negatively impact operations, such as emerging competitors, natural disasters, cyberattacks, or financial crises.

Business resilience vs. business continuity

Business resilience and business continuity have similar concepts but different focuses.

For instance, business continuity is when an organization can continuously operate, even during challenging times or natural disasters. It involves having plans and procedures in place to keep operations running normally while maintaining exceptional customer service.

For example, a small retailer might stockpile supplies to ensure it can fulfill customer orders and have alternate sources for materials in case of supply chain issues.

Business resilience, on the other hand, goes beyond simply continuing operations during hardships. It involves a company’s ability to adapt and recover from disruptions, ensuring that it can continue to thrive in the long term. Resilient businesses are better equipped to handle unexpected challenges and are more likely to emerge stronger from them. One reason is because they adapt and innovate in the light of adversity.

For example, a business may develop new processes or procedures to manage supply chain issues. It could also create additional sources of income, such as offering online services or new products, to counterbalance any losses caused by the disruption.

Business resilience examples

Covid tested businesses large and small, and only the resilient made it out.

In March 2020, the pandemic shuttered over 3m US businesses during the lockdowns, and roughly 400k closed permanently by June 2020. And guess who fared the worst — the small-business owner.

Those that remained found ways to pivot their operations to stay in business for the long haul. An International Journal of Disaster Reduction survey found 63% of American small businesses switched how they served customers, and 56% changed how they procured supplies. 

Here are a couple of examples of small businesses that were resilient during and after the pandemic:

  • Natoli’s Italian Deli in New Jersey pivoted during covid by bringing seats and tables outdoors and selling groceries when everyone stopped ordering sandwiches. The demand for groceries was high, so the owner opened another grocery store across town. 
  • Java Game Haus Cafe in Jacksonville pivoted during covid from being a social gathering and event spot to a warehouse-like setup for processing online orders in 2020. This carried them over, and two years later, the husband-and-wife owners are looking to expand. 

But a pandemic isn’t the only challenge that businesses have faced over the years. They’ve also gone through recessions and, in certain areas, natural disasters . Others have dealt with the unexpected departure of a business partner, cybersecurity attacks, and countless other serious issues.

For example, Sally Day, director of Saltoria Marketing, a UK virtual marketing agency, and her then-partner, launched their business in July 2020. Given the nature of the pandemic, the two designed a flexible and agile model to ride the unpredictable waves of the business landscape. 

“We offered multiple packages to suit businesses at whatever point they were at (e.g., one-off projects or monthly retainers),” says Day. “This meant we weren’t restricted by one way of working or charging, and could work with the business's objectives and budget. Our retainers are built to be on/off for maximum flexibility too, so people don’t feel bound to long and expensive contracts.”

The impending cost of living crisis affecting the UK made hiring full-time employees challenging. So instead, they outsourced many tasks to experienced freelancers from various marketing disciplines to build a team. This allowed them to:

  • Build a bespoke team for each project/client experience
  • Be truly flexible by only paying freelancers for what they do
  • Keep costs low and client fees competitive 
  • Cherry-pick the best talent for each project
  • Not worry about covering staff wages when cash flow is a concern

And just a few months ago, Day’s partner left back to Italy amid Brexit issues, and she now has to deal with solopreneurship for the first time. 

“It’s been nearly two months of solo entrepreneurship, and I’ve found it really tough, but I’m trying to remain positive and excited for the future,” shares Day. 

Since she no longer has an accountability partner, she connects with local marketing consultants to collaborate and feel like a team again. She’s also taking measures to prevent burnout . 

"I’m putting basic boundaries in place around my daily routine, like not working late and saying no to things that don’t truly excite me."

How to build business resilience

Building business resilience involves creating systems and processes that make it easy to respond quickly, effectively, and efficiently to unexpected disruptions. 

According to McKinsey , these are the five ways businesses are building resilience: 

  • Creating resilient operations. Companies are redesigning their operations and supply chains to be more flexible and resilient. This includes having global and regional suppliers and cross-training their workforce to manage different areas of the business in the event of workforce shortages. 
  • Adopting Industry 4.0. Going digital is an affordable and agile way to maintain productivity and connectivity with each other and customers. Those that haven’t already are digitizing their operations to make them more efficient. 
  • Allowing spending transparency. Companies can improve their spending strategies by increasing transparency around capital and expenses. For instance, tech-based methods speed up cost transparency, reducing the effort of performing calculations manually from months to weeks or days. Other digital approaches may include procurement spending analysis, inventory rebalancing, and capital spending diagnostics. 
  • Embracing workplace automation and technology. More companies are allowing employees to operate remotely using collaborative tools. Businesses are also using automation to remove repetitive tasks to allow workers to be more efficient. This shift will require training employees to use new technologies. 
  • Becoming agile. Fast-changing shifts in consumer demands and industry structures requires businesses to adapt fast. This may include reimagining how you run your operations to bring value to customers. Some examples include rapid product development, customer experience innovation, and digitization.

These are just some of the options businesses can employ to maintain resilience. The key is finding what works for your business and customers so you emerge from challenges stronger and more competitive. 

Steps to create a business resilience plan

Creating a business resilience plan is essential for any organization looking to ensure its long-term success. Here are some tips for creating a comprehensive, effective plan:

  • Identify potential risks: Before creating your resilience plan, understand the types of disruptions your business is susceptible to. This might include natural disasters, cyberattacks, supply chain issues, or economic crises. In compiling a list of risks for your business, consider your industry, competition, geography, and any regulations you may be subject to.
  • Assess the potential impact of each risk: Once you have identified potential risks, assess the potential impact of each one and prioritize them accordingly. This will help you to create a plan that’s tailored to your organization’s needs.
  • Develop a response plan: Create a comprehensive plan for responding to and recovering from disruptive events. This plan should be as detailed as possible, including details such as who’s responsible for each step and what resources are needed.
  • Involve all stakeholders in the process: Include all stakeholders, such as employees and investors, in the process to ensure a successful outcome. This way, everyone knows their role in responding to disruptive events.
  • Test the plan: Regularly test and practice the plan to ensure it’s up to date and effective. This can be done through drills, simulations, tabletop exercises, and more.
  • Review and update the plan: Your business resilience plan should be a living document that’s regularly reviewed and updated. As your business evolves, so will your risks, and your plan should be flexible enough to adapt to these changes.
  • Continuously monitor the environment for changes: Monitor external factors such as regulations, technology trends, customer needs, and the competitive landscape to anticipate potential risks.

Once you have a business resilience plan in place, you can focus on monitoring how well it works. 

How to measure business resilience

Measuring business resilience will determine how well your business will stand against whatever life throws its way. To effectively measure your business’s resilience, assess the following areas:

Response time: Monitor how quickly your business detects and responds to disruptions. This includes both internal responses, such as IT security threats, and external responses, such as natural disasters or economic crises. 

Recovery time: Assess how quickly your company recovers from disruptions. This includes restoring services, retrieving data, and returning to normal operations.

Adaptability: Evaluate your organization’s ability to adjust its operations to changing circumstances. This includes adapting processes, adjusting budgets, and responding to new regulations or customer needs.

Risk management: Monitor how well your organization can identify and address risks. If you struggle to manage risks, then there may be gaps to fill or better management processes to put in place.

Financial stability: Evaluate how well your business maintains its financial well-being during a crisis. The ability to generate consistent revenue, maintain cash flow, and manage expenses is critical during unexpected events. 

Supply chain: Evaluate your business’s ability to maintain a stable supply chain during unexpected events. If your suppliers are unreliable, consider adding new or additional options to your network. 

Employee morale: Identify how well your organization retains employees during a crisis event. If it struggles, then it could be that employee morale needs improvement. 

Business resilience is all about how well you can foresee and plan for potential risks. But don’t just plan ahead — practice ahead to keep your workforce on its toes. 

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Running a business

Building a more resilient business

May 04, 2023 | 6 minute read

If there was one overriding lesson for small business owners over the past few years, it was to prepare for the unexpected. Staying ready to weather economic disruption and take advantage of new opportunities is not only the key to survival, but also a way to help your business thrive.

“Hope is not a strategy. Disruptions happen unexpectedly,” says Rochelle Clarke, founder of Continuity Strength , which creates web-based contingency plans for small businesses. “Successful businesses protect their growth by making risk mitigation a core part of their business strategy so they’re ready for anything.”

Many small business owners recognize the importance of being prepared for the unexpected. In fact, 76% of respondents to Bank of America’s 2023 Small Business Owner Report said their business is equipped to survive an economic recession, while most acknowledge a recession as a concern this year. 2023 Small Business Owner Report , p. 5." data-footnote="duringpandemic" aria-label="Footnote 1"> Footnote [1]

How to build resilience into your business

Being ready, willing and able to adapt to change can give your business staying power. Beyond that, being flexible can help you seize new opportunities when others dry up. Here are some ways to stay nimble.

Prepare for an emergency

Make sure you’ve covered the basics of keeping your operations up and running if there’s a sudden emergency. Create a list of emergency contacts as well as a list of bank accounts and individuals who have signatory rights, so you’ll be prepared in the event you’re unable to run the business.

Also, draft a communications plan that covers how to get in touch with key stakeholders and a plan for handling your operations, including the technological aspects. “Having a business continuity plan lets you manage the unpredictable,” says Clarke.

Be ready to pivot

It’s important to consider workarounds if the current way you’re doing business no longer works as well as it once did. For instance, 80% of small business owners have digitally optimized their business over the past 12 months, up from 70% last spring. 37% are bolstering their social media presence, and 60% are accepting more forms of cashless payments , according to Bank of America’s 2023 Small Business Owner Report . 2023 Small Business Owner Report , p. 11." data-footnote="cashlesspayment" aria-label="Footnote 2"> Footnote [2]

Other ways to adapt include selling your product or service to new types of customers, expanding into new markets, introducing a new product or service to reflect current market demands, or creating a digital version of one of your in-person offerings. (For a more detailed look at ways to diversify your business, see “ Guide: Growing a business .”)

Set frequently trackable goals

Staying on top of your business’s performance regularly can help you avoid unwelcome surprises. One way to do this is by setting trackable goals on a weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis — and course-correcting quickly if you’re falling behind. It’s also important to set aside regular time for innovation, whether it’s by testing new marketing approaches or new product development.

How to determine where you need to build more resilience

Every business is different. Doing a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis, using our editable worksheet can help you identify key areas where your business may benefit from building more resilience.

Many small businesses find there are opportunities for improvement in these seven areas:

  • Financing: Ask yourself regularly if you would be in a position to seek financing successfully and on short notice. How creditworthy is the business at present? If you don't like the answers to those questions, work on improving your cash flow and credit score . You never know when you may need funds. In the year ahead, 54% of business owners plan to obtain funding through business credit cards. Another 44% will use personal savings, and 31% will turn to personal credit cards, according to Bank of America's 2023 Small Business Owner Report . 2023 Small Business Owner Report , p. 2." data-footnote="smallbusinessownerreport" aria-label="Footnote 3"> Footnote [3] Also, be sure to build an emergency fund . Make a list of your monthly expenses like payroll, rent and taxes, and multiply that amount by three. That is the number of months of overhead you’ll ideally want to have tucked away for a rainy day. If you’ve already opened an emergency fund, make sure to contribute to it regularly.
  • Marketing and branding: If your business is heavily dependent on in-person sales, consider diversifying into digital and mobile sales channels . Similarly, if you were to lose all of your sales during an internet outage or if there were a change in the terms of service on a platform you rely on, like Amazon, you need to have backup systems in place. Making sure you are protecting your brand and other intellectual property is also important in an increasingly digital era. An appointment with your attorney to make sure you’ve covered your bases can be a great investment in the future of your business.
  • Product or service: With more people using social media, customers can post complaints online with the click of a button. Make sure you have systems in place to get input from your customers on your offerings before that happens, whether it’s a suggestion box at your point of sale or an organized way to log input from your front-line employees.
  • Talent: Staffing can easily become a source of grief for employers who aren’t making a concerted effort to attract and retain talent. A noteworthy 4.1 million people quit their jobs in December 2022 alone, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And among small business owners surveyed, 41% listed hiring challenges as a top concern, the 2023 Small Business Owner Report found. 2023 Small Business Owner Report , p. 3." data-footnote="talentsbor" aria-label="Footnote 4"> Footnote [4] Even if you haven’t been hit yet, make no assumptions. Working harder to keep a healthy pipeline of employees and hold onto your team can go a long way. Also look for new avenues to recruit people, whether it’s on social media or through a trade organization or alumni network you belong to.
  • Operations : In today’s business environment, staying prepared for supply chain snafus is mission-critical. Search on an ongoing basis for alternate suppliers, shippers, and others who perform critical tasks for your business. It’s better to find them before you need them than to search desperately and make last minute decisions. And if you have the means, stock up on essential supplies you need to conduct your business to give yourself breathing room if things go awry.
  • Market: If your business depends heavily on sales in your local market, consider expanding into new markets. For instance, a local retailer could start an e-commerce store and reach new markets by running advertisements on social media.
  • Environment: Every small business should be prepared for local situations such as a hurricane or storm that causes power outages or knocks out the internet. If you run a brick-and-mortar business, also be sure you have plans in place to keep your operations running if you experience flooding or another weather-related disaster.

How key advisors can help you identify areas for improvement

When you’re dealing with complex and fast-changing challenges, you may not know what you don’t know. Your banker , accountant and attorney can be valuable members of your advisory team and help you spot solutions and alternatives that aren’t on your radar.

How to build a business culture that fosters resilience

In addition to your advisory team, your employees can help you keep your finger on the pulse of emerging challenges in your business, so you don’t get surprised later on. Holding daily or weekly “huddles” and regular town halls can help you keep the lines of communication open and strengthen bonds.

Ultimately, no business owner can do it all alone. By unlocking the potential of your team and making the best possible use of the resources you already have, you can position your business to keep growing no matter what the economy does.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Business Resilience

Discover why business resilience is becoming essential to the modern organization and what you can do to foster resilience at your company..

What you'll learn about:

What is business resilience in corporate risk management?

  • What does business resilience look like in 2022?
  • Develop a resilient business
  • Building resilience: Strategies and best practices
  • Foster resilience by operationalizing real-time technology

Before 2020, business resilience was a smaller—though still important—capability for enterprises. Plenty of organizations understood resilience and its impact on business operations, but few implemented programs that developed resiliency for long-term success.

Today, business resilience is essential. No event has demonstrated this truth more dramatically than the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, 90% of business leaders agree the pandemic raised the importance of risk management and corporate resilience. But even in the face of COVID-19, businesses had to keep pace with an evolving risk landscape and an increasing number of threats—all of which had the potential to strike a blow to critical infrastructure and operations.

That’s why building and strengthening business resilience is mission-critical to the future of any organization. Not only is resilience key to mitigating the short- and long-term effects of disruptive events, it’s also essential to growth and survival.

Let’s take a closer look at business resiliency and what can be done to create and maintain a more resilient organization.

Although many businesses are still recovering from the global pandemic, they have taken a renewed interest in developing crisis contingency plans and other resiliency programs.

According to the International Organization for Standardization , resilience is an organization’s ability to adapt to a business disruption while maintaining operations under changing circumstances. In other words, a resilient organization is one that can absorb the initial shock of a disruption while also pivoting in response to its dynamic environment.

It’s important to note that business resilience shouldn’t be confused with business continuity . Although they’re related and often overlapping terms , business continuity planning is focused on immediate response and short-term operation. In contrast, resiliency approaches risk management with a long-term and proactive lens.

Moreover, business resilience is a combination of several risk management disciplines, including business continuity, disaster recovery and crisis management. But the bottom line: Resiliency is about planning ahead, anticipating disruption and adapting to changes as necessary.

Why is business resilience important? 

Organizations that had at least some semblance of resiliency were able to keep critical business operations functioning during the pandemic and multiple, compounding crisis of the past several years. The others —those who lacked a resilient risk management posture—were more exposed to consequences such as the following:

  • Significant financial loss
  • Reputational damage
  • Threats to employee health, safety and wellbeing
  • Loss or disruption of critical infrastructure
  • Loss of corporate data, assets and other resources

According to the Bain Resilience Index , high-resilience firms have nearly double the survival rate of low-resilience organizations. That means resilience is becoming synonymous with survival. And when you consider the increasingly sporadic and unpredictable threat vectors that put organizations at risk, it’s plain to see why resilience is garnering so much attention.

The business resilience plan 

Anticipating disruption is fundamental to resilience. But to anticipate a disruptive event, you need to be forward-thinking—that’s where the business resilience plan comes into play. 

A business resilience plan is a document designed to help organizations navigate business disruption and return to a state of acceptable operation. In short, it outlines the necessary steps a firm should take to mitigate and survive a crisis. The basic contents of a business resilience plan include the following:

  • Business impact analysis: Evaluates the potential consequences of a disruption.
  • Risk assessment: Identifies risk factors with the potential to cause harm.
  • Risk management plan: Documents steps taken to keep risks in check.
  • Business continuity plan: Outlines how the business should continue to operate during a disruption.
  • Disaster recovery plan: Describes how a firm can quickly minimize the impact of a disaster so the organization can resume operation.
  • Crisis management plan: Outlines how to respond to a situation that negatively affects profitability, reputation or ability to operate.
  • Incident response plan: Describes procedures for identifying and responding to an emergency incident.

Benefits of resilience planning 

Business resilience isn’t merely a survival strategy—it’s an ongoing competitive advantage. Take the impact of a natural disaster, for example. When an extreme weather event strikes a manufacturing plant, it not only halts operations at that one facility, but also triggers a domino effect that’s felt across the supply chain. An effective business resilience plan provides the framework a firm needs to mitigate the ongoing ramifications of the disaster and accelerate recovery.

Thus, business resilience planning offers three key advantages:

  • Improved risk detection: Resilient firms don’t just wait for disruption—they anticipate and prepare. This enables them to recognize, mitigate and respond to risk more quickly and effectively.
  • Stronger elasticity: Resilient businesses are like rubber bands in that they can stretch to their limit and return to form. With a well-prepared and agile response plan, they can withstand the initial shock of unexpected disruption and rebound to an acceptable state of operation.
  • Greater recovery: Resilience enables organizations to thrive in their new post-crisis environment because of their ability to adapt and overcome the new normal.

What does business resilience look like in 2022? 

COVID-19 may have been an eye-opener for most businesses, but the truth is that resilience has been a long time coming.

Business leaders must contend with a risk landscape that is more complicated, less predictable and increasingly difficult to manage. This includes a multitude of risk factors that are increasing in frequency and severity over the past 30 years. And global uncertainty, climate change, geopolitical risk, cyber attacks and natural disasters are all on the rise.

Here’s the problem: A substantial number of firms still lack the resiliency to keep up with the accelerating pace of the risk landscape. According to FERMA, just 57% of businesses believe they’re equipped to manage resilience, and nearly three-quarters of them see a clear need to strongly integrate resilience into their organizational strategy.

6 areas of business resilience 

The good news is that there are six fundamental areas of focus that business leaders can use to develop and strengthen resilience:

  • Financial resilience: Organizations are often blinded by short-term returns and not focused enough on long-term financial risk. Balancing the two with a solid capital position and sufficient amount of liquidity is key to mitigating fluctuations in revenue, cost or credit. For example, in 2016 Samsung Note 7 smartphones would catch fire under certain conditions, prompting a $5.3 billion recall. The crisis may have put Samsung’s smartphone operation in jeopardy, but it was able to quickly recover because of its flexible investment portfolio.
  • Technological resilience: Businesses that invest in secure, flexible technology stacks and operationalize high-quality data are better equipped to deliver projects safely, on time and under budget. They’re also able to develop a robust IT disaster recovery plan to avoid service outages and maintain critical business operations during a disruptive event, such as a cyber attack or similar incident.
  • Organizational resilience: Employee acquisition, retention and satisfaction are big parts of mastering organizational resilience. Firms that foster diversity and inclusion, develop a culture of agile learning and secure top talent are able to more flexibly navigate fluctuations in the workforce, such as the “ Great Resignation .”
  • Operational resilience: Supply chain disruptions can undermine productivity and send business operations into disarray without contingencies in place. Resilient organizations are able to pivot to meet sudden changes in supply and demand, such as by adding redundancies to their supply chain.
  • Reputational resilience: Consumers, employees, investors and other stakeholders are holding businesses accountable for their actions and values. Resilient organizations bridge the gap between the two and closely align what they say with what they do. They embrace accountability, are open to change and actively listen and respond to societal expectations.
  • Business-model resilience: Traditional business models were put to the test when the pandemic forced companies to shift to remote work. Firms with flexible models in place were able to quickly adjust as needed, which enabled business continuity during a time of uncertainty.

Develop a resilient business 

Implementing resilient strategies is much easier said than done—especially when organizations lack a proper understanding of risk and resilience. There are three main barriers to becoming resilient:

No. 1. The returns are long-term: 

Many businesses are focused on short-term returns rather than long-term sustainability. Achieving resilience requires a multi-timescale perspective—one that accounts for both immediate and future continuity. BCG estimates that roughly 60% of companies are preparing to navigate a likely recession, but only 40% are preparing for a rebound in demand. Even fewer have begun reimagining their business for the post-pandemic environment, meaning that most organizations aren’t adapting to the new normal.

No. 2. Plans are too static:

Companies are primarily concerned with creating fixed continuity plans rather than dynamic ones. But risk isn’t set in stone—it’s ever-changing and unpredictable. Stable plans are only effective when the causal relationship between incident and impact is clear. 

No. 3. Business leaders need convincing:

Strategies for business resilience often create value differently than an organization’s typical activities. For this reason, it may take clear evidence and explanation to convince decision makers that resiliency strategies are a worthwhile investment.

Building resilience: Strategies and best practices 

Implementing a culture of business resiliency throughout an organization doesn’t happen overnight. But with time, dedication and a few basic strategies, businesses can get started in the right direction.

The following are tangible actions and best practices business leaders can use to win executive buy-in, develop strategic resilience and elevate their risk management abilities:

  • Integrate risk into everything: Consider resilience as both an opportunity and an imperative to expand the organization’s scope beyond the limits of short-term return. By assessing the impact of lost or reduced functionality in every business operation, you can coordinate a tailored response to mitigate a potential disaster.
  • Discuss resilience in terms executives understand: In other words, measure resilience in terms of the bottom line. Communicating the relative cost of disruption will help convince executives that resiliency is a critical component of growth and sustainability.
  • Be a forward-thinker: Look past the short term to help business leaders see the long-term implications of disruption. Shifting time horizons outward allows organizations to see the bigger picture and turn crisis into opportunity.
  • Identify strengths and weaknesses: Know where your vulnerabilities are. This is key to understanding the risk environment. Test your resilience strategies against various scenarios to better analyze performance and implement improvements.
  • Embed resilience within first-line teams: People are an important piece of the resilience puzzle. Ensure frontline employees are integrated into the resilience framework, which empowers them to participate in risk management and enhances their ability to spot and respond to disruptions.
  • Establish an early-warning system: The faster a threat is identified, the sooner it can be addressed and the faster the organization can respond. Third-party solutions, such as a real-time information tool, can be leveraged to kick-start incident response and get ahead of potential threats.

Foster resilience by operationalizing real-time technology 

Although there’s much debate about how businesses should quantitatively measure resilience, there are four qualitative factors that all resilient organizations have in common. A truly resilient business can:

  • Identify and assess risks that threaten critical infrastructure.
  • Locate people and assets that might be in harm’s way.
  • Execute standard operating procedures and protocols.
  • Analyze performance before, during and after disruption and crises.

Mastering all four of these conditions is no easy task. But by implementing a real-time alerting solution like Dataminr Pulse, businesses can rise to the challenge faster than ever before.

Dataminr Pulse processes billions of units of information daily pulled from hundreds of thousands of publicly available data sources to detect the earliest indications of emerging risks and high-impact events—often within seconds or minutes of their occurrence. Combined with geovisualization capabilities, Pulse helps security teams locate and safeguard people and assets during a crisis by providing rich visual context. 

For example, when severe weather struck Western Europe, Dataminr Pulse alerted customers about potential flash floods in the area using geo-location data. This allowed customers to view relevant data at the hyperlocal level, prioritize risk by area and ensure business continuity.

Pulse’s collaboration capabilities also enable customers to develop their own iterative response playbooks. They can then quickly move from risk detection to mitigation—a critical advantage when managing a high-risk situation. And they can use real-time and historical data to assess incident management performance from end to end, including any lingering effects on the business.

As a result, those who employ Dataminr Pulse are better able to maintain business continuity and achieve the business resiliency needed to grow and compete today and tomorrow. 

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The CEO’s Dilemma

Business Resilience in Times of Uncertainty

In times of volatility, the most successful leaders turn uncertainty into opportunity, activating a business resilience strategy that is forward-looking, resilient, and competitive. No matter their starting point, BCG can help.

Business resilience is the capacity to absorb stress, recover critical functionality, and thrive in altered circumstances, and it has become a key indicator of a company’s overall health. Resilient companies enjoy better outcomes than their peers in three ways: an external shock can have a lesser impact on their performance, the speed of their recovery can be faster, and the extent of their recovery can be greater.

Downturns and disruptions are inevitable. Whether companies lose momentum or—preferably—adapt and advance comes down to one thing: business resiliency.

How Our Business Resilience Framework Can Help

No two resilience journeys are the same, with each path forward individually based on region and industry, so BCG’s business resilience consulting experts help leaders recognize their starting points and guide them each step of the way. Our business resilience framework—sense, adapt, thrive, and transform—equips leaders managing uncertainty with a head-on strategy and a more long-term approach for business resilience planning.

BCG’s sense, adapt, thrive, and transform approach is a dynamic strategy mindset that helps leaders chart their course for the future and build a more resilient enterprise, no matter their starting point. Our business resilience consulting teams help companies reinforce their positions and create functional advantage, even at times of disruption.

Client Success in Business Resilience

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A major health care company faced challenges hitting its growth targets in an increasingly competitive market. BCG developed a resilience transformation plan to enable the company to re-invest in growth. We pursued end-to-end cost management and top-line business resilience tactics including streamlining the organizational structure, automating processes, and optimizing where and how to invest across product, marketing, and distribution, leading to a +40% increase in stock price by the completion of the transformation.

Meet BCG’s Experts on Achieving Business Resiliency

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Our Insights on Business Resilience Strategy

The CEO's Dilemma: Building Resilience in a Time of Uncertainty offers a playbook to leaders looking to build more resilient organizations. Explore our deep dives on everything from shoring up supply chain resilience to creating value by embedding sustainability into business resilience strategy, and more.

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Are You Resilient? Your Tech Function Can Tell You.

By optimizing technology costs, sourcing, and management, businesses can thrive amid disruption. Here’s how the most resilient companies do it.

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CEO Outlook 2023: Caution, Optimism, and Navigating the Road Ahead

A BCG survey of C-suite leaders reveals how they are setting priorities and taking action.

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Amid Uncertainty, AI Gives Retailers a Path to Resilience

Artificial intelligence can provide optimized solutions to three key retailer concerns: rising cost of goods, declining consumer spending, and supply chain volatility.

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BCG Executive Perspectives offer insights on global topics that matter most to leaders in the public and private sectors. Explore these topics and read the latest thinking from BCG’s experts.

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BCG’s research reveals six key success factors and the steps companies need to take to drive innovation, gain competitive advantage, and build for the future.

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Being prepared, ready and resilient

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  • When Tech Meets Human Ingenuity
  • A Valuable Difference
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Call for change

While risk is a fact of life for any business, there are times when even those that have learned to expect the unexpected can be taken by surprise. Accenture’s approach to business resilience demonstrates that, with the right plans, processes and people in place, it is possible to be ready for anything.

Business continuity can be affected by many different situations. From natural disasters to cybersecurity incidents, civil unrest to turbulent financial markets—not to mention unexpected health and humanitarian events such as the global pandemic—businesses are under pressure to minimize disruption and be more resilient.

Accenture’s experience of managing disruption is based on years of preparedness. We have introduced intelligent tools that enable us to be agile and adapt, with robust plans that validate and recalibrate our approach so that we can be prepared for whatever comes our way.

But it’s not all about preparation. We have changed the way we manage and deliver services, internally and externally, to counter shockwaves of change. And we have invested in technologies and enabled a digital workforce so that we are flexible and ready to make the impossible, possible.

Any business is only as resilient as its weakest link. With a robust business resilience capability embedded across the organization, we can not only continue to serve our clients but also work with them to help them do the same.

"We are prepared for the worst by being ready with the best of our systems and services—not forgetting our people performing on their best day, every day." — MARGARET SMITH , Senior Managing Director and Executive Director – Corporate Services & Sustainability and Business Operations, Accenture

When tech meets human ingenuity

Our business resilience strategy supports how we operate as a company, starting with our global client base of leading household names, underpinned by our internal functions (such as Global Asset Protection, Travel, Procurement, Workplace, Technology , Finance , Information Security , Legal and Human Resources) and supported by the collaborations of our third-party ecosystem.

With a business landscape that is constantly changing, it’s important to make sure that technologies are working in harmony with our people so that we can align to industry leading practices and overcome challenges.

The focus of our global approach includes first to be prepared so challenges do not overwhelm our organization. We take steps to secure the safety and well-being of our people who, in turn, embrace the business resilience program through education and ongoing awareness. We ensure that continuity plans are developed consistently and integrated with response and crisis processes. Exercises are used to validate our plans. A range of exercise scenarios (including pandemic) are performed at least annually, and results capture improvement actions so that the implemented strategy remains effective. 

Second, we are ready by identifying priorities and making sure we are able to respond if threats become a reality. Accenture resilience processes support robust emergency response and crisis management. Preventative and contingency measures are taken to minimize the impact on people and services. Our operational teams identify essential and business-critical processes for vital functions such as employee payroll and supply chain to keep goods moving. And our Global Asset Protection team offers 24/7 monitoring to keep pace with changing conditions around the world.

Finally, we focus on being resilient in the long term. We are proactive, with sustainable plans that mitigate the impact of volatility, backed by strong leadership, integrated processes and ongoing collaboration.

business resiliency plan

In addition, our business resilience programs are supported by policies and we align methods to industry standards and practices so we can grow and evolve our capabilities relevant to the changes around us.

Like many global organizations, Accenture depends on a range of activities being performed extensively across Accenture’s locations around the world. For example,  70% of our Finance team’s services  are performed in  intelligent operations  centers and many involve complex accounting, business and tax advisory activities—making business continuity a priority.

We rely on the simplicity, automation and preparedness that comes from technology transformation. For example, we have deployed cloud-based business resilience management software that sits on the Salesforce platform and provides greater analytics and insights.

In this way, we invest in and draw on best-in class technologies to automate and integrate, so that we can work faster and smarter. And also, we make sure we realize the full value from these technologies, so that we can disrupt and innovate the processes that we run to help future-proof our business.

"Our dedicated professionals are working across our business to drive out leading practices—the bedrock of being prepared, ready and resilient." — ERIN HARRIS , Managing Director – Corporate Services & Sustainability, Business Resiliency Services, Accenture

Our strategy Three core plans make up the business resilience program:

Business continuity focuses on developing and implementing processes to support continued business operations. Accenture employs a range of capabilities to support business continuity planning that use our own methodology, following industry guidelines and standards. We undertake standardized analysis and reviews to identify critical business processes and the resources they rely on. We develop and implement solutions based on risks and requirements, conducting training (in-house and with vendors) and maintaining and measuring compliance.

Technology continuity focuses on the technology required to continue mission-critical systems. Our capabilities to support technology continuity include geographic distributions of data centers and service providers across multiple locations, data backup to maintain data integrity, specialist support teams with 24x7x365 coverage, standardized processes and testing and exercising programs to validate effectiveness.

Crisis management focuses on Accenture people and facilities—preventing, mitigating, preparing for, responding to and recovering from conditions that threaten life, property, or operations. Our people are our first priority—but in taking care of our people, we are also taking care of our business continuity for our clients. Accenture supports crisis management with dedicated teams; for example, the Global Asset Protection team was a huge part of our early and swift response to the global pandemic, setting up a Pandemic Task Force in China and surrounding areas in January 2020. We also created a global people emergency communication system and a 24x7 Accenture Security Operations Center (ASOC)—a global watch program to advise our people on safety, security, health and travel and specialist risk intelligence that is shared across the world.

In the past 15 years, we have seen many extreme events in various corners of the world that had the potential to seriously impact business continuity. From the volcanic ash eruption in Iceland that caused enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe in 2010, to a major hurricane in the United States in 2016 or a global cyberattack in 2017, we have seen and dealt with our fair share of crises. In each situation, our crisis management teams were not only prepared to handle the event, but also skilled in understanding the specific needs of those circumstances, through effective collaboration, agile response and being able to manage uncertainty.

One of the areas of specialty that has proved especially helpful in the last year has been our team handling infectious disease outbreaks. Accenture has a global Infectious Disease Plan (IDP) which provides preventative measures and recommends pre-planning for, and responses to, situations such as COVID-19.

The plan includes inputs from leading health authorities (such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and respective regional and local health agencies. We adjust global and location actions based on developing situations and support regional and local business resilience teams following a defined crisis management process.

As a result, our ability to manage the fallout from the pandemic was eased by a robust and well-informed team. It was able to put in place the plans and people to deliver a timely and response that was right for us and our business. For instance, we enabled 95% of Accenture people to work from home, including 350,000 delivery center people, while completing 42 acquisitions and establishing 100 Return to Office Workplace protocols.

"Now, our corporate functions and client projects can manage disruption using their business continuity assessments and plans—enabling end-to-end business resilience." — PENELOPE PRETT , Chief Information, Data & Analytics Officer, Accenture

business resiliency plan

A valuable difference

Accenture uses multiple methods to support business resilience. But at the heart lies our strategies around people (running award-winning learning programs on remote working), infrastructure (deploying uninterrupted power supplies and secure connectivity) and technology (providing soft phones and privacy screens).

Our business continuity planning isn’t limited to how we provide our client services. We also bake in business continuity for our functions and facilities that support those client services. With such a comprehensive, end-to-end strategy in place, we can realize business resilience for more than a single corporate function. We include every aspect of how we operate, serve and run—and are able to do all those things quickly and easily.

Two elements are helping us to respond in such an agile manner. First, we have modified our technology approach toward a “one person, one machine” strategy. This means we have 721,000 people, all using workstations and mobiles that can communicate securely and reliably in every corner of the world.

Second, Accenture IT infrastructure  runs in the hybrid cloud . That not only means we’re saving cost by spending half as much as our legacy delivery models, but also gives us new IT potential through flexible and resilient capabilities.

Above all, we are successful in executing business resilience because we work together, better than ever. We bring together specialists in various disciplines across the organization to deliver an integrated, cross-functional strategy and enjoy the shared success of a more robust, resilient business.

What we do for clients We use the same framework that we use for ourselves to support resilience for our clients. We are able to apply lessons learned around agile workforces and flexible plans to support clients’ business continuity.

Accenture’s agility-first approach includes three core options that help businesses be more resilient:

Remote work

An agile workforce that is able to work remotely. What’s involved? The workforce must use laptops. Connectivity over the public internet must be possible. Security controls, public services stability and regulations will all influence remote working.

Redirect work

A distributed workforce that provides location resilience. What’s involved? Multiple locations need to be used for service delivery and time zones taken into account. Languages, skills and access to applications need to be agreed when the plan is activated.

Relocate work

A flexible workforce that is able to physically move from one location to another. What’s involved? Only used when Remote and Redirect is not an option. Involves laptop-enabled users for greater agility and consideration of physical security controls (restricted work area vs open area).

Continuity from collaboration

A combination of resilience options could offer a more agile response and continuity of services; for example, combining remote and redirect or redirect and relocate.

The Accenture business resilience program is aligned to the industry standards (ISO22301, ISO20000, ISO 27001) and certified in all India and Philippines locations, plus the China and United Kingdom Advanced Technology Centers.

Although we recognize that no one can guarantee 100% continuity in the event of a crisis due to the uncertain nature of situations, we have seen that bringing together effective collaboration with robust continuity plans is helping our organization to not only build resilience, but also help our clients to manage change.

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Clients supported globally

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Continuity plans implemented

Meet the team

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Traci Stewart

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These teams are enabling innovation, growth and business continuity for Accenture.

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Business Resilience Plan Template

Business Resilience Plan Template

What Is A Business Resilience Plan?

A business resilience plan is a set of strategies, procedures, and processes that help organizations prepare for and respond to emergency situations (from pandemics to natural disasters). It outlines the steps to be taken in the event of a disaster or disruption, providing business continuity and protecting the organization’s assets and reputation. It also helps organizations identify and prioritize potential risks and develop mitigation strategies to minimize their impact and return to normal operations as fast as possible.

What's Included In This Business Resilience Plan Template?

  • 3 focus areas
  • 6 objectives

Once you have set your template, you can also create dashboards for real-time performance monitoring.

And yes - you get free access with no credit card required. ✅

Who Is The Business Resilience Plan Template For?

The Business Resilience Plan template is incredibly versatile and caters to organizations of all sizes, from startups and small businesses to large enterprises.

For small businesses , the template provides a scalable approach that aligns with their available resources and requirements, empowering them to build robust strategies for maintaining continuity and minimizing disruptions, even with limited budgets and personnel. Larger organizations can benefit from the template's ability to handle the complexities associated with multiple teams, departments, and locations. It encourages cross-functional collaboration, ensuring a unified approach to resilience planning.

The template's flexibility also allows it to adapt to different industries . It acknowledges that each sector faces unique risks and regulatory requirements. Whether you're in finance, hospitality, energy, or any other field, the template can be customized to address industry-specific challenges.

It can be used by teams in different business units and functions. With this template, risk management teams can create and implement measures to ensure resilience, but it can also be used by any employee, from staff members or team members to senior management.

👉🏻The template will guide you with an easy framework to help identify, measure, and monitor potential risks and develop an action plan to mitigate them.

Business Resilience And Business Continuity Plan - How Are They Related?

Business resilience and business continuity plan go hand in hand, working together to safeguard organizations in the face of disruptions. While they have distinct roles, their shared objective is to ensure the survival and success of a business.

Business resilience is all about adaptability and thriving in the face of challenges. It encompasses a broader perspective, focusing on proactively identifying risks, developing mitigation strategies, and fostering a culture of preparedness. It's like building a strong foundation that can weather any storm, ensuring the long-term sustainability of the organization.

A business continuity plan (BCP) , on the other hand, is a practical and operational approach to maintaining critical functions during and after a disruption. It's the tactical side of things, outlining specific procedures and actions to keep the business running smoothly. A BCP includes emergency response, crisis management, backup systems, communication protocols, and recovery processes.

Think of it this way: business resilience sets the stage, while the business continuity plan takes center stage when a disruption occurs. Together, they form a powerful duo. By integrating a well-designed BCP into the broader resilience strategy, organizations can effectively manage risks, adapt to changes, and ensure their long-term viability.

📚Recommended read: 16 Business Continuity Plan Templates For Every Business

How To Use This Business Resilience Plan Template

Follow the following step-by-step instructions to make the most out of your template and ensure you build a successful plan to achieve business resilience.

1. Define clear examples of your focus areas

Focus areas are the broad categories on which your business resilience plan should focus. By addressing these areas, businesses can proactively identify and mitigate risks, ensure the continuity of critical functions, and inspire stakeholder confidence. Each focus area should have clearly defined objectives, actions, and measurable targets (KPIs) that can be used to assess the success of the plan.

Consider the following examples as inspiration to define the focus areas for your business resilience plan:

  • Risk Assessment and Management : Assess potential risks and vulnerabilities, including natural disasters, cybersecurity threats, supply chain disruptions, and others. Develop mitigation strategies and protocols for ongoing risk monitoring.
  • Business Impact Analysis : Analyze the impact of disruptions on critical business functions, operations, and financial stability. Identify key resources, prioritize continuity measures, and minimize impact on customers, employees, and stakeholders.
  • Incident Response and Crisis Management : Establish business processes and protocols for incident response, defining roles, communication channels, and decision-making processes. Test response plans through drills, ensuring coordination.
  • Business Continuity Management : Develop a comprehensive BCP for critical function continuity, including alternate facility and alternate site options, redundant systems, data backup, and recovery measures.
  • IT Disaster Recovery Strategy : Create robust IT (information technology) recovery plans, implementing data backup, redundancy, and recovery procedures. Enhance cybersecurity measures against threats and breaches.
  • Supply Chain Resilience : Evaluate supply chain resilience, collaborate with critical suppliers, diversify, and implement contingency plans to minimize disruptions. ‍
  • Employee Preparedness and Training : Train employees in emergency management and procedures, crisis communication, and business continuity protocols. Foster a resilient culture and employee participation in preparedness efforts. ‍
  • Communication and Stakeholder Management : Develop a communication plan for timely and accurate information dissemination. Establish protocols, designate spokespersons, and update stakeholders on recovery efforts.
👉🏻These are just a few examples of focus areas you can use for your own business resilience plan. Our Strategy Experts at Cascade recommend selecting 3 to 5 key areas to prioritize. In our Business Resilience Plan Template, we provide focus areas such as Business Continuity, Risk Management, and Recovery . These areas can be easily customized to align with your organization's specific needs.

📚Recommended read : Supply Chain Risk Management Examples

2. Think about the objectives that could fall under that focus area

Consider the objectives that can be associated with the chosen focus area. Objectives serve as specific goals that contribute to the overall success of the plan.

Examples of objectives within the Business Resilience Plan Template are:

(Focus Area) Recovery

(Objective) Streamline recovery processes to minimize downtime

(Objective) Enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of recovery efforts

👉🏻Remember to tailor the objectives to your own focus areas in your plan.

3. Set measurable targets (KPIs) to tackle the objective

KPIs , or Key Performance Indicators, are tangible benchmarks that can be used to measure the progress and success of the plan. Effective KPIs are specific, measurable, attainable, and defined within a certain timeframe.

Examples of time-bound KPIs for the Recovery focus area:

  • (KPI) Reduce recovery time from 24 hours to 12 hours within the next six months
  • (KPI) Increase recovery effectiveness by 20% within the fiscal year
👉🏻Think of KPIs that will allow you to easily gauge the progress and success (or failure) of your objectives.

🤔Don’t know where to start? Check out our articles:

  • How to Write KPIs in 4 Steps + Free KPI Template
  • 84 Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Examples (Tips + FREE templates)

4. Implement related projects to achieve the KPIs

Projects , also known as actions, encompass the steps taken to implement the plan and accomplish the identified KPIs. These projects should be realistic and customized to suit the specific requirements of the organization.

Here are some project examples to help you build your business resilience plan:

  • Enhance employee preparedness through targeted training programs
  • Strengthen data protection with updated security measures
  • Expand supplier network to mitigate dependencies and ensure continuity
  • Develop contingency budgeting and risk-based insurance coverage
  • Establish effective communication channels and share contact information
  • Upgrade infrastructure for robust hard drive backups
💡Pro Tip : Projects must be related to your KPIs, objectives, and focus areas since they’re the actions you’ll take to achieve your goal.

Define your projects following this framework/structure:

Focus Area : Supply Chain Resilience

Objective : Minimize supply chain disruptions

KPI : Reduce average delivery time by 20%

Project : Implement a vendor performance tracking system to monitor and improve supply chain efficiency, ensuring timely deliveries and reducing lead time.

5. Utilize Cascade Strategy Execution Platform to see faster results from your strategy

In today's business landscape, organizations face the challenge of answering critical economic questions and adapting to changing circumstances. However, the ability to access and analyze the right information promptly is essential for informed decision-making.

That’s where Cascade comes in!

As the world's leading strategy execution platform , Cascade revolutionizes the way businesses operate, enabling you to navigate complexity with ease. By seamlessly connecting metrics, initiatives, and investments, Cascade's platform empowers swift decision-making based on actual performance.

With Cascade, you can bring order to the chaos, gain unparalleled visibility, and make better decisions faster. This agility is crucial for building resilient businesses that thrive in uncertainty.

  • Map your business . Gain a comprehensive understanding of your current performance and the factors driving it. This insight empowers you to make informed and adaptive decisions.
  • Connect the dots. Centralize visibility over your execution engine, identify dependencies, and proactively address risks. Strengthen your chances of success by streamlining your execution processes.
  • Maximize returns . Optimize your business operations by untangling complexity, reallocating resources, and making efficient investments. Achieve cost savings and operational efficiency while driving growth.

Achieve business resilience with Cascade

Explore the unique product features designed to help you achieve business resilience:

  • Relationships : Prepare for the unexpected by tracking program dependencies, blockers, and risks that may arise on your strategic journey.

Example of an Alignment Map showing Relationships in Cascade strategy execution platform

  • Integrations : Consolidate your business systems under one unified platform, enhancing clarity in strategic decision-making. Seamlessly import real-time context through Cascade's extensive library of +1,000 native, third-party connectors (Zapier/PA), and custom integrations.
  • Dashboards & Reports : Gain a comprehensive view of your strategic performance and easily share it with stakeholders, suppliers, and contractors. Evaluate revenue-generating initiatives against cost-impacting factors to make informed decisions.

Example of a Dashboard in Cascade strategy execution platform

Related Templates

  • BCP - Business Continuity Plan Template
  • Business Continuity and Disaster Preparedness Plan
  • Business Resilience Plan Template for Supply Chain
  • Risk Assessment Plan Template

🔍 Didn’t find what you were looking for? Check out our Template Library with thousands of templates to help you streamline your strategic planning process.

🆘Need extra help? Book a guided 1:1 tour with one of our Cascade in-house strategy execution experts.

What is a disaster recovery plan?

A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a documented approach outlining processes and strategies for recovering critical systems, data, and operations after a disruptive incident. Its goal is to minimize the impact of a disaster, restore essential functions quickly, and ensure business continuity. The plan includes steps for response, recovery, and restoration, covering aspects like data backup, infrastructure restoration, and communication protocols. Regular testing and updates are essential for its effectiveness. With a solid DRP, organizations can minimize downtime, protect assets, and swiftly recover from disruptions.

Cisco Blogs / Perspectives / What’s Your Business Resiliency Plan?

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Perspectives

What’s your business resiliency plan, derek mitsumori.

The COVID-19 pandemic set a new high bar for organizations and their need for increased business resiliency. When the pandemic hit, thousands of organizations around the world found themselves forced to rethink how to keep things running while keeping their employees safe and serving customers and the community.

Cisco was one of them. When work-from-home policies took effect in March, we sent home virtually our entire workforce of 100,000-plus employees, contractors, and partners almost overnight. Massive IT challenges followed. Cisco IT saw a huge surge in activity on business platforms like Cisco Webex Meetings and Webex Teams. Within a week, employee activity on these platforms leapt from 39 billion events per day — logins, calls, videos initiated, messages sent, and so on — to over 270 billion events per day. That’s a roughly seven-fold increase as the work-from-home policy expanded around the globe.

To manage this unprecedented transition, we took an architectural approach. One that spanned multiple technologies — networking, security, cloud, applications, and collaboration — to transform how we connected our people, secured our organization, and automated our processes.

Here’s an overview of how this approach worked.

Connect Our People

  The foundational layer in this approach is providing base-level connectivity with virtual private network (VPN). This allowed our employees to work from anywhere on company laptops or personal mobile devices and access internal company resources.

When you have tens of thousands of employees suddenly working remotely, you have to take a clear-eyed look at whether you can scale to support them and all the additional traffic they will generate. To that end, we focused heavily on expanding our VPN capacity and resiliency. On load balancing to make more efficient use of system resources and improve performance and availability. And on split tunneling to handle the increased VPN traffic caused by the work-from-home order.

But there’s more to business resiliency and connecting people than VPN access. Employees have to feel engaged and able to collaborate and work productively using tools like email, IM, voice, and video. We found that access to key collaboration tools like Webex Teams, email, and voice are even more important during times of emergency like this.

And with a mind-boggling number of meetings migrating online, the need for a high-quality meeting experience can’t be overstated. In our case, Webex Meetings met that need. In the early days of the pandemic, we saw our Webex daily meeting volume more than double month after month, with meeting volume increasing 24-fold from where it would be normally during peak times. So a platform with the scalability and adaptability to accommodate these unprecedented requirements was essential.

Secure Our Organization

We believe that security must be built in, rather than bolted on. We take that to heart. And our architectural approach to the security elements of business resiliency proves it.

Going beyond just connectivity, our VPN technology provided the visibility and controls our security teams needed to identify who and which devices were accessing the infrastructure. We used identity management to enforce compliance and beef up infrastructure security. And we delivered security from the cloud through Cisco Umbrella — a plug-in to Cisco AnyConnect that combined multiple security functions into one solution and extended protection to devices, remote users, and distributed locations anywhere.

When people are working from home, the security risk increases. So we worked closely with our security team to make sure we opened the right ports and followed the right protocols to deliver Webex securely and effectively to our end users. We also carefully applied key technologies such as Cisco Duo Beyond, Cisco AMP for Endpoints, and Cisco AnyConnect® Secure Mobility Client to protect remote workers anywhere, anytime, on any device.

Just as important as collaboration tools are business-critical applications like Salesforce, Enterprise GitHub, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Not only did they need to perform as flawlessly when employees worked from home as they did in the office, but they also needed to perform securely in the expanded infrastructure. With that in mind, we built critical application lists for each Cisco function, including engineering, sales, and our Customer Experience (CX) organization.

Automate Our Processes

Relying on manual approaches to keep processes humming on such a vast and diverse scale is not an option. Instead, our approach relied on automating processes to link visibility to insights, and insights to action.

Take VPN, for example. After you implement a work-from-home policy, it’s critical to keep monitoring the connectivity status with continuous planning and optimizing. We used these metrics to test the split-tunneling traffic for even more applications to lower the VPN bandwidth demand. Automation here was key.

Similarly, keeping the Webex experience at its best required close monitoring and extreme agility in providing new infrastructure to accommodate the increased demand on the platforms. That meant keeping network, data center, ISP, and other connections under constant surveillance, and rerouting to sites that were under less utilization as needed. Here, too, automation was key.

Cisco’s AppDynamics is a powerful tool for monitoring systems, allowing complete visibility into application performance, as well as the ability to track and monitor business transactions in real time, diagnose and fix problems fast, and more. Our Webex Control Hub includes an analytics section that let us track how our users used Webex services and monitor their experiences. And ThousandEyes, a recent acquisition, gave us visibility into the Internet — a huge asset at a time when remote working is the new norm. The platform allowed us to visualize any network as if it was our own, and quickly surface actionable insights to improve quality of experience, even on infrastructure, networks, and services we do not own or control.

Transform the Experience

The benefits of this architectural approach included the ability to handle complex use cases with flying colors. Have a major conference on the horizon? Or a workshop training that focuses on group work? Need our contact center employees to offer the same level of support, or better, to customers while working from home?

We used this approach for all of the above, including taking our flagship Cisco Live! conference for customers and partners all digital in 2020 for the first time in its 30-year history.

Here’s a closing thought: To manage this unprecedented transition, we needed to look beyond the “normal” or even the “new normal” and embrace the ever-changing reality of our future. This year it was a pandemic. Who knows what it will be a year from now, two years from now, or five years, a decade from now. We wanted to do more than just recover and adjust in the face of change — we wanted to thrive. Our business resiliency plan for reimagining and redesigning the remote experience empowered our teams to work from anywhere, innovated built-in security into every solution, and automated platforms for added agility.

What’s your plan?

For more information, download Cisco’s eBook, Business Continuity Pandemic Preparedness Planning .

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What is a Business Resiliency Plan?

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The ability to adapt is a necessity in today’s ever-changing world, and how well an organization can respond to change can have a significant impact on long-term growth and success. The term “business resilience” is often used to refer to business continuity and vice versa, but failing to recognize and approach business resilience as the related, but more broad, strategy that it is, can result in a missed opportunity to position your organization for optimal success.

What is Business Resiliency?

James Crask, the convenor of the group responsible for developing the ISO standards for business security and resilience, states that “a resilient organization is one that is able to adapt to change, is aware of where its vulnerabilities lie, and has plans in place to respond should things go wrong.” While business continuity plans focus on being prepared to face, respond to, and recover from known risks, resilience plans take things a few steps further.

A BCP resilience plan prepares an organization to face risks both known and unknown.

Therefore, it comprises both business continuity and risk management efforts, as well as other policies and procedures to prepare for challenges and threats that could emerge in the future.

What Risks Should a Business Resiliency Plan Consider?

Being able to adapt quickly is a central element of business resiliency. But what should your organization consider when developing a business resiliency plan to best prepare for the unforeseeable? All risks—known and unknown, existing and potential. Let’s take a look.

Known Risks

Every organization has some number of potential threats, disruptions, or other risks that have enough potential to occur to be a concern. This is where a business continuity plan comes in.

A business continuity plan considers the most critical functions and assets of the organization, identifies primary risks, and details procedures for preventing, mitigating, responding to, and recovering from disruptions. The exact details of a business continuity program will vary from one organization to the next but will plan for a range of potential incidents, including:

  • Cyberattacks
  • Network outages
  • System failures
  • Supply chain disruptions
  • Natural disasters
  • Personnel shortages

Having a comprehensive, adaptable plan in place will prepare for high-risk and high-probability disruptions and threats—and lay the foundation for preparing for their unknown counterparts.

Unknown Risks

How can your organization prepare for risks that don’t exist yet but may arise in the future?

A flexible business continuity plan does play a critical role here, but it needs to incorporate an organized approach to governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) to be effective:

  • Governance assures processes and procedures are aligned with your goals
  • Risk management ensures seamless identification and mitigation of risks
  • Compliance ensures applicable regulations are being followed, completely

A mature, integrated approach to GRC will facilitate clarity, communication, and efficiency which will, in turn, better position the organization to adapt to new concerns as they emerge.

Security

Workforce Readiness and Wellness

Personnel safety and shortages should be addressed in your business continuity plan. But resilience can be impacted even in the absence of an incident. Factors to consider include:

  • Education and awareness – Do personnel have sufficient training opportunities? Training is essential to helping keep professional skills current and support the awareness of and compliance with security standards, operational procedures, and organizational policies.
  • Health and wellness – Are there initiatives in place to ensure healthy working conditions and to support the long-term wellness of personnel? Physical and mental health can impact productivity even under ideal conditions, so supporting employee health can contribute to the long-term success of the organization.
  • Communication – Is there sufficient multidirectional communication throughout the organization? Do personnel have access to leadership, and is critical information disseminated promptly? Communication is crucial to an organization’s success at all times, especially in the face of unexpected challenges.

Ultimately, a rewarding professional environment that provides personnel with a sense of security will have better retention and engagement. This will position the organization to be better able to attract talent down the road, mitigating the risk of skill gaps and shortages.

Financial Stability

Disruptions can lead to financial loss, but financial stability is worth considering under any circumstances. In the face of financial hardship, you should ask these questions:

  • What organizational activities are most critical?
  • What processes, procedures, and personnel are most essential to achieving organizational goals?
  • What resources are necessary to remain in compliance with legal and regulatory requirements?

A resilient organization will be prepared to respond to shifts in demand for what they provide, the emergence of new competitors, and other changes that could impact its finances.

The Reputation of the Organization

An organization with a poor reputation is unlikely to have much hope for a bright future. Consider your organization’s relationship with the public and what they count on you for:

  • Does your organization provide services that people rely on day-to-day?
  • Are you entrusted to handle personal information or other sensitive data?
  • What image does your organization convey and uphold?

Consider how the situations your organization could face might also affect the community you serve, stakeholders, and other relevant parties. Ensure your business resiliency plan includes measures for protecting the reputation and image of your organization by mitigating negative impacts on other parties and communicating critical information promptly and responsibly.

laptop

Business Resilience Strategies

A comprehensive business resiliency plan addresses several potential concerns and, therefore, must employ a variety of strategies. Some of the most crucial to consider include:

  • Robust cybersecurity – Cyberattacks are among the most significant threats to an organization’s resiliency, so implementing an effective cybersecurity program that is ready to evolve in the face of emerging threats is essential. 
  • Diversified technical infrastructure – A rigid IT infrastructure can make it much more difficult to respond to the need for change. Evaluate the application of virtual infrastructure, the use of multiple cloud services, and other emerging technologies as they become available to establish fallbacks that will help keep operations on track in the case of an outage or other failure.
  • Evolving workflows – Technology and globalization have changed the way people work, and that trend is only likely to continue. Establishing procedures that account for the way workflows may change in the future can help improve flexibility now and provide resiliency in the future.
  • Establishing a strong organizational culture – An organization with an established culture, clear norms and expectations, and a strong sense of identity will be better equipped to face unexpected challenges.

Benefits of Business Resiliency

Being prepared to face and overcome acute incidents such as cyberattacks , natural disasters, and supply-chain disruptions are all critical to an organization’s success. An effective business resiliency plan will establish the policies and procedures that you can depend on to:

  • Give your organization a competitive edge
  • Foster and support a healthy, satisfied, productive workforce
  • Support your organization’s ability to achieve its objectives
  • Foster and protect a positive image and reputation 

Coupled with robust cybersecurity, business resiliency will keep your organization operating at its maximum capacity regardless of any challenges it faces—or will face. And the best way to leverage these benefits is working with a quality managed services provider, like RSI Security.

Position Your Organization for the Future with RSI

An effective business resiliency strategy requires ongoing analysis of your organization and the consideration of risks and other factors across several domains. RSI Security’s dedicated incident management team will help set your organization up to succeed in the unknown conditions of the future so you can remain focused on your mission.

Contact RSI Security today to assess your organization’s resilience.

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RSI Security is the nation’s premier cybersecurity and compliance provider dedicated to helping organizations achieve risk-management success. We work with some of the world’s leading companies, institution and governments to ensure the safety of their information and their compliance with applicable regulation. We also are a security and compliance software ISV and stay at the forefront of innovative tools to save assessment time, increase compliance and provide additional safeguard assurance. With a unique blend of software based automation and managed services, RSI Security can assist all sizes of organizations in managing IT governance, risk management and compliance efforts (GRC). RSI Security is an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV) and Qualified Security Assessor (QSA).

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Economy featured

Redesigning business for sustainability.

By Daniel Wortel-London , originally published by Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy

February 21, 2024

small business

Can businesses become sustainable? Certainly—at least in theory. In recent years, new business models have emerged that attempt to place business on an ecologically healthy footing. The  doughnut economy , the  regenerative economy,   sufficiency enterprises , and  postgrowth and degrowth businesses : These and other experiments represent ways of doing business that not only create customer and firm value, but address social and environmental needs as well.  In a context of limits to growth, such experiments are excellent vehicles for providing the goods and services people need, within boundaries set by nature.

Women's co-op in Cameroon

Members of a women’s cooperative in Cameroon. ( UN Women/Ryan Brown , Creative Commons 2.0)

But relatively few businesses are adopting these models. On the contrary: Businesses drive resource extraction and erosion of natural capital and therefore are key drivers of our planet’s environmental crisis. For example,  just 100 corporations  account for more than 70 percent of global carbon emissions on earth.

Presumably the primary reason businesses aren’t embracing more progressive models isn’t ignorance, greed, or a lack of commitment. It’s a question of design. The way businesses are  governed and incorporated  tends to promote unsustainable production and consumption and blocks them from undertaking activities that can make a net-positive impact on our environment.

But these designs can be changed—and more and more firms are changing them. Business leaders are broadening business governance to include different voices, expanding corporate charters to include environmental responsibilities, and reforming how their businesses distribute profits. The enterprises emerging through these reforms,  from B-corps  to  worker cooperatives  to  nonprofit enterprises , are addressing head-on the task of reducing our economy’s environmental impact.

Misaligned Incentives

The way businesses produce, the way they encourage consumption, and the way they design products and choose suppliers  have enormous environmental implications . Environmentalists have looked to  government intervention  to curb bad practices and encourage good ones—through regulations, taxes, subsidies, reporting requirements, and other measures.

arena hosting a shareholders meeting

A Walmart shareholders meeting. (Walmart, Creative Commons 1.0)

Regulation creates, at best, a hostile relationship between businesses and government (and environmentalists). But the bigger problem is that regulatory tools don’t touch incentives  internal  to businesses. To change the way businesses make things and deliver services, we need to think first about how businesses are  designed .

For example, corporate law in the USA  imposes fiduciary duties  on directors to act in the best interest of their shareholders. A corollary to this principle is that corporate directors must act to maximize shareholder value, defined in terms of distributed profits. In pursuit of maximized profits, corporate directors can ignore the health of the environment, labor, or local communities in their decision-making. In fact, they can be held  legally liable  if caring for the interests of these other stakeholders depresses profits.

Alternative Designs

Other ways of designing businesses  go to the heart of their operations.

First, we can change the purpose of businesses to incorporate or even prioritize environmental benefits. Most states have adopted legislation creating  new legal forms  of enterprise, such as social purpose corporations and benefit corporations, that specify that corporate managers must take social or environmental considerations into account when making decisions. These businesses, such as Patagonia, continue to function in many ways as conventional firms. They have products, services, customers, expenses, and revenues like any other business. The difference is that shareholders can’t sue them if these firms decide to forgo profits in favor of environmental protection.

Second, we can change the way businesses are governed. Currently, most answer to a relatively narrow range of investor shareholders. But other ways of governing firms can “embed” environmentalism and worker protection into decision-making. In  cooperatives and mutual associations , for example, local workers can ensure that business decisions benefit communities threatened by environmental deterioration rather than  geographically distant shareholders. Open-source and  commons-based enterprise  open the doors to environmental protection even wider. The business “Faith in Nature” has even appointed a  “Nature Guardian”  to its board. Its job is to give nature a voice and a vote in business strategy. Such governance structures provide an additional internal incentive—and legal grounding—for businesses to take environmental and social considerations into account.

A graphic showing four types of social enterprise

Alternative ways of designing a business to encourage sustainability. ( Financestrategists , Creative Commons 2.0)

Finally, we need to take on the elephant in the room:  profit . If businesses aim to maximize profit, they will be compelled to maximize production and consumption. This dynamic is difficult to balance with any environmental commitments a business might otherwise have made.

But there  are  other ways of doing business ; nonprofit  enterprises  are a good example. While these firms buy and sell services like any other, the profit they make is legally required to be used for  social or environmental purposes , rather than being distributed to private owners or shareholders. Growth is not the goal; maximizing the firm’s positive environmental impact is. And if making additional profits threatens to reduce this impact, profits are sacrificed.

Together, these reforms of the purpose, governance, and profit orientation of businesses can dramatically shift their orientation toward sustainability. They will be incentivized to respect planetary boundaries not by government fiat but using their own by-laws. Moreover, they could  welcome  government sustainability initiatives to the extent that those initiatives make their own job easier. All of this can help make an economy more resilient—and more just.

Real Potential for Real Change

Businesses with a progressive orientation do in fact exist. There are currently  6,000  certified B corps in 60 countries around the world, up from  2,500 in 2018 . In the EU alone there are more than 2.8 million “social and solidarity economy” firms—more than  10 percent  of all businesses!

Moreover, these alternative firms are very successful. Cooperatives  routinely demonstrate a lower failure rate  than traditional corporations or small businesses: About 10% of cooperatives fail after their first year, compared to 60–80% of traditional businesses. And the potential to convert other conventional businesses to alternative models may be greater than one might expect. Most businesses in America and elsewhere  are small  and don’t necessary want to expand dramatically. A recent survey of German firms found that only  two percent were “growth-driven.”  Despite the absence of a growth ambition among the other 98 percent, they operated successfully enough to remain in business.

Two bikes parked in a cafe.

Most businesses are small, and don’t seek to grow dramatically. Laws should help businesses like these. ( Roman Bozhko , Unsplash)

Environmentalists might wonder whether promoting these new forms of business risks generating a  “rebound effect”  in which reduced consumption in one economic sector is outweighed by the broader growth of that sector. But we need to keep our eye on the goal: reducing the growth of our economy  as a   whole . We still want to shrink the highest-impact sectors, like energy and agriculture, while increasing product durability as a way of lessening throughput. But increasing product durability will generally  increase production costs , which in turn could reduce profits. If we want businesses to adapt to this era of lower profits, we need to encourage new models of enterprise that will help them do so. That’s where public policy comes in.

What’s Next?

Public policy could better support the new kinds of businesses that our environment and economy need. Incorporation laws that enable the formation of these businesses are ad hoc and vary wildly. Governments could procure from, or contract with, existing social enterprises through tools like “ community wealth building .” Public bodies could better publicize and promote the  role  these enterprises can play in addressing our planet’s challenges.

Luckily, campaigns across the world are attempting to change this. More and more U.S. states are providing support to  worker cooperatives  and  B-corps . A coalition to promote  “impact-oriented businesses”  received the support of three American senators and eighteen representatives in the House. Meanwhile, a campaign in the UK to require corporations to consider social and environmental concerns in decision-making has received  the support of 2,000 businesses .

speaker and listeners in front of a giant mural.

Creating an economy that works for all requires that all step up. ( Joe Piette , Creative Commons 2.0)

Too often, however, these campaigns silo themselves from each other. Nonprofit enterprises act separately from cooperatives, who work independently of B-corps. To encourage businesses to transform the way Earth needs them to—to transform their purpose, governance, and relation to profit—these firms need to be working together. And ecologists need to join them.

Not that business reform is by itself sufficient for sustainability. The economy grows as an integrated whole, ultimately limited by agricultural and extractive surplus at the base. (That is the essence of the “ trophic theory of money .”) In other words, not all businesses can be truly “green,” even if most can become “ less brown .” That’s why there is a limit to economic growth and a fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. Therefore, macroeconomic policies to cap the size of the economy are a prerequisite to sustainability.

Yet even with steady-state macroeconomic policy, we can’t solve our planet’s environmental crises without the help of business. We need to reform businesses so they adopt environmental protection goals  on their own . This means encouraging new legal forms of business: ones that allow the purpose, governance, and role of profit to align with the steady-state goal.

Daniel Wortel-London

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Age Strong Vermont 10-Year Action Plan released, shaped by public input and focused on state resiliency

General Assembly designates February 22 as Age Strong Vermont Day

Vermont Business Magazine Vermont health officials announced the release of the Age Strong VT 10-Year Action Plan, a comprehensive roadmap designed to address the evolving needs of Vermont's aging population. This strategic plan, titled "Age Strong VT: A Vision for the Future," is the result of extensive public input.

Vermont's older population is our fastest growing age group. By 2030, one in three of us will be over the age of 60. As the state grapples with changing demographics, the Age Strong VT 10-Year Action Plan emerges as a vital tool, fostering optimism and providing a platform to prepare and build on the state's resiliency and strengths.

“From imagining the best of livable communities, to incorporating public health equity in all policies, this plan will be a valuable resource for communities, businesses, non-profits and state policy makers,” said Health Commissioner Mark Levine, MD.

Public comments revealed a diverse range of perspectives. While some individuals expressed concerns about the economy and the affordability of living as they age – issues actively being addressed by the governor and state legislature – many others applauded the plan for its positive vision and strategic roadmap. Noteworthy comments highlighted the plan's emphasis on leveraging the state's strengths, such as community connectedness, flexible transportation pilots, and inclusive arts and recreation programs catering to individuals of all ages.

The Age Strong VT Plan aligns with and supports key priorities to benefit everyone in Vermont, including:

  • Age-Friendly Housing: a future of affordable housing, convenient zoning, and infrastructure that supports aging in place, socialization, local business, and community health.
  • Continuing Education: increasing access to adult learning opportunities for all generations, fostering mental and social engagement, and cognitive well-being beyond retirement.
  • Age-Friendly Health Systems: Recognizing the importance of patient-centered care for older adults, Vermont hospitals, notably Grace Cottage Hospital, prioritize prevention and treatment of dementia.

“Age Strong VT includes strategies that will support Vermonters at all ages and stages of life, including inclusive transportation, accessible housing, opportunities for healthy choices, social connection, and more,” said Megan Tierney-Ward, interim commissioner of the Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living. “By proactively building more age-friendly programs, services and communities we will build a resilient Vermont for everyone.”

Looking ahead, the Age Strong VT Steering Committee is set to meet with state leadership this spring to discuss avenues for successful plan implementation and monitoring. Simultaneously, the committee will monitor ongoing plan activities and create an Age Strong Vermont Dashboard to share progress with the public.

Age Strong VT invites people to join in the ongoing conversation as the plan unfolds, to continue the collaborative work that will ensure a vibrant and supportive future for all Vermonters.

To see the action plan and for more information, visit HealthVermont.gov/AgeStrongVT .

About the Department of Health

We have been the state's public health agency for more than 130 years, working every day to protect and promote the health of Vermonters.

Visit healthvermont.gov ─ Join us @healthvermont on Facebook , Instagram , YouTube  

About the Department of Disabilities, Aging, and Independent Living

The mission of DAIL is to make Vermont the best state in which to grow old or to live with a disability – with dignity, respect, and independence.

Visit www.dail.vermont.gov

Source: 2.23.2024. BURLINGTON, VT – Vermont Department of Health

Vermont Business Magazine

 Visit the Pennsylvania State University Home Page

Syllabi Portal for Online Courses

Penn State's Smeal College of Business

SCM 863 – Managing SC Risk & Resiliency

February 22, 2024 by brettbixler

This course will cover foundational topics for understanding and managing supply chain risks and strategies for building supply chain resiliency. Course modules will 1.) make the case for managing risk and building resiliency in supply chains; 2.) present models and tools for identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks; and 3.) discuss leadership needed for governance of risk and business continuity.  

Major topics include defining supply chain risks and supply chain resiliency, the competitive advantage in building resilient supply chains, risk mitigation strategies, tools for disruption management, cybersecurity in supply chain management, and business continuity planning. Case studies and industry partner interviews will be interspersed throughout the course to illustrate business applications and best practices.  

SCM 800 Recommended Preparations: Understanding the foundations of Supply Chain Management is a necessary pre-requisite to success in this course.

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to do the following:

  • Summarize the nature and impacts of risks within supply chains
  • Interpret ways to assess risks throughout supply chain operations and determine criticalities
  • Devise strategies, tools, and techniques to lessen exposure to a risk disruption
  • Create business continuity plans for risk resilience and disaster recovery

Course Design and Delivery

The course will address the following topics:  

  • Module One: The Case for Supply Chain Risk Management and Resiliency
  • Module Two: Identifying and Assessing Supply Chain Risks
  • Module Three: Building Resilience
  • Module Four: Crisis Leadership, Business Continuity Planning, and Governance

Assessment Plan

  • Individual Assignments
  • Team Assignments
  • Discussions
  • Knowledge Checks

Course Schedule

Spring- 16 weeks

Technical Requirements

The Penn State World Campus technical requirements are used for this course. Additional requirements are listed below.

Zoom Videoconferencing is also used. Zoom is free to use for all PSU students and does not require any additional software or hardware. Learn about Zoom .

February 25, 2024

Top stories, resilient lee task force approves hurricane ian recovery and resiliency plan.

Resilient Lee Task Force meeting

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business resiliency plan

Fort Myers Beach rebuilding highlights Urban Land Institute forum

Panelists discuss rebuilding Fort Myers Beach at an Urban Land Institute forum.

  • BY David Dorsey
  • February 23, 2024
  • Photo Credit:Gabby Occhino

Resilient Lee Task Force meeting

Resilient Lee Task Force unanimously approved its Recovery and Resiliency Plan and will forward it to the Lee County Board of County Commissioners. If approved by vote March 19, the plan will provide a blueprint for the county’s municipalities and other stakeholders to seek federal and state grants to continue recovering from Hurricane Ian, which devastated the region Sept. 28, 2022.

“It took almost a year and a half to get here,” said Lee County Manager Dave Harner, who presided over the approval meeting Feb. 23 at Collaboratory in downtown Fort Myers. Task force Chairman Kevin Ruane did not attend.

“We know it’s going to be many years before we recover completely. This plan allows us to seek grants for the future,” Harner said. “Whether it’s the county or the municipalities or collectively, we’ll be working together in many areas. Specifically with flood mitigation. We’ll be working on those issues.”

business resiliency plan

Although Resilient Lee Task Force also provided input for a Community Block Grant of $1.1 billion coming from the federal government, the approved plan is about the separate issue of boosting infrastructure and planning for future storms.

The plan covers 43 initiatives in eight categories—Planning and Capacity, Infrastructure, Natural Resources, Housing, Economic Recovery, Education and Workforce, Health and Social Services and Cultural Resources.

Resilient Lee Task Force meeting

“The next step is each new municipality or entity, including the school district and the fire departments would approve their own plan,” Harner said. “The county would take all of those plans and accept them and approve their version, which won’t change at all with today’s vote. I think everybody’s consistent that the plan will be consistent across the board.

“Whether it’s the county or the municipalities or collectively, we’ll be working together in many areas. Specifically with flood mitigation. We’ll be working on those issues. This allows us the framework, and it allows us to move forward. They’ll dig deeper with our own entities to decide the next steps to move forward.”

If approved by vote March 19, the plan will provide a blueprint for the county’s municipalities and other stakeholders to...

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  26. Age Strong Vermont 10-Year Action Plan released, shaped by public input

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