In a world of accelerating complexity and uncertainty where crises are becoming the norm, strategic resilience is increasingly seen as a crucial feature that reflects the capacity of a company to manage disturbance and reorganize itself without collapsing in the face of adversity.
Resilient companies are more adaptable to change, can learn, and are less vulnerable to disruption and external shocks such as natural disasters, economic crises, or political shifts. As business leaders in uncertain times, we must explore resilience as a framework for promoting more sustainable trajectories, highlighting our business potentialities, and advantages for effective planning processes.
In practice, strategic resilience is the capacity to turn threats into growth and leverage opportunities in a non-crisis-like manner. Strategic resilience enables an organization to learn about the new opportunity early, shape its formation, and benefit from the uncertainty inherent in change as it unfolds in ultimately unforeseeable ways.
In general, strategic planning provides a structured path for determining what goals a company should pursue to accomplish its mission over a specific period and how it can most effectively achieve these goals. This process includes fostering adaptive thinking, encouraging learning, broadening team participation, and promoting formal governance to manage plan changes. Strategic resilience planning addresses business continuity as a direct response to a crisis and, post-disaster recovery, an organization's ability to come back on track in an even better position after a business-altering event.
Strategic resilience goes a step beyond essential resilience characteristics by offering post-disaster strategies to avoid costly downtime, manage structural vulnerabilities, and maintain business operations in the face of additional challenges. It allows a company to quickly adapt to disruptions while maintaining business operations and safeguarding employees, assets, and overall brand equity. In short, adversity can present a new growth path to all parties involved.
Preparing for strategic resilience begins with an understanding that the core processes must be preserved for an organization to survive unexpected events and crises. An often-overlooked challenge of strategic resilience planning is the human element, whereby in an emergency, employees must be prepared on how to respond accordingly. Employees need to develop strengths, acquire coping skills, recover from hardships, shake it off, and be prepared for future challenges. They need to be resilient to succeed in life and help our businesses overcome.
2017 was a challenging year for companies operating out of the markets impacted by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria but what we have learned is that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In other words, let's learn to leverage the growth opportunities inherent to crises by building and celebrating resilience.
DuartePino is a management advisory firm that combines in-depth customer knowledge with practical expertise in marketing communications to help clients create sustainable business growth. We can provide your organization with a fresh perspective, a proven process that invests in the outcome, and the tools for successful execution. From Fractional CMOs to business advisory services, contact us to learn how our team can help with growth strategies for your organization.
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