Cranfield University, in partnership with the National Preparedness Commission (NPC) and Deloitte, has produced a report ‘Resilience reimagined: a practical guide for organisations’ to present key insights from business leaders on how to become more resilient.

The report comes at a time when the businesses have borne losses due to the coronavirus pandemic followed by frequent lockdowns.

Cranfield University's professors David Denyer and Mike Sutliff conducted in-depth interviews and four focus groups with more than 50 C-suite level people (boards, senior executives, policymakers, and resilience directors) from FTSE 100 companies.

The report cautioned that the world is entering a new period of uncertainty and change, with an ever-increasing possibility that things would go wrong. It sought answers from leading figures about how resilience can be developed, who does it well, and what other businesses can learn from them.

Cranfield's research found that the organizations that coped best with the pandemic had already been doing the following three things:

They understood what was most important to their customers and therefore what were the most essential things to continue to deliver as the crisis unfolded.

If something went wrong, they knew what the thresholds of tolerable impacts to the customer/user were and had examined in advance alternative ways of delivering those outcomes that mattered the most.

They had relentlessly stress-tested for possible disruption without worrying about what type of threat they might have to face - a cyberattack or a pandemic - learning how to cope when under pressure from challenges that might not be foreseeable or imaginable.

Professor David Denyer, Professor of Leadership and Organisational Change at Cranfield University, said: "We do not know what shape the next crisis will take but we can take proactive action to prepare.

He added: "Businesses and organizations need to seize the learnings from this crisis and develop the agility to cope with the next. Whether it is another pandemic, another financial crisis, or threats from a cyber-attack or climate change, the risks are multiple and complex but the capabilities of readiness, responsiveness, recoverability, and regeneration, the 4Rs, are ones that can be ingrained.”