This is an enormous swing in value with the cost of inaction resulting in serious loss and the investment in resilience leading to improved profitability and significant growth.

For organizations, the investment in resilience yields a demonstrable competitive advantage—as the 2007-09 economic crisis and the COVID pandemic proved—in terms of the ability to survive disruption, recover, asses, adapt and thrive. Planning and preparation translate into a self-made advantage: to move fast, early and decisively in the face of disruption.

Consequently, this research into resilience leads to several calls-to-action:

• Leaders need to drive resilience from the top down
• Resilience needs to become an agenda
• What gets measured gets done: what is the framework for measuring resilience?
• Measurement need to be embedded in the decision-making and scenario planning for any organization
• Resilience emerges through collaboration: it cannot be done alone.
• Organizations need to identify how to build skills, capabilities and practices
• Resilience is a process for working continuously to face challenges, adapt and transform for sustainable growth because business, societal and economic resilience are interlinked.

Clearly, resilience has emerged as a strategic priority to manage risk and threats as well as drive transformation and growth in the face of disruption, crisis and transition.

But what exactly is resilience? And how do we build it?

What resilience means is much discussed and debated. For RAYVN, one definition that stands out refers to 'a healthy, adaptive, or integrated positive functioning over the passage of time in the aftermath of adversity.’ Fundamentally, resilience is growth-oriented and involves the ability to assess risks, mitigate disruption and learn from experience how to adapt and transform in the face of anticipated and unexpected challenges.

Source: The World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum proposes that there are four key principles to a resilience framework from an organizational perspective: resolve, communication, agility and empowerment. 

At RAYVN, we see that the decision to invest in emergency preparedness and critical event management can help build resilience as organizations commit to risk assessment, create action plans and build out their emergency response networks to respond more effectively. Reporting, assessment and adaptation processes to improve for the future can help to mitigate risk for the future.

Specifically, we see that RAYVN helps customers in the following way:

• Resolve the commitment to digitalize emergency preparedness improves operational and organizational resilience through the commitment to deal with disruption, risk and crisis as efficiently and effectively as possible.
• Communication improves through the access to a common solution or platform for creating and managing the emergency response plan, for creating and executing training exercises that help teams understand procedures and put them into practice. Roles and responsibilities are clarified through simulations so that organizations gain efficiency and effectiveness in their ability to prepare for and manage critical incidents.
• Agility improves through the strengthening of business continuity plans and actual responses to critical events when they arise. Through the collaborative nature of the RAYVN solution, and its unique built-in collaboration functionality, the entire emergency response network can work together and adapt to deliver the appropriate response, even when the unexpected occurs.
• Empowerment grows as people take shared ownership of risk and collaborate to manage disruption more efficiently and effectively together. Furthermore, reporting, review and change management can help to foster resilience—so that even when a critical incident happens, insights can be gained to help drive improvements for the future.

As we have seen, the plans, practices and processes of resilience are strengthened when organizations invest in emergency preparedness and critical event management.