Resilience Strategy Framework
Resilience strategy is not a plan for one disaster; it's a loop: see the shock coming where you can, absorb what you can't avoid, adapt while it's happening, recover deliberately, and feed what you learned back into what you watch for next time.
Five stages sit in a ring, arrows carrying each shock's lessons round to the next scan.
Reach for this when…
- One disruption exposed how little slack you actually had.
- You have a disaster recovery plan but no sense of the risks that never made the plan.
- You keep recovering from shocks but never seem to get better at seeing them coming.
How to run it
- Anticipate: scan for the shocks most likely to hit you, not the most dramatic ones.
- Build absorption capacity, slack, redundancy, reserves, before you need it.
- Adapt while the disruption is live. Don't wait for a post-mortem to change course.
- Recover deliberately: restoring the old normal isn't always the goal.
- Learn, and feed it back into what you scan for next time.
A worked example
Situation. Miguel Santos ran a wine export business in Porto, Portugal, with a thorough earthquake evacuation plan and no answer when a shipping strike froze his export routes for six weeks.
Applied. He ran the loop properly for the first time, scanning beyond earthquakes to his actual exposure, shipping routes, currency, a single distributor in the UK, and built absorption capacity by signing a second distributor before the next shock hit.
Result. When port congestion hit the following year, he adapted within days instead of weeks, and the recovery fed straight back into a wider scan.
The catch
Resilience planning can drift into stockpiling slack for shocks that never come, at a real ongoing cost. It also tends to fight the last disruption well and the next, different one badly, because the anticipate step rarely gets revisited with enough honesty. Building resilience is easy to announce and hard to sustain once the memory of the last shock fades.
A resilience plan aimed only at the last disruption is a monument to it, not protection from the next one.