Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2025

it like every other crisis scenario your team has conducted for the past hundred years. And since we have an all-hazards plan, let’s try on these strategic threats for size! OK, we’re adding some humor here, despite the stress and gravity of the deci sions this team would be facing. Like with any exercise, it is being conducted on a blue-sky day, where

we have the luxury of planning ahead, before the threat is real. We should feel good about that, and be able to lighten the mood. You are a trusted professional, helping guide and lead busy executives through an exercise that could poke at the heart of the organization. We need to trust one another’s intent and focus on the big mission to get stronger and not sink into

silliness. We are doing this work because it is mission critical. We are doing this because we do not intend to fail on our watch. We intend to win. This requires emotional intelligence, the ability to be humble when facing the future, and the ability to chart a path forward with the strength of a team. The better and faster we can do this, the more resilient we become. Exercises are an important way to test your strategic continuity plans. These also present themselves in a similar way to traditional operations-focused tests of BC/DR plans. Use creativity and common sense to decide what will most benefit the team, whether a table-top scenario or functional exercise. Next Steps Implementing a full strategic resil ience program should only be considered by organizations that have capable and mature operational resilience and BC/DR programs in place. However, building a strategic resilience program does not need to become a new mountain to climb. Just like BC/DR programs, strategic resilience provides capabilities that can start small and evolve organically within your organization. Every organization is unique. Like BC/DR, the concepts can be incorporated into daily work activities, making an organization stronger just by adopting the concepts, one component at a time, one team at a time. Each compo nent adds new value. As resilience professionals, we want to be aware of all threats to our organiza tions. Since strategic threats are likely to significantly impact all organizations, let’s expand the frontier of our profession to include strategic resilience capabilities as part of our value and purpose. v

Bob Klemme is managing director and founder of Trailmark Co., a consulting firm focused on increasing the strategic resilience of organizations. He managed the BC/DR program at Verizon Wireless

and subsequently developed an approach for managing strategic innovation risks for Verizon’s strategy depart ment. Prior to Verizon, Klemme was a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

14 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SUMMER 2025