Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2025

H ere’s a new idea for threat facing your orga nization. There is a good chance many people in your organization have no idea what that threat is. This is my goal: to help your organi zation become more resilient in the face of strategic threats. I call this concept strategic resilience. You and your team are in the right place to drive meaningful results, just like you help your organi zation prepare for major disasters and respond to any kind of crisis. This article will outline how to increase strategic resilience. In step one, I will describe and define strategic resilience, and then in step two, I will outline the components of a strategic resilience program. First, some background. Before start ing my own consulting firm, I spent 20 years working for Verizon Wireless. They were one of my clients when I worked for a global professional services firm. Funny how that works. My entire career has been focused on increasing the technical, operational, and strategic resilience of organizations. Step One: Defining and Understanding the Concept of Strategic Resilience There are risks to your organization that transcend the normal operational risks we have helped our organizations manage since the early days after 9/11 made “BCP” an acronym of interest to every board of directors. For example, you don’t want to be director of business continuity or VP of operational resilience at Blockbuster as Netflix is going online, at Sears prior to Walmart, or at Borders before Amazon. You get the picture. These old companies are gone. Disrupted. So much for busi ness continuity. Let’s pause here for a moment. How seriously do you take your role, as a resil ience professional? Is this your responsi bility? operational resilience and business continuity profes sionals: go talk with your chief strategy officer. They know the biggest strategic

In my first 16 years as an operations focused resilience professional at Verizon, never once did I speak with our chief strategy officer. It made sense at the time. I was only focused on the things that could disrupt our operations. Things like power outages, fiber cuts, natural disas ters, active assailants, human error, etc. The strategy team wasn’t responsible for any of those things, and I had plenty of work already. Then I decided to advance my career and step into Verizon’s strategy depart ment. It opened an entirely new view of the world. Look at those biggest strate gic risks! My units for measuring risk changed from thousands and millions of dollars to billions. I had been missing the big picture, threats that could sink the entire company. Ouch! I had work to do. If one definition of resilience is posi tive adaptation despite adversity, then strategic resilience is positive adapta tion despite strategic adversity. We can consider strategic adversity to be anything that can disrupt your organization’s abil ity to achieve its strategic goals.

window. Some strategic issues are urgent and time sensitive. It won’t be comfortable. People will ask, “Who you do think you are, and why are you poking around in these quiet hall ways?” Tell them you are a resilience pro fessional, and you are here to learn more about the strategic risks to your organiza tion. Even if someone else is working on strategic risks and opportunities, it will be a good connection. They could probably use some help. It’s a fair question to ask: “Who is responsible for managing the strategic risks to your organization?” Perhaps this responsibility belongs to the chief strat egy officer. Perhaps the CEO or board of directors, maybe the VP of enterprise risk or internal audit. I am less concerned with where the responsibility falls in an organization, and more concerned the work is done well, with the right execu tive visibility. Here is a diagram that positions stra tegic resilience in relation to the ongo ing evolution of business continuity and operational risk programs.

This is what we do as resilience professionals. We help our organizations with the risks that are most significant. And like me, you probably take your role seriously. We don’t ask for money unless we really need it, unless the risk is real. When we call, the execs know something urgent needs their attention. This credibil ity we have built is pure gold, built over the course of many years of operational planning and crisis response. Let’s help with the big strategic risks too.

Welcome to the world of strategy. If you have succeeded in the world of business continuity, where the profession is often interpreted in 10 different ways by 10 people, you are perfectly suited for the job of strategic resilience. Even better, you can bring operational rigor to a team that may benefit from making decisions when the clock is ticking loudly, like during a crisis, not just for the annual budget cycle or five-year planning

DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SUMMER 2025 9