Gartner Predicts CEOs will Mandate Culture of Organizational Resilience to Survive

In the recent research paper from Gartner, entitled “Predicts 2021: Organizational Resilience,” four Gartner analysts provide their predictions for the growing trends that will impact the ability for organizations to remain resilient in the face of increasing threats and the continued impact of the pandemic.

One of the focal points of this paper (which is a series of discussions on various aspects of resilience) that stood out to me is David Gregory’s discussion of the following key strategic planning assumption: “By 2025, 70% of CEOs will mandate a culture of organizational resilience to survive coinciding threats from COVID-19, cybercrime, severe weather events, civil unrest, and political instabilities.”

His analysis confirms what Fusion has been seeing in our own research:

Stronger collaboration across the business is imperative to properly develop resilience strategies because threats and impacts are wider-ranging. Also, organizational resilience as a discipline is essential (now ─ and not sometime in the future) to successfully negotiate the current business challenges and develop an incident management plan.

Gartner, through the words of Gregory, recognizes that organizational resilience is not just successfully reacting to a crisis but involves scrutiny, planning, and reassurance to customers and stakeholders. At Fusion, we are providing the risk management software needed to scrutinize your business for the development of new approaches to resilience. By building your resilience efforts around an information foundation that captures how the business works in a very approachable way, you gain visibility into priorities, dependencies, and weak points that create risks which leads to new approaches and new strategies that will drive customer trust.

By mandating a culture of resilience, CEOs should be appointing resilience leaders that understand how to break down silos and connect the dots as they capture critical business services along with all dependencies across the organization. Visualizing impact and weak points is critical for identifying how to pivot and change course to achieve a more resilient posture. Resilience is not just about responding to the next pandemic, but it is about building new strategies that address the concerns that can only be identified by understanding how your organization works without silos.

A key point from Gregory is that “organizations that are able to provide evidence of robust continuity arrangements will engender confidence in customers and stakeholders.” He goes on to recommend that firms should “recognize organizational resilience as a strategic imperative and as an enabler for the continued delivery of strategic objectives in disruptive scenarios.” It is thus both a key strategic focus and a source of ensuring other strategic objectives can be delivered on no matter what interruption may occur.

At Fusion, we wholeheartedly agree. Navigating your strategic moves as the world shifts and changes will require an understanding of how things work. To fully see your organization’s structure and challenges, you must develop a culture of resilience that encourages and enables everyone to contribute so the resilience picture is complete, accurate, and trustworthy. Then, a resilience system must tie visibility to action by providing tools to help make decisions quickly and allow you to pivot quickly under changing conditions. With these as your core tenets, resilience will provide significant strategic advantage in the coinciding threat environment that Gartner describes and is likely to be the new normal.

The recommendations form a solid approach for any organization who is taking resilience seriously as the right way to survive and thrive.