Strategic resilience: A primer for business

Resilience thinking is by its nature strategic, as it supports and drives fundamental questions on how systems and companies are organized to deliver utility, how they might anticipate, respond and adapt to change and disruption, and how they might drive new business models and ways of meeting society’s needs.

This primer complements the Vision 2050 issue brief on Building long term business resilience. The issue brief explores early business responses to COVID-19, making recommendations on how companies can build greater long-term resilience through improved approaches to corporate risk management, human & social capital management, and the integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) information.

This primer presents the importance of resilience to corporate strategy, and how companies can evolve their approach and processes using resilience principles. It introduces fundamental principles of resilience, explores ways in which these principles can be used as lenses by which to choose practical interventions and how those lenses can be used in specific contexts, including in food and energy systems. Resilience is a crucial property of business and societal value and a critical enabler of system transformation.