Operational Resilience has always mattered. But today, it has become one of the defining capabilities of successful organisations.
From cyber outages and supplier insolvencies to geopolitical shocks and AI failures, disruption is no longer an exception – it has become business as usual. Recent incidents such as CrowdStrike (2024) and at UK car manufacturers and retailers (2025) have shown that when disruption hits, organisations must possess a clear understanding of their important/critical services and dependencies to recover faster and limit operational and financial harm. Those without that clarity often scramble, elevating the impact of these events from inconvenience to crisis.
The challenge is that most operating models were never designed for this level of complexity. An organisation’s most important or critical services now cut across multiple functional groupings and components within the technology stack – third parties, data, people and premises. Organisations are expected now to not only withstand disruption but to also demonstrate a clear understanding of how shocks spread across their service delivery model and where possible, prevent them from occurring.
Once you add the complexity of the growing reliance on technology and AI, supply chain fragility and increased regulatory pressures, it’s evident that existing static resilience documentation quickly becomes obsolete. Boards are increasingly asking a simple but difficult question: do you really understand how your services are delivered, and what would break them?
