From climate shocks and cybersecurity threats to geopolitical crises and economic volatility, resilience has become a defining issue for societies. And in this era of permacrisis, resilience can’t be built by any one institution or organisation alone. It’s the result of collective effort where governments, businesses, and communities work together to prepare for, adapt to and learn from disruption.
The changing face of resilience
Traditionally, resilience was viewed through the lens of a narrow emergency response: how quickly can this system or process restart after a disaster? Today it’s far broader. The response needs to factor in things like social cohesion, economic stability, environmental sustainability and digital security. The challenges we face are interconnected, so the solutions must be too. Resilience now means ensuring that societies, and the organisations that support those societies, can keep providing critical services in the face of a disruption.
The outages to the electricity grids of Spain and Portugal last year provide the perfect example. We saw a disruption in one sector spill over into the rest of society, from finance and transport to healthcare.
This showed that resilience is not just about getting isolated, unconnected sections of society working again. Instead, it needs a holistic response involving all participants to ensure dayto-day activities can continue. When the impact of an incident like this is felt across society, the response must also be society-wide.
In other words, an organisation could have the most robust resilience plan, but it won’t matter if the society in which it operates isn’t equally as resilient.
The importance of public and private collaboration
All of this means that neither the public nor private sector can build resilience in isolation.
Governments have a public mandate, legitimacy and the duty to protect citizens – they set the regulatory framework and the priorities. But often it’s the private sector that must operate within this framework and deliver – they have the innovation, agility and resources to implement solutions at scale.
When these forces align, the results for society as a whole can be transformative:
As we continue through this era of permacrisis, collaboration across society is not just desirable, it’s non-negotiable.
Putting theory into practice
Societies are starting to wake up to this new reality. During 2025, the UK government tabled to Parliament the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill and published its Resilience Action Plan, which sets out the UK’s strategic approach to improving its resilience. We’re seeing firms across multiple industry sectors now recognise that resilience is not just important for their bottom line, but also for the long-term resilience of UK society.
These bills and regulations start to provide a guide for how both public and private sectors must strengthen the systems and national infrastructure society depends on.
Here the basic principles of operational resilience still apply, but they need to be applied in a very different manner.
Creating a resilience plan is about understanding the services you provide and what is most critical to forming your ‘Minimum Viable Company’ (i.e. how do you keep the lights on and deliver your most critical or important products / services). Organisations used to only think about this in terms of commercial resilience and what needs to underpin their bottom line. In today’s new operating environment, true resilience means focussing on your services, how they’re critical to your customers, employees, suppliers, markets, and how they underpin society as a whole.
Let’s take a theoretical example, a national supermarket would previously focus on ensuring that it is able to fill its shelves as quickly as possible. In today’s new operating environment, operational resilience means that the same supermarket needs to be resilient to supply chain disruptions, cyber threats and severe weather events impacting product / raw material availability and price stability.
Alongside these interconnected macro-risks, the supermarket needs to be thinking about which of its stores would cause the greatest impact to the local community if its shelves were empty and how vulnerable customers can continue to have access to basic food products - on time and without putting themselves in harm’s way.
Whole society resilience needs a whole society response
Society as a whole is experiencing increasingly turbulent times, and the basic principles of operational resilience provide a blueprint for how collaboration and co-ordination between regulators, government bodies, private enterprises and community groups can strengthen not just an individual organisation’s resilience, but the wider systems society depends on. In an increasingly interconnected world, where disruptions can spread rapidly across industry sectors and impact local communities, collaboration is vital to ensure continuity of those services society most depends upon, even during severe disruptions.
To truly build societal resilience, we need a renewed understanding of how value and responsibility are shared. Governments can’t just regulate resilience; they must enable it. Organisations can’t simply ensure their own operational resilience, they must contribute to a broader, collective focus on societal security and sustainability.
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