What does societal resilience mean?

A whole-of-society approach means adopting an “always-on” resilience mindset – where individuals, organisations, and communities keep their sensors tuned to risk and preparedness at all times. From home to work, society needs to be prepared, planned, and equipped with options and contingencies to respond quickly when disruption occurs.

Join us as we look at how we can take the core concepts of organisational resilience, and use this to inform and build whole of society approaches.

Resilience is built through multiple contributions

In organisational resilience, it’s vital to understand that resilience building must be carried out across the whole organisation. No one person can make an organisation resilient – it’s the sum of each individual and each team understanding their role in business continuity and operational resilience.

This framing can be applied to society as a whole – each individual, organisation, group of organisations (such as emergency services), or supply chains (such as in retail or manufacturing) that strengthen their ability to cope with challenges, collectively make society more resilient.

Events such as the recent cyber-attack on M&S, power outages in Spain and Portugal, and extreme weather events throughout the UK have shown us that organisations need to anticipate, prepare for and have plans in place to cope with and recover from large scale disruption if it occurs.

Technology powers justice services now and this is only going to increase. As much as technology brings huge benefits, it also brings equal dependencies – how prepared is everyone for disruption?

This is where an “always-on” mindset becomes critical. Technology-driven systems require constant vigilance and readiness, not just periodic reviews. Organisations need to embed resilience into everyday operations, ensuring they can pivot quickly when systems fail.

Learning lessons from the past, businesses and organisations will be much better able to respond and continue functioning – which has a knock-on, positive effect for their employees, civil life, and the economy.

The importance of diversity of input

One of the enabling behaviours of organisational resilience is inclusion – meaning that multiple and varied contributors (either individual or corporate) should be a part of resilience efforts, and that there are multiple systems of managing resilience. This also means ensuring these diverse and critical views have the right community connections and channels to help inform resilience governance as they appear.

There are a couple of key points:

• Requisite variety – mitigating risk through varied perspectives, varied management systems, and varied data sources.
• Skills spectrum – allowing a broad range of knowledge to be involved in resilience building, to ensure that creative, innovative, and effective strategies and plans are put in place to deal with change or major events.
• Separation of assets – distributing operationally critical assets in a manner that can allow for parts to fail without the whole failing, and allowing them to contribute to resilience through capacity planning.

Each of these have a part to play in societal resilience. For civil society to continue uninterrupted in the face of change, it requires communities of people, governance and public services, and businesses to work together to continue to function.

How civil contingencies are changing

The recently updated National Occupational Standards moved the focus from civil contingencies – named after the Civil Contingencies Act 2006 – to a new Resilience and Emergencies suite.

This is a significant change in focus, showing that the standards are no longer just about emergency planning and response, but about embedding resilience across society. Embedding resilience means moving beyond reactive planning to proactive, “always-on” readiness, where resilience is part of the daily decision-making rather than reserved for crisis moments.

It opens the use of the standards to wider sectors than before and clearly indicates how organisational resilience principles are being put forward by the government as an underpinning enabler of societal resilience.

Find out more about the standards →

Dimensions of organisational resilience

The key dimensions of organisational resilience can be split as follows (as according to International Consortium for Organizational Resilience).

• Finance
• Infrastructure and operations
• Workforce
• Environment
• Social

Social resilience is a reciprocal exercise in organisational resilience. It means that understanding how, and underlining the importance of, organisational resilience contributes to social resilience – in terms of impact and benefit – is a core component of why organisational resilience is important.

The environment factor

You cannot talk about resilience without thinking about the climate emergency. Particularly in understanding the risks associated with extreme weather events for emergency services (such as wildfire increases, or heat waves). But what does organisational resilience have to do with the environment beyond planning and responding?

This is where carbon neutral or net zero principles come into play. These organisational policies and trends directly contribute to societal resilience through mitigating the risks associated with fossil fuels and raising global temperatures. Organisations are increasingly reporting on and planning for how to reduce their carbon footprint, which will be a major contributor to how resilient the nation is to climate change as a result (regardless of how fast or slow the pace of change is).

But is it also thinking about supply chain vulnerability – considering how ethical and stable these are, but also how vulnerable they are to climate events (often globally).

How can you use these principles to support societal resilience?

Organisations need to have robust plans and capabilities in place to support societal resilience. These plans should reflect an “always-on” approach, where resilience isn’t about checking a box but a continuous practice.

The operating environment of each organisation will dictate what these capabilities look like – for the justice sector, these are often in the form of incident response and emergency services collaborations through Local Resilience Forums, for example. But, equally, all public services need to have contingencies in place to ensure vital services remain functional in the face of adverse conditions without disruption.

One way organisations can strengthen their resilience planning is through scenario-based assessments. Our parent company, The Workforce Development Trust, offers a Scenario Informed Resilience Assessment service – a structured approach to stress-testing organisational resilience against realistic, high-impact scenarios. By identifying vulnerabilities and gaps before disruption occurs, this assessment helps organisations embed resilience into everyday operations and align with the UK Resilience Frameworks’ whole-of-society approach.