Revealing resilience

Only resilient organisations will survive and prosper over the long term. To help them, BSI has developed the world’s first Organisational Resilience Index report and benchmarking tool that can show them just how resilient they are.

The Index comes at a time of intense and unrelenting business disruption. Organisational resilience is about the ability to adapt to change. It is about being innovative, constantly learning and improving to overcome adversity and spring forward to seize new opportunities. 

BSI has produced the Index with the aim of improving and embedding a culture of continual improvement. Achieving mastery of Organisational Resilience requires leaders to reflect upon and challenge assumptions. Past prosperity is no guarantee of future success, even for the greatest enterprises; time and again, inflexibility and introspection have been shown to be their undoing.

The Index equips today’s leaders with a study against which to consider their organization’s fitness across 16 core elements, categorised into four areas: Leadership, People, Process and Product.

To create the Index, BSI conducted a major international study in which 1,260 senior business leaders participated, representing organisations in ten sectors across three regions of the world: UK and Ireland, USA and Asia Pacific.

Overall research findings
BSI’s study found that, overall, leaders regard all 16 elements as important.

Reputation is seen as the most critical element for the long-term success of the business, even more important than Financial Aspects, Leadership, and Vision and Purpose. Despite this, 43% of the leaders interviewed believe their organisation is strongly susceptible to reputational risk.

When asked to rate their own resilience, different sectors have widely differing perceptions of themselves.

Focusing on aerospace
The advent of the revised AS 9100 series of quality management standards has led aerospace organisations to consider areas they may not have examined previously in relation to quality management, such as strategic intent, risk, and ‘context of the organisation’. Many are looking at themselves through a new lens and asking, “Just how resilient are we?”

Now, the BSI Organisational Resilience Index shows the indicators aerospace leaders rank highest in terms of performance and importance for their industry:



On the positive side, most feel the Alignment of their business is strong, with staff pulling together in the same strategic direction. Similarly, they believe they are performing well in terms of Financial Aspects and Leadership. More worryingly perhaps, particularly for a sector undergoing tremendous changes due to digitalisation and technology, Innovation is ranked surprisingly low.

Comparing aerospace with other sectors
The Index shows Supply Chain to be consistently among the weakest performance elements across most sectors, but it is perceived to be stronger in the Aerospace sector. However, it is still seen as one of the high risk elements due to the length and complexity of the Supply Chain. Horizon Scanning has lower perceived performance and importance ratings across all geographies and sectors – and it is markedly weaker in the Aerospace sector.

Innovation is comparatively low in many organizations, even in sectors that must innovate to stay ahead of the competition, such as Aerospace, Automotive and Manufacturing.

Where are your strengths and weaknesses?
To find out your organisation’s relative strengths and weaknesses – and how you compare with the 1,260 organisations behind the Index – complete the BSI Organisational Resilience Benchmark tool, a simple questionnaire located at www.bsigroup.com/organizational-resilience

This online tool will present your results in a spider diagram. It will allow you to compare how you perceive your performance in Leadership, People, Processes and Product, based on the 16 elements, against the overall benchmark results.

I hope BSI’s Index will inspire your organisation to boost its resilience, embrace change and seize every opportunity.


Brendon Hill will be speaking at The Farnborough International Airshow on ‘Future cybersecurity challenges facing the aerospace industry’.