Resilience must morph from operational to strategic, supported by leadership mindset shift

Company leadership “requires a sea change” when it comes to thinking about and investing in resilience and risk management, as prior “operational resilience” focus must morph into “strategic resilience” if businesses are going to successfully navigate “the big stuff that’s going to be hitting us over the next 20, 30, 40 years”.

This was according to Frederick Gentile, director of risk engagement at WTW, who was speaking at trade association Airmic’s The Risk Forum conference on 11 February 2026 in London. He joined a panel discussion entitled ‘Putting resilience into practice – global complexities demand leadership and strategy’, chaired by Airmic chief executive Julia Graham.

As part of this conversation, Gentile confirmed that both an organisation’s staff and its culture “are absolutely critical” in terms of enabling successful risk management – however, these people-centric components can only benefit a company’s resilience if they are underpinned by board level buy in.

He explained: “Resilience is a board level value principle. It has to be right at the top.”

Marc Bentley, head of global risk finance at IHG Hotels and Resorts, agreed with Gentile – he noted that “people and culture are absolutely key” to achieving “resilience throughout the business”.

He added: “Having the right people in roles, having the right culture is absolutely fundamental because the risk management team can’t do everything. Ultimately, we do need the various functions and the leaders within the business to actually have that resilience focus as well.”

As to how to garner board level buy in, Gentile recommended getting “key sponsors within the board to visualise what [a systemic] event in the future [could look like], how that could affect the organisation, how [we could] respond and what can we do to prepare for it now? How will we survive it?”

He continued: “Scenario planning or scenario creation is useful, but it has to have context. It has to inform decision-making.

“When you create a scenario, it needs to be very credible and relevant to the organisation and meaningful. Because if it becomes abstract, we fall back into saying ‘it’s not going to affect us. It’s not going to happen’.”

Survive and thrive

For Gentile, resilience falls into two camps – resilience with a small “r” or a capital “R”.

The status quo in risk management has been “resilience”, Gentile explained, which is centred around business interruption and recovery processes – something he believes risk professionals have been making good strides in across recent years.

However, he feels that “Resilience” is the future of risk management. This considers systemic events with “far reaching implications” – such as the 2008 financial crash – where resilience moves beyond just responding to incidents and instead incorporates adapting and recovering from broad and wide situations.

“That resilience with the capital ‘R’ – it’s that longer-term thinking rather than the short-term, that ability to survive and thrive,” he added.

“We need to look back at the operational resilience part of it – the business continuity, maintaining processes, critical activities and services – and move that on. I consider that to be almost version 1.0 [of risk management].

“We need to move that on to version 2.0 given what’s happening today, given the creeping risks, the big stuff that’s going to be hitting us over the next 20, 30, 40 years. It has to become strategic resilience and that requires a sea change at board level. It requires investment. It requires a completely different mindset.

“The business interruption part of [resilience and risk management] is key, but it is a risk transfer option – and when we’re thinking about resilience, it’s broader than risk transfer.”

Gentile described aviation, medical care and nuclear utilities as three “high reliability” industry sectors that risk professionals could perhaps learn from moving forward.

The Covid-19 effect

Both panellists agreed that 2020’s Covid-19 pandemic was hugely important in really pinpointing what resilience is and what it means to organisations – Bently described the worldwide event as a “marker in the sand” and a “big step change” in the world of risk management.

At IHG, the pandemic forced the organisation to review both its internal and external resilience plans. Bentley confessed that there was a mismatch in preparedness between different parts of the business, which then needed alignment. This has been a key priority for him in the intervening years.

He said: “Covid really brought to light some of the resilience challenges that we faced. A lot of the focus prior to that was about resilience at our hotels, how they operate. So, a lot of [the] focus [was] about continuity at the hotel level.

“Covid really brought to light a lot more [of the] challenges that we have at the corporate level – there’s been a real shift to focus [on the] corporation. We don’t own many of our hotels anymore. We manage 1,500 hotels and then we franchise 5,000 – so, as a business, we’re really a brand owner and a systems technology reservation business rather than a hotel operator, which 10, 15, 20 years ago was where we were.

“There’s been a real shift [internally] to focus on now that we are a brand owner and a systems company, how resilient are we?”

Touching on business continuity, Gentile added that “business impact analysis” which unpicks the activities and processes that need to be recovered the quickest following an incident is “very useful” – especially when then reviewed against a corporate’s “risk registers”.