Introduction

Lyndon Bird

Business continuity management (BCM) has been around in various guises since the mid-1980s, whereas its “young cousin” – organisational resilience – has largely emerged since the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–08. There has been a view in some quarters that conventional risk management, and by implication BCM, failed to predict the severity of the crisis or provide any effective way of mitigating the operational impacts resulting from it. This led many organisations to question their approach to operational risk, seeking a more holistic approach that relied less on theoretical models. They recognised that, in order to continue to be successful, extrapolation of current trends needed to be combined with a business perspective on how the contextual landscape might change: the unknown risks (which became known as black swans) and the increasing power of social media in defining public perception of performance.

As a result of this type of thinking, the term “resilience” (or resiliency in the US) emerged as an important new concept, and became used in many large-scale businesses to cover a range of functions that had traditionally been seen as specialist