Who Owns Resilience?

Every organisation has someone who manages the money, someone who runs the buildings, someone who takes care of the people stuff and someone who is responsible for the technology. Ask "who is responsible for our finances?" at a board meeting and you would get a really strange look. The question would be absurd.

But who owns resilience? Ask "who is responsible for our resilience?" and watch what happens. A brief silence. A few sideways glances. Someone will eventually volunteer that it probably sits with the risk manager. Or health and safety. Or facilities. Or the COO. Or possibly everyone.

If you just mentally scanned your org chart and came up blank, you are not alone. In most organisations, resilience does not have a home. It does not have a desk. It certainly does not have a budget line. Nobody wakes up every morning and thinks "resilience, that is my job today."

Which in practice means it's just like the kitchen!

You know the kitchen. The one at work. The one everyone is responsible for. The one that somehow never gets cleaned until something starts to smell or someone sends a reminder. Resilience works the same way in most organisations. Shared responsibility. Zero accountability. And a hope that it will be sorted out magically by someone else.

The thing is though, people do care. Most organisations are full of people who would step up in a crisis and do their best. The gap is between responsibility and accountability. One is a warm feeling. The other is a name on a page that the board can point at when things go sideways.

Big organisations have their version of this problem. They have enough structure to assume someone else is handling it. The risk team thinks operations has it covered. Operations thinks FM owns it. Facilities thinks the risk team wrote the plan. Everyone has ticked a box on the risk register. Nobody has checked whether the boxes add up to anything. The plan exists in a folder. The folder exists in a shared drive. The shared drive exists in a part of the network that three people can find. Two of them have left the organisation.

Small organisations have a different version. They often have one person who quietly carries the whole thing in their head. It could be the office manager who knows where the backup keys are, who the plumber is, what to do when the internet drops, and where the first aid kit actually lives (as opposed to where the policy says it lives). That person is not called the resilience manager. They are called Jo. And when Jo goes on holiday, the organisation's resilience goes with them. Nobody notices until day three when something goes badly wrong and the collective response is "Jo would know what to do."

Neither version is real resilience. Both work right up until the moment they do not.

The fix does not require a restructure or a new executive appointment. It requires someone to decide what most organisations keep avoiding: resilience needs an owner. Not a committee. Not a shared responsibility. Not a line on everyone's position description that nobody has read since induction. A person. With the authority to ask hard questions, the time to actually do the work, and enough backing from the top that people take it seriously when they come asking.

What tends to happen once someone is named is that things start moving surprisingly fast. Plans get updated. Exercises get scheduled. Gaps get found. It turns out the work was never the hard part. The hard part was getting someone to own it.

If you are reading this and realising your organisation does not have that person, the question is not really whether you need one. It is what are you waiting for?

We do not tell you who that person should be. But if you want help understanding what they would be walking into, what your actual resilience capability looks like, and where the gaps are, that is what we do.