What’s the Metric for Resilience?

Many executives insist their organisations need to be resilient.  Given all the adversities and disruptions businesses had experienced, it’s understandable to believe resilience is vital.

Resilience is “an organization’s ability to adapt to and recover from disruptions, such as natural disasters or market shifts, while maintaining core operations and continuing to function.”

But how does one measure resilience? 

Metrics are performance measures which tell stakeholders how well their businesses, in terms of their activities, products, & services, are doing versus standards or goals.  

There are many metrics for areas like sales, quality, reliability, and cost.  But what metrics do we use for resilience? 

Is a metric for risk mitigation a metric for resilience?  An audit for risk can provide assessments for concerns such as safety and security.  But could it tell the whole story about an organisation’s resilience? 

Inventory turnovers, or how an item swings in relation to demand and supply, indicate how well executives are managing working capital.  Can it be an indicator for resilience, in how products are weathering challenges in a given period of time? 

Making resilience an objective is not easy when one can’t pinpoint standards or targets directly corresponding to it. 

When one can’t measure an objective, one then cannot manage how to get there. 

It becomes nothing more than a buzzword.  And so far, that is what resilience is: an unmeasurable buzzword. 

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