Today’s world is fraught with numerous challenges for businesses. These range from global conflict, rising costs, inflationary pressures, and geopolitical tensions impacting supply chains to shifts in employee and consumer behavioral patterns post-pandemic, and sudden adverse climate events. This volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world has become the new normal, presenting companies with an array of creeping, converging, and compounding crises. These disruptions often come with legal, regulatory, and reputational risk, leaving boardrooms with limited time to react. This has firmly put resilience and crisis management on the corporate agenda.
Businesses are perpetually looking to evolve and better prepare for these crises. The effectiveness with which these are managed can be the dividing line between survival and class action lawsuits, fleeing investors, or a loss of key customers. Resilience – the ability of an organization to respond and recover from these adverse events – is fast becoming a paramount quality. Businesses are looking for resiliency leaders or quarterbacks to spearhead this endeavour.
Global crises typically call for a cross-functional team, extending across geographies and business units, to coordinate a response. Such a task typically falls on the shoulders of individuals from traditional business functions such as HR, risk and compliance, legal, communications, finance, and IT. A growing number of businesses are seeing the benefits of appointing a chief resilience officer (CRO) to ensure proactive and agile responses to crises.
CROs, unlike traditional risk mitigators, can help an organization achieve adaptability to withstand shocks by building resilience systems. These resourceful professionals ensure that their organizations are primed to thrive when faced adverse circumstances. According to the Rockefeller Foundation, as part of its 100 Resilient Cities initiative, the CRO is an innovative position that acts as a point person for resilience building.
Nowadays, an increasing number of corporate boardrooms are recognizing the importance and value of having a CRO in place. As businesses become more global, and with increased customer and stakeholder engagement, CEOs are now prioritizing business and reputational risk over other risks. The role of a CRO is not limited to studying risks but also involves exploring ways to use these risks for additional benefits for either the organization itself or the community.
This culture, at the intersection of preparedness and value creation, spearheaded by a CRO, can be instrumental in helping an organization succeed. Such a role requires expertise in coordination across all silos in an organization. As opposed to a vertical business function, CROs work horizontally across all business units, and report to the CEO. This role creates an environment where employees across functions are empowered to contribute to the organization’s overall elasticity.
As the world continues to grapple with these evolving challenges, the appointment of a CRO is imperative – more than just a strategic decision, it is a critical step towards building a more resilient future.