Resilience is a broad topic that can take on many different meanings for organizations. Generally, it focuses on developing programs and designing infrastructure that can withstand future changes, stresses, and shocks, including those that come with disasters and extreme weather impacts. Our firm’s resilience planning goal is to help clients and stakeholders better understand how to make communities, infrastructure, natural resources, and social connections more resilient to natural hazard events like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. While the needs of organizations may vary, developing an integrated resilience program is an opportunity to help coordinate an organization’s efforts to be more strategic on where they are investing resources and how they’re integrating projected hazard impacts into their efforts.

As extreme weather becomes more frequent and costly, agencies are turning to resilience to protect essential services, stretch limited budgets, and meet rising public expectations. Establishing a resilience program instead of relying on one-off actions helps align efforts, prioritize investments, and track progress. From public works managing drainage systems to transportation agencies maintaining mobility to local governments planning for long-term service, resilience reduces risk, prevents costly disruptions, and helps build public trust. It also supports operational continuity, improves safety, and can enhance bond ratings through proactive risk management.

Steps for Success

Each resilience program is unique, and can be influenced by many factors such as the maturity of the resilience program, whether the program is centralized under one department or integrated across the organization, and whether the drivers for the program are regulatory or self-directed; however, building towards a successful program typically involves these five key steps:

Step 1: Identify the Program Lead

Either an individual or a group within the organization needs to volunteer or be selected to lead the resilience program. These individuals should have a passion for resilience and have the work capacity to drive strategic resilience program goals forward. Some organizations may have formal roles, such as a chief resilience officer that can serve as this lead. In other cases, this person or group might be appointed by the organization’s leadership team or be informally organized. Sometimes there is an informal torch bearer, or someone already doing the work informally and without clear authority. Identifying a lead helps elevate and support those efforts so they can be more effective, coordinated, and sustained.

Step 2: Define Program Priorities and Steps for Implementation

One foundational criterion is to determine priorities. Articulate the requirements based on the program’s drivers, which will then influence the goals and actions. To establish these priorities, those leading resilience activities should assess where the organization is at currently and decide what effective steps need to be taken to move the program forward. To minimize impacts from natural hazard events, whether current or future conditions, an organization should aim to minimize that risk in a coordinated way. One way to do this is to think about resilience more comprehensively, recognizing that it is interdisciplinary and affects various elements of the organization differently. Some examples of specific steps to be taken to determine program priorities include:

• Assessing the current and projected risk to staff, customers, and assets.
• Defining the risk tolerance of the organization.
• Identifying specific actions that could be amended to enhance disaster resilience, such as changes to infrastructure design guidance, operations, or staff training.
• Prioritizing activities using organization-defined categories, such as project costs and benefits.
• Developing tools and metrics to track resilience.

Many organizations develop a plan to work through the aforementioned steps that serves as road map for ongoing implementation.

Step 3: Clarify Stakeholders

The resilience program is often carried out by a team or committee that is tailored based on the maturity of an organization’s resilience program and ideally comprised of interdisciplinary departments that reflect the organization, such as policy, operations, design, communications, and other organization-specific subject matter experts. This team provides leadership and helps amplify the organization’s priorities to other stakeholders.

Step 4: Build Support Within the Organization

Fostering internal support is an effective practice of building a resilience program. There is not one standard approach, however, garnering organizational leadership assistance and finding employees who are interested in joining the resilience program is beneficial. The most important idea to communicate is the “why.” Suggest how the resilience program is important to your business and what the benefits are. There are regulatory benefits, financial incentives, and a business case to be made for implementing disaster resilience. For example, communicating that codes for structures are often created to meet the minimum needs and are typically decades old, posing a significant risk to wellbeing and business assets, can help your organization understand the business case for taking action.

Establishing regular standing meetings with those driving the resilience program will help create a clear path of action so everyone understands the ask, the strategy or plan, and what their role is. Roles may include gathering support for the strategy through communications channels or conversations with leadership, creating and leading regular newsletter updates or meetings to keep those involved with the plan on track, or taking initiative to share program updates at relevant organizational or town hall meetings. Presenting the business case in front of an organization’s board of directors, council, or other governing body is also a key step towards internal buy in.

Step 5: Communicate How Your Organization Can Support Resilience Efforts Internally and Externally

In addition to the internal communication of the reason for implementing your program, you will want to share the significance of these efforts externally as well. Consider how reducing risk through the resilience program can benefit customers or external stakeholders. For example, how reducing risk to disasters and extreme weather can make organizational structures safer, protect critical services like water supply, prevent supply chain disruptions, lower costs, and increase operational efficiency. Financial groups are also interested in knowing what agencies and businesses are doing to reduce their risk in future conditions. Our firm’s multi-disciplinary resilience team collaborates with financial experts who can help determine the avoided losses and cost savings for an organization.

Finding Program Support

With over 50 years of experience in disaster resilience work, we have an extensive background in helping organizations implement resilience programs by building out the strategic plans, conducting research, and providing engineering and communications support. Our firm has served a variety of local, state, and federal governments and commercial entities, guiding them from concept to the implementation of not only their resilience programs, but the design and construction of adaptive infrastructure as well. We look forward to continuing to support our clients and helping communities prepare for and recover from future hazard events.