Last month Resilience First hosted a virtual panel discussion on building resilience in today’s evolving geopolitical environment. This session was part of our Geostrategic Programme developed in collaboration with PwC.
Below is a summary of the event, with key insights on how your organisation can identify opportunities and strengthen its resilience.
Geopolitical Risks and Organisational Resilience
- Interconnected Risks: The impacts of geopolitical risks are compounded by cybersecurity, reputational risks, and regulatory complexities.
- Regulatory Landscape: Geopolitical shifts will drive sector-specific regulations, potentially increasing divergence and adding complexity to resilience strategies.
- Resilience Reassessment: Organisations will need to rethink resilience approaches, focusing on vulnerabilities, critical services, and key assets.
- Governance Role: Effective governance is necessary to build resilience around what is most important to organisations.
- Executive-Level Priority: Organisations can use this geopolitical moment to elevate resilience discussions to the Executive level.
Data, Intelligence & Decision-Making
- Breaking Silos: Geopolitical analysis must go beyond quarterly briefings or being solely the remit of government affairs teams—organisations need to integrate insights across functions.
- Proactive Approach: Forward-looking analysis is essential rather than reactive responses.
- Internal Coordination: Identify teams with access to geopolitical insights (e.g., credit risk teams using rating agency data, local market teams with perspectives or insight on local conditions) and ensure cross-functional coordination for informed decision-making.
Adapting Resilience & Taking Action
- Uncertainty & Change: While uncertainty is constant, the speed of change has increased — organisations should be prepared for a degree of chaos and disruption.
- Use Scenarios to Guide Action: Rather than creating single, all-encompassing scenarios, break the problem down into key elements (e.g. Trade, Financial Markets, Supply Chain, Workforce, Conflict) and develop better to worse cases for each element. Against each of these identify key indicators to be monitored, possible ‘no regret’ actions, other actions and when they might be triggered. .
- Rapid Risk Shifts: Slow-moving risks can escalate suddenly, so ongoing monitoring is crucial.
- Supply Chain Due Diligence: Apply a geopolitical lens to assess risks and ensure adequate resources for thorough analysis.
Strategic & Competitive Resilience
- Thinking the Unthinkable: Provide Executive Teams with radical but reasonable worst-case scenarios, a better-case view, and potential opportunities.
- Embedding Resilience in Strategy: Use resilience thinking to drive long-term viability and identify strategic advantages.
- Board Involvement: Engage the board in scenario analysis outcomes and exercises; form a geostrategic resilience subcommittee or task force if there is substantial risk and work to be done.
Key Steps
- Scenario Planning: Move beyond speculation—analyse first, second, and third-order impacts to inform resilience strategies.
- Timely Action: Balance reaction speed to geopolitical developments—avoid acting too early or too late.
- Collateral Impact Analysis: Consider all downstream consequences before taking action.
- Regulatory Alignment: Align global decisions with local regulatory frameworks to avoid compliance risks.
- Ongoing Monitoring: Track geopolitical developments proactively to anticipate sudden impacts.
- Expert Advice: Establish a geopolitical taskforce and engage external experts where appropriate (e.g., former ambassadors) to brief the board.
To learn more about contact us
Resilience First
Theo Bachrach, Head of Business Engagement, Programmes and Strategic Partnerships: contact@resiliencefirst.co.uk
PwC UK | Crisis Management, Risk & Resilience
Bobbie Ramsden-Knowles, Partner & Co-Lead Global Centre for Crisis and Resilience: roberta.ramsden-knowles@pwc.com
Alex Sagovsky, Crisis, Resilience and Geopolitical Risk:
alexander.sagovsky@pwc.com
