Member-Led Dialogues

Resilience challenge:

The member Dialogue would aim to illuminate impacts on organisational resilience and identify emerging
approaches to tackling this issue, with a view to generating practical recommendations on how organisations
can reinforce their geopolitical resilience and how resilience leaders can support this strategic agenda
within their organisations.

Geopolitics is an increasingly significant upstream driver of resilience exposures for many organisations.
A mixture of high levels of external volatility and internal structural factors often complicates the
process of optimising resilience arrangements in response, however, with little in the way of agreed
best practices or recognised approaches for organisations when dealing with this issue.

How the Dialogue can support inter-organisational learning:

• Illuminate resilience impacts organisations have faced from geopolitical developments
• Demonstrate how these have been tackled, whether effectively or not, and the mitigation options available
• Illustrate key learning points and emerging best practices from which others can learn

Key learning points are expected to focus on the significant role resilience teams can play on this agenda,
as well as wider organisational approaches.

Outputs:

We anticipate a best-practice paper or similar to be a key output, perhaps accompanied by supplementary
guidance on how resilience teams engage on these issues within their organisations, given the enterprise-wide
nature of the challenge. Emphasis in both would be on practical application, and circulation could also be
supported by other events such as a webinar or presentation.

Resilience challenge:

How can organisations build the knowledge, skills and working approaches to be able to effectively anticipate within a fast-moving and increasingly complex risk landscape and then, over time, embed, enhance and extend these capabilities? Although guidance frequently emphasises anticipation’s foundational role, there is little detail on how it may be developed and implemented as a structured capability, without which organisations risk recognising change only once impacts are material, limiting their ability to prepare and adapt effectively.

Many resilience activities are inclined towards reaction rather than proactivity, with decision cycles, budgets, and risk frameworks favouring short-term certainty and response over continuous sensing, monitoring, and adaptive decision-making able to consider a range of uncertainty and a variety of different time horizons. This is problematic as change is often ambiguous, interconnected, and difficult to initially quantify, emerging within saturated information environments where early signals are easily obscured by noise, and systemic effects may cause disruption that exceeds or falls outside of conventional control and mitigation planning.

Building anticipatory capability therefore stands to benefit organisations through deploying real-time situational awareness, sustained horizon scanning, and longer-term strategic foresight approaches for effectively responding to the different time needs of the resilience cycle.

How the Dialogue can support inter-organisational learning:

• Provide a structured space for members to compare how anticipation is practised across sectors, functions, and organisational maturity levels.
• Share practical examples of effective approaches and surface common enablers or constraints.
• Introduce ISO-aligned foresight practices that help establish a shared baseline of understanding and generate practical insight into what works and why.
• Foster recognition that emerging and future risks frequently develop across domains, scales, and organisational boundaries.
• Enhance member perspectives on shared conditions, sector and organisational interdependencies, and collective cascading implications.
• Support the broader adoption of general and transferable practices.

Outcome:

• Fostering a shared understanding of anticipation as a defined and actionable resilience capability.
• Identification of common information and organisational challenges, barriers and enablers to building anticipatory practice.
• Increased familiarity with ISO-aligned foresight and horizon scanning practices relevant to risk and resilience functions.
• An in-person, half-day Resilience First Anticipation Symposium to explore key themes surfaced through the Dialogue programme.
• Strengthened cross-member connections to support continued knowledge and practice exchange beyond the Dialogue.
• A concise briefing pack summarising key Dialogue insights, guidance and case examples, a post-Symposium report, and recommended actions for the wider membership.

Additional details:

• The Dialogue is envisioned to commence in the second half of 2026 to allow sufficient time for programme development.
• The programme and schedule will be co-designed with Resilience First and prospective participants to ensure suitability and alignment.
• The Dialogue will not require access to proprietary information unless voluntarily provided, and all discussions will follow Chatham House rules.
• An in-person symposium may accompany the Dialogue to enable perspective sharing and networking, subject to internal agreement and resources.