Resilience is widely recognized as a key driver of business success, yet the real challenge lies in turning this powerful concept into an actionable strategy. How can today’s corporate leaders bridge the gap between theory and practice? To do so, these leaders must activate resilience in their teams' everyday work, tools, and processes.
Activation starts with an understanding of what resilience means in practice. It involves meeting disruption with confidence and taking actions that navigate near-term obstacles while enhancing long-term competitive advantage.
The ability to translate resilience principles into concrete actions will define successful organizations in the years ahead, as innovation accelerates, uncertainty persists, and risks grow more complex. BDO’s 2025 Techtonic States Report found that businesses that want to stay competitive must play offense, not just defense, in the face of an uncertain and dynamic future.
Read on for a practical guide on how to:
- Build a resilient organization
- Develop a strong data foundation
- Cultivate a resilient culture
- Embed resilience in operations
Before diving into each pillar, it’s important to understand a key principle that underpins organizational resilience: distributed decision-making. This approach empowers teams to act swiftly and autonomously, enabling businesses to thrive in uncertain environments.
Distributed Decision-Making Drives Resilience
Resilience depends on the ability to act quickly in a highly volatile and dynamic business environment. This ability rests on distributed decision making, which empowers leaders and individual teams to act autonomously. In a culture of distributed decision-making, managers are empowered to act independently rather than wait for senior leadership to make key decisions that cascade throughout the organization. This approach empowers individual leaders across the enterprise to be more entrepreneurial, resourceful, and adopt an ownership mindset toward their profit and loss (P&L) lines.
Achieving this model has become more feasible due to technological advancements that have made data collection, sharing, and analysis faster and more accessible. Frontline teams with real-time data access and analysis capabilities are better able to spot patterns, adapt to disruptions, and capitalize on opportunities. These teams become more agile than those in hierarchical organizations, which are generally slower to identify and react to external changes.
61% of business leaders believe resilience is now the most important quality of a business.
Organizational Resilience Begins with a Strong Data Foundation
A healthy data environment starts with data stored in an accessible format and location. This creates access to clean, reliable information across the enterprise, enabling organizations to quickly and consistently analyze that information, and creating a reliable basis from which artificial intelligence (AI) powered tools can operate. Organizations with more mature data infrastructure will go beyond leveraging internal data to integrate information from external sources — such as weather, geopolitical events, and economic indicators — to conduct more sophisticated scenario planning.
Beyond improving data cleanliness and access, businesses must also equip their people with the analytical skills to interpret data accurately. Organizations that prioritize upskilling and reskilling will unlock advantages that extend beyond basic data literacy. They will achieve better outcomes in areas including resource management, proactive trend recognition, and forecasting, which in turn drive competitive advantage.
Together, these capabilities enable teams to make decisions and act more autonomously, improving their ability and speed to respond to disruptions and take advantage of new opportunities. This agility forms the backbone of resilience.
How to enable a resilient environment
In addition to establishing a strong data foundation, organizations must build a culture embedded with resilient principles. There are four critical priorities to lead with resilience:
- The interplay of Deep Trust and High Expectations®
- Investing in learning, training, and career growth
- Strengthening talent and well-being
- Developing future-ready leaders and managers
Deep Trust and High Expectations®
Employees feel deep trust when they know they can safely seek feedback, call for help, and voice concerns. They also feel confident that they will always be met with respect and their ideas will receive fair consideration.
A high-expectations environment provides stretch challenges to individuals and teams. These opportunities aim to spur collaboration, stimulate meaningful contributions from all parties, deepen learning, and set a standard of excellence for the whole organization to follow. Meaningful collaboration extends beyond individual teams to connect all areas of the organization – including finance, product, sales, engineering, marketing, and beyond.
A cross-functional approach enables leaders to triangulate insights from various parts of the business, enabling teams to draw connections and identify trends that might otherwise remain siloed or undiscovered. When diverse perspectives converge, organizations gain a more complete picture of challenges and opportunities, leading to more informed and creative problem solving. By establishing high expectations while fostering psychological safety through deep trust, and granting access to the right data and tools, organizations create an environment that enables people to operate with greater autonomy.
Investing in Learning, Training, and Career Growth
The need for the development of soft skills — critical thinking, collaboration, and emotional intelligence — has never been greater. These qualities, which AI cannot replicate, are essential to foster a collaborative environment where teams feel empowered to solve problems proactively and autonomously. Organizations should prioritize the development of these skills alongside technical upskilling and build pathways for employees to move across roles and departments, supporting development and career progression.
Strengthening Talent and Well-being
At the center of every resilient organization is a workforce growing individually and collectively. Our research reveals that employee talent and well-being are inseparable from business innovation and success, as 93% of business leaders believe employee health and well-being are essential. These priorities reveal that leaders who want to drive growth and resilience must support their people holistically. This involves creating a cohesive talent management and well-being strategy that seamlessly incorporates emotional and physical wellness into daily operations. When employees feel supported holistically, they are better able to show up as their best selves — healthy, engaged, and equipped to drive resilience.
Developing Future-Ready Leaders and Managers
Organizations need to reimagine the roles of managers by instituting consistent and scalable management systems. Relying on individual personality or intuition to manage teams creates a patchwork of expectations and styles that undermines organizational alignment and can crumble under external pressure. Management philosophy must be clearly defined, supported, and scaled like any other strategic capability. When equipped with well-outlined expectations and frameworks, managers can lead with confidence and consistency, acting as culture carriers, performance coaches, and trusted navigators during change.
Enabling Cultural Transformation
Cultural change can’t be imposed — it must grow from within. Senior leaders play a critical role by modeling the values they want their organization to embrace and motivating others to do the same.
The first step should be to define guiding organizational values, which need to be clear, believable, and consistent. They need to express who the organization is, who it aspires to be, what it stands for, and a value proposition for both customers and employees. These values cannot be created and dictated from the top down; they should be cultivated by listening to employees and leaders from all levels. This includes conducting exercises like interviews, focus groups, town halls, and surveys to capture the employee experience, understand business goals, and determine what needs to be amplified in values to achieve those goals. From there, organizations can craft clear messaging and compelling narratives that outline the values and behaviors needed to achieve their goals.
To bring organizational values to life, consider introducing new feedback channels or guidelines to support the desired culture and foster greater transparency at all levels. Train internal leaders on how to model these values through open, honest interactions with their teams, then highlight examples of these values in action. Work closely with leadership to identify “lore defining” stories that reflect the desired culture and share those stories across the organization. Create forums where employees can ask questions and receive candid responses from leadership. Encourage team leaders to talk as openly about setbacks as they do successes and invite feedback and input from all levels. Finally, identify internal “influencers” — frontline managers and team members to help shape and champion the culture.
Spotlight: Avoiding the Reactivity Trap
There are two critical pitfalls to avoid when reacting to new signals:
Not every signal necessitates the same response. Businesses need to differentiate between signals that necessitate a change in tactics or strategic direction and those that can be safely monitored. To achieve this understanding, organizations must establish criteria to evaluate signals based on their potential impact, urgency, and alignment with strategic priorities. Leaders should anchor this assessment in the fundamental metrics or trends — such as company performance, customer behavior patterns, and pricing — that underpin their overarching business strategies. Without this framework, organizations risk overreacting to minor changes or risk key warning signs that demand immediate action.
Even if a business has clarity into what external signals warrant a swift response, an uncoordinated response may cause as much damage as ignoring the signal entirely. When departments operate in siloes and lack shared response playbooks, they may waste resources, duplicate efforts, and send conflicting messages to customers and employees. Responses will be slower and less effective compared to competitors that mobilize decisively and cohesively. Organizations need pre-established response frameworks that define roles, decision-making authority, and communication processes.
To avoid these pitfalls and respond effectively to emerging signals, organizations need tools that build strategic clarity and operational readiness. Scenario planning can teach teams how to achieve the necessary understanding, navigate uncertainty, and avoid these pitfalls when reacting to new stimuli. Scenario-planning exercises simulate disruptions, enabling teams to practice their responses and build institutional confidence and experience.
Consider the following example:
A reactive vs. resilient-minded retailer
Retailer 1 learns that tariffs will be immediately placed on imports from the country where they primarily source their products. Recognizing the complexity of the situation, the retailer promptly engages external advisors to help navigate the new landscape. With their guidance, the retailer conducts a thorough analysis of viable alternative sourcing options and carefully vets suppliers in another country. Although the transition requires investment and may result in higher short-term costs, working with external advisors enables the retailer to make informed decisions, minimize risks, and position itself for long-term success. By leveraging specialized expertise, Retailer 1 is better equipped to adapt to changing market conditions and protect its revenue.
Retailer 2 faces the same disruption — but responds differently. Earlier in the year, they conducted scenario planning exercises that prepared them for this exact situation. Instead of reacting impulsively, they follow a pre-established playbook.
Retailer 2 contacts suppliers to explore cost-sharing strategies, renegotiates contract terms, and develops new pricing models. They proactively communicate with customers about the potential impact and offer preferred pricing programs to VIPs. In some cases, relationship managers are empowered to absorb tariff costs or tailor responses based on customer value.
Because Retailer 2 invested in scenario planning, they respond with agility and intention — minimizing operational disruption, preserving supplier relationships, and protecting customer loyalty.
Integrating Resilience into Operations
In practice, resilience-minded leaders solve problems by overcoming short-term obstacles while simultaneously improving long-term competitive positioning. For example, when faced with rising costs and tariff volatility, a reactive approach may be to reflexively cut budgets, including the product or service lines that appear to have the costliest inputs.
A more resilient business, however, might instead consider portfolio simplification to improve revenue and profit margins. In this scenario, the organization would start by analyzing the performance of products and services to determine where to focus efforts for the greatest impact. The analysis would provide an overview of the highest performing products and services by revenue and profitability to inform next steps. Then, leaders would use the results of the analysis to deprioritize underperforming areas and reallocate resources to high-margin product or service lines. As part of this renewed investment, organizations can allocate new resources to hiring and retaining top talent for the prioritized growth area.
A resilient organization would also analyze its customer profile within top-performing lines of business to identify its top customers, including those who buy multiple products or services and have the highest margins or growth potential. As part of the resource reallocation effort, they might create a VIP level of customer service to increase satisfaction, deepen relationships, and discover new growth opportunities among this sub-group. This would help continue to build differentiation, particularly important in volatile times when competitors may be struggling to maintain consistent service levels.
The future for resilient organizations
The benefits of resilience have compounding effects that will materialize in the next few years. Business leaders who use disruptive events as opportunities to reposition their organizations for the future will create competitive advantages that lead to outsized performance.
We expect to see that gap widen over the next few business cycles as innovation continues to accelerate. Leaders who prioritize building resilient teams and operations today will be better able to drive innovation, transformation, and reshape their businesses for an ever-changing world.
Are you ready to face uncertainty with confidence?