with practitioners who possess a defined body of knowledge, a structured development pathway and the credibility to lead this critical area of organisational capability.
Crisis A gap in the profession?
When a crisis strikes, who in your organisation is responsible for ensuring that your people can cope? Not the process. Not the technology. The people. In most organisations, the honest answer is that nobody holds that specific responsibility. Crisis preparedness is spread thinly across risk registers, business continuity plans and emergency procedures, yet the human dimension, the capability of individuals and teams to actually perform under the acute pressures of a crisis, is rarely owned by anyone.
This is a significant gap in my view. Research consistently demonstrates that the decisive factor in crisis outcomes is not the quality of an organisation's plans but the capability of the people who must execute them. Decision-making under uncertainty, communication in high- pressure environments, leadership when the situation is ambiguous and evolving: these are human capabilities that determine whether an organisation navigates a crisis effectively or is overwhelmed by it. The Grenfell Tower disaster revealed failures not of procedure but of human judgement, communication and leadership at critical moments. The 2017 WannaCry attack on the NHS exposed organisations that had invested in technical defences but neglected to
Resilience needs
The decisive factor in crisis outcomes is not the quality of an organisation's plans but the capability of the people who must execute them.
What Is Crisis Resilience?
professionals A
s crises grow in frequency and complexity, Dr. Paul Wood believes organisations and society need a recognised profession of crisis resilience focusing specifically on the human capabilities that determine how well organisations perform when crises strike.
prepare their people for the reality of operating under sustained crisis pressure. In each case, the decisive failures were human, not technical.
Of course, there are long-established and highly developed professional disciplines in adjacent fields. Risk management has ISO 31000 and the Institute of Risk Management. Business continuity has ISO 22301 and the Business Continuity Institute. Emergency planning, disaster management and crisis management each have their own mature standards, training programmes and professional qualifications. These disciplines are essential, and the expertise they have built over decades provides a critical foundation for organisational preparedness. Each makes a vital contribution to ensuring that organisations have the structures, processes and plans in place to deal with disruption.
Yet there is no established professional discipline for crisis resilience: the capacity of people and organisations to withstand, respond to and recover from acute crises. It sits across and beneath the established disciplines, drawing upon all of them, but addressing something none of them fully owns: the integrated human capability that enables everything else to work when it matters most. I believe it is time to change that. Organisations and society need a recognised profession of crisis resilience,
29 © CITY SECURITY MAGAZINE – SPRING 2026
www.citysecuritymagazine.com
Crisis resilience is distinct from both organisational resilience and crisis management, though closely related to each. Organisational resilience describes the broad capacity of an organisation to anticipate, prepare for, respond to and adapt to change. Crisis management refers to the procedural and structural arrangements for managing crisis events. Crisis resilience sits between and beneath these concepts. It is fundamentally concerned with the human capabilities that enable effective performance during periods of acute crisis: the individual and collective qualities of a workforce that determine how well an organisation actually performs when it matters most.
These capabilities do not develop by accident. They must be deliberately identified, cultivated, measured and sustained over time. Research has identified at least twelve distinct human factors that contribute to crisis resilience: personal resilience, flexibility, communication, motivation, decision- making, perseverance, sense-making, optimism, leadership, risk awareness, self- efficacy and perception. Critically, these factors do not operate independently.
They form a mutually reinforcing architecture: strong communication supports better sense-making, which improves decision-making, which in turn strengthens leadership effectiveness during a crisis. An organisation's crisis resilience depends upon how well this architecture is developed across its workforce.
Six core capability areas
If crisis resilience is to become a recognised profession, or skillset for those with responsibility for it, alongside their other role, then its practitioners need a defined body of knowledge. Based on current research and professional practice, six core capability areas can be identified that a crisis resilience professional must develop.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
