Is resilience the new sustainability?

A new pattern is emerging in the conversations we have with organisations on sustainability: the word resilience is gaining more and more traction. It has slowly but surely found its way into sustainability strategies, and some sustainability managers are even being asked to develop resilience frameworks to answer questions like: What do we do in the face of external shocks? How do we stay in business when a flood hits our production facility? How do we keep our supply chains running when a war breaks out?

It is perhaps not a surprising development in a world where climate change and geopolitical tension introduce what feels like unprecedented uncertainty. Naturally, we turn to concepts that might help us navigate this new context and protect what we have built. But what does resilience actually mean? What have we learned from years of sustainability work? And how do we move beyond the frameworks to work with resilience in a meaningful way?

Resilience in a sustainability context

As any dictionary will tell you, resilience means the ability of a system or organisation to respond to or recover readily from a crisis or disruptive process. This is still how many organisations think about it – as a shield that protects against vulnerability.

But that understanding is literal, and as with many literal interpretations, rather narrow. If the goal is merely to maintain the status quo, we miss something fundamentally important to any thriving organisation: the capacity to move.

It helps to be precise about what moving can look like. Some organisations bounce back: they absorb a shock and return to business as usual, more or less intact. Others bounce forward: they come through it stronger, having learned something they could not have learned in any other way.¹ And some – the ones perhaps really worth studying – bounce beyond: they emerge genuinely changed, with new capabilities and a clearer sense of direction in a world that has itself shifted. Ørsted, for example – formerly DONG Energy, a Danish fossil fuel company – did not come through its transformation as a slightly more robust fossil fuel company; it emerged as something different, strategically and culturally. The difference between the three outcomes is rarely the quality of the contingency plan. It is the human capacity that was either there or not when it mattered most.

So how does resilience relate to sustainability? The most important distinction is worth naming directly: resilience always points to a threat; sustainability does not. You are resilient in relation to something – a flood, a supply chain rupture, a geopolitical shift.

Naming the threat, however, is only half the work. What decides whether an organisation withstands it is rarely technical. The flood is external; the vulnerability is relational – whether the systems, the relationships, and the trust exist to act together when it counts. No framework absorbs a shock that people are not prepared to face together.

Seen this way, the two concepts do not just coexist; they depend on each other. Sustainability, genuinely embedded in the core business, gives direction – a sense of where the organisation is heading and why it matters – and addresses the root causes of those threats. Resilience gives the capacity to keep moving in that direction when the world pushes back. One is the compass; the other keeps you moving when the terrain gets difficult.

On closer inspection, the two agendas turn out to be nested rather than running in parallel. Climate is one of the largest drivers of the very disruptions that resilience planning responds to. Resilience without a sustainability lens therefore risks being short-sighted: it optimises for surviving the next shock instead of preventing the shocks from becoming more frequent and more severe. A company that invests in resilience while scaling back the sustainability work that addresses its most material risks is quietly storing up future vulnerabilities. Think of a manufacturer that flood-proofs its plants while dropping its decarbonisation targets: is it not just protecting itself against a risk it is still helping to grow? The organisations that take both seriously are doing something more – they are reducing the likelihood of the disruptions everyone else will have to absorb.

If history is any guide

When a new concept lands in an organisation, a familiar pattern tends to follow: a function is created, a responsible person is hired, a framework is developed, and progress is reported.

That is not a problem in itself. A new concept or framework can be useful in providing a structure and shared lens that directs our attention. But if we have learned one thing from working with sustainability, it is this: we do not just need a sustainability strategy but a sustainable strategy. The same applies to resilience. We need to build resilience into our organisations so it becomes part of how we think, decide, and move – not an addition to the strategy but the test it must pass to thrive in this day and age. In short, we need our strategies to be resilient.

Lost in translation

Mentioning resilience in a sustainability strategy – or even developing a dedicated framework with one person assigned to report on a set of metrics – does not in itself make an organisation resilient. If only it were that simple. But if the work stops there, the only thing added will be extra workload and, even more concerning, a false sense of confidence in the leadership team.

So how does an organisation become truly resilient?

The answer lies in behaviour. Resilience is not something an organisation has but something it does – and something it needs to practice. We tend to think of it in physical or technological terms: flood defences, backup systems, cybersecurity protocols. And while these matter greatly, they are not sufficient. What is harder to build, and easier to overlook, is social resilience, the human dynamics and everyday mechanisms that determine whether people can actually act together once pressure comes knocking.

That kind of resilience shows neither in annual reports nor in strategy documents. It lives in the small decisions and interactions that either strengthen or quietly erode the organisation’s ability to navigate the unknown. It reveals itself, as the Danish disaster researcher Kristian Lauta has put it, on any given Tuesday afternoon – in whether people share information or hoard it, whether they raise concerns or stay quiet, whether they trust their colleagues enough to act without waiting for permission.

This is why frameworks, however well designed, always need to be translated into behaviour. A resilience framework that makes sense in a boardroom may mean very little to the procurement team, the plant manager, or the customer service lead who would actually have to carry it in a crisis. The framework is only as good as the translation work that follows it. How do people in your organisation behave in the face of external shocks?

Five capabilities worth cultivating

If resilience lives in behaviour, the next question is which behaviours to cultivate. Five capabilities stand out as the difference between a strategy that holds under pressure and one that does not. None of them can be installed with a document. They are fostered by creating the conditions – through practice, repetition, and the kind of leadership that takes the human dimension seriously – in which the right behaviours can take root.