Risk and/or resilience management

Abstract

Risk management aims at managing all the uncertainties that may interfere with the objectives and missions of the organization. Resilience engineering aims at building its capacity to get over disturbances or stress while keeping the functionalities needed to survive, and possibly thrive. A recently open debate on an Internet blog launched by the risk managers of the Scottish Widows Bank seems to arise from what some professionals see as two competing branches of the management sciences. Whereas through the development of ERM – Enterprise-wide Risk Management – risk management is emerging at last to become a science, as well as an art and a practice, the mentioned above centered on the role of a newly forged name “resilience management”. This opens a new front of the many debates that could derail the path to maturity of Risk Management as a science and reopen new silos much as Business Impact Analysis, BIA, or continuity management, might do if a clear distinction is not made between science, objectives and tools. However, because organizations are so interconnected today in the supply cloud that it is inevitable that they will face catastrophic risk and this is why resilience needs to be a core objective of any risk management plan? Whereas traditional risk management techniques alone may not be adequate to deal with such pervasive and insipient risk scenarios, resilience is ingrained into ERM.