Resilience as the key to successfully overcome crises

Resilience is the key for enterprises to successfully manage crises, and this is no coincidence: “You can plan them strategically and make them measureable,” says Dr. Alexander Stolz, Head of Safety Technology and Protective Structures. 

He and his team have developed the FReE-Tool with the goal of creating not only a scientific but also a practical application that companies and systems can use for themselves.

You want to test the resilience of your company?

Here you find the link to the Fraunhofer Resilience Evaluator

The perception of resilience as a core competence of an organization represents the most important step in the strategic planning of resilience. This strategic planning process of resilience is subdivided in the following five phases: prepare, prevent, protect, respond and recover. In order to increase its own resilience, a company should go through this temporally closed resilience cycle several times and implement resilience at best already in the design phase of the system. This procedure is called resilience by design and is clearly more efficient than a subsequent integration of resilience. Besides, it is noticeably more profitable in times of crisis, since an increased crisis resistance is achieved. 

In comparison to existing safety concepts, resilience improves the protection and recoverability of our globalized, highly interconnected and, therefore, more vulnerable world. Conventional safety programs are designed for probable disturbing factors of a system, while the concept of resilience takes into account that protection against all disruptions is impossible and therefore promotes the ability of companies to react and recover. This enables companies to better react to crises and recover from them. 

You can learn more about Dr. Alexander Stolz’s research in the article “Crisis and opportunity – toward a more resilient society” in the Fraunhofer magazine 2.20. 

Listen to more about resilience in the German podcast by Dr. Alexander Stolz. He explains the great potential of resilience in times of crisis for companies and systems. 

All contributions from the German podcast series “Zukunft erleben – Zukunft hören” (Experience the future – listen to the future) can be found on the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft website.