2 minute read. Lessons from our RMIA x Battleground Live Podcast
2 minute read
On the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, we kicked off RMIA Disaster Reduction Week with our first-ever live Battleground Chats featuring Simon Levy from RMIA. The message was clear: fund resilience now to avoid paying for disasters later.
Key themes and takeaways:
- The economics are undeniable: every $1 invested in disaster risk reduction can yield up to $4 in economic output—yet funding is decreasing while disaster costs rise. We need to flip that trend.
- Practice to breaking point: Exercises should be designed to find failure points, not to “tick the box.” Failure in testing is success in learning. Boards should expect and value insights from hard scenarios.
- Comms are a critical vulnerability: Repeated real-world lessons—from earthquakes in Japan to major retail incidents—show that assumptions about mobile networks, battery life, and tower uptime collapse under stress. Build redundancy, carry chargers/battery packs, and plan for tower outages.
- Risk-informed, not risk-blind: Avoid “risk-blind” investments that create new vulnerabilities. Map external threats—weather, geography, infrastructure, cyber, and third-party risk—across your supply chain. One pigment factory, one access road, or one linen supplier can become your single point of failure.
- Think whole-of-system: CPS 230 in financial services is a strong model—stress testing, supply chain depth (including fourth parties), data flow mapping, and continuous scenario work should be “business as usual” across industries.
- Risk and resilience are inseparable: They coexist in “perfect harmony.” Whether your org leads with risk or resilience is less important than ensuring they operate as one, with shared data, shared scenarios, and shared accountability.
- Move from reactive to proactive: Understand threats and vulnerabilities to enable anticipatory action, not crisis reaction. Partner with critical suppliers to lift their resilience—because their failure is your disruption.
What to do next:
- Take the motto to your execs and board: “Fund resilience, not disasters.”
- Run extreme scenarios that test your limits—then share findings openly.
- Audit communications resilience: power, backups, alternatives, and tower dependencies.
- Map supply chains to fourth parties; overlay climate, infrastructure, and geopolitical risks.
- Make stress testing and supplier uplift a standing program, not a project.
This week is about changing the narrative in Australia: invest in resilience before disaster strikes. Join the conversation on LinkedIn, share your lessons, and let’s build organizations—and communities—that are risk-informed, not risk-blind.
