Risk Leadership Unplugged – Lessons from our RMIA x Battleground CRO Round Table

3 minute read

Battleground’s Disaster Reduction Week Chief Risk Officer (CRO) Roundtable with RMIA found common ground on resilience tolerances. Specifically a shared understanding that operational continuity for customers is paramount.

By focusing on customer needs, acknowledging tough choices, managing dependencies, testing thoroughly, and cultivating a learning culture, organisations can better define and meet their resilience tolerances in line with community expectations. The roundtable’s insights reinforce that resilience is ultimately about delivering for customers even under adverse conditions.

From the discussion

• Tolerances force clarity on customer needs. Defining resilience tolerances begins with understanding what your customers value most during disruptions. This customer-first perspective ensures continuity of critical services that the community expects as non-negotiable.
• Minimum Service Levels (MSLs) demand tough prioritisation forcing uncomfortable trade-offs. Establishing an MSL often means choosing one cohort of customers to serve first at the expense of others, which is an unpleasant but necessary trade-off. The group acknowledged that maintaining even a basic level of service requires these difficult decisions as you can’t serve everyone fully during a disruption.
• Understand your third party providers’ tolerances. Your resilience is only as strong as that of your critical service providers. The roundtable emphasised knowing the minimum service level commitments of important third-party providers, because any shortfall on their end will likely impact your own ability to deliver.
• Go beyond the obvious stresses in exercises. Resilience testing shouldn’t stop at fixing known gaps. Teams should first address identified issues, then push further to uncover unknown vulnerabilities by simulating challenging scenarios. Avoid simplistic “Dorothy Dixer” drills (i.e. exercises with pre-scripted easy answers); instead, run realistic, demanding exercises in a safe environment that encourage teams to fail and learn without fear.
• Frame drills as opportunities to learn, not tests to pass. The consensus was that how you contextualise resilience exercises is critical. By emphasizing learning over evaluation, participants are more likely to engage openly and take away valuable insights. Every simulation should yield at least one key lesson and boost the team’s confidence (“match fitness”) in handling real incidents, rather than being a mere pass/fail judgment.

To strengthen your organisation’s resilience for the battleground of tomorrow, discover how Battleground’s risk and resilience consulting and software work together to build capability, confidence, and continuity. Book a meeting or contact our experts today to find out how.