What Is Presilience® and Why Traditional Risk Management Fails?
Risk management is view predominantly for “finance”, especially when we say: “Ceicia supports risk management, decision-making and crisis anticipation”. The most common response in Hong Kong is: “oh really, in finance?”
It is a misconception to think “risk Management” should only be applied to finance while all industries are in needs to performance and remain stable in their development.
Looking at the world we are in, organisations are facing volatility and uncertainty affecting their operation and people. Disruptions are coming from geopolitical uncertainty, technological disruption, cyber threats, regulatory pressure, changing workforce expectations, supply-chain instability and rapid digital transformation.
This is where the limitation starts, people and organisations are still managing risk using approaches designed for a more predictable world.
Being ready doesn’t mean having registered a list of all the potential risks, prepared all the policies, audits or possible controls for business continuity or escalation procedures. They won’t stop the risk to happen, and so the real question when incidents happen is: “are your people ready to face crisis?”
Processes and controls alone cannot prepare people to perform when reality no longer follows the plan.
This scenario is where Presilience® comes into play and introduces a different way to think about risk and approach risk.
What Is Presilience®?
Presilience® can be define as proactive resilience: developing the capabilities required to anticipate uncertainty, recognise risk, make effective decisions and adapt before, during and after disruption.
The concept was developed by Dr Gavriel Schneider following his research in the psychology of risk and human-centred risk management. Rather than concentrating primarily on recovering from disruption, Presilience® shifts attention towards building capability before disruption occurs.
At Ceicia, we have a focus on anticipation and preparation aligning perfectly with Presilience® as an integrated approach connecting:
- Risk management
- Organisational resilience
- Risk intelligence
- Leadership
- Human behaviour
- Applied psychology
- Decision-making
- Organisational culture
The objective of the approach is to support anticipation and preparation rather than simply responding to crisis or try to increase control.
When people can recognise risk, communicate concerns, think clearly and make effective decisions even when conditions are uncertain, this is when you grow your chances of stability.
What Is the difference between resilience and Presilience®?
Traditional resilience often focuses on an organisation's capacity to withstand disruption and recover afterwards.
How about focusing on minimizing disruption by preparing your people to recognise the signs of a crisis?
Don't focus only on:
“How quickly can we recover after something goes wrong?”
Ask yourself:
“How prepared are our people to recognise, manage and adapt to uncertainty before it becomes a crisis?”
This changes the organisational mindset from reactive to proactive. Presilience® follows the logic of those three steps
Step 1: Prepare before disruption.
Step 2: Perform during disruption.
Step 3: Learn and become stronger after disruption.
Why does traditional risk management fail?
The real weakness appears when risk management becomes disconnected from how people work, think and make decisions. Their perception of the risk is playing a major role in the application of policies or governance frameworks.
6 main preconceived ideas that should be questioned:
- Risk management becomes a compliance exercise
- Risk registers are often seen as KPI or remain static
- Traditional risk management underestimates human behaviour
- Risks are managed in organisational silos
- More controls can create an illusion of safety
- Frontline intelligence does not reach leadership
Keep in mind that some of the earliest signs of organisational risk rarely appear first on a dashboard.
As a leader your job is to shift from risk management to risk intelligence
How Can Organisations Build Presilience®?
5 areas to start with to build Presilience
- Build risk intelligence
- Develop decision-making under pressure
- Strengthen risk culture
- Connect risk across functions
- Train for reality, not only for procedure
Presilience® aims at preparing your team before the crisis
Don’t wait for the crisis to happen to react, start to build resilience before crisis begins. This way you have a higher recovery rate and you question is your people are genuinely prepared to face uncertainty.
Build a Presilient organisation With Ceicia
Ceicia adopted an holistic approach to help organisations prepare for crisis by connecting people, leadership, process, risk culture and risk management.
Through Presilience® consulting, risk culture programmes, leadership development, scenario-based training and risk intelligence education, we help organisations move beyond the vision of “compliance only”. We prepare your people for real-world uncertainty.
If you recognise your organisation challenges after reading the above, get in touch with Ceicia team.
Prepare before disruption to perform under pressure and recover after a crisis.
Founder & Managing Director, Ceicia