Building better business resilience

Why do I need the Resilience Toolkit

Research carried out by the Enterprise Research Centre shows that small and medium-sized business leaders often struggle to find time to think about future risks and to plan for them. As a consequence, many are unprepared for a crisis when it hits. Yet we know that firms that do engage in crisis planning are more likely to bounce back from adversity stronger than they were before. Our toolkit encourages leaders to think about the strengths and weaknesses of their businesses, and helps them to identify their greatest potential future risks. It also makes crisis planning quick and easy.

What does it involve?

The NICRE Resilience Toolkit will guide you through a three-stage process to help you to understand how resilient your business is already, to allow you to identify the potential future threats to your business, and to help you to put in place plans to address these threats. Each stage can be undertaken on its own or alongside the others. The toolkit has three elements.

  1. Resilience health check: This helps firms to consider their current level of resilience, by reflecting on the skills networks and experience of its leadership team, and by assessing the firm’s resources and values. It will highlight areas of strength and areas for focus.

  2. Risk analysis: This encourages firms to think in a structured way about internal and external risks, and in particular about how likely the risks are and how severe their impact would be. It will highlight areas for focus in crisis planning.

  3. Crisis planning: This enables firms to put in place crisis plans for the most serious risks identified in the risk analysis. It provides templates to allow the quick creation of essential data files and critical risk plans.