What Is a Crisis Resilience Professional?

Defining the Discipline That Organisational and Societal Resilience Demands

Dr. Paul Wood MBA CSyP ChCSP CiiSCM CIISec FSyl RSES (Principal)

The Missing Professional

Organisations invest heavily in crisis management plans, business continuity frameworks and technological defences. Yet when a crisis actually strikes, the outcome is rarely determined by the quality of the plan. It is determined by the capability of the people who must execute it.

Decision-making under uncertainty. Communication when the situation is fluid and the stakes are high. Leadership through ambiguity. Sensemaking when the information is incomplete and contradictory. These are the human capabilities that separate organisations which navigate crises effectively from those which are overwhelmed by them. And yet, there is no established professional discipline dedicated to developing these capabilities. Crisis preparedness remains distributed across risk, security, HR and operations, with no single function responsible for ensuring that the workforce possesses the human qualities required to perform under crisis conditions. This represents a critical gap, one that the emergence of the crisis resilience professional is designed to address.

Defining Crisis Resilience

Crisis resilience is distinct from both organisational resilience and crisis management, though it is closely related to each. Organisational resilience describes the broad capacity to anticipate, prepare for, respond to and adapt to change. Crisis management refers to the procedural and structural arrangements through which crisis events are coordinated and controlled. Crisis resilience sits beneath and between these constructs. It is concerned specifically with the human capabilities, both individual and collective, that enable effective performance during periods of acute disruption.

Research has identified at least twelve distinct human factors that contribute to crisis resilience, including personal resilience, flexibility, communication, motivation, decision-making, perseverance, sensemaking, optimism, leadership, risk awareness, self-efficacy and perception (Wood, 2024). These factors do not operate in isolation. They form a mutually reinforcing capability architecture: effective communication supports sensemaking, which strengthens decision-making, which in turn enables more effective leadership under pressure. The strength of this architecture across an organisation's workforce determines how well it will perform when a crisis occurs. Critically, these capabilities do not develop by accident. They must be deliberately identified, cultivated, measured and sustained through structured organisational routines.

The Six Capability Domains

If crisis resilience is to be recognised as a professional discipline, its practitioners require a defined body of knowledge. Six core capability domains can be identified that a crisis resilience professional must master:

•       Intelligence: The ability to gather, assess and interpret threat information from multiple sources. Practitioners must understand intelligence methodologies, open-source analysis and cognitive biases that distort threat assessment, enabling early warning and informed decision-making before crises escalate.

•       Risk: Moving beyond conventional probability-impact matrices to understand systemic risks, cascading failures and the human factors that shape how risks are perceived and acted upon. The ability to translate risk analysis into preparedness measures that change behaviour is what distinguishes effective practice from compliance.

•       Converged Security: Understanding how threats exploit gaps between physical, cyber, personnel and information security domains. Crisis resilience professionals must think in terms of interconnected systems, ensuring that a converged security posture strengthens both prevention and response capabilities.

•       Security Culture: Building, assessing and sustaining a positive security culture in which awareness is embedded in daily practice rather than confined to periodic training. This involves influencing attitudes and behaviours at every level of the organisation.

•       Resilience and Business Continuity: Grounding in resilience theory and continuity practice, including structured approaches to testing, training, measurement and sustainment. Crisis resilience is a dynamic capability requiring continuous renewal through organisational routines, not a one-off investment.

•       Communication and Leadership: The ability to communicate clearly under pressure, lead teams through ambiguity and maintain stakeholder confidence during periods of acute disruption. These capabilities must be developed to an advanced level and practitioners must be equipped to develop them in others.

Why Professionalisation Matters

Physical security, cyber security, business continuity and risk management each benefit from established professional bodies, recognised qualifications and structured career pathways. Crisis resilience has none of these. The consequence is that responsibility for developing human crisis capabilities falls to individuals who may possess expertise in one adjacent discipline but lack the breadth of knowledge to address the challenge holistically.

The business case for change is compelling. Organisations with mature crisis capability reduce recovery time, protect reputation and retain stakeholder trust when disruption strikes. Logistics firms that cross-trained their teams in crisis decision-making and adaptive leadership maintained operations throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, while competitors with comprehensive plans but underdeveloped human capabilities struggled to adapt. The Grenfell Tower disaster and the 2017 WannaCry attack on the NHS each demonstrated that the decisive failures in a crisis are human, not technical.

Professionalising crisis resilience would:

•       Establish a recognised body of knowledge defining what practitioners must know and be able to do

•       Create structured development pathways across the six core capability domains

•       Provide organisations with confidence that crisis resilience responsibilities are held by individuals with validated competence

•       Raise the profile of human capability development as a strategic investment, not a discretionary cost

Without a professional framework, organisations lack a coherent approach to developing human crisis capabilities. Individual departments invest in training that addresses their own concerns without reference to the broader capability architecture. A crisis resilience professional provides the integrating function that connects these efforts into a coherent organisational strategy.

The Societal Dimension

The case for crisis resilience professionals extends well beyond the individual organisation. National resilience frameworks depend upon the assumption that organisations across the public and private sectors can manage crises effectively. When individual organisations fail in their crisis response, the consequences cascade into communities, supply chains, critical national infrastructure and public confidence. Every organisation that develops genuine crisis resilience capability within its workforce contributes directly to the resilience of the society it serves.

The increasing frequency and severity of crises, whether arising from pandemics, cyber attacks, climate events, geopolitical instability or operational failures, demands a professional cadre of practitioners equipped to develop and sustain the human capabilities that underpin effective crisis performance. This is not a responsibility that can be adequately addressed as a secondary function of existing roles.

Building the Profession

The crisis resilience professional represents the next necessary evolution of the security and risk profession. Organisations, professional bodies and educational institutions must work together to define competency frameworks, structured development pathways and recognition frameworks that establish this as a discipline in its own right.

The knowledge exists. The need is urgent. The question is whether we build the profession deliberately or learn the hard way that we should have done so sooner.