Resilience by design: Why redundancy still matters

Resilience is rarely created by a single solution. It comes from understanding dependencies, building alternatives and knowing which resources can be mobilised when normal operations no longer work.

Discussions during Almedalen, not least with organisations supporting Ukraine, provided a useful reminder of something easily forgotten in highly digitalised societies: preparedness is about much more than technology or formal contingency plans.

More than five years of full-scale war have generated difficult but important lessons. One of them is the importance of having alternatives when established systems and services can no longer be taken for granted.

Resilience is a system capability

Preparedness is sometimes discussed in terms of what an individual organisation or person should have available.

But resilience is broader than that.

At community level, different people possess different resources, equipment and capabilities. One person may have equipment, another practical knowledge and someone else access to resources that become important during a disruption.

The same principle applies to organisations.

Critical capabilities rarely depend on one system alone. They depend on combinations of people, technology, suppliers, information, facilities and decision-making.

Understanding those relationships is fundamental to operational resilience.

Dependencies become visible when something fails

Modern organisations have become highly efficient partly by consolidating services and relying on specialised technology and suppliers.

That creates enormous value – but it can also create concentration risk.

A payment process dependent on one technical channel, a critical service dependent on one supplier or a business process dependent on one cloud platform may work extremely well under normal conditions.

The weakness becomes visible when that dependency is disrupted.

Efficiency and resilience are therefore not always the same thing.

Redundancy does not mean duplication everywhere

The answer is not to duplicate every system, supplier or process.

That would be expensive and often impractical.

Instead, organisations need to understand where loss of a capability would have unacceptable consequences and determine which alternatives are actually required.

Sometimes the answer is technical redundancy. Sometimes it is an alternative supplier, a manual procedure, another communication channel or people who know how to operate when normal systems are unavailable.

The important question is not whether everything has a backup.

It is whether critical operations have realistic alternatives when their normal dependencies fail.

Community matters in organisations too

One of the strongest reflections from the discussions around Ukraine was the importance of community. Resilience is strengthened when people understand what resources exist around them and are able to work together when circumstances change.

There is a direct organisational parallel.

Business continuity cannot be owned by one resilience manager or documented in one continuity plan. Technology, operations, suppliers, management and individual employees all contribute to the organisation’s ability to respond.

Exercises are particularly valuable because they expose these relationships before a real disruption occurs.

Build alternatives before they are needed

The time to discover a critical single point of failure is not during a crisis.

Organisations should continuously identify important dependencies, challenge assumptions about availability and test whether alternative ways of working are realistic.

Technology will continue to change. Dependencies will change with it.

But one resilience principle remains remarkably constant:

Robustness comes from understanding what you depend on – and ensuring that the most critical capabilities do not rely on a single path to success.