What 2025 taught us about resilience and preparedness

Ask most UK organisations about the last 12 months and few would describe it as predictable. Extreme weather has disrupted transport, utilities and buildings. Power outages linked to severe storms have interrupted operations across large parts of the country. Supply chain disruption continues to affect availability and delivery. Cyber incidents have tested systems and trust.

This isn’t anecdotal. In 2025, severe storms left hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power. Nearly half of UK businesses report having already been affected by climate-related disruption, and 43% experienced a cyber security breach or attack in the past year.

Taken together, these experiences offer a clear set of lessons about resilience, not as a concept, but as something tested repeatedly.

Preparedness is a workforce capability

Adverse events rarely arrive neatly or in isolation. A weather incident can trigger power outages. Infrastructure disruption can affect supply chains. A health emergency can reduce workforce availability just as demand increases. Cyber incidents can undermine confidence and capability at precisely the wrong moment.

What these situations have in common is the strain they place on people.

Organisations rely on individuals and teams to step into unfamiliar roles, make judgement calls under pressure and work across organisational boundaries balancing speed, safety and service continuity to sustain performance over prolonged periods of disruption.

One of the clearest lessons from 2025 is that preparedness cannot sit solely within emergency planning or business continuity functions. It must be embedded into workforce planning, skills development and organisational design. Preparedness is not just about what an organisation plans to do, it’s about whether its workforce is ready to do it.

How we responded in 2025

In 2025, our work focused on turning preparedness into something practical and workforce-led – moving beyond high-level plans towards workforce capability.

We developed National Occupational Standards for Resilience and Emergencies to set out clearly what good looks like in practice. The standards define the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to plan for, respond to and recover from adverse events.

They provide a consistent foundation for workforce and role design, recruitment and progression, and learning and professional development. By anchoring resilience in nationally recognised standards, organisations can build capability systematically, rather than relying on informal knowledge or individual experience.

Alongside this, we introduced the Scenario Informed Resilience Assessment to help organisations test their preparedness in realistic conditions. Rather than asking whether a plan exists, the assessment explores how the organisation and workforce perform when exposed to credible adverse event scenarios such as extreme weather, infrastructure failure or prolonged disruption. It helps organisations identify strengths, reveal gaps and prioritise action where it matters most.

In addition our new simple, high-level reflection checklist offers a light-touch way to prompt internal discussion and highlight where resilience depends on people, communication and decision-making.

Looking ahead: Stress-testing workforce plans

Our next development is an open programme that builds on our established Six Steps Methodology to Integrated Workforce Planning® and extends into a resilience context. The programme will help organisations stress test workforce plans against adverse events, understand interdependencies, and strengthen plans to remain effective under pressure.

The focus is not on predicting every possible disruption, but on ensuring workforce strategies are robust under strain, flexible in response and aligned to operational conditions.

Preparedness starts with people

The experience of recent years makes one thing clear: disruption is part of the operating environment for UK organisations. Whether driven by weather, infrastructure, health, technology or global supply chains, adverse events will continue to test organisations in unpredictable ways.

Those that cope best will be those that recognise preparedness as a workforce capability and invest in it deliberately.

Explore how the National Occupational Standards for Resilience and Emergencies and the Scenario Informed Resilience Assessment support workforce preparedness, and discover how our forthcoming open programme will help stress test workforce plans.