NFP, an Aon company, has released its ‘2027 Business Resilience Report’. The survey-based report provides the views of senior business leaders in the UK on business resilience and related areas.
The survey sees overconfidence about business resilience capabilities, finding that while 92% of respondents are confident that their organization could maintain operations during a major disruption, just 64% have a fully developed and implemented resilience strategy in place to cover the next 12 to 24 months.
Respondents also rate their own risk management strongly across several key areas. 82% describe their organization’s overall risk controls as strong, and 92% are confident they can clearly identify their organization’s top three business vulnerabilities. However, only 41% are very confident they could maintain operations during a major disruption. Less than a third (32%) describe their risk controls as very strong, and just over a third (34%) consider their organization very prepared for continued disruption and volatility over the next two to three years.
“Resilience is what separates businesses that navigate disruption from those that do not,” said Matt Pawley, President of Europe, NFP. “In today’s uncertain environment, with economic pressure, regulatory change, and compounding risks, that distinction is more important than ever. Our findings show that leaders in the UK have confidence in their ability to handle a crisis, but a robust and tested strategy that is specific to the risks they face will determine how their business comes out the other side.”
Additionally, the findings show that preparedness is not uniform across the different risk categories. Business leaders feel most prepared to manage workplace safety, with 60% feeling very prepared, compared with cyber attacks (47%) and talent shortages (46%). By contrast, leaders feel less prepared for economic and cost pressures (39% very prepared), supply chain disruption (38%), and regulatory change (34%).
Methodology
The ‘2027 Business Resilience Report’ is based on a survey of 250 senior business decision-makers in the UK responsible for any of the following: business continuity and commercial risk, insurance and health and safety, cyber, digital and supply chain risk, people strategy, HR, wellbeing and benefits, financial resilience, and operational performance. The survey was conducted by Censuswide between 17 and 30 June 2026.
Resilience Forward comment
Leadership overconfidence seems to have been a persistent theme of industry surveys through 2026, as a browse through our research section will confirm.
Two important things emerge from the NFP survey:
- A dangerous cognitive bias within top leadership: the conflation of risk awareness with operational resilience. Finding that 92% of senior leaders are confident they can survive a major disruption, yet only 64% possess a fully developed resilience strategy, highlights a critical capability gap. This discrepancy represents the confidence illusion, where leaders conflate the appearance of a threat on a risk register with the organization’s ability to mitigate that threat.
- Business resilience must be a demonstrable capability: validated through realistic and frequent exercising. For business continuity and resilience professionals, this data serves as a clear mandate. The priority for 2027 must be translating C-suite and boardroom optimism into measurable, capability-led frameworks, ensuring that confidence is grounded in empirical evidence rather than untested assumptions. The difficulty may be in persuading top leadership that it has taken an over-optimistic view of business resilience. This study may provide some help in this regard.
